How it came to be--A message from the founder, Dr. Dena Scher
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This collection began because my students would tell stories about their families---how they came from the South, their experiences of racism and Civil Rights. In fact there were a couple of significant events that led to my desire to preserve and document the student “stories”.
In March 2002, I took eight students on a “Roots” travel seminar to North Carolina to study the African-American experience. One of our stops was at the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. For this experience, we donned gloves and went into a special room to read documents from the Federal Writers project 1936-1940. Sitting in that room and reading about ex-slave experiences like “jumping the broom” galvanized my sense of the power of preserving the lives and experiences of ordinary people.
On this same trip, we went to Greensboro, NC where alumnae of Bennett College spoke about the sit in demonstrations at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960. Our group was mesmerized listening to Yvonne Revell and Roslyn Smith.
At the end of the session, Ms. Revell made what to me was a shocking statement: It was the first time she had spoken about those events since they had happened. This statement led to a return to NC to document her experiences—Yvonne Revell’s interview was the first in the collection. (LINK) Ms. Revell speaks of not being able to eat in the city restaurants, the fear she felt at the lunch counter, the participation of the president of Bennett College in supporting the female protesters who were jailed, the jubilation that the demonstrators felt at the closing of the Woolworth’s store, and the impact of these experiences as she became the first black teacher in a white elementary school.
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And then technology intervened with the development of small digital recorders, audio downloads, and web sites. The collection of oral histories dovetailed with my training and skills as a clinical psychologist and my teaching of interviewing techniques. Historian Tom Klug and participation in the Oral History Association helped me to understand the expectations of historical primary documentation.
The interviews that were collected by students would have been languishing on my computer memory, if not for Michael Barnes. With the support of the Marygrove College library administration, Michael Barnes created the web site and online repository for the interviews.
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Through these interviews, I know each of the people interviewed personally---
I am amazed by the tenacity of Sam Moore (LINK) in moving from the poverty of Texas where they existed on leftovers from the white people’s house and then by sharecropping to living in the back of a bowling alley when he moved to Detroit.
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I am delighted by Edith Floyd’s (LINK) description of playing gladiator using a mule and the hood of a car on the farm in South Carolina.
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I am thoughtful when Frank Rashid (LINK) speaks of the events of July 23, 1967 and his father receiving a phone call that the family store was being looted. What happened next sparked the 16-year-old’s questioning, “What role did we play? TAKE OUT Use Khapoya
And when you own a liquor store you recognize that you do play a role.”
I am touched by US-born Esperanza Perez (LINK) who at age nine worked in the cotton fields of Texas five days of the week. Then with less than $5, she crossed the border to Mexico to stay the weekend with family.
And on and on….
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It was a joy for me in November 2011 when Daisy Gary at age 96 and her great granddaughter visited our PSY436: Clinical Perspectives: Interviewing course. Daisy’s great granddaughter Danielle Washington was a student in the psychology course on interviewing skills in 2006.
Daisy Gary was born in Arkansas in 1915---she was 91 when her great grand daughter, Danielle Washington, interviewed her. As a girl Daisy picked cotton, shucked corn, and stacked peanuts in Arkansas. Her father was mixed white and Cherokee Indian, her mother was Italian and black and her grandmother was a slave freed by a “good master”. She moved from Arkansas to Texas to Detroit, she had two husbands, one was bad and the other was stupid---in telling about her life she recounts incidents of discrimination and racism and in the interview you hear her feisty way of not being subdued by racism.
That day when Daisy and Danielle visited the class we all listened to a clip from Danielle’s 2006 interview of her great grandmother. You really should listen for yourself to hear Daisy call Mr. Charlie, a pile of slop!
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