>> My name is Adina Leger,
and I am the curator of the Museum of History and
Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University.
Today is August 20, 2019,
and I am here at the Museum of History and
Holocaust Education with M Alexis Scott
for a legacy series interview,
during which we will remember her father,
WA Scott the third.
First of all, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes. Absolutely.
>> Wonderful. Can you state your full name?
>> My full name is Marion Alexis Scott.
Marion is my mother's first name,
so I grew up being called Alexis.
And that's why I use M dot as a tribute to her.
>> Alexis.
>> Alexis Scott.
>> And can you tell me when and where you were born?
>> I was born in Atlanta in McLendon Hospital,
which is a private Black-owned hospital in 1949,
and February 4, was the actual date.
>> And before we talk more about your life,
I'd like to go back a bit and talk about your father.
>> Yes.
>> So can you please state his full name?
>> His full name is William Alexander Scott the third.
He was named after his father,
who was William Alexander Scott the second,
who was named after his father,
who was William Alexander Scott Senior.
And he is in a legacy of Williams,
I have a grandnephew now who is
William A. Scott, the sixth.
>> That's cool.
And how far back can you trace your father's family?
>> On my father's side, I can go back pretty far.
His grandfather would be my great grandfather,
was the son of an enslaved African American who helped
a Union Army officer traverse
the swamps in Mississippi during the Civil War.
And following the Civil War,
the officer wanted to know
what he could do for him and he said,
don't do anything for me but educate my son.
So my great grandfather ended up
going to school in Ohio in Hym College.
And he studied there and then he went on to get a PhD
in theology from Indiana University
that I cannot remember the name of right now.
While I was in school, he would sell
bibles to earn money,
and he knocked on the door of
my great grandmother's house
in East Liverpool, Ohio.
Her parents had moved there
from Virginia after the end of
the Civil War and she was in school at the time,
she became her class spokesman
and she won the Latin prize.
She was the only girl and the only
black person in her class of seven
and they met and married
and I think it was 1898 or something like that.
And they moved back to Mississippi,
which is where my great grandfather was from,
and he became a minister and
they had nine children and her family told her,
you can marry him, he's a good guy,
but we're not going to come see you.
If you want to see us, you have to come
back up here we're not going south.
And so that's what happened
they would come back and visit in Ohio,
but they never came down to Mississippi.
But in any case, my grandfather was the second son.
Apparently, I'm told that back then they didn't name
the firstborn son junior because he might
die more often than not, apparently.
So my grandfather had
an older brother named Aurelius he was the first son.
And because she won the Latin prize,
all of her sons had these Latin and biblical names.
There was Aurelius, Augustus,
Cornelius and ML and who else?
Daniel. And the three daughter,
she had three daughters of
the nine children, Ruth, Vashti,
and Esther were the daughters,
so it was really interesting family.
>> And your father,
where was he born?
>> My father was born in Johnson City, Tennessee,
which is where his grandfather
had moved because of his health.
He went there to
pastorate church in Johnson City, Tennessee.
Now, I've never asked that question how
my father and his mother
ended up being there, but that's where they were.
I guess, with the family to help take care of the baby.
Because my grandmother was also from
Jackson Mississippi and Edwards, Mississippi.
She was my grandfather's childhood sweetheart and
the mother of his only two children. He had two sons.
>> So they were your father and he had one brother.
>> He had a younger brother
who wasn't that much younger,
I think he was only two years younger.
>> And what was his name?
>> Robert Lee Scott.
>> And your father,
what year was he born?
>> My dad was born in January 15, 1923.
>> And can you talk about his early childhood?
What was life like for him?
>> I think it was pretty interesting for
him in that his parents divorced early.
My grandfather was married four times
before he died at the age of 32.
So my dad and his brother were with
their mother and my grandfather's mother
from time to time depending on what was going on.
When they first got divorced,
my grandmother and she died 14 years ago and she was 103.
But she told me that after they divorced,
he asked her what did she want to
do and she said she wanted to complete her education.
So he drove her to Nashville,
Tennessee and she enrolled at Tennessee State,
and she graduated from there in 1932.
And when she graduated,
she went to work at the Birmingham world,
which was one of the papers that
my grandfather also owned.
And so that my father and
his brother would go back and forth from her
and back to Atlanta during that period.
I'm not sure where my uncle was
born whether he was born in Atlanta or he
might have been born in Shreveport because
my grandmother's parents moved to
Louisiana from Jackson at some point.
>> So your father
came to Atlanta, who was still very young.
What brought the family to Atlanta?
>> The newspaper and
the opportunity that had presented for the entire family.
My grandfather had been working as a I guess,
a clerk on the railroad from Jacksonville to
Miami and a mail clerk and he had been saving his money.
And he was going to publish a series of
black business directories so that people
would know where they could get goods and services.
And the first one he did, he
published one in Jacksonville,
Florida in 1927, but he came
to Atlanta to do it next because Atlanta was
such a thriving black business community.
He also had been there to go to
Morehouse he went to college.
After he went to Jackson State,
he did that for two years,
and then he came to Atlanta and went to Morehouse,
following his older brother,
Aurelius, who also was at Morehouse.
And he came to Atlanta early in 1928,
just after his father had died and
he did do a business directory for Atlanta.
And then he was going to go around
the southeast and just do that but someone said,
you need to start a newspaper.
We need a newspaper in Atlanta.
