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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
A related resource
RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Dan Carter
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history interview with Daniel Carter on February—</p>
<p>Tom Hungate: 19<sup>th</sup>.</p>
<p>Franklin: 19<sup>th</sup>, thank you, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Dan about his experiencing living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Dan Carter: Daniel G. Carter, Junior.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and can you spell that out?</p>
<p>Carter: D-A-N-I-E-L, G, C-A-R-T-E-R, Junior, J-R.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thanks a lot, Dan. So tell me how you first came to the Tri-Cities area.</p>
<p>Carter: Well, I was recruited by GE, that I refer to as Generous Electric, and I think that’s because of the fact that they had their own appliance store here and we found it very generous of them to allow us to buy GE appliances at a discount.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Carter: I was recruited by GE, and I was supposed to be going to Florida. And then I got a call from Schenectady. They said, no, we want you to go out to the Hanford Site near Pasco, Washington. Do you know where it is? Nope, never heard of it. So, that started the ball rolling, and I started getting calls from the HR people here with GE at Hanford, trying to schedule a date for me to come out for an interview. And it took me a couple of months to do that, because I was teaching school at the time. And I told them I had to wait until the school year was over before I could break loose and take a trip out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where were you living at the time?</p>
<p>Carter: In Louisiana.</p>
<p>Franklin: Are you from Louisiana originally?</p>
<p>Carter: Yes, I’m originally from Louisiana.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you give us your birthdate?</p>
<p>Carter: September the 19<sup>th</sup>, 1939.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thanks. So what was your educational background at that time?</p>
<p>Carter: I graduated from Southern University in Baton Rouge with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and is that what you were teaching?</p>
<p>Carter: I taught chemistry, general science, physics, and geometry. [CHUCKLING]</p>
<p>Franklin: And what position had you applied for at General Electric?</p>
<p>Carter: Just a scientific position.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And when you were living in Louisiana, that was—you were born into segregation.</p>
<p>Carter: That’s correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and Louisiana was still segregated at that time?</p>
<p>Carter: That’s correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you talk about how that impacted your life and your education?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, first of all, I went to a segregated school all twelve years of secondary education. It was interesting that, at that time, due to the segregated system, our school was lower on the totem pole for resources. For example, the textbooks that I got were not new. They were used textbooks that were sent over from the all-white high school when they got new textbooks. It was in later years that they decided they were going to try to do better and started giving the all-black schools new textbooks. And started building some new buildings at that time. When I went to Southern University in Baton Rouge, I had no choice of going to Louisiana State University. However, if you were in graduate school, you could possibly get into a program at that university. But for undergraduate work, you couldn’t do it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was Southern University an HBC?</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And where did you grow up, your formative years? Was that in Baton Rouge?</p>
<p>Carter: No, central Louisiana.</p>
<p>Franklin: Central Louisiana.</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And your town, all of its facilities and everything were segregated?</p>
<p>Carter: That’s correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you also—was the town itself segregated as well—</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: --from the—and so what—can you describe what some of the segregated facilities were and kind of the differences between the white facilities and the black facilities?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, you had, on the social side, the restaurants, it was either all-white or all-black. The churches were either all-white or all-black. There were efforts to try to bridge that gap between church members, especially when it came to civil rights. So, like I say, the black communities on one side of town generally, and the white community on the other side of the town.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you—I know it was a common practice at that time for blacks to use the backdoor of a restaurant in order to take food to go. Was that the case in your—where you grow up?</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, if you went to one of the white restaurants, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: You could order food, right, and give them money, you just couldn’t eat the food—</p>
<p>Carter: There.</p>
<p>Franklin: --inside the restaurant.</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, right. So, normally, you would go to a black restaurant. Because there were black restaurants. Rather than go to the white restaurant and get food out the backdoor.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. So when you started getting these calls from this Hanford place, kind of take us through that and kind of how you got to the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Carter: Well, they gave me a little information about the Hanford Project and the fact that they were doing some really scientific work that I thought was very interesting. I wanted to learn more about it. So—</p>
<p>Franklin: What did they tell you about it? What did they tell you about what they were doing, and what kind of detail did they go into?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, they didn’t go into a lot of details, because they were—you know, still a lot of stuff was just absolutely secret at that time. But they explained that they were part of the Manhattan Project, but they didn’t go into any details of building bombs or operating reactors or any of that kind of stuff. They just talked about the scientific work that was being done here. They thought I could be a participant in that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And so what happened next?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, I came out for my interview, and I was really impressed with the high-level scientific work that was going on in the laboratories, in the reprocessing facilities and the reactors. That was all new stuff to me. I just found it very interesting, so I was thinking, you know, I think I’d like to become a part of that. So I went back home and I was married at the time and had one child. My mother-in-law said, you know, it’d probably be a good idea for you to take that job. I think mother-in-law wanted me to be in a position to properly support her daughter. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, right. Had you left the South before that?</p>
<p>Carter: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, so going to Hanford was your first time north of the Mason-Dixon Line?</p>
<p>Carter: Oh, no, no, that’s not true.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Carter: I had relatives in Detroit, so we made trips to Detroit from time to time. Not often, but occasionally.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So you eventually picked up your family and moved to Hanford. When was that, approximately?</p>
<p>Carter: In mid-’64.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mid-’64. What were your first impressions, and your family’s first impressions of the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Carter: It’s a very desolate place. A lot of open space. Not many trees. We’re used to lots of trees. Never had seen tumbleweeds rolling down the streets. We saw that. Had to water your lawn to have any grass, and that was new to us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did you first live when you came to work for the—</p>
<p>Carter: In Richland Village.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Richland Village. And what type of house did you live in?</p>
<p>Carter: I don’t know what—it was a two-bedroom house. They didn’t have the ABC names in those houses.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what were you kind of—tell me about your work, what did you first start out doing for Hanford?</p>
<p>Carter: I started working in the Analytical Laboratories in the 300 Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and what type of work did you do?</p>
<p>Carter: Analytical chemistry.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Tell me about kind of—</p>
<p>Carter: And—and—</p>
<p>Franklin: --a day in a life of an analytical chemist.</p>
<p>Carter: Well, you work in a laboratory and you’re doing analytical work. Separating materials out, studying materials and—that’s the kind of stuff you’re doing in an analytical laboratory. You’re also making a determination of what kind of concentration you have of certain chemicals in a compound and so forth. That was my first assignment. I was on what they call the tech-grad rotation program. So I spent three months in the Analytical Laboratories and then I was sent out to the PUREX Plant and to spend another three months out at the PUREX Plant also in the Analytical Laboratory. Then after that, I moved back to the 300 Area, and that’s when GE decided to leave. And I went from GE to Battelle.</p>
<p>Franklin: And is that because Battelle took over that work—</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: --when GE left?</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, okay.</p>
<p>Carter: And I had a choice of staying with GE at one of the other locations, like out at the 200 Area with the PUREX Plant, or agreeing with GE to move to another city.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh. And how come you chose to stay and go to Battelle?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, the human resources person who recruited me leaned on me very heavily to go with him over to Battelle.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why was that?</p>
<p>Carter: I suppose that he thought that I would make a good fit for Battelle in the technical area. So he didn’t want to lose a, I guess, another technical person to another location.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Tell me about the—more about the tech grad program and kind of the makeup of it. It was college grads.</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Was it—how diverse was it? Did you work with mostly white coworkers, or did you have—were there any—and was it segregated at all? Or—I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about that.</p>
<p>Carter: No, there was no segregation, because I was it. There were no other—all the people in the program were white.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: There were no minority people at all.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your perception by your white coworkers?</p>
<p>Carter: Got along fine with everybody. They treated me well.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what about in Richland? I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about moving from a formally segregated society to a not formally segregated society.</p>
<p>Carter: We didn’t have any problem. We fit in very well. We did not—my bride and I never had an issue.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. I guess I’m just wondering about how it felt, maybe, to go into spaces that, in the South, would have been whites only, but in the North would have been open to anyone regardless of race. I’m just kind of curious how that—was there something to get used to there?</p>
<p>Carter: Not at all.</p>
<p>Franklin: Not at all?</p>
<p>Carter: Nope.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you’ve lived in Richland your whole time since moving here, right?</p>
<p>Carter: That’s correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: And we know there’s a large African American community in Pasco. How large was the African American community in Richland?</p>
<p>Carter: Very small. I would say less than 100 maybe. There were some families that were here long before I came, like the Mitchells, the Wallaces, the Browns. So there were other families here before I came.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your wife, you mentioned. Did she work outside the home, or was she--?</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and where did she work?</p>
<p>Carter: First job was in the Battelle Technical Library.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: Then she went from there to the Technical Shop. Then the 300 Area. And then from there, she went to—what was it called? Hanford Environmental Health Organization, who did all the medical work out at Hanford, she went to work for them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, the HEHF, Hanford Environmental Health Foundation.</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what was her background? Did she have a college education as well?</p>
<p>Carter: She did not finish her college degree, because we got married in college, and we promptly started a—with a child. So she dropped out of school. But she was majoring in business. So she did clerical work, you know, and that kind of thing when she worked out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you have any interaction with the African American community in Pasco?</p>
<p>Carter: Sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that.</p>
<p>Carter: Oh, I initially met people in that community through the church.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm. And then how—what other types of interactions did you have?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, over the years, I met different people. And at one point, there were some of us—the African Americans here in Richland, and the ones in Pasco—became good friends, and we would have a Pokeno party once a month.</p>
<p>Franklin: A keynote?</p>
<p>Carter: Pokeno.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, Pokeno.</p>
<p>Carter: So then about three or four couples from Pasco and about three or four couples from Richland would get together and go from one home to another home. We did that for a number of years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Did you go to church in Richland or in Pasco?</p>
<p>Carter: I went to church in Richland, and I attend church at Central United Protestant Church over the years. However, we would go to special events at especially the St. James Methodist Church over in east Pasco. But we also participated and attend the black Baptist churches over there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. I’m wondering if—I know there were some—so, you know the ‘60s, kind of when you came and the few years after you came, that was kind of the growth and kind of the climax of the civil rights movement in the United States.</p>
<p>Carter: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if you can talk about how that affected you and your family and others that you knew in the African American community.</p>
<p>Carter: Well, first of all, my bride and I were part of the very first largescale downtown marches during the Civil Rights period, and that was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: Where we were part of the first big march that went into downtown Baton Rouge. In fact, the university was shut down for two days because of the—well, I guess you could say the concern for people on both sides of the arguments there. But we finally got things settled back down. And it had to do with—one of the things that bugged the hell out of me a lot was—I have a distaste in my mouth for Walgreen drugstores now. And it goes back to when there was a Walgreen drugstore in my town that had a lunch counter. And I could not go and sit at the lunch counter and order a hamburger. And that always bothered me. [CHUCKLING] But after my bride and I came here, we went to wherever we wanted to go. We went to any restaurant or the store or whatever. We never had any issue. We never did.</p>
<p>Franklin: What motivated you to participate in that civil rights march in Baton Rouge?</p>
<p>Carter: Oh, we had a lot of—we lived—my bride and I both lived on the campus. And the dormitory councils held meetings about it, and we just said, hey, we’d jump in and participate in this thing. Because I don’t like what’s going on either. So, we don’t like this segregated lunch counters downtown where we have to go spend our money for our clothing and our shoes and so forth.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. But you can’t eat lunch there.</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah!</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I understand there was a little bit of civil rights activity in Pasco, as well. Did you participate in any of that?</p>
<p>Carter: We did not participate in any of the marches or anything like that in Pasco. We were aware of them, and there was a CORE organization here in Richland. CORE, Congress from—what was it called?</p>
<p>Franklin: Congress of Racial Equality, right?</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, something like that, yup. We were not a part of that group, but I did join the NAACP. What we did do, Dr. Dallas Barnes and some others, we put together a corporation called the Matrix Corporation and built a facility over in east Pasco called the Matrix Building, which is still there. Our idea was to bring employment opportunities, investment opportunities and a rebuilding of the east Pasco community. Unfortunately, there were some people who didn’t like that idea who lived there, and they bombed the building a week before we was going to have the grand opening.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did they ever find out who bombed the building?</p>