And he he went to Citizens Trust Bank,
which is the black owned bank that opened in 1921.
And they had an insurance company's printing press
in receivership because they had gone out of business.
I believe it was either
Mr. Yates or Mr. Milton, I can't remember which one,
offered him a $500 loan to start
the business and to buy the printing press.
He decided to do that and he took off from there.
The paper started in August 5,
1928 that was I think the first issue,
although I haven't seen the first issue.
I've seen a block of
type that was the first editorial, I think,
but it's the earliest papers that we have on record from
1931 and they've been put on
microfilm and have since been digitized from there.
So it was an interesting time. Should I keep going?
>> So you mentioned that your family
had a religious connection.
There were a few ministers. What were
they practicing once they came to Atlanta?
Did they mix religion and [inaudible]?
>> Well, I think that's why
my grandfather was married so many
times because he was a preacher's kid.
And so he'd take up with these women and he had to
put one down and get them one in line.
So I don't know for sure,
but only my great grandfather was the minister.
There were no none of his sons became ministers,
but they were always trying to
do the right thing even if they couldn't live up to it.
But I'm trying to
think if there is anything that I need to say about that.
>> What did your dad tell
you about growing up in Atlanta?
>> Well, he said it was fun because they could
get in the car and drive from the west side,
which is where my grandfather's house was on,
which is now Lowery and Spencer.
It was Ashby and Spencer back then in
the day and he said his dad would never want to stop.
So very time he got to a red light,
he'd turned right and he'd just keep going in
a circle if he needed to to get to
where he was going because he didn't want to stop.
He was so energetic,
he also said that,
he told me that his father and
this is probably a pejorative shouldn't say it,
but he said his dad could sell ice to an Iskimo
which means that he was a real smooth talker
and could convince people to do things.
I remember seeing some pictures of my dad and his brother
playing football in the backyard, stuff like that.
So it was a regular childhood
until the tragedy that
happened when my grandfather was killed.
He was shot in his back at his front door at night,
I don't remember the exact date,
but it was in February of 1934.
And it was two years after the paper had gone daily.
And so there was no witness,
they never found the gun,
and so no one was ever convicted.
The Street Committee thinks that
the perpetrator was the brother of
my grandfather's fourth wife.
Yikes. So the story goes that my grandfather,
he thought he was a bigamist.
He didn't think he had been officially
married to these women,
plus he was a womanizer,
I guess, is what they decided.
But he also happened to be in a business deal
with the perpetrator's father, his father-in-law.
They were going to buy the Odd Fellows Building,
which is a building down on Auburn Avenue.
And it was just a grand mess.
So initially, they had
an inquest and felt like they couldn't bring charges,
but the paper and the family persisted in asking
for any clues or any evidence and they did it for a year.
And finally, the DA was convinced to bring
charges against this brother of the bride.
But again, he said he didn't do it.
They didn't have a witness and they didn't have the gun,
so he was not convicted.
>> And did your father [OVERLAPPING].
>> My father was, he was 11 years old at the time,
and he didn't talk about it much as an adult,
but there's a picture of him and his brother going into
the courtroom and they look like so sad and so pitiful.
So it was really hard for him.
And I'm sure that that contributed to
his demeanor and his lack
of wanting there to be violence in the world.
And that was further enhanced or exaggerated,
or whatever you want to call it,
by his experiences in World War II.
>> So when his father died,
this was only about five years
after the start of the Great Depression.
Did that have an important impact
on the family and on the business for the paper?
>> Well, I think yes and no.
I think that they were able to make
money because it was a part of Black community,
everybody was anxious to get this daily newspaper,
and so they made most of their money from circulation.
And so they were really probably thriving at that point.
Remember the headline on the paper where it
announced my grandfather's death was above the fold?
It says, ABC circulation audit 23,000.
So that was the first time they've been audited by
a majority white company.
So that was really important.
So I think they were really thriving at the time by 1934.
>> So your father was 11 years old,
where was he going to school at the time?
>> He went to a school,
it's called Oglethorpe Elementary School.
It was part of Atlanta University.
They called it a laboratory school
because when it started,
it was a place where they could train teachers who were
majoring in getting their master's
and graduate degrees in education.
And I have a photograph of my dad,
of the whole school,
sitting in front of the school from 1932.
And he started going there about second grade,
and he's sitting right in front of
my mother. And it's amazing.
And so I went to the same school.
And the year that they closed it,
my dad had them take a picture of
the whole school so I'm in a similar picture from 1958.
>> The school closed.
>> I think it was part of the move to
prevent black people from desegregating white schools.
They built a brand new school right behind our school,
the Atlanta School Board did,
and they were trying to make
it so attractive to stay in our community,
so we wouldn't go to theirs.
And they did.
They also agreed to hire all of
the teachers who were currently teaching at the school.
>> So it was a shift then from
this community-centered private school
to a public school,
but still specifically geared
for the people [OVERLAPPING].
>> On that neighborhood.
>> So what were
your father's aspirations when he was coming up?
>> Well, I'm not sure exactly.
Although I think he wanted to be
a great chess player. I'm sure of that.
He sometimes said that he could have
been a grandmaster had he not had
a family and business to run because he
would focused on that a lot more than he was able to.
But he was rated an expert and he
got that rating from playing in tournaments.
He played in the US Open,
he taught himself how to play on
a ship during World War II.