<p>Carter: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you have any idea?</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: And can you say?</p>
<p>Carter: No, because I can’t prove it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Can you say which community it may have been in? Was it someone from the African American community?</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. What do you think the potential motivation to bomb—to sabotage that building?</p>
<p>Carter: Jealousy, hatred for Richland people. There are people who thought, for some reason or another, that we looked down on them and was going to be doing stuff that was not favorable for them, for some reason or another. But at the same time, all of the commercial facilities in east Pasco were owned by whites. And they didn’t have any problem going to that white grocery store over there and spending their money. Or having to drive all the way across town to a white-owned laundromat, when we built a very nice one there. It was one of the nicest ones in the Tri-Cities area there. So it was jealousy and just disgruntlement toward Richland people.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Carter: Even Dr. Dallas Barnes lived right there in that community, and he was a part of the program.</p>
<p>Franklin: So it wasn’t just Richland people; it was like a collaboration between Pasco residents and Richland residents.</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You had mentioned Dallas Barnes before, before the interview and just now. I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your relationship with Dallas Barnes and—</p>
<p>Carter: We met Dallas and his wife, Lozie, the first year we were here. In fact, the second week, I think, we were here, because my bride came out here alone on the train with two babies.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Carter: And she just fell sick after she got here. She was just exhausted. So I had to put her in Kadlec Hospital and Dallas’ wife, Lozie, stepped up to help me with the babies until I got my bride out of the hospital. That’s how we met. At that time, Dallas was working as a technician out at the 300 Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. And is that how you knew each other, was from—you had met at work?</p>
<p>Carter: No, we had not met at work. We just met through—probably one of the nurses at the hospital knew about Dallas’ wife, Lozie, and said, you know, I bet she can help take care of those babies of yours.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, that’s really great. And you guys became kind of lifelong friends?</p>
<p>Carter: Yup, that’s right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you mentioned that Dallas later went on to a career at the university, right?</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: But still continues to live in Pasco?</p>
<p>Carter: No, he lived up in Pullman for 20-something years, probably.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, right, right, right.</p>
<p>Carter: But he left Pasco and went up there and got his bachelor’s degree, and then went on and got his PhD and joined the staff up there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you—when did you first purchase a home in Richland?</p>
<p>Carter: My first year here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you have any problems buying a house here in Richland?</p>
<p>Carter: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: At the time, the Richland Village was a rental community. And they decided that they wanted to get out—the outfit that owned it wanted to get out of it and sell all the houses in Richland Village. Which, you know, was hundreds of houses. So the manager of the organization called me and said, Dan, we’re going to sell these houses and you can buy the house that you’re in, or you may prefer to have a larger house, like a three-bedroom, since you have a family. So, we chose to look at one of the three-bedrooms he had, and we bought that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the address of that house?</p>
<p>Carter: I think it was 2027 Newcomer.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So right in central Richland, in Richland proper.</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Let’s see here. I’ve heard from others and by doing a little research that Kennewick was kind of an unofficially segregated town in that African Americans were not encouraged to be there after dark or were not encouraged to live there. I’m wondering if you had any experiences with—</p>
<p>Carter: When we moved here, as far as we knew, there was not a single black family that lived in Kennewick. However, interesting, through some of the people at work, we were invited to homes over in Kennewick for a social gathering.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: One of the first black families to get a home in Kennewick was the Herb Jones family. Herb Jones and his wife, Rendie, Rendata. They purchased a home over in the old part of Kennewick. And as far as we know, they were the very first ones to own—black family to own a home there. I think both Herb and Rendie worked out at Hanford. And I think they were a part of the CORE organization, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Do you remember about what time that was?</p>
<p>Carter: I’m going to guess late ‘60s?</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. When you would go to Kennewick, did you feel welcome in the area? Did you ever get any kind of—</p>
<p>Carter: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: --undue harassment by the police or anything?</p>
<p>Carter: No, never.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: And we went there for shopping, you know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. How would you describe life in the community of Richland when you first moved here?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, like I said, we never experienced an overt negative situation at all. As far as I know, when we came here, Ed Smith and I were the only black professionals here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: And Ed has passed away now. Ed was an engineer, and I was a scientist. As far as I know, we were the only ones back in the mid-‘60s. I came in ’64, and I think Ed and his family came here in probably ’62, ’63, thereabouts. They were here before we were. And we became lifelong friends also. And like I say, Eddie died about five, six years ago. But we went to whatever store we wanted to go to. We were treated with respect. At church, we were well-received. At the time, my wife went to Christ the King, and I went to Central United Protestant, and over the years, she transferred over to Central United Protestant because of the music program. She wanted to get in a music program.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Carter: Christ the King didn’t have much of a music program, so she came over there and sang in the choir at Central United Protestant for about 30 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Carter: So I was never called names or anything like that. I can’t remember anything like that happening to me or to my family.</p>
<p>Franklin: While you were here?</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: But did that kind of thing happen in the South, when you were growing up and when you were in college?</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, things like that happened, but I don’t remember it happening to me. We sort of did all of our activities, if you will, in the black community, the black churches, black restaurants, and movie theaters and so forth.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. Do you remember any particular community events in Richland that stand out to you when you moved here and the years after?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, I became an activist myself. I helped start the first Head Start program for Benton and Franklin Counties. I recall loading stuffed toys in my old station wagon and hauling it over to the Unitarian Church in Kennewick, where we started the program. And that, like I said, that was at the Unitarian Church in Kennewick where we started the Head Start program.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: I became the first president of the Community Action Agency for Benton and Franklin Counties.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did that agency do?</p>
<p>Carter: It still does community services. It’s a community service organization. It does a lot of things. Housing, weatherization, and all kind of community support activities. They’re located in Pasco over there on Court Street. So they’ve been around ever since. I was the first chair of the Benton, Franklin and Walla Walla Private Industry Council. That’s an organization we set up for job training, and became a part of the—grew out of the Job Training Partnership Act. I serve on the state level in that organization, and then when they decided to set up the private Industry Council, then I had the knowledge. So the county commissioners called me in, and we met at the Franklin County courthouse for our first meeting to start this program. And the county commissioner said, Dan, you’re going to have to head this thing up to get it started. And I did, to get it started.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Carter: In fact, I even have a plaque from President Reagan for my activities in that program.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Carter: Yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. How—kind of returning to your Hanford work—</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Going to flip over to the Hanford side of things. It says here that you hold a US patent in one of the PUREX processes.</p>
<p>Carter: That’s correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did that happen?</p>
<p>Carter: That’s the work I was doing in the laboratory, doing research work in the laboratory, and stumbled upon something that was—I was working on PUREX work in the laboratory in the 300 Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that for Battelle?</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, that was under Battelle, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Without getting too technical, I wonder if you could describe the patent.</p>
<p>Carter: It has to do with the suppression of hydrogen generation during the PUREX process.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what was the importance of that?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, if you get too much hydrogen in the system, you can have an explosion. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: So, you as a private person, can hold a US patent while doing government work?</p>
<p>Carter: You get a patent issued under your name, but the government owns it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. That’s still really, really cool. So it says here that you began working for GE, and then to Battelle and then to Westinghouse.</p>
<p>Carter: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you work for Battelle for?</p>
<p>Carter: About five years.</p>
<p>Franklin: And was it all in the 300 Area?</p>
<p>Carter: Yes, all the Battelle work was in the 300 Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: And when you transferred to Westinghouse—well, first of all, why did you transfer, and then what did you do?</p>
<p>Carter: Because Battelle lost the funding for reactor programs. And at the time, I was working in nuclear fuel on development. So, if I wanted to stay in the reactor-related program where the funding was, I had to go over to Westinghouse. And Westinghouse was awarded the contract to build the FFTF, the Fast Flux Test Facility. So, I jumped to Westinghouse to become a part of the Fast Flux Test Facility design, construction and operation.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you stay working with the FFTF?</p>
<p>Carter: I can’t tell you exactly the number of years, but maybe ten years. I’m not sure it was that long, because I signed up to become a part of the startup crew for the reactor. So I had to go through nuclear power training for that. And a part of that was done down at Idaho Falls. So, I had to go down to Idaho Falls and work down there in the reactor business at the EBR-II reactor down there to qualify. And then when I came back, I was sent out to the 400 Area at the Site to work with Bechtel on constructing the reactor. So, one of the things that we had to know, as a part of the reactor operation program, we had to learn every system in that reactor. And as a result of that knowledge, Bechtel would lean on me when they need to find something in the plant as we were building it. So I walked the plant every day to see what was being built where, and I could work with the design people and the construction people to make sure we were building the reactor properly.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the importance of the FFTF?</p>
<p>Carter: It was the leading edge of the Breeder Reactor program. We were going to demonstrate how you could generate more fuel than you burned and also at the same time generate electricity. It was called the Breeder Reactor Program. So, we were the first to do that, and we had the most sophisticated reactor in the world at the time. And then based on the work we were doing at Hanford and the design we came up with, a large breeder reactor was designed to be built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And I had to go down there, also. But when the thing with the Carter Administration came in and decided to pull the funding out of that program even though we had the design, a lot of that facility, and all these beautiful stainless steel components built and ready to go in, poured the foundation and ready to start coming up out of the ground with it, and they pulled the funding out of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ouch.</p>
<p>Carter: So that was essentially the deathblow to the Breeder Reactor Program, even though Westinghouse continued to build the FFTF and we got it built and got it up and operating. At the time it became operational, I was not involved because Westinghouse farmed me out all the time as a consultant to the Department of Energy, to United Nuclear, to Rockwell Hanford—I worked for almost ten years as a consultant.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of things did you consult on?</p>
<p>Carter: It had to do with documentation of systems and components, like when DOE was going to build the, what was called the B-WIP program, where they were going to dig this big hole out in the 200 Area and go down into the basalt—</p>
<p>Franklin: The Basalt Waste Isolation Project.</p>
<p>Carter: Yep, yep. I was—DOE had me to come in to work with them to write up documents on design and construction for that project. So I worked with them on that. And in fact, DOE even sent me down to Puerto Rico for a trip to go down there for a while.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why did you go down to Puerto Rico?</p>
<p>Carter: Oh, they wanted me to represent them down there at a big conference.</p>
<p>Franklin: Must’ve been fun.</p>
<p>Carter: I thought it was the worst conference I’d ever been to. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Why is that?</p>
<p>Carter: So, it was terrible. I wrote it up as being very terrible. But my wife and baby enjoyed it. [LAUGHTER] They went along, too, and they had a great time out on the beach.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was it terrible because of the technical aspects of the conference, or was it a—</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, because of that, and the people who they had as keynotes—speakers and so forth. They were just terrible.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. That’s funny.</p>
<p>Carter: And I let them know it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And when did you—you eventually retired, right, in 1996?</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, ’96, I retired, because we lost our contract with DOE.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who did?</p>
<p>Carter: Westinghouse.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: And Fluor-Daniels and their buddies were coming in, and I felt that, no, I didn’t think I was going to fit into that bunch. At the time, I was doing a lot of science education work for Westinghouse. I traveled extensively to the Washington, D.C. and the southeast, working with colleges and universities doing science education work. Served on like the College of Engineering Advisory Council at Southern University, for example.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you were kind of moving out of direct Hanford operations at that time with Westinghouse.</p>
<p>Carter: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Westinghouse left. Okay, and what did you do after retirement?</p>
<p>Carter: My wife had a business going, and I decided to support her.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what’s that—what was the business?</p>
<p>Carter: She had a National Car Rental for Tri-Cities and Yakima for a while. And then she operated a post office for the West Richland community for a while, and then she went out a bought a travel agency and set up a tour company called Genie Tours that had—and she built up a fleet of almost a dozen tour buses. And it tours throughout the western part of the United States. And she also did tours back to, like, Branson, but she didn’t take her own bus.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: She would fly them back there and she would charter over somebody’s back there where she did that. But back here, many trips to Portland, Seattle, down to California. Like when WSU played in the Rose Bowl, both times, she took one of our buses down there with people on it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Your wife was quite entrepreneurial.</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: All of your kids—how many children do you have?</p>
<p>Carter: Three.</p>
<p>Franklin: Three. And they all grew up in Richland and—</p>
<p>Carter: Yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: --attended Richland schools.</p>
<p>Carter: Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hanford High.</p>
<p>Carter: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did they ever talk about experiencing any kind of discrimination or segregation or anything due to the—</p>
<p>Carter: Nothing serious, you know. There were probably a few occasions where there may have been a name-calling or stuff like that. But, no, they did okay. And they ended up going from Hanford to WSU Pullman.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. All three?</p>
<p>Carter: All three, except for our youngest son decided, nah, I want to do something different. So he went into the Air Force and studied for a little while, and then he came back out and formed himself a band out of Spokane and bummed around. And finally decided, you know, it’s not doing too well. So he came back home and now he’s working out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, kind of continuing in the family tradition. Oh, shoot, I had a question. What was it? Oh, and then you also, at some point, joined the B Reactor Museum Association.</p>
<p>Carter: Correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: And when did you join that group?</p>
<p>Carter: Right when it started.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, so back in the ‘90s.</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, wherever it was. I don’t remember, yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, okay. Did you play any roles within the association?</p>
<p>Carter: No, I did not.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, just a supporter?</p>
<p>Carter: Yeah, I was too busy with other activities, you know. When I joined my wife with her tour company, it was all I could do to try to keep up with that operation and help her keep up with that operation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, I bet. Running a business takes a lot of work.</p>
<p>Carter: Especially that particular business, because she got buses going and coming, and you have breakdowns and you have situations at the hotels for your people, you got to make sure they’re taken care of. She used to do the spring training for Mariners baseball down in Phoenix every year.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah! Does she still operate the business?</p>
<p>Carter: No, we had to shut that down. My bride is now suffering from Alzheimer’s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: So I’m her principal caregiver now. And she requires 24/7 care.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so. I just have a couple questions left, kind of larger reflective questions. In what ways did security and secrecy at Hanford impact your work on, or daily life?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, I can’t say it impacted. We know that if you had a Q clearance, there’s certain information you had access to, and you couldn’t talk about it with people that didn’t have Q clearance or the need-to-know. So, I knew that, and I worked accordingly.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you have a Q clearance?</p>
<p>Carter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Carter: That one of the most talented group of scientists and engineers anywhere in the world were right here at Hanford. And they shared their knowledge with you. I learned probably more from coworkers than I learned at the university.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Carter: Because they knew what was going on. And they would help me understand processes and how technical things worked.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there ever—did you ever have any fear or trepidation about working with nuclear materials--</p>
<p>Carter: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: --at all when you came to take the job at Hanford?</p>
<p>Carter: No, never.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your wife at all?</p>
<p>Carter: No, no.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Carter: In fact, when I worked at 325 Building, I was sometimes looked upon as the mad scientist. Because on occasions, I would have a little minor accident and blow up something and fumes coming out into the hallway. [CHUCKLING] And people coming, Dan, you okay, you okay? Yup, everything’s cool, everything’s cool.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Kind of a laissez-faire attitude to industrial hazard. Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration, segregation, and civil rights and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Carter: Well, I feel that my bride and I were very fortunate in our family, because, like I say, we were treated well, we were well-respected, and we had opportunities to participate in a lot of community activities. My bride did, also, too. She was very active over at CBC, for example. The Martin Luther King monument over there, she was one of the persons who helped raised the money to build that monument over there at CBC. She served on the Foundations board for several years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Carter: So, yeah, we became a part of the community, and I think we made some significant contribution to our community here. And as a result, we choose to still live here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I would say so. Well, Dan, thank you so much for coming and speaking with us about your life and your work at Hanford. I really appreciate it.</p>
<p>Carter: It’s my pleasure to share whatever knowledge I can share about the Hanford Project and the great work that’s been done out there, and the wonderful, highly technical people that worked out there. As a result, I got a chance to meet some outstanding scientists from around the world: some scientists from England that came over and we worked with them. I did some research with a scientist from Berkeley, who ended up at WSU Pullman and he tried to get me to leave Hanford and join his research team up at Pullman. But I chose not to do so. I met Bob Sanko, from Connell, who—he and his other colleague who were authors of textbooks—tried to get me to come up and join their research team up at Connell and I chose to stay here. So, as a result, my work at Hanford, I got a chance to meet a lot of outstanding scientists.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Well, thank you again, Dan.</p>
<p>Carter: My pleasure.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
PUREX
200 Area
HEHF (Hanford Environmental Health Foundation)
FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility)
400 Area
B-WIP (Basalt Waste Isolation Plant)
325 Building
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1964-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1964-1996
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Dan Carter
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Chemistry
African American colleges and universities
Segregation
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Description
An account of the resource
Dan Carter moved to Richland, Washington in 1964 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1964-1996.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
02/19/2018
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd6c77308885ccc1dd563285937f9e849.JPG
87d38ef7972a3113d8f0b134c209c51c
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F398bd1450eec3a75a54e04dd5debade9.mp4
b516a9c754c5e403e48b906ff90f3b1a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Vanis Daniels
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Joe Williams
Location
The location of the interview
Home of Joe Williams (Pasco, WA)
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>[camera operator]: It’s recording.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: I better turn mine on?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[camera operator]: No.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[camera operator]: Go ahead.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Good afternoon, my name is Vanis Daniels. We are here to interview Mr. Joe Williams. We are from the Historical and Recognition Committee, which is a sub-committee of Triple-A-S. We would like to interview you and find out, if we could, please, some of the things that you did when you first came to the state of Washington, and why you came. We’ll start with, when did you arrive in the Tri-City area?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Joe Williams: Is Tri-City and Hanford the same thing?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: In 1943, I think. It was in February.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Did you come alone? Or if not, who came with you?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: My wife, and the three other fellow workers.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, could you give me their names, please?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: I can give you their nicknames. One of them they called Long Coat and the other one High Pocket.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. And your wife’s name?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Was Velma.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Approximately how old were you?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: He was a young man.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Years, I can’t remember, but I was pretty young then.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Where did you live before you came to the Tri-Cities? Where did you come from when you came to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: From California.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: And prior to that, where were you? Where did you come from?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, where were you originally from?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: Because he came from the South.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Where I’m originally from?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: South. Alabama. Atmore, Alabama.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. What kind of work did you do in Alabama, before you left Alabama?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Well, I was putting out magnesite, and spark-proof and concrete and bricks.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And after you moved to California?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: The same trade. I was shipped from Alabama to California.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. How did you hear about Hanford?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: I was sent from Mare Island Navy Yard, by the Col., to Hanford.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And you decided to come because of your job?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: I was drafted.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: How did you travel when you came to Hanford? By car, train --?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: By car.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. And how long did it take you to get here?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: They gave us five ten-hour days to drive from California up here, but we couldn’t drive but 25 miles an hour. Five working days.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Where was the first place you stayed after you arrived in the Tri-Cities? Or at Hanford?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Hanford. I stayed at Barrack 205. At Hanford.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Now, was that a segregated barracks, or was it--?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yep.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: How did you get to and from work? That means from the barracks to the job and back.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: They had what they called buses that they’d bus us from the cafeteria to the job.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And what kind of work did you do after you went to work?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: See, I was a brick layer, cement finisher, and putting out spark-proof and magnesite.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Now, do you remember any of the areas that you worked in out there at Hanford?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: 200-East, 200-West, and 205.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Do you remember the name of your employer, the man that you worked for? Or the company you worked for?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: It was Marine Decking Company out of New York. But at that time, DuPont had the job—assumed it from the government. And we were transferred out there to put out magnesite and spark-proof. And rubberizing those plug tanks.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: How did you feel about working at Hanford?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Oh, I felt the same working one place I did; it didn’t make no difference. Because I working strictly on the old manpower labor board.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: How were you treated on your job?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Well, on the job, fine. Didn’t have no trouble. It was segregated. The black worked with the blacks, and the white worked with the whites.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: What was the hardest thing you found that you had to get adjusted to by being in a new place and new surroundings?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Well, at that time I had been transferred about 20 times–it wasn’t nothing to get adjusted to because I be used to it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: What did you and your coworkers do in your off hours? When I ask you that, I mean like, where did you go, where did you spend your time? You know, like if you had clubs you could go to, or churches. What did you do for relaxation, I guess I’m asking you.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: They had a big room, there in those barracks–that were full wing barracks–and one room was a rec-room. And in that rec-room they had every kind of game that you could play, or you could do this. If you wanted to shoot dice or gamble in the middle of the week or the street, it was legal.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Let’s shut it off.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. How long did you work at Hanford?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Three-and-a-half years.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Now, did you have any idea what you were working on? Did they give you any information about what you were doing? Did they say anything to you as to whether you should talk about what you were doing or anything like that?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: You couldn’t talk about nothing you was doing. With nobody.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And, did you know what—have any idea what you were building or what you was contributing to, or anything?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Nope. Because you go in one cell; if you was in Cell 45, you wouldn’t know what they was doing in Cell 18–now, you stuck with 45. And that’s where I was stuck, on Cell 45.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Leonard Moore: And Cell 45, it was a work room?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: No, that down in the ground, 45 feet deep.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Moore: Oh, it was an area.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Uh-huh. Where you had the rubberizing. Rubberizing, spark-proofing and all like that. No crew worked—they worked in once place. It wasn’t the way you work here and work there. I was assigned out as being a chief rubberizer, spark-proof, stop any leaks that ever started. That’s what we were transferred all the way from back east here for that. Weren’t but eight peoples in the United States had that trade and I was dumb enough to be one out the eight.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Moore: Let’s talk about the barracks.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. In living in the barracks, were you and your wife able to live together?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Nope.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Would you tell us a little bit about how you guys lived out in the barracks?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: She lived in the women barracks and I lived in the men barracks. And they had wired fences up like penitentiary around all the women barracks. And the only way you could get in there—you had to get—you could visit–and they had a big rec-room and that’s far as you could get. You didn’t know what room she slept in, or didn’t know nothing. You could go in the rec-room, that’s far as you could go. But she could come to the men’s barracks, down there, and go all the way through it. But a man couldn’t go in the women’s barrack without going through the police, or the guard, or whatever he was.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Do you remember any African Americans that you worked with at Hanford? Any black people?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Did I remember--?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Remember any of them’s names?