After Buchenwald was liberated back in April '45,
they disbanded his unit and
they put him on a ship to go to someplace in
Japan or the South Pacific something
and he was on the ship,
so he didn't have anything to do, so he taught
himself how to play chess.
And he really got into it because it requires
just enough thinking that you cannot worry
about your stuff if you do every day,
but you have to focus on the game.
So I think that was a good escape for him.
But he played in 1953, I believe it was.
He went to play in a US Open
so he could begin to get a rating,
and it was in Nashville,
Tennessee at the Peabody Hotel,
which was, of course, segregated.
So when he walked in, they said,
you can't stay here, you can't do this.
So the tournament director
came to the man at the hotel and said,
if he has to leave, we're all going to leave.
So they flopped around for a minute and they said,
well, okay, but he can't do this,
he can't do this.
My dad said I came to play chess.
So that was the way he
confronted the system by just acting like
he was a human being and doing what
human beings do in spite of the resistance to it.
But I don't know,
I say he led a life of
beauty and grace because he started
oil painting too and he listened to
classical music as he painted.
He was just, I don't know,
a sensitive soul, I think.
>> So you mentioned that
your father and your mother went to school together.
Did your dad tell you stories about meeting
your mom or your mom tell
you stories about meeting your dad?
>> My mother does.
She said when they were in school together,
as I said, in this picture where they were
sitting together in second grade, it was amazing.
But they were all good friends.
And then finally in the 10th grade,
she said she wrote out a contract.
We're going to get married
and we're going to have two children,
a boy and a girl.
And he did not disagree.
He just said, yes, ma'am. And that's what they did.
And they did get married.
They graduated from Laboratory High School,
which was another Atlanta
University teacher training institution
that was on the campus of Spelman College.
And my mother graduated,
I think they graduated in, what is that?
'41 that she went to Spelman College,
and my dad went to Morehouse.
And so they were continuing to
be classmates and boyfriend and girlfriend.
And then in the winter of '43,
my dad got drafted to go into the army.
And so in,
I guess, it was the summer of '44,
he was about to be shipped out overseas,
he was home on leave and he told mother to pack her bag,
we're going to get married and going to New York.
So he went with her future mother-in-law and
my dad to New York City to get married.
They had to go to three different places
to get married because people didn't want to marry him.
My mother is very fair-skinned and they thought she was
white and they were from Atlanta from the South,
they [inaudible] to get married.
So they ended up getting married in
Harlem at a justice of the peace.
And then two days later, I think he left,
he went to London or England.
It wasn't London, but it was where with the coast,
where the ship went into.
>> And what's your mother's name?
>> Her name is Marion Willis, W-I-L-L-I-S, Scott.
And she'll be 96 this year.
>> That's amazing. So she's still [OVERLAPPING].
>> She's still alive.
>> Does she live with you?
>> I used to live with her. I moved in with
her seven years ago because she
went blind, and my plan was for her to move in with me,
but after she went blind, she said
she had to stay where she is because this is
the only house that she'd known since her own house.
And she and my dad built the house in 1949,
which is the year that I was born.
So it's the only house that I had known growing up too.
But she had a stroke three years ago,
so she's in a nursing home because she can't
stand, can't walk anymore.
>> Well, so going back to this eve of war,
being in the newspaper business,
did your father and his family have
a special sense for the growing tensions in the world?
>> Oh, absolutely.
And it was amazing how much coverage they put in
the newspaper because they had a subscription to the UPI,
United Press International,
which carried a lot of international news.
And because they were daily,
they got the attention of a lot of people.
The newspaper had
the first black White House correspondent
and Congressional correspondent because
it had to be a daily in order to get credentials,
so the Black publishers group joined together with
the Daily World to get a credential
for a reporter to cover what was going on.
So national, international news played a big deal.
In fact, I was on a panel
a year or so ago about just that,
the press coverage and
what did we know and when did we know it?
And there is a huge article
on the front page about Kristallnacht
and how awful it was,
and the persecution of Jews was
a very readable story by
black people in the South who
felt persecuted by Jim Crow.
>> Absolutely. So was there speculation
in the paper about what would happen after
Hitler and Vivid Poland and or
advocacy in any of the editorials about
whether the US should enter the war, anything else.
>> I don't remember seeing
any editorials, but there may have been some,
but I don't remember seeing
the paper just carried the stories,
but most of the stories were,
pro US and against Hitler and
against Japan after the Pearl Harbor incident.
So a lot of people did want to join,
but my dad was he didn't join.
He was drafted. So a lot of his friends were also.
>> He was in college.
He was a sophomore.
>> And did your family own a radio too?
>> No, but there
is the street committee report says that
my grandfather died with
the papers for a radio station in a briefcase.
So that was his plan to do that,
but the first Black radio station
wasn't started until 1949.
>> And what about just a physical radio?
Did they have one in their house to listen to?
>> I don't know. I'm sure they did,
but I don't know for sure if they
listened to it on a regular basis,
but I'm sure they had one at
the newspaper in which they did.
>> Did your parents share with you any of
their memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor?
>> No. [LAUGHTER] I don't know if
I asked my mom about it or not. I have to do that.
She'll probably remember at this point,
but I just remember her telling me
about listening to baseball on the radio with her father,
and that was her favorite past time
because she played softball,
but I don't remember about the war.
I think that, initially,
they were concerned about things going on in
the rest of the world, particularly with Hitler.
But when the attack on Pearl Harbor came,
I think they just thought it was,
we can't stay out of it anymore. We have to go in.
>> And was there? [OVERLAPPING].
>> She was graduated from high school.
And she waved his freshman at
Spelman because it was December.
>> And did she tell you anything about rationing or
having to save used fat
or anything like that for the war effort?
>> No. I don't remember any of that.
>> What about the Daily world versus
some of the other newspapers in Atlanta?
Did they cover the war differently?
>> Well, they were at the time,
I think they were the only paper in
town for the Black community in
1941 through until 1960
was when the other two Black papers got started,
but they used a lot of UPI stories,
as I said, and they used a lot of stories about my dad.
They had his picture in when
he first went to Europe and with
another soldier and William Scott,
who's the son of the founder
because he was put newspaper.
So they knew that they would publish it.
And so there were
several stories and he would send pictures too.
>> So what did your dad tell you about being drafted.
What was that like for him?
>> Well, I don't know if you actually talked about it
because he didn't really
talk about the experiences at all.
I remember seeing the photographs,
some of the photographs at a very young age
and how horrific they were.
Particularly, there was one with
a pile of dead bodies and
outside of a crematorium with
the black and white soldiers standing behind him.
They had put, all the Black battalions
were had officers who were white and or Jewish.
And there is we found one of them was,
I can't remember his name now.
I met his son who worked here in Atlanta.
In fact, he's credited
this lieutenant who is a white Jewish lieutenant,
my dad's unit was credited with discovering
the Legionella stuff with Legionnaires disease.
He worked at CDC when he left the army.
And he wrote a memoir.
He was interviewed and he
said some of the army officers and others said,
put the niggas and the Jews
together and let them all die.
So it was terrible. And so there was
discrimination going on on both fronts.
And my dad's union was never intended to fight.
They weren't even given
bullets until the battle of the bulge when they needed
everybody but my dad's unit was
the 183rd engineer combat battalion and they
were to do bridge repair and roads and find water.
And that was their assignment.
So they were all of them
were service units that were intended to
do behind the enemy line not behind the enemy line,
but behind the fighting lines.
And they were to come after the fact
but at the battle of the ball
which was in December of '44,
they needed every human being.
So that was when they first got
some bullets and that's when they fought.
And it was the spring of '45 that he
ended up being sent to this concentration camp.
To help with displaced persons
because it was Bouch involved,
and this was the camp that
the prisoners overthrew themselves, actually,
because it was really
the political prisoners who had the strength to
do that and the Germans knew that the end was near.
They started fleeing and they just left
and the prisoners said,
we were taken over, so they did.
But my dad says that when they got there,
they were told that they tried to kill
30,000 people in two weeks just to get
them off the planet so
that they would have gotten their job done,
but it was really horrific for him.
Here's the thing. We're working on a screenplay based on
his experiences and we were able to find
out how he got there.
And it was a part of
a reconnaissance team that was sent there with
another white unit that
was asked to go there or called to go there.
And in the Black units were called core units,
which meant they belonged to no one
and they belonged to everyone.
And you could ask for them
to come help you if you needed some extra bodies.
So they got called up by the 1126 and they went
in as early recognizance team to see what was going on.
And that's when he came into the camp and
he wrote about it much later in the late '80s,
he did a brochure with pictures
and a reflection on his experience there.
What he said was they had been told about the camps,
but they didn't believe it could be as bad as they said.
When they first got there it looked okay and then
all of a sudden they walk in and
they see all these skeletal people and bones and
bodies and incinerators with bones and stuff.
He said it was just so gruesome as
he hadn't seen anything ever like it.
He later said in an interview that it
was hard to believe that the Germans who
were known for their intellect and technology and love
of art and beauty that they could
ever do something so inhumane.
It just didn't make any sense to him.
He decided, he said, even in America,
the slaves had value
because they could work and do stuff,
they didn't want to kill them but here they just wanted
the Jews off the planet
and he just didn't understand that.
It didn't make any sense, he says
and furthermore, they were white.
It was really baffling and it was
hard for the soldiers to comprehend.
And then I think that's when he
made a decision you can't fight hate with hate.
You have to fight it with something else like love.
>> And he was tasked with actually taking photographs.
>> He was a photographer with his unit
and archivist for his unit.
So he took pictures
and he wrote later that he finally put
the camera away because it was just too much and he
walked around in a daze like the rest of them,
as you know some of
the other prisoners took them around to show
them. What was what?
>> So prior to going to Buchenwald and just kind of
being this black core unit that could be,
borrowed by different other units.
Did he have a sense of the European soldiers
perceive his unit differently than
the US soldiers did or did he have any?
>> I remember talking
to another member of his unit, Leon Bass,
who did lots of team
on to become a high school
principal when he returned to the US,
he was in Philadelphia and
he would talk to different schools.
He came down here a couple of times to
Georgia to give talks with the Georgia Commission.
And he said that when he was overseas,
he didn't get married until he got back
but when they went to England,
he said they go to parties
with people who were native to London and they
would be white and there was
no problem and that was what was part of
the attraction to many of the Black who wanted to stay in
Europe even after the war
because they could be just be themselves.
Even if they were novelties,
it was better to be a novelty than
a cursed person and
suffer from the indignities of being not seen as human.
>> So right around
when your dad was
in Buchenwald and experiencing all of this.
Roosevelt also passed away.
>> That's right.
>> And he did he talk at all about
what that meant to him or?