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: In the beginning or the ending?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: All the way through.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Well, in the beginning, no. I just knew the one that was shipped out. Eight of us had this trade in the United States, the whole United States, only eight of us had this, what they can stop any leaks, rubberize all [UNKNOWN] tanks. And that’s why we were transferred all over the country. But later on up in the year I recognized some. But we never knew what each other was doing. Us four was together, but they never would let but two of us work side by side. It always be somebody else that you didn’t know and they didn’t know you when you was in those cells.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Now, If, when you—after, in other words, since you couldn’t talk about what you did, and you didn’t know what the project was about, when did you learn that you were working on the Manhattan Project or that you were helping the war effort by the job that you were doing?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: After they started testing it. We didn’t know what we was doing. We was just doing, in one cell. Men worked in 45 cells, and I don’t know nothing but for the one. You don’t work—don’t nobody work in each other’s cells. About five different craftsman worked in the cells. And we was on the high—what they call it, when it says, it started at one up to three?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Clearances.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: What?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Clearances.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yeah. Q Clearance.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Right.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: And 45, that was the toughest ward in the whole place because it was 45 foot in the ground. And now what happened in the other cells, I don’t know no more than you do. That’s the only cell I worked in.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the things that you have done since you left Hanford?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Oh, I left Hanford, and come to Pasco and started to try to do business there and had things where the banks didn’t lend no money on the east side of 4<sup>th</sup> Street. And we started a little mortgage company. A bunch of us pooled-in. And about the time as it got ready to start up and draw a little money out and leave, one more guy had a little write-up in a paper that we’re going through anyway. And then here come a guy out of Spokane with Intermountain Mortgage started to lending money there in Pasco.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And once they started loaning money, did you go into business for yourself? And if so, what kind of business and were you prosperous in your adventure?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yeah, I started in the home building, which, that’s all I ever do. I started at 15 years old.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And you owned your own company?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yep.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And did you always live in the Tri-Cities? Or did you leave the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yeah, I left Tri-Cities and worked in Alaska.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: How long did you live in Alaska?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Twenty-some years.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Did you own your own business in Alaska?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yeah.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Then you left Alaska, and--?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Come to Oregon to retire. More like retarded.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And since you have been here in Oregon, have you enjoyed it? How has life been here in Oregon for you?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: It’s like a dream come—a good dream come true.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Were you able to do any extra work, or anything after you moved here to Oregon?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: I stayed flooded with work.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And you built—how many homes have you built since you’ve been down here in Oregon?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: About thirty-something.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: All right. And is there any of them close enough where we could look at them?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yup.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Can I ask one personal question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. What range of house would you build? Did you build? </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: I built dream homes.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: Sure did.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: That’s all I needed to know.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Mr. Williams, since you left Hanford and after you left Hanford and moved to the Tri-Cities and started your own business, could you tell us a little bit about your life at Hanford? And before we get started with you, I would like to introduce your daughter, Bessie May Williams--</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: Doctor Bessie May Williams-Fields. And this is my father, Joe Williams. And I am the second child of my father and my mother, Velma and Joe.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Now, if you could, could you tell us a little bit about your life after you moved to Pasco from Hanford?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: You talking to me?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Mm-hmm. And Mrs. Fields—Fields.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: What part of that life you asking about?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Well, what did you--</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: I can share some basic stuff that I remember, when my father—A long time ago, you know where they had the railroad tracks? Front Street is where I remember living there with my father and my mother and their children, my sisters and brothers. And we lived in a house that I think dad built himself, and he also built a café there. There were very, very few people of color living in Pasco at that time. It was a lot of tumbleweeds. When my father moved up on Orange Street, there was nothing but tumbleweeds. And that’s where you built, he built a really, really nice house on Orange Street. But he’s built numerous homes on Orange Street.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>And they also started the first church there in the state of Washington—Pasco, Washington. My uncle, my father, my mother, they started praying in their homes, and they started uniting together and from that became the biggest church in Pasco, Washington today, Morning Star Baptist Church. Tremendous minds got together and they did tremendous things.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Wait, just before you start.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[camera operator]: Go ahead.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Make sure you tell us about the red line. In other words, once you got past 1<sup>st</sup> Street or 4<sup>th</sup> Street, or wherever it was, nobody would loan you any money. Where they red-lined east Pasco.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Oh yeah. Okay, I see.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Mr. Williams, could you tell us a little bit about the living conditions and the availability of funds for black people or being able to better yourself in Pasco?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: The banks had a boundary. Nobody on the east side of 4<sup>th</sup> Street would they lend. Nobody, to nobody. On the east side of 4<sup>th</sup> Street.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And, you said that you started your own little banking industry?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Just me and my brother-in-law and the relations and a friend pooled up X amount dollars and was going to start a loaning company. And, when we got up to where we had about, oh, $60,000-$70,000, before we could open it up, they chickened out. Well, me and one of the boys just kept on and we pretend that we was doing it, and it got in the paper. And then Intermountain Mortgage come out of Yakima and started to lending money then. We put the bluff in there because Buck and Luzell and all them chickened out. And we just had that in the paper that we were going to go ahead anyway. And that’s what started the foreigners coming in as an outfit for Intermountain Mortgage out of Spokane, Washington.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And were you able to go in restaurants, and sit down and have a meal? Or was it segregated? How did you do for getting haircuts, et cetera, et cetera?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Well, it wasn’t any place, legally, for haircuts. And we had one colored guy run a café there, that’s the only one you could go in. I forget the name of it. And no place for cleaning or laundry; you had to settle to Walla Walla, Washington.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Fields, you went to school in Pasco. Could you elaborate on that a little bit for us? Tell us about the conditions, the hardships you ran into. And just growing up and going through school.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: I started school, I think, around 1945, and I graduated in 1958. During that time there were not a lot of people of color going to school. There are very few people that I can think of that was real inspirational in terms of my academic years in school. I do remember that I had a math teacher that was an excellent teacher, Mr. Metcalf. But I found, as a person of color, I did not have a lot of support; I didn’t have a lot of encouragement in terms of what I should do with my mind. I was always told that I had good dexterity, which I was real good in my fingers, and I was encouraged to, perhaps, be a beautician.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>To me that was like an insult, because I felt that, maybe if black people were still picking cotton, that would have been a perfectly good place for me to go, because I had good dexterity in my hands, to start picking cotton. But I didn’t get the kind of encouragement and the support I think I could have gotten had we not had a segregated, in some sense of the word, even though blacks and whites did go to school together. But they did not, specifically did not want you to mingle together. Because I and another student, a white male, and me, a black woman, or student, was holding hands as we walked down the halls in the school, going to each other’s locker. And we was called into the principal’s office, and sat down, and talked to us about, do your parents know that you’re black and he’s white and you guys are co-mingling together? And made a big deal out of something that was really relatively nothing.</p>
<p>So, my experiences at the high school level was not the most positive experience that I had.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>No jobs. When I graduated from high school, did you see people as role models? Black people that you could look up and say, wow, I can do that. No, you didn’t have any role models, so what could you do? I left there, what, in the ‘60s? I think I left maybe—no, I think I left there in 1959, Pasco. Because I saw no way for me to—I didn’t have role models. You need role models. You need people support and encourage you. You have family, but what about, you know, other people? It just wasn’t there at that time. Hopefully it’s different now, but I don’t know.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: --you can ask me that.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah. Back to Williams. In the Tri-Cities, was there, like, any other high schools around? What do you know about blacks and academically? And, just, how was it?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: I think, in terms of academia, and blacks at this college –not college, but—yeah, I did go to Columbia Basin College for a while. But prior to that, while I was in high school, in fact, when I graduated there was only two of us that graduated the year that I graduated in ’58. But my experience academically, there wasn’t, like I said earlier, a lot of academic support for people of color.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>And in terms of working at Hanford, I wasn’t cognizant that they was even hiring people at Hanford. Coming out of high school, no one ever told me that there was job openings at Hanford that I could even try to apply to a position. So, I did not work there, nor did I even know they was hiring people to work there at that time when I graduated from high school. I just tried to look at the shops and maybe get a job at some of the shops, but I was never hired. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Did you intermingle with any of the high school kids from Kennewick and Richland?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: No, I think Kennewick was kind of like, and Richland, was kind of, forbidden territory. You know, you wasn’t, you didn’t feel accepted when you went there. So, I didn’t really go over there very often. Seldom. Very seldom did I ever go. And I’d heard of experiences of people of color who had gone over there and they were negative experiences, so therefore you wasn’t encouraged to go over there.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[camera operator]: Go ahead.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, Dr. Fields, you have since gone on and furthered your education. Would you like to tell us about it?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: Yes, I did. I went to Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. I left Pasco, Washington and moved to the state of Oregon. I got married, and I married a person by the name of Fredrick Marshall Fields. He was black. He also went to Pasco Senior High School. But I left there. We had two children. And then I went back to school and I got a baccalaureate degree in education, because I wanted to teach children.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>And when I graduated with my degree in elementary ed., at the same time that I graduated, Portland State University, who I never even applied for a position, called me up and asked me would I apply for a position there? And I also had an offer to teach sixth grade in the state of Oregon. But then when I thought about it, why not work at the college, because that’s like working at the house of knowledge, and you can work and go to school constantly. So, then I worked there for 12 years, and during that 12 years I completed my Master’s Degree in counseling, so I was counseling when I left.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>And then I left there and I went on vacation in Alaska. I was hired there, almost, like, on the spot, to work as a counselor there. And then, while I was there working at the house of knowledge again, I went back to college and I got my doctorate in education administration. And I still work in academia today. I teach college and I’m also a counselor. And then I also do work with people who are mentally and physically challenged.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And how many sisters and brothers do you have?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: It’s ten of us all together. And I’m the second of ten. And I think there are nine of us currently living in—well, maybe there could be one brother living in Pasco, or in the state of Washington now. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Could you tell us a little bit about what they do?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: I have a sister that’s an accountant. I have a brother that’s working for the federal government. I have another sister who worked on the pipeline in Alaska. Some working for Boeing. And so, all of us are doing quite well in the fields that we chose.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Moore: So, basically with Mr. Williams coming to this area, and raising his family here, it brought a lot to the area as a whole. Okay, so, that’s what we want to get out of that.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: In Hanford, you was associated with your grade average. Peoples you knew you didn’t have nothing to do with them because your average was up here—your Q Clearance, and you stayed in the back with the peoples on the same Q clearance, eat with them, all the time. But the rowdy bunch, they couldn’t stay in the barracks that the guys with the high Qs lived in. They couldn’t eat in the mess hall with the high Qs. And I had Q-4, the highest. There was only ten of us. That’s all I can give you on account of the ten of us that worked together.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Moore: So, you were pretty isolated.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yeah. We were totally isolated.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: Very isolated.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: See, the highest you could go was Q-4, and I was Q-4. And when it got down—all ten of us wasn’t no Q-4. There was only three of us made Q-4.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Moore: Okay.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[camera operator] Okay, go ahead.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: We did have a trailer. I pulled it down there just for that short period of time, then I bought them the thing from the railroad.