>> Well, he passed away right
at the time they were at Buchenwald.
So he didn't really
put the two together except that was when he was there.
That's how they remembered the date
because it was like April 12 or something like that.
And I think they
decided that the war was going to be over at
that point because the Germans were in bad shape,
and I don't remember him
talking about the connection
between that and Roosevelt dying.
>> Did he have any strong opinions by Roosevelt?
>> Not that I know of.
I think they all thought he was
popular because he had helped,
get social security and
do things like that that helped everybody
but I think, I don't know.
I don't remember him talking
national politics at the time of the war,
but in the South because Roosevelt was a Democrat.
In the South, the Democrats were the segregationists.
So my dad was a Republican
and I guess his father was too,
but he was dead before he could really become active,
but my great uncle who took
over the newspaper when my dad was
a little boy when
my great uncle's brother
who was my grandfather was killed,
he was a Republican too,
and most Black middle class people
were in the South were Republicans because it was
the Grand Ole Party and it was socially progressive.
They were against segregation,
but all the Democrats were in favor in the South.
So that's all I remember is my dad,
he used to say I'm an independent
who usually votes Republican.
>> Interesting. So your father was
headed toward Japan when
the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan.
Did he did he talk about that all all,
about his memories of that?
>> He didn't. He just
he just said that war is not a good thing,
we got to do anything but do
that because it's just killing people to
kill people and he became a real pacifist after that.
>> What about your mother and your father?
How did they communicate with
each other during the war. Did they write letters?
>> Yes. My mother wrote them every day.
If you ask her now I bet she can
still say a serial number.
And she could up until the time she had her stroke.
I asked her and she just rattled right
off. She wrote them every day.
In fact, a couple of their letters are in a book
called Love Letters from Home or something like that,
that this woman did on Black GIs
and love letters that they wrote during the war.
>> So did you maintain any of that correspondence?
>> Some of it, yeah.
I have a few of the letters.
Not that many survived.
And in fact, I have a duffel bag that belonged to my dad
that my husband won't let me go into it right now because
he said we got to get it de-loused or whatever it is.
So we got to find a place safe place to open it.
So that is something that I still have to do.
We just discovered it.
We've been doing some renovations on my parents home,
and we're discovering a lot of
old things like that duffel bag.
>> Did your mother talk at all about what
her hopes and dreams were for the future,
waiting for your dad to get back from.
>> She just wanted to complete her contract
that was get married,
have two kids, and she was the devoted wife and mother.
And she used to work at the newspaper,
but she stayed home until we started school.
And after we went to school,
then she went to work at
the paper as a kind of support staff.
She was a cashier and then, you know,
did some secretarial support stuff,
but she really just wanted my dad to
be successful and be happy and she was happy.
She was a traditional housewife type who worked.
>> So you talked a little bit about how
your dad taught himself chess.
Did he play with the other soldiers.
>> I think he had trouble getting them to play with him,
but he did play some but he played himself a lot
and he went on to do the tournaments.
We had a great trip out west in
1959 because he went to play in a tournament in Omaha,
Nebraska and we ended up
staying in this hotel and I
remember we had this big broom.
It was like a ball room because
they didn't want to get in a guest room,
so they brought us these road away
beds and we slept in this room,
and my mother went across the street to
the bus station and got hamburgers for us to eat.
So I think it was we were supposed to be insulted,
but it was fun for me and my brother.
I was 10, he was 12.
We could play kickball in the room
because the room was so big but
he played chess every day during the tournament
and I don't know if he increased
his standing as an expert,
but when he came back home that summer,
Ebony Magazine did a story on him.
And I think it was because the editor of the magazine,
Laron Bennett and his friend
who was the editor of Jet magazine,
Robert Johnson, they were.
He was related to Mr. Johnson who started the paper,
but same name started Ebony
but the Atlanta Daily World was
the only place that ever worked besides Ebony and Jet.
So they did
this wonderful four page layout with pictures and
everything on my dad
being a chess champion despite segregation,
despite barriers, something like that.
I think it was the headline. So I
was impressed by that of course,
and I had my picture.
I'm sitting at the table scratching my head trying
to figure out my next move on the chessboard,
but pictures of my mom sitting and watching
him play and my brother playing me or him or something.
And then the group of guys just to come to
our house every weekend to play.
There were students from Morehouse and
other people that my dad had encountered along the way.
And it was just I don't know,
interesting time to be in my house.
>> And did your dad teach you play chess?
>> Yes, he did. And I
played until I got old enough to say, Dad,
I don't want to play anymore because it
required too much concentration, too much thought.
I wanted to think about other things but that.
So he let me stop playing,
but he would do demonstrations at high schools.
In fact, that was part of this picture spread.
He played 20 kids.
He'd walk down the board of the table, and of course,
he'd beat them all and
he'd just blow people's minds because he was so good.
>> So what was
your father's homecoming like from the war?
>> There was a story about
his experiences in Buchenwald and he didn't remember it,
but I found it in the archives of
the paper right after he got back he talked about it.
And he also wrote a story on
the 40th anniversary of the battle of the Bulge in for
the Atlanta Daily World
and he just really thoughtful reflective pieces
about how horrible the war
was and how horrible war is in general.
>> What did he what did he want to do next with
his life after having these experiences?
>> Well, he wanted to come back
and join the family business.
He did come back and apply to
Georgia Tech because he didn't finish.
Of course, they didn't let him in,
but he said he went back to
Morehouse and I don't
think he actually graduated from Morehouse,
but he stayed there for a year or so but he
came back out because he was working
at the paper at this point.
And he initially took over circulation manager.
And when he died, he was advertising manager.
So his whole life was dedicated to preserving the paper
because his father had started it and so CA,
his uncle, ran the paper from
1934 until I took over in 1997.
And that was 63 years later, 60 something like that.
And he was 89 when I took over.
And I was like 40 something,
but it was amazing.
I had already done 22 years at
Atlanta Journal and Constitution and
Cox Enterprises before I
came to join the family business.
And it was five years after my father had died.
>> So you mentioned that you dive in back to Morehouse,
was he able to access the benefits of the GI bill?
>> Yes. He was able to access the GI Bill benefits,
particularly for education and for his house.
They built a house in 1949 with the help of that.
>> Can you tell me more about his decision
to build the house and where he built it?
I know that it became.
>> It did become a thing and I just didn't
really realize how big of a story it was until lately,
I read a book called White Flight,
and I can't remember the author's name,
but he wrote about
my dad actually building this house where he built it.
Back then, there was a kind of
an apartheid designated spaces for Blacks to live.
And they had expanded west from originally,
most Blacks and most everybody lived on the East Side,
and then it went west after the war,
or actually before the war
because the black high school was on the west side too.
It was the first public high school,
Booker T Washington that opened in 1924,
but they expanded west,
but they stopped at
Chickamauga was where he was supposed to not go
beyond and definitely not Chapel Road
because that's where the name of the street
changed from Hunter Street to Mosley Drive.
And back then, that designation of
name change of the street would
designate black and white.
And so my dad had this property.
I guess he got it from his dad because
my grandfather had bought up a lot of
property in the West Side area,
and he was going to build the house on Mosley Place.
It was the first house on the block,
and this is what I learned from reading the book.
I didn't learn from my dad. He didn't talk about it.
The Mosley Park neighborhood
Association came to him and said,
don't build this house here.
And he said, yeah, I'm doing that.
And they said, well, if you have to build it,
let it turn to face Chapel Road,
and let it face Mosley Place.
So he said, No, I'm not doing that.
And so he did build the house.
And they said he told
them that if you don't want to live here no more,
I know a lot of soldiers,
GIs who were returning from World War II,
who would love to have a home
and would be interested in buying yours.
And so that's apparently what
happened because they all fled.
>> And then the neighborhood.
>> The neighborhood from White to Black.
And the park itself,
Mosley Park went from White to Black.
>> And so then yeah,
in terms of its designation under
segragation was now a black park, interesting.
So what were your earliest memories of your father?
>> I don't know my earliest memories of him.
I don't know, just being a soft
spoken, cerebral storyteller.
And he loved to tell stories and he loved to inform me.
He used to tell me that if you can read,
you can do anything and I would say, but I can't do that.
He said, yeah, you can.
And I remember he
used to have people come over and play chess.
There would be students and other folks that he would
run into on Saturday night.
So they would go down in the basement and play chess.
And one night, my brother
had a friend spending the night,
Sammy Westerfield, whose dad was
a professor at AU or something.
And one of the chess players came
in and it was Gordon Knight.
And as soon as he came in and went downstairs,
Sammy said to my brother,
what's that white man doing in your house?
And my brother said,
that's not a white man, that's Gordon.
And so that was weird to me that that would even come up.
And so when everybody went home,
my brother said to my dad, why did you
let that white man come over here?
My dad looked at me and said, that's
not a white man, that's Gordon.
And so that very summer,
he sent us off to a sleepaway camp in
Tennessee where it was integrated so that we
could see that white people were people
too and that they
probably could see that we were people too,
but the main thing is it was a group
that was supporters of the civil rights movement.
The freedom school that Martin Luther
King Jr. went to was in Mount Eagle,
Tennessee, and this is where this camp was too.
And I must have been seven,
six, I don't know, really young,
but I didn't learn how to swim in the lake
and we had archery and we had arts and
crafts and stuff and it was
fun and they and I really liked people.
I don't remember how many.
There were other black people there, but not that many.
It wasn't a big huge camp anyway,
but there were black and white kids there.
>> That was cool. So what memories
did you have of your neighborhood growing up?
>> It was full of kids.
The people next door had three daughters,
an older one, one who was
close to my age, and a younger one.
The people on the corner was
the dean of Clark College and his wife was a librarian.
She was the first Black librarian.
So that was the McFeders' home.
The parents of the three girls,
the mother was a Black social worker
from the Black first ones.
Her husband worked at the post office.
The people on the other side of us,
he was the chairman of the board of
Atlanta Life Insurance Company.
So everybody was educated, everybody was professional.
People behind us had a daughter who was older than I,
and then one much younger than I.
And I used to use their house to go
visit my girlfriend who lived on Chapel Road,
and her mother was a school teacher and her father
was something with the juvenile justice system.
I'm not quite sure exactly what he did.
And the house that I used to walk
through with the older daughter and the younger daughter,
she was a social worker too,
and her husband was
a referee coach in one of the Black high schools.
So I thought everybody was smart and rich.
In terms of relative, everybody was comfortable.
You could go eat at anybody's house,
you could spend the night at anybody's house.
And so it's a lot of friends
and the girl who lived on Chapel Road,
her name was Alexis.
We had the same name. So there you go.