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: When you first moved to Pasco, you lived in a trailer --</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yeah.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels:--and then from a trailer then you built--</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, Mr. Williams, after you moved to Pasco, how did you live? Was it in a trailer, a house, or apartment?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: When I first went there I pulled a trailer in there. We lived in there. And the railroad had a row of one room of I think about six, and then one that had two rooms in it, and I bought that from the railroad on Front Street. And then from Front Street, I started to go on east building something to live in decent.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: And when you left the Tri-Cities, did you own your own home when you finally relocated to Alaska?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: You mean, did I own my home in Alaska?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: In Pasco.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yeah, I had seven homes there.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: Seven.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Seven.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: That’s what I’m trying to get out of you. And then you relocated in Alaska.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Yeah.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: And built beautiful homes in—beautiful dream homes in Alaska. As well as in The Dalles, Oregon.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Were you allowed to build on the west side of Pasco, or were you limited to the east side?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: Limited to the east side, if I’m building them for myself. But if you wanted me to build you a house, I could build it over there. But I couldn’t build nothing on the east side of 4<sup>th</sup> Street. And I was stuck with what I was trying to do on the east side. And after I goofed up on putting in them foundations, they tore the playhouse down there and wouldn’t put in a grocery store. Because I wasn’t going to build no grocery store.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Moore: Ask him about—let’s hear the story about the grocery store. Was that a company wanted you to build out?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: The company wanted me to put in a grocery store, kinda like the Eastside Market was, over there. But the guy was going to run it for me. And if I was going to borrow the money to build it, I wanted to run it for myself. And because I wouldn’t sign for him—me build the store, they supply the store and they run the store, they cut my funding off and told me they wasn’t going to lend me another nickel and I told him I didn’t give a damn.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Moore: [whispering] Where was it located?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Where was it located at, Mr. Williams?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: What?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: The store that they wanted you to build.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: It was over there off of--what street Velma stay on?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: Sycamore.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: It was off of Sycamore.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Moore: All right.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, that just about concludes the questions and the interview. And we want to thank you, Mr. Joe Williams, and you, Dr. Fields for helping us out.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Williams: You’re welcome, and I appreciate you coming. I didn’t know nothing when you got here, and I don’t know nothing when you leaving. So, nothing from nothing leaves nothing.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Fields: The pleasure was ours.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Thank you.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/gHiDjPyeU88">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
200 East
200 West
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Joe Williams
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Migration
Segregation
Discrimination
School integration
Description
An account of the resource
Joe Williams moved to the Tri-Cities in 1943 to work on the Hanford Site.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
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African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
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video/mpg
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6db522bd5dd76e3750a404b383da3b41.JPG
c242a4ba8344155595e6fb257908f934
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbfc34c0c8b8917e0671f608d2604c421.mp4
09c71f39c1bb58e676d37b1c5671e8f9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
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Hanford History Project
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Vanessa Moore
Interviewee
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Velma Ray
Location
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Home of Velma Ray (Pasco, WA)
Transcription
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<p><strong>Interview with Velma Ray. Interviewed by Vanessa Moore.</strong></p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: This is an interview this afternoon with Miss Velma Ray. Velma is a Tri-Citian who was involved with work out at the Hanford Project during the Manhattan Project era, 1943-1945. And she’s here to share some of her information and experiences with us. Mrs. Ray, how are you today?</p>
<p>Velma Ray: Fine.</p>
<p>Moore: Great. I’m going to ask you several questions and you feel free to just share any stories or information that you would like with us, and we would appreciate that. First of all, let’s start off by finding out when you came to Hanford. What year was that?</p>
<p>Ray: We came to Hanford from Mare Island Navy Yard in California. I was working on the Mare Island Navy Yard and my husband was working. He was a cement finisher and I was a welder. And I went to school, their welding school. And they say I learnt how to weld quicker than any student went through that school. And I was out on the shipyard and I got two raises from the time we left. And so my husband he, I guess the man that my husband—I was drawing more money than he was, and he kept talking, why, if I could just make that Pasco job, if I could just make that Pasco job. I was wondering why he wanted to leave when I was making good money. And you know when we left there, we didn’t have time to get my check and we left my whole back check, you know. And then we was in Hanford and we’d been working there I guess about six months, and finally, you know what, they sent me my money. And I wondered how did they find me? Would’ve been too bad if I’d been a criminal, because they’d’ve found me anyway. Thank God I’m a Christian; I don’t think about that. But I just thank God that they did find me and send me my check. And I thought we was going to get a welding job in Pasco. But I didn’t. We went to work at the mess hall.</p>
<p>Moore: What year was that?</p>
<p>Ray: That’s the same year we got here.</p>
<p>Moore: In 1940--?</p>
<p>Ray: ‘42. Mm-hmm. Because they was working when we got here. Because the job was already going on. I guess that’s why my husband kept on talking about, if I could just make that Pasco job. I didn’t know what the Pasco job he was talking about ‘til we got here. </p>
<p>Moore: How did you hear about it, or how did he hear about jobs out here?</p>
<p>Ray: I guess on the job where he working at.</p>
<p>Moore: What type of work did he do in California?</p>
<p>Ray: Cement finishing.</p>
<p>Moore: Cement finishing?</p>
<p>Ray: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Moore: And, he decided to come, I understand, just looking for more wages, that he could do better here. And so you all came and brought the family. How many children did you have?</p>
<p>Ray: We had three children at the time and we had left them in Alabama with my parents.</p>
<p>Moore: Where did you first stay when you arrived here?</p>
<p>Ray: We had a little a trailer.</p>
<p>Moore: Was it in Pasco? Richland?</p>
<p>Ray: It was in Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: What did this area look like when you came? The cities, were they big cities?</p>
<p>Ray: A desert, no, it was so––just almost a desert. It didn’t rain for about three years when we came out here. Didn’t see a drop of rain. And those dust storms would come up and I cried. And one time I went to wash my clothes and had the whole lot on the line. Time I hung the last piece up, a big dust storm come and broke the line. And I just cried and went in the house. I said, Lord, I just want to leave. If somebody give me a place here, I wouldn’t—I’d say, no thank you, you can have it. Because I was ready to go back to somewhere. I thought I was fed up with Pasco. But you know it’s a funny thing. There’s something about Pasco. When you come out here and you meet more people and you leave, you want to come back. And it’s just––I just thank God; it’s a blessing to be in Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: Well, that’s great. You mentioned you lived in a trailer; did you ever at any time live in a one of the trailer camps out at Hanford, or the barracks?</p>
<p>Ray: Just the barracks. The barracks. And the women barracks, it was a funny thing. We could either go down to barracks where our husband at, because it was too dangerous, unless he come, you know. But they would come up to the sitting room. They would sit there just like courting, and then he had to leave here and go back to his barracks.</p>
<p>Moore: Were the barracks segregated by race at that time, or just male and female?</p>
<p>Ray: No, just male and female.</p>
<p>Moore: You mentioned it was dangerous. What made it was dangerous?</p>
<p>Ray: You want me to tell that?</p>
<p>Moore: Sure.</p>
<p>Ray: Those men was raping women so bad. And so, I hate to tell this. Because one thing—see, I didn’t know it was dangerous as it was. And when I was on my way down to go—you know, a woman would go where her husband at at that time. Usually, usually you could go where he was, but this was a time, it was too dangerous. And I didn’t know that. And I don’t think he knew it. And I was walking down, then after while a man comes coming up to me, and I said, don’t you see my husband? And I just lied. And you know, God was with me. Because if I hadn’t’ve told them lies, I don’t know what they would have done. But they was coming’ up to me, Lady, so-and-so––. I said, don’t you see my husband? And that was not my husband; that was just a man about as far from as that tree. And they would leave me alone. By the time I get that far, I had said, don’t you see my husband?––Oh, Lord, I had so many husbands! </p>
<p>Moore: It was a little bit scary.</p>
<p>Ray: And God took care of me. When I got to that barracks, I fell across that bed. I told my husband I was never coming down there no more. And I wouldn’t either.</p>
<p>Moore: I can understand.</p>
<p>Ray: But he would come up there and get me. Because I wasn’t going down there no more. I was so—I’m even nervous, now, just to think about what I would do.</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Ray: Girl, talk about some hard praying. I was praying every step of the way.</p>
<p>Moore: You mentioned when we spoke earlier that you also worked out at Hanford. And, tell us a little bit about what type work you did.</p>
<p>Ray: We did Mess Hall #2. Oh, there was so many people here. There was about five mess halls. There was quite a few mess halls. But I worked in Mess Hall #2. Another lady, we worked, and we was hotline girls. And food was already set up on a table when men come to the door to walk in. And it was two hotline girlsand we had to, it was plates, bowls with hot food. And when the mens come in that door, we would have to go by that couch and stack that food up on our arms about four or five dishes. And how I done it, I don’t know. But they taught us how. And then we get in a hurry, never stop walking, just giving them food from one side of the table to the other one. And by that time, get another one. In about five or ten minutes, the whole thing was set up. And me and that girl, we laughed about it because a lot of time, them bosses, they stand there and watch us. I see them smiling. Because we were running, we set that table up so fast. They talked about how good we was.</p>
<p>Moore: It sounds like all of the needs of the workers were met, that this was not a place that they came in, like a restaurant, and bought their food. It was provided.</p>
<p>Ray: No, no, no. Just like, just like, you know, set the tables. And they had had everything else already set on the tables ‘cept hot food. And that’s all we had to put on there. That was why we could do it so quickly. They had the tables set up. Just that quick.</p>
<p>Moore: Tell me a little about your husband’s work. You mentioned he was a cement finisher. And what type of work did he do here? And did he talk about it? Tells us a little about that.</p>
<p>Ray: Well, I tell you what he done. He was a cement finisher in California, when we lived in California, come out here. He built some houses afterward. But when he working at Hanford job, we wasn’t allowed to talk. They had a sign up, talk with nobody about your work.</p>
<p>[camera operator]: Okay, keep talking.</p>
<p>Ray: And we couldn’t talk about our work. So that’s why a lot time, we don’t even know what was going on, because it was a secret job. But I do know they was building ammunitions to fight.</p>
<p>Moore: Ammunition?</p>
<p>Ray: Right.</p>
<p>Moore: And, your husband’s name?</p>
<p>Ray: Joe Williams.</p>
<p>Moore: Pardon me?</p>
<p>Ray: Joe Williams.</p>
<p>Moore: Joe Williams. Thank you.</p>
<p>Moore: And now, basically, you were both contributing to the effort because the war was on at this time, right? Employer–wise, did you know what the company name was, or just the project name? That you worked for, was it the DuPont Company, or that he worked for--?</p>
<p>Ray: Well, I don’t think he worked for the same company. Because we was working for the people that served the food in the mess halls.</p>
<p>Moore: So it was all the same. Same company, Hanford Works.</p>
<p>Ray: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Moore: Do you feel you were, that the working conditions, and how managers or supervisors treated the workers, what did you think about that?</p>
<p>Ray: They treated them real nice. Real nice.</p>
<p>Moore: You talked a little bit about the dust storms, and one of the questions I had is, what was the hardest—</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/Gw4Pzo1gEZY">View interivew on Youtube.</a></p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Velma Ray
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Migration
Description
An account of the resource
Velma Ray moved to Pasco, Washington to work on the Hanford Site during the Manhattan Project.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
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African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mpg
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F89fce3241701c3d58378786875fff7cf.JPG
acba8b9b6c77d3630951a4bb70d16234
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8d82eea1f502ff3eef5b9efd443d8103.mp4
8fd48403898a7a19ee7162e11f819f35
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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National Park Service
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Hanford History Project
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
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English
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Vanis Daniels
Interviewee
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Cornelius Walker
Location
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Home of Cornelius Walker (Pasco, WA)
Transcription
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<p>Vanis Daniels: Mr. Walker, we would like to conduct an interview with you as to when you came to the Tri-City area. And the reason why we are wanting to conduct an interview with you—we are with the Triple-A-S History and Recognition Committee and we would like to interview you to find out the part that blacks played in developing the Pacific Northwest and their contributions to like World War II and the Tri-Cities in general and the Pacific Northwest since then. So, my first question to you is, do you remember when you arrived in the Tri-City area, what year did you come here?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Cornelius Walker: ’48.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: In 1948.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Walker: Right.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: Did you come by yourself, or did you come with someone, like a group of people?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Walker: I traveled by myself.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Daniels: You traveled by yourself. Where did you live before you came to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Walker: I lived in Vallejo, California.</p>
<p>Daniels: And before Vallejo?</p>
<p>Walker: St. Louis.</p>
<p>Daniels: And before St. Louis?</p>
<p>Walker: Gregory, Arkansas.</p>
<p>Daniels: Say that again?</p>
<p>Walker: Gregory, Arkansas.</p>
<p>Daniels: Gregory, Arkansas. Okay. What kind of work did you do in Arkansas, before you—</p>
<p>Walker: Farm work.</p>
<p>Daniels: Farm. And when you went to St. Louis, what kind of work did you do?</p>
<p>Walker: I worked in the steel foundry.</p>
<p>Daniels: How many years did you work in St. Louis at the steel foundry?</p>
<p>Walker: Oh, I’d say about, it was pretty close to two years.</p>
<p>Daniels: And then, when you went to Vallejo, what kind of work did you do there?</p>
<p>Walker: Worked at the shipyard.</p>
<p>Daniels: How many years did you work at the shipyard in California?</p>
<p>Walker: Oh, I would say almost three years, around.</p>
<p>Daniels: Do you remember how old you were when you left Vallejo and came to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Walker: 18.</p>
<p>Daniels: 18.</p>
<p>Walker: Oh, wait a minute—no, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Hold on now. Just wait just a minute. Erase that. When I left—</p>
<p>Daniels: Arkansas?</p>
<p>Walker: No, I left Vallejo and came here.</p>
<p>Daniels: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Walker: Vallejo. Now, ask the question over again.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Do you remember how old you were when you left Vallejo and came to the Tri-Cities or Pasco?</p>
<p>Walker: I must’ve been 22, I believe.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Why did you leave Vallejo and come to Pasco?</p>
<p>Walker: Because I heard it was better jobs up in here. And I think, I’m pretty sure, some of the Hanford work had started and I just heard it was better construction work up here.</p>
<p>Daniels: Do you remember—I’m getting kind of personal, but do you remember your rate of pay when you came here, against what you were making in Vallejo?</p>
<p>Walker: Oh, I think we was at that time, we must’ve been getting $0.80-something an hour. That was at the shipyard. So when I came—no, at the ship—let me get it straight. I left the shipyard and started working construction. I worked at Fairfield, California. Vacaville, I worked there, all up through there. Of course, my company had a job, I’d go one job to the other one. When I left there, I came here.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. And you heard about Hanford and that it was paying more money?</p>
<p>Walker: Oh, yeah. They said there was a lot of work out here. I wouldn’t worry so much about the pay. I was young, I was looking for longer work, you know.</p>
<p>Daniels: I understand.</p>
<p>Leonard Moore: Did he stay in construction work?</p>
<p>Daniels: Did you stay in construction work?</p>
<p>Walker: Yes.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Now, when you left Vallejo and came here, did you come by car or train, bus--?</p>
<p>Walker: Bus.</p>
<p>Daniels: Oh, okay. And did you come to—you came from Vallejo to Pasco by yourself?</p>
<p>Walker: Right, I didn’t have no—I didn’t travel with friends. That’s the way I’d make it by myself. I didn’t travel with friends. I just—because I didn’t want to get nobody—if I found me the bed, I wouldn’t need to help nobody. So I just traveled by myself.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, do you remember when you first came to the Tri-Cities or Pasco, do you remember where you lived?</p>
<p>Walker: I got a job and I lived at the—North Richland, in the barracks.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about your living conditions? What was it like?</p>
<p>Walker: It was really nice there. We had good food, we had the maid change the beds and everything—it was a joint to clean the barracks everyday. It was good living conditions there. I really did like it there.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, did you eat in a mess hall, or did—in the barracks, were you allowed to do your own cooking, or did you eat in the mess hall?</p>
<p>Walker: No, they had a big mess hall. [INAUDIBLE] They had a small one first before they got the big one built, then they closed down the little ones, small ones. Of course, you know, they really started hiring later, and they had to get that done where the men had a place to stay and eat. That was their position, to feed the mens and house them.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, after you came here and went to work, do you remember what areas you worked in?</p>
<p>Walker: Well, I didn’t work in the Area at first, because I worked for a company, J.A. Turlin. Richland was classified as the Area, but it wasn’t out in the Area that we might be speaking about.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. How did they treat you? I mean, when you lived in the barracks out at Richland, was they segregated? Were they mixed?</p>
<p>Walker: Oh, they was mixed. There wasn’t no segregation at that time. They didn’t have separate barracks for this race, they all lived together. If there was room in a certain barracks, that’s where we went, wherever they wanted to put you at. There was nothing about like no segregation.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, once you got to the barracks, how did you get to and from your job, from the barracks to your job and back to your barracks?</p>
<p>Walker: They had transportation for that. Worked their way from the barracks.</p>
<p>Daniels: Again, were you a skilled craftsman or did you do plain labor, or what did you do?</p>
<p>Walker: I did labor work, like that. Most of the time, I did skilled work because I was a pipe layer. I laid pipe. So that would be classified as skilled work, but it’s labor skill.</p>
<p>Daniels: Again, would you give me the name of the person you worked for?</p>
<p>Walker: The company?</p>
<p>Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Walker: J.A. Turlin.</p>
<p>Daniels: J.A. Turlin, okay. Now, I want you to tell me in your own words how you felt about working at Hanford. And before you say anything, when I ask you this, coming from Arkansas to St. Louis to Vallejo, California to the Tri-Cities, the transition is what I’m trying to get from you, as to whether you felt that you were treated right or you felt comfortable with your job and with your supervisors, or did they sort of, I guess what I want to say is, kind of intimidate you?</p>
<p>Walker: No, there was no intimidation. I had a good job, and the bosses all, from the superintendent down, were just like that with me. Because they believed in me, they trusted me, over the crew, over the type of work we were doing. Because they knew if they sent me on, it’s going to be done. That’s the reputation I had.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, what was the hardest thing for you to adjust to—and this is the entire area, including your work—when you came to the Tri-Cities? And that means the social life, after work, at work, the area in general, you know, was built up, was it shacks? Whatever it was.</p>
<p>Walker: No, no, it wasn’t no shacks. It was all new barracks. They’d build ‘em, they’d move them in. Because that’s the way they was hiring at the time. They couldn’t hire too many mens at the time and have somewhere for them to stay. They didn’t come, or hire nobody that they would depending on having them find place for themself. They had a place for them.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, do you remember what you did once you got off work as far as social life? Was there places to go? Could you go out and eat dinner or maybe dance, or whatever your preference were?</p>
<p>Walker: No, there wasn’t no places like that then. Because Richland was the closest place, and it wasn’t built up. At the time, the places that was, they was kind of segregated, you know? So I didn’t worry about going to them of course. We had fun at the barracks, we could play ball like with the fellows around there, you all got together, you could do that.</p>
<p>Moore: Did you play baseball?</p>
<p>Walker: Beg your pardon?</p>
<p>Moore: Did you play baseball?</p>
<p>Walker: Yeah, I played a lot of baseball. But I didn’t get as good as I wanted to get. Of course, I wanted to go to the big leagues. But then my situation I had come here to work and so forth so I just kind of forgot about it.</p>
<p>Daniels: I see. In working out at Hanford, did anybody ever tell you, or did you ever know, the project you were working on? What I mean by that is, did you know what—when you built whatever you built, worked on whatever you worked, did you know what they were going to do with it after you got it built?</p>
<p>Walker: Well, I know is something was on a chemical plant, like I said. Something I worked at before they started building the building, I was laying pipe and such as that.</p>
<p>Daniels: And nobody ever told you that this was to further the war effort or anything like that? Where you worked, were you allowed to talk about it after you got off work with people that you knew?</p>
<p>Walker: It was explained to us, they didn’t want the mens going out doing talk about the Project. They was explaining that to you at least once a month. Of course, there’s new guys coming in. They just wouldn’t take the new guys; they’d go over everything with the old guys, too. They listened to it, too. They had to.</p>
<p>Daniels: I see. Can you tell me a little bit—I understand that you left here in the early ‘50s and did a lot of work in Alaska, but you would come back. You still had a family and a home and all that stuff here. So can you tell me a little bit about your travels and your jobs and how you would progress through the years and able to retire and—</p>
<p>Walker: Well, when I would go to Alaska, I always had good jobs—always had a job. I had people, after the first year, I had companies that I’d work for and when they got ready for me, they would either send for me, or if I didn’t have the money, they would send it and just get the ticket and come over. They’d refund the ticket. Them kind of people I would work for, and that’s the kind of job—I was a hard worker, taking care of my own business. I didn’t associate—it was all right, but I didn’t associate, drinking. A lot of guys get off from work, they’d sit around the barracks and drink and get drunk. Well, that wasn’t my thing, because I didn’t drink. So not that I thought I was more than they were. They weren’t doing what I liked to do. I found God, we sat down, sometimes we’d play cards. You could play cards and all that stuff. Sit down and talk about some of your back-life, where you come from and how you come up and all of that.</p>
<p>Daniels: Do you remember any African Americans or black people, do you remember the names of any of them that you worked with while you worked here at Hanford?</p>
<p>Walker: Mm—names I don’t hold in my head so good. But let me see if I can think of some of them.</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: I’m going to stop it right here.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: Okay, go ahead.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, I understand that you worked on McNary Dam, and at the time, you moved from the barracks to Pasco. Can you tell me where you lived when you came to Pasco?</p>
<p>Walker: Mm, let me see now. Where did I move when I moved from Pasco? I really—I’m sorry to say, I really don’t know exactly where I was living at the time.</p>
<p>Moore: Was it a house or a trailer?</p>
<p>Walker: It was a house.</p>
<p>Moore: But here in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Walker: Yes.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay.</p>
<p>Daniels: When you—do you remember what year you worked on the dams?</p>
<p>Walker: I don’t know exactly what year I worked—I know it was in the ‘50s.</p>
<p>Moore: In the ‘50s.</p>
<p>Daniels: Would it have been ’50, ’51 and maybe the first part of ’52?</p>
<p>Walker: I worked there in ’52, I know that, yeah. I worked at the dams a little while.</p>
<p>Moore: What kind of work did you do?</p>
<p>Daniels: What kind of work did you do at the dam?</p>
<p>Walker: Well, I was just labor, but I worked in concrete.</p>
<p>Daniels: And you can’t remember any of the names of the people, either by nickname or real name, that you worked with?</p>
<p>Walker: Oh, one guy, Stan Cooper, he lived up in Hermiston. Stan Cooper. That was one guy. Let’s see, I’m trying to think now. You know, I just can’t call it now. It been long time.</p>
<p>Daniels: That’s okay if you can’t remember.</p>
<p>Walker: And got old. Other things have happened since then. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, do you have any pictures or anything of any of that area back in there that you might want to share with us?</p>
<p>Walker: No, I don’t have no pictures. I’m sorry.</p>
<p>Daniels: Well, do you know of anyone else that we might be able to talk with and interview and get some information from them?</p>
<p>Walker: Not other people that worked on the dam with, they gone. But one guy, I don’t know if he’s still living or not. I don’t think he’s still living, because he used to come over and see me every year. That was EC Stalker. I worked with him. I just don’t know.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Daniels: Can you tell us a little bit about your kids and grandkids?</p>
<p>Walker: I just had that one kid. I got another boy, but I don’t know which way he went after I left St. Louis. I used to try to keep up with him, but when they got of age, they just get away from their parents sometimes.</p>
<p>Moore: But you had the one daughter.</p>
<p>Walker: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Her name was—your daughter’s name was Eva?</p>
<p>Walker: No, not Eva. Martha.</p>
<p>Moore: Martha. Okay.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, and your grandkids? Names?</p>
<p>Walker: Avery and Elvis.</p>
<p>Daniels: All right.</p>
<p>Moore: They don’t live around here.</p>
<p>Daniels: No.</p>
<p>Walker: They live in Fresno, California.</p>
<p>Daniels: [whispering] Shut it off just a sec.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Moore: Ask him about the house.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, now.</p>
<p>Walker: We didn’t come by that house. They didn’t buy because they had no money to buy from. Walter, the husband, he worked over there at the cemetery. And right across the street, he got acquainted with these people. On account of him associating and so forth, the people—</p>
<p>Moore: Let me have you start over, because we don’t know who these—</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, can you tell us about your daughter and son-in-law living in Kennewick and owning a home?</p>
<p>Walker: Well, this is what happened. Her husband were working at the cemetery, and right across the street, the people lived. So he got acquainted and the peoples gave him the home. They gave him a home, but the people didn’t want him to live over there. So in order for them not to live over there, somebody just set the house on fire and burned it down. By them, hadn’t been able to get insurance and everything, so there wasn’t nothing left for them but to get out of there.</p>
<p>Daniels: So, in the early years, there was still prejudices in the Tri-Cities, and this is one example of what you could and could not do in the Tri-Cities, or what they wanted you to do and what they didn’t want you to do.</p>
<p>Walker: Well, like job and things, if hye didn’t want you on, you wasn’t gonna have no job. That’s just it, because they wouldn’t hire you. All there wasn’t a contractor for, some do union, like that. We had a business here, maybe you know who I’m talking about, because his name Charlton Knapp.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Walker: He was really prejudiced. He wouldn’t send a black man out on no kind of good job. He’d just have to—contractor started squawking, you finds me mens! So that’s the only way they got out.</p>
<p>Moore: He was a union?</p>
<p>Walker: Yeah, he finished his BA.</p>
<p>Daniels: He finished his Business Agent.</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: And what was his name?</p>
<p>Walker: Charlton Knapp.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay. So there was—let me turn this off for a minute.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Walker: Be caught after dark. That’s just the way it was. They wasn’t mean people, but there was mean people over there. You know, mean people, and they would hurt you if you were caught over there. If you doing—if you had to go the store or something over there, do some business, get out of there before dark.</p>
<p>Moore: That was Kennewick.</p>
<p>Walker: Yup.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Walker: You know, at the time, when I first got going, it wasn’t too many black people living nearby. It was like four or five there and some of them had they own homes, some of them was just there. But as time went by and all the work started, then they had to hire black because they was crying for people to come to work. At one time, young white peoples, they was kind of like scared to go up there. They wouldn’t take the chance that the black would take. They had a job, man, they kept it. Most of them did have jobs here. But a lot of black people left their jobs here because a lot of them wouldn’t study. They had no future to look out for. They working when they needed them, but when they got done, you didn’t have no job. So that’s the way that went.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay.</p>
<p>Walker: Moving to Anchorage, they got good jobs, they had foreman jobs. Of course, they had the opportunity to have ‘em, because they needed fresh peoples there. The man needed somebody to work. On a lot of jobs, they didn’t want to work black, but they had to. And then when the union got strong, when they called—you can call, you could call and request us all the time but they weren’t calling for nothing but white people. The union broke that up. You say, you call, I got mens. I’ll send you who available. If it don’t work out, send them back to the hall.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah. Okay, Mr. Walker, that concludes our interview. We want to thank you and hopefully we have gotten some information and we thank you very much for your interview.</p>
<p>Walker: Yeah.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/c3vUd_46coM">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1948-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1948-1952
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Cornelius Walker
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Migration
McNary Lock and Dam (Or.)