>> And so what kind of things did you do for fun?
>> Well, in summertime, we played outside a lot.
We played throwing poses.
You know that one, where somebody is the thrower
and you swing around and
then you have to freeze however you land.
And then it was May I. You know that?
You started together at the same place and
the caller says take two giant steps.
And if you just take them, you're out,
but you have to say may I,
and then you take you
two giant steps and the person who gets to
the end goal is a winner.
So it was a lot of fun to do that.
My brother had a film projector
and would show movies on the wall
in our basement in the summer, too.
The one that I remember he
got first was Creature from the Black Lagoon.
[LAUGHTER] So everybody was
screaming and stuff like that. It's just fun.
And I was the same age as Kathy,
who was a little girl on Father Knows Best,
which was a TV show and
I just felt like I had the same kind of life.
It was really weird.
Stuff that was going on her house
was stuff that was going on mine,
except that I got
these mixed signals from the larger community
that said I wasn't worth a damn and
not good enough to do anything, I'll be anywhere.
And that was very frustrating and hurtful.
And I think some things I'm still angry about,
and I'll always be angry about,
but on the other hand,
I think I'm fabulous.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Who was that like to have to consume media with
no representation or
very little representation in the mainstream?
>> Well, the newspaper more than made up
for it because we had lots of representation.
And Black History Month rolled around,
and it would be Abraham Lincoln,
Frederick Douglas, Carter Woodson, and my grandfather.
Those would be the pages
going across the top of the page.
So it didn't seem like it was not in representation.
And the TV shows, I didn't really mind
because they were funny and they were good, well written.
And I could relate because I was
very middle class and very protected in that way.
>> How did your father react to the struggle of
the civil rights movement start to take off more?
>> I think that he was most concerned
about being a non-violent thing.
His uncle, who was running the paper at the time,
did not approve of the street demonstrations
because they thought you need to let us handle it,
we'll take care of it through
the courts because they had won
the banning of the all White Democratic Party primary,
which was 1944.
The county unit system had been wiped
out as unconstitutional in 1959 or something like that.
And the suits have been filed for equal pay for teachers,
equal access to the park.
It took five years so from
the lawsuit the golf course from '51 to
'55 before the State Supreme Court finally ruled it
unconstitutional to have separate
and equal because they weren't equal.
There was no public golf course for Black people.
But just they were afraid, I think,
what harm could be done to them
physically by the confrontation in the street.
And when I later learned not
from my father, but about CA,
and I don't know where my dad was on it,
but I think he probably was concerned
about it too, the impact on the business.
At of advertisers threatened to
pull their business if CA didn't
stop the students from demonstrating and boycotting,
and so he was caught in a rock
and apart place on that one.
And there was a negative impact
on the business as a business,
and particular people like me.
I went to work someplace else instead
of the newspaper because I
was trying to cross those barriers that they had been
working so hard to bring down.
So the paper really went through
a hard transition in the '60s and '70s because of that,
and a brain drain and it was a tough period,
and that's when they closed the printing presses
in 1970, I think.
Well, they had been doing
seven days a week during World War II.
They cut back to six days so they could take Sunday off.
They cut out the Monday paper.
And thenthey after they closed the printing presses,
they went to four days.
By the time I took over in '97,
it was down to two days.
And we launched the website and made it every day.
But we made it once a week,
I think, after I had been there for five years,
probably should have done it sooner.
Universe was just not trained
to advertise like that anymore.
>> So as your father continue to work for the paper,
he would sometimes go out into more rural areas
and cover struggles that people
didn't see right in Atlanta, right?
>> Yeah. In the lynchings in,
Georgia in Monroe County, I think that's what it was,
he went with a reporter to interview one of
the they thought witnesses
because it was a kid who had gotten beat up.
So my dad took pictures of him and it was
really gruesome pictures,
his face all beat up and swollen up and stuff like that.
So he was well aware
of what it meant to leave the metro area.
And the paper did have a lot of
correspondents who wrote things and sent them in still.
But the primary focus
was on Atlanta and the activities in Atlanta.
He also at some point,
I think this is until the '70s,
he started doing a radio show in
which he would interview different people
about different topics.
And I have a suitcase full of his cassette tapes of
those interviews that I've got to
get transferred or digitized.
>> So can you tell me a little bit about
your dad's increased involvement in
Holocaust education and activism
because I think that was also starting in the '70s?
>> Yes, it was. He responded
to a call from Dr. Crawford at
Emory University who put out a call
for liberators and survivors.
And so he decided to go and
he took some of his pictures with him.
And he met Alex Gross,
who was a survivor of Buchenwald,
and they became fast friends and they
would do tours and lectures at
different schools all over
the state and talking about their experiences.
Alex used to call them a black angel because that was
the way they felt when they saw
these black soldiers coming into the camp.
I think Alex was around somewhere
around 14 or 15 at the time.
He was a little bit younger than my dad,
but they really were great friends.
In fact, he spoke at my dad's funeral.
>> And why was this work so important to him?
>> Because he knew that some people
didn't believe it and he had
proof from his photographs and he needed
to make sure it didn't happen again
that people needed to know.
>> So what was your relationship like with your father
as he grew older and you grew older?
>> Well, we disagreed on politics a lot because he
continued to argue the Republican position,
and I, of course, was more liberal and
more prone to be confronted in the street.
Then even though I was a little bit younger to do that,
I did not join any of the student movement here.
I was still in high school,
but he was so cool. He was so sweet.
He stayed up with me all night
and when I was a senior in high school,
building a Roman home.
And I had that was my assignment.
I was taking Latin for
my senior year because I had
taken all of the Spanish that I could take.
And so that was the assignment
was to build a typical Roman home.
So he stayed up all night and helped me do that.
But he used to lecture a lot and I didn't like that.
>> Did you feel that there was
just degenerational divide in terms of
how people responded to change or?
>> Yeah, I'm sure there was some of that
because when I went to first went to college,
I went to Bard College,
which is women's undergraduate,
Columbia in New York City and when I came home,
I cut my hair off into an Afro and dad said,
next thing we know you want a bone in your nose.
So he thought that it was not the way to look.
And plus I got my ears pierced and
that was not a good thing to do,
not the proper lady like thing to do.
And I think in retrospect,
he was just concerned for me in
terms of how I would be received by the larger community.
If I had looked like Angela Davis,
they would think I was a militant scary woman
as opposed to my hair all done up.
I looked like a regular,
like the girl from Father Knows Best.
[LAUGHTER]
>> And did your mother voice
any opinions about these things?
>> Not a lot. My father believed in living by example.
And that was really great except if you didn't get it.
What does he mean by that?
You know, what is that example that you're doing there?
If you don't know, but he really
didn't like to tell you what to do.
He let you figure it out,
trying to give you some guidance,
mostly I was on my own,
and I was very strong headed, strong willed too.
>> So what do you think your father would most
want students to take
away from his life and his experience?
>> That you cannot fight hate with hate.
Nobody wins, everybody loses.
You lose your humanity,
you take away other people's humanity and that you have
to find a way to work it out
and you have to disagree agreeably.
It just won't work any other way.
Something that Andy Young says all the time,
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves
everybody blind and toothless. That's not good.
>> And what do you think
are the most important things for
students to take away from this history,
his history, yours, this timeline?
>> Pretty much the same.
And you have to be a bridge builder too.
If you want to
know what's on the other side of the bridge,
you need to go extend yourself.
And exposure is important too.
You need to see how other people live,
how other people express themselves.
There used to be
a golden rule called do unto others as you
want them to do unto you.
I think it needs to be expanded.
So do unto others as they want to be done unto
and then they will do the same hopefully to you.
>> Is there anything that I haven't
asked you about that you'd like to talk about today?
>> I don't think I can think of anything
except that I was
director of diversity for
Cox Enterprises before I
left to take over the family paper.
And that further built on
my lifelong philosophy that grew out
of my experiences with
my father and with the paper and everything.
And our slogan was,
our diversity is our strength
because I needed them to understand through
their businesses that people diversity
is as important as business diversity.
And so they had broadcast newspapers,
cable and automobile auction companies
as the four main branches,
and so I came up with that slogan,
our diversity is our strength.
And I do believe that.
And sometimes it takes longer to
get things done, but in the long run,
you have a better end result,
I think by including more different viewpoints.
>> This was the '80s and '90s.
>> This was the early '90s.
I went out in '93 and my dad had died a year before I had
been VP community affairs
at the Journal Constitution for seven years.
And I gave away the corporate philanthropy and I became
a professional community volunteer
sitting on boards of nonprofits and stuff like that.
That further enhanced
my bridge building and outreach tendency.
I've had a pretty interesting life.
I ended up being the publisher for
the Atlanta Daily Woled for 17 years,
which is amazing to me.
But we sold a paper though in
2012 because we just couldn't do it.
It's not Mom and Pop anymore.
Based on the recession that happened in around '07,
'08 and the tornado of
2008 took the roof of our building on Auburn Avenue.
We never went back in
because we couldn't afford to fix it.
We could fix the roof, but we couldn't
afford to bring everything up to code.
And the changes in the industry,
social media was sucking up all the advertising.
And we had launched a website,
but we didn't have the eyeballs.
We just have no way to measure in,
no marketing money either.
So in 2012, I convinced this company to buy the paper.
And they did because they wanted the Atlanta market.
And it was a company based in
Detroit called Real Times Media,
and they had already bought John Sengstacke's newspapers,
which was a Chicago Defender,
which was the first black paper in 1905,
that it was successful and Pittsburgh Courier
and Michigan Chronicle and
the Memphis Tri-State Defender.
So that's the home that Atlanta World is in now.
They have suspended publication altogether,
but they have the digital daily so Atlanta Daily World.
And when we launched our website in 1999,
that's why we kept daily in the name too because
we could update and add to it every day.
>> What do you think today is the role
or the best balance between media that's targeted
toward one particular community or one viewpoint
versus all encompassing or
attempting to be all encompassing?
>> Well, I think you need to have both.
I think there needs to be a caucus voice, if you will,
for women, for people of color,
for different ethnic groups.
And then there needs to be
the broader umbrella voice that includes them all.
But I do think that they're all useful and good to have.
>> That's great. Well, thank you so much
for sharing your story and
your family story with us
and allowing us to
tell your dad's story here at the museum.
>> That's great.
>> I appreciate that.
>> I appreciate you taking the time and let me tail it
as I'm in the process of trying to write it down.
So hopefully, this time next year,
I'll have a book to share.
>> And we'll share a copy of this interview.
>> Oh, wonderful. That'd be great.
>> It will always be helpful when [OVERLAPPING].
>> Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
>> Of course.