Discrimination
Description
An account of the resource
Cornelius Walker moved to the Tri-Cities in 1948 to work on the Hanford Site.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
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African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mpg
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9b9b824c2876af5e43f239333ee53cf6.JPG
91a00d141b86347a69036b0521d1e0ea
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
John Skinner
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
James Pruitt
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>John Skinner: Ladies and gentlemen, my name is John Skinner for the African American for an Academic Society History and Recognition Committee. Our committee has been involved with ongoing interviews with African American men and women that was brought or were lured to the Tri-City area in 1943-45 for the Manhattan Project, formally became known as the Hanford Atomic Energy Commission, and subsequent projects. Tonight we have with us, we have Jim Pruitt, a long-time resident. James, excuse me, James Pruitt, a long-time resident of the Tri-City area, community activist, civil rights leader, human rights leader, youth counselor, and a number of other things. Jim also has a wealth of knowledge about the Tri-City area and Pasco, and Pasco in particular. So, we’re going to get started here, Jim, on this interview. And some of the basic questions we want to ask is in connection with the Tri-City area. Jim, when did you come to the Tri-City area?</p>
<p>James Pruitt: I came to the Tri-City area in 1948. I got here on June 20<sup>th</sup>, on my wife’s birthday.</p>
<p>Skinner: Well, James, did you come alone when you came to the Tri-Cities or Pasco or Hanford?</p>
<p>Pruitt: That was the only—well, another guy, a friend of mine from Los Angeles, Bill Mathias.</p>
<p>Skinner: Bill Mathias?</p>
<p>Pruitt: And I came up with me on the bus.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, okay. Jim, let me ask another question. Approximately, how old were you when you came to this area?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I were 22 years old.</p>
<p>Skinner: 22 years old, okay. Jim, when you came to the Tri-Cities, was there a particular city that you lived in, since now we have Pasco, Kennewick and Richland? Was there any one of those particular communities that you first—</p>
<p>Pruitt: I first lived in Richland in the barracks. Because when I got here, it was on Saturday. I went to the union hall. I worked labor. And I had a meeting with the business agent. So they dispatched me out for work Monday morning. I went to work out in Richland on the housing project up there.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, what was the name of the housing project that you went to work? Do you remember? In Richland?</p>
<p>Pruitt: It was—in Richland, it was Militant Sound, was the construction company that I worked for.</p>
<p>Skinner: The contractor that you worked for?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I worked for them.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Militant Sounds Project in Richland on the Bypass highway.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Jim, let me back up a little bit. When you came to the Tri-Cities and, say, Pasco, or Richland barracks, where did you come from when you came here?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I came from Los Angeles.</p>
<p>Skinner: Los Angeles?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Los Angeles, California.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Jim, you’re native to what state?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Mississippi.</p>
<p>Skinner: Mississippi, okay.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Mississippi.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Let me ask you this next question, Jim. How did you hear about Hanford? Or when did you hear about Hanford? What did you hear about Hanford that—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Well, a friend of mine, in fact, it was my sister’s boyfriend, Emmett Hoy, came up here. And he was working out there for Militant Sound for the project where I went to work. I was working in Los Angeles, and he asked me if I wanted to make some money, to come up to Richland, Washington. So I decided to come up here and I stayed up here for six months. The dust and the tumbleweeds were so bad, I left and went back to Los Angeles and stayed three months. And I came back. And I’ve been here ever since.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Jim, let’s talk about the social environment in the Tri-City area, you know, again, Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland, for the African American at that time, 1948. What was the relationship between the African American and the white community or the majority community at that time?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Bad.</p>
<p>Skinner: Give me a—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Very, very prejudiced. Very racist. I was surprised when I came here to find a place that I had left a few years back from Mississippi and came here and found the same thing that I found in Mississippi.</p>
<p>Skinner: So we—again, we’re talking about we just had blatant and overt racism and discrimination towards the African American community.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes.</p>
<p>Skinner: Was it, again, was that exhibited as not only—was it on the job?</p>
<p>Pruitt: It was on the job, it was in housing, it was in foods, restaurants, it was in the bars, in the lounges, and wherever you went, there was a sign—[LAUGHTER] If it wasn’t a sign, it was, no, we don’t serve you in here. We don’t serve your kind. We couldn’t eat. I remember 1950, Hazel Scott suing the bus station.</p>
<p>Skinner: Mm-hmm, when you say the bus station, was this—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Greyhound bus station.</p>
<p>Skinner: Greyhound bus station?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Greyhound bus station, because she was going to Richland to perform. And that was Adam Clayton Powell’s wife. She was an entertainer. She went to the bar to get some food. They were riding the Greyhound bus, she and her secretary. They told her they didn’t serve black people in there. So she went back and sat down and her secretary was white, and she goes to the bar, and they gave her the whole setup, and the whole courtesy and everything. And she said, you know, I don’t want to eat. They said, why? She said, because you refused my boss. Mrs. Scott is my boss. And they went over and asked Mrs. Scott to eat, and they apologized to her for what they had done. And she says, no, why should I eat now that I’m good for $50,000. So she sued the bus station. From 1950 to this day, the bus station has not been anything progressive, nothing.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, okay. Jim, let me speak on—or say on the economics, in terms of comparable pay at that time, we’ll say, for the white community. Doing the same work that—a black was doing the same work that the whites were doing, was it the same pay involved, or was it lesser pay?</p>
<p>Pruitt: No, it was the same pay, because it was union. The guys that worked in the union, it was same pay. But they tried to see that the white guys got the better jobs, the higher-paying jobs, like foreman, supervisors, and whatever.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, Jim, also on that note, we’re speaking on the—we spoke about some of the accommodations in restaurants and other public facilities. Let me ask you this question. In 1948, we had some groups that was formed in the black community. Could you give me any information on some groups that were formed? Was it the human relations committee that was formed around those times?</p>
<p>Pruitt: The most that I can remember started in 1949, like the East Pasco Improvement Association. That was started in 1949. Out of that, came the Tri-Cities Human Rights Commission. Mrs. Merricks and Mr. Merricks and other people, Shirley Shepard and her husband, Mr. Shepard.</p>
<p>Skinner: Also on that committee, did you say that was Heidlebaugh?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah.</p>
<p>Skinner: Heidlebaugh was on that?</p>
<p>Pruitt: George Heidlebaugh.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, and we had some other members.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Luzell Johnson.</p>
<p>Skinner: Luzell Johnson, Iola James.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Iola James, Ray Henry. Joe Bush. Gilbert Owens. We had, I think—who was Mr.—Miner. Charlie Miner. He was one of the guys on that.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, you were also saying that you went to work in ’48, and you were working on the housing project on the Bypass highway in Richland. At that time, Jim, I know that there were African Americans working on the Hanford Project. Could you tell me if there was a large number of African Americans, a small number of African Americans, that was employed on that Department of Energy site, or the Atomic Energy Commission, or—were there many African Americans employed on that?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, there was quite a few African Americans. I can’t give you a round figure of what it was, but there was quite a few African Americans.</p>
<p>Skinner: Can you recall some of the job description, the titles of some of the African Americans that did work on the Project? Were they laborers?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Laborer, cement finisher and painter. And a truck driver every now and then. They’re riding this truck and it wasn’t—they’d haul the honey wagon. That was the only thing that they could get. They couldn’t get no higher than that.</p>
<p>Skinner: So the jobs were limited—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Were limited.</p>
<p>Skinner: --to menial task jobs and also back-breaking jobs as far as laborers and stuff like that.</p>
<p>Pruitt: That’s right.</p>
<p>Skinner: And very little chance for advancement.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yup, that’s right. There was no supervisors or foremans or none of that on that job.</p>
<p>Camera man: We need to change the tape.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Skinner: So, Jim, let me—we were just talking about employment. And obviously we see that there was a disparity in employment, and also there was—the African Americans were limited in being able to elevate themselves above just a certain level. Let me ask a question on the African American women. If they were employed, what type of employment, most generally, were the African American women?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Dishwashers, a few cooks (not many), bed makers, that kind of thing.</p>
<p>Skinner: So it would be an African American woman at that time, again, 1948, was more domestic?</p>
<p>Pruitt: House-making, yeah, housekeeping, more or less.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Jim, let’s go on to social entertainment for African Americans, say, ’48, and let’s work down, work this way. What type of entertainment as far as if it’s night clubs, eating establishments, that black businessmen/businesswomen in the community—what was the social life like at that time for blacks?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Ho, ho, ho, ho. Well, they had one club to go to at that time. That was out on Lewis Street. What is the name of the club? I have to think. I forgot it already. But there was only one club at that time. And I think 1950 was when Mr. Moore, last of ’49, first of ’50, he had a club down there on 1<sup>st</sup> and Lewis Street. The M&M was a place where you could go and eat. It was next door there.</p>
<p>Skinner: When you say the M&M, [LAUGHTER] I know that’s initials for something. Do you know what the M&M stood for, as far as the restaurant or that eating establishment?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I don’t know what. That was the name of it. The M&M. I don’t know what—[LAUGHTER] But I was trying to think of Mr. Moore’s night spot he had there. God, I can’t think.</p>
<p>Leonard Moore: Poulet Palace.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Poulet Palace is what it was, right. Yeah, that was the swinging place in town, was the Poulet Palace. But the other place across the street over there, that was where most of the people hung out at one time when I first came in 1948. It was the only place that I know that black people could go. I have to come back to that name, because I can’t think of it right now.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, we got time, we can come back to it, Jim. Also, again, as far as black businesses, and we use the term entrepreneur here today, right or wrongly, but black businesses, were they limited at that time?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Oh, yes. Yes. Mrs. Iola James had a trailer court. That was her business. Mr. and Mrs. Haney had a trailer court. And eventually they had a pool hall and stuff there. It was about—you know, eventually as the years went by. And they built a tavern over there, Norse’s Tavern. And Ms. Iola James had a restaurant in there. That was kind of entertainment and that was a black business.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. What was that—you said Norse’s Tavern and you said Mrs. James had a restaurant in there. Where was that located? What was the location of that?</p>
<p>Pruitt: On Oregon and—was that—hmm. What was that street?</p>
<p>Moore: It was south of Lewis Street. It was kind of south of Lewis Street.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, it was—</p>
<p>Skinner: Columbia? Hagerman? Marvin?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I think it was Hagerman.</p>
<p>Skinner: It was Hagerman?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, okay. Mrs. James—you mentioned Mrs. James, and she had a trailer park business. Where was that located?</p>
<p>Pruitt: 820 South Oregon. Right in the middle of where Mr. Moore’s junkyard is today.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Pruitt: That’s where my kids was born, right in the middle of the junkyard. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. And I know that there were other businesses, and as far as trailer park owners.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Aretha and Bob—Robert Dillon had a trailer court.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, what was the names again?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Bob—Robert Dillon and his wife, Mrs. Dillon.</p>
<p>Skinner: Right?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Aretha.</p>
<p>Skinner: I want to make sure we get the--</p>
<p>[camera man]: Try not to hide your mouth with that, with your glasses.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Also, Jim, on some of the black businesses, I know it appeared to be a number of blacks at that time, because housing was limited and substandard at most, but at that time, most of the living was in trailer parks for African Americans in Pasco, east Pasco if you want to section it off, and there was a number of trailer parks. I don’t remember the names of the individuals besides Mrs. James and Dillon. I understand that Mr. Ely had a trailer park. Ed Ely’s father. There was a Bud Walker had a little trailer park.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, he had a little trailer park there. Eventually, there was Dew Drop Inn. I almost forgot that. JD Evans had the Dew Drop Inn. That was a little hole-in-the-wall. We had that. It was a black business.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Were there any other businesses that as you recall and as we’re going over this, black businessmen or women, as limited as it was as that time?</p>
<p>Pruitt: No, that’s about—that was it. You couldn’t live no place else in town but east Pasco. That was the limit of black businesses there and that was the—Ms. James, Iola James, and JD’s place was it. And then years after that, I guess, well, in 1955, Ed Jackson opened up the place. It was Jack’s Bar and Grill. That was the really beginning the hangout of most black people was this restaurant, this bar.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, let me go on and just speak in terms of the black community and the black churches where the blacks’ worship area. At that time—and I’m speaking, again, from the time ’48 and early years—where were the paces of worship for African American men and women and children in the area? Or was it also very limited at that time?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, it was. You know, they had two churches at that time. It was Morning Star Baptist Church and the Church of God and Christ was the only two churches. And Saint James was built in 1950, the Methodist church, CME church. And from the expansion came New Hope Baptist Church now, and then Greater Faith. And I understand there’s a Seventh Day Adventist in—and then there was another, Holiest Church. Reverend Vaughn, the two churches split and that was two church, one of them was the Holiest Church and the other was the Church of God and Christ, I guess, the way it split.</p>
<p>Skinner: James, let me again ask the question. We know the race relationship at the time was bad at worst. Jim, when did you see any changes on the horizon in the black community in the Tri-Cities? When did we start seeing some substantial changes, social change, in the area?</p>
<p>Pruitt: After 1964.</p>
<p>Skinner: And that’s dealing with—we’ll say 1964, 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Affirmative Action.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, that’s right.</p>
<p>Skinner: And that was some of the most significant changes was occurring at that time for the blacks and the black community.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, because we still could not go to Kennewick and any place, enter the clubs at night and stuff like that.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Jim, tell me a little bit about Kennewick at that time as far as blacks being able to freely move in the City of Kennewick. It sounds there was no freedom to move in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Pruitt: There was no freedom to move in Kennewick. There was only one grocery store in the Tri-Cities at that time stayed open after midnight. It was Tri-City Foods. And if you go across the river to that store, the police were sitting out there somewhere. If you went anywhere like you was going downtown, they would stop you and tell you you was on the wrong side of the river. And you had to come back on this side. You could go to the movies, but that was it. When you get out of the movies, you come on back across the river.</p>
<p>Skinner: It was just that pervasive?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, it was. No eating, no messing around in Kennewick, period.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. Jim was there—you know, again, we’re talking about that, you know—we’ve seen how things was blatant and pervasive. Did the African American men and women, when they did, we’ll say, cohabitate or comingle with the white community, were they subject to derogatory treatment of any kind? Were they treated with an even hand?</p>
<p>Pruitt: No, they weren’t treated with an evil hand. But you always stood back. You was never their friend. A lot of times, as long as you was on a job with the guys, they’d laugh and talk and treat you like you was a part of them. But then when they get off and you meet them on the street in Kennewick with his wife and kids, he acted like he didn’t know you. He wouldn’t speak to you. Sure. It was a lot of that, man. It’s like I said, I didn’t know that this place would be like that when I came here. That you couldn’t walk into a restaurant and sit down and eat. You could not do it in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, Jim, let’s talk about Jim—James a little bit more. James, I know that you’ve been involved in any number of activities, organizations, as I said earlier, being a human rights, civil rights, community relations, working with the youth. Jim, tell us a little bit about some of yourself and some of the miles that you’ve walked as far as some of your job descriptions over the years, being involved in the East Pasco Improvement Association and a number of other groups. Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you were involved. Obviously, you cared, so that’s why you were involved. I can remember—</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: Okay.</p>
<p>Skinner: Again, Jim—James, as I was saying, tell us a little bit about yourself. Again, because I know myself, as a younger—as a kid—I know you was involved in youth baseball, you were involved in officiating, as far as umpire, you were involved with the community relations between the City of Pasco police and the community, involved in Affirmative Action in a number of areas—Jim, tell us a bit about yourself and when you first got involved.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Well, I’ll tell ya, when I first came to Tri-Cities, I went out on a job, I never, never heard my name called Jim until I came here to the State of Washington. Everybody called me James; nobody in my family knew anything about Jim. My older brother was named Jimmy, and they called him Jim. But for James, I thought it was really odd. I’d tell people what my name is, and they’d say, well, we call you Jim. And I said, no, that’s my brother’s name. They didn’t understand that, I guess. I just got tired of trying to tell people that my name was James and not Jimmy. So this one white lady told me that my momma was crazy for naming my brother Jimmy and naming me Jim. And I told her if she said that again, I would slap her. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>But I got involved, because when I was a kid growing up in Mississippi, there was no place for us to work in city council, anything that would help us to make any kind of progress in life. When I came to Los Angeles, I would go into the city council meetings when I got a chance. My brother-in-law would take me in. I wanted to see what was going on. So I said, if I ever got to a place where I could work and do something, I would.</p>
<p>And when I came to Pasco, it was a small town. So I begin to see what was going on after I seen all the racism here. So that’s when I begin to do that. I begin to look out and see what was going on. That’s when put forth an effort to do something about this kind of thing. And marching and demonstrations that we put on and stuff like that, I was a leader in that, in the civil rights thing.</p>
<p>I begin the Scouts, I believe it was in 1954. I’m the first black Boy Scout master in the Tri-City area to belong to the Blue Mountain Council. I worked with the young people. Out of the 22 kids I had, I lost two of them. The rest of them has progressed very good in life. It makes me feel very good about that.</p>
<p>Working with the youth, Youth Council, and doing something to try to get them to understand where we had to go. Because the place was—I mean, it was bad. It was segregated. The kids couldn’t go in the swimming pool. We couldn’t go in the Memorial swimming pool and go in. They filled up a swimming pool out at the navy base out there to keep black folks from swimming in it. Those were the things that I seen that I worked on--</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay. So, Jim, you mentioned in 1948 that in the African American community there was a group that was formed to promote social change. What was the name of that organization? 1948, was it the—it wasn’t the East Pasco Improvement Association, was it? Or what was it?</p>
<p>Pruitt: The East Pasco Improvement Association was 1949.</p>
<p>Skinner: It was 1949.</p>
<p>Pruitt: 1949 was when that began. I just gave you some of the names of that. Napolea Wilson, Shirley Shepard, Mr. Shepard, Luzell Johnson, Ray Henry, Mrs. James, Mrs. Barton, Gilbert Owens. There was many people that seen that this needed to take place. These were the organizers. Mrs. Merricks and her husband organized the Tri-City commission.</p>
<p>Skinner: Human Relations Committee?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah.</p>
<p>Skinner: Those two organizations, Jim, they were focusing on—when you say improvement, it is basically improving social conditions and economic conditions in the African American community. What were some of the projects or efforts that initially started that? Was it substandard housing, no housing, streets, water—what--?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Substandard housing, streets, street lights, the dusty streets that we were having and these things, for better homes and for better jobs. They worked to get me the job for the city in 1960. I’m the first black man that worked for the City of Pasco.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, Jim, I know that there was, again, I can say there’s a number of organizations that you’ve been involved with on the civil rights area, the human rights area. Jim, if I can recall that you were also City of Pasco, and I believe it was on police and community relations?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Police and Community Relations department.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, how did you get tied into that—</p>
<p>Pruitt: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Skinner: --we’ll say, human relations program?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Since I was working in the black movement, and I led quite a few demonstrations and marches on the streets in Pasco and in Kennewick and also Richland, they decided to grease the squeaking wheel. That’s why I got the job. I put in the application for it and everything, but there was over 200 applications. People had doctor’s degrees that they didn’t get it. What happened, in 1969—if you remember, ’68, they had a little riot over in Kurtzman Park. In 1969, they had the riot in front of the court house in the park there. And there was over 400 that was out in the park. And police went down and they had four warrants. They went down and arrested—got the four young men they was after for drugs. They—well, it wasn’t they, it was Lieutenant Butnam, we’ll just call his name out. He hit a couple of girls with his night stick, and he drew the crowd. And the kids came back the next day with rocks, rifles, shot guns—there was over 400 people out in that park, young people. There was only three white people in that park. Lee Brush—</p>
<p>Skinner: A police officer?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, Sergeant Lee Brush. And Sam Hunt was one of the teachers, and Mr.—oh, he run Columbia Light Products down there on May Street. I can’t call his name right now. But anyway, I’ll get back to that. But anyway, those kids was out there fixing to get destroyed, because they’d come to destroy the police department. They’d torn over police cars and stuff up there in the street; they’d burned down the trees in front of the court house. And they had Reverend Allen—yeah, Reverend Allen, he didn’t come, but Reverend Vaughns, Wayne Jackson, Annette Jackson and myself. And everybody spoke to those young people.</p>
<p>I got on the wishing well and I cried like a baby. Because I seen what was going to happen. If those kids had pulled out those guns out there and start shooting at them police, they were going to destroy them. And these was all white kids. And I got on the wishing well, and I promised them, if they would just think about it, because they were going to get destroyed—and go back home and think about it. I said, as long as there is blood in this body, I would never let this happen in this town again. I promised them that. And the kids dispersed. I went down and put in my application after that. They started sending out applications, and I went in and put in my application. That’s how I got that job.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, okay. Jim, you had also mentioned that you organized a number of marches in the Tri-Cities area of Pasco, Kennewick and Richland. Can you tell us something about the first march that you were involved in in this area here and the reason why you were marching?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes. For the same reason we’d been fighting all the time. For better housing, for better streets, for better lights and for better jobs, for better schools. Whittier School over there had rats and roaches and they had no place to put the food. The food was on the floor out there with roaches and everything else crawling trough it. The white people moved all their kids out of Whittier. There was four white kids going to Whittier School over there. Those were the things we demonstrated.</p>
<p>We had no black policemen, we had no black lawyers in this town. We had nothing. And why not? Why not recruit some of these people? Because they were unwelcome. And that’s why I—we did that. Mozetta Orange was one of the young people that I worked with very rapidly.</p>
<p>East Side Market was right in the black community. They wouldn’t hire a black person. Gene and Gerald would not hire a black person in their store. Before they would hire a black person in that store, they sold the store. And we got Roland Andrews the job there. And then Reverend Wilkins, he went to work there as a clerk. Those were the kind of things that we done.</p>
<p>We had Slip’s Firestone down there in the black community, wouldn’t hire no black people. Finally, when his place went up for something down there, then we got the—we hired the black man. I guess he retired a couple of years ago.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, I’m trying to think of the gentleman’s name here I believe that was working out at Slip’s Firestone. But I can’t think of it. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Pruitt: I can’t, either. It was Wild Bill. Mr. Wild Bill, everybody know his nephew. But I also, I worked—the first 18-wheeler driver was Henderson.</p>
<p>Skinner: It was Henderson?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes. Not Clyde, but—</p>
<p>Skinner: Was it Gilbert? Gibson?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, Gibson Henderson. Gibson Henderson, I got him a job out at that Chevron station. Way out there, driving an 18-wheeler. Avery Johnson. Not Avery—Tony—not Tony, but the other Avery.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim Avery, we call him Jeb, there’s a Henry, there’s a Larry.</p>
<p>Pruitt: I guess it was Tony, Tony and--</p>
<p>Skinner: And he had a brother named Danny.</p>
<p>Pruitt: No, Tony. Tony was the one. I got a job for PI. I talked to PI down there about them driving. I got him a job down there. Oh, it’s another young man, he killed his wife up in Spokane. He was a secretary when I was there with the police department. What was that boy’s name? Ah, god. It’s right on the end of my tongue, and I can’t call it. But he was driving. They were driving 18-wheelers.</p>
<p>Those were the kind of things that I were working for. You know, to get these positions. That’s why we had the demonstrations. In Kennewick, we demonstrated over there because nobody could go to Kennewick.</p>
<p>The first black man who had a house over there in 1961, he left and came over to Mr. Walker’s. It was Mr. Walker’s daughter’s husband. Mr. Walker’s daughter had the house over there. And she and her husband came over to visit him in Pasco; when they got back the house was burned down.</p>
<p>Skinner: This was in 1961?</p>
<p>Pruitt: 1961 in Kennewick. Yes. These was why we was demonstrating. Herb Jones and his family moved to Kennewick in 1965. They cut the tires on his car, broke the glass out of a brand new Ford he just had bought. These was the things we were marching for. Why not? Why not live in Kennewick, anywhere, if you wanted. We were citizens—</p>
<p>Skinner: And this is America, you know what.</p>
<p>Pruitt: And this is America. I look at it today, and people are saying we’re together. For over 400 years, we haven’t been together. And now they want to say, we are together. But we are not yet there.</p>
<p>Skinner: James—and obviously the story that you told about being called James, which is your given name, opposed to Jim. Is there a story behind that right there? Is there—in the past, that the white community referred to African American men outside of their given name? Jimmy, if their name was James, and that was a negative connotation?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes. And “boy.” They wanted to call you “boy,” “say, boy.” I didn’t allow nobody to call me “boy.” Because my name is James, and I feel like this, like I tell guys, I say, whatever—whoever you meet, and they give you their name, they tell you what my name is, that’s what they feel comfortable with you calling them. And that’s what they try to do. But yeah, they’d call you Bob for Robert, if your name was Robert. They wouldn’t call you by your full name.</p>
<p>Skinner: Your given name.</p>
<p>Pruitt: No, your given name, they had to put something else to it.</p>
<p>Skinner: So this was out of, obviously this was—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Lazy.</p>
<p>Skinner: Is it lazy or out of respect, not having respect for the African American?</p>
<p>Pruitt: That’s right, didn’t have no respect for them at all. None. None, and I tell you what. Believe it or not, I hit a guy in the mouth for calling me a nigger. Right here in Pasco, I hit him just like God had forgot him. And I wouldn’t’ve ever thought that that would happen. And they would do that as long as they felt like they could get away with it. And they’d call you “boy” as long as they felt like they could get away with it.</p>
<p>Skinner: Oh, so in other words, you’re saying as long as you allowed it to occur, it would continue to occur.</p>
<p>Pruitt: They would play with you out at Hanford out there. The man would come—the foreman sometime would come up and he would kick you with his knee. I’ve seen guys laugh and walk on off on me. Don’t take your feet off the ground towards me. Never. But they’d do that. And then finally a few of let them keep bumping you with your knee and then soon they start absolutely kicking. Oh, yes.</p>
<p>Skinner: So it was just a general disregard for African Americans, if you allowed it to happen.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, let us revisit some of the, again, some of the firsts that you had mentioned now that—some of the firsts for blacks in the Tri-Cities area. Whether it was jobs, whether it was patronizing white businesses, night clubs and not have that Jim Crow stigmatism. Can you share for us some of the first things that you recognized as far as accomplishments or positions that blacks never had held before but now was holding, stores that blacks formerly couldn’t go in but now we could go in. Could you give me some of the firsts on that, Jim?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, that’s what we were talking about a little while ago, when black people couldn’t go into the restaurants, job situation, they couldn’t work in the stores—the clothing stores or food stores or none of those places. I think, it was about 19—it was in the early ‘60s, before we really seen any changes to where people—and like I said, one of the things, east Pasco was a big grocery store there. We made them guys rich, and they wouldn’t hire a black person in the black community.</p>
<p>Skinner: And you mentioned the name of that store was Gene and Jules?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Gene and Gerald.</p>
<p>Skinner: James, as I can recall, the Gene and the Jules, their last name were Wright? If I’m not mistaken, their last name was Wright?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Gene Wright and Jules—I don’t know what Jules’ last name was.</p>
<p>Moore: Was it Meyers?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Might have been Meyers.</p>
<p>Skinner: They also had not only the Gene and Jules over in east Pasco, but they also had a Gene and Jules on the west side of town.</p>
<p>Pruitt: They sold Gene and Jules over there and built this one over here because they did not want to hire no black person. They wouldn’t hire no black person.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay, and on that relocation of the Gene and Jules from east Pasco to west Pasco, where was the Gene and Jules Store that they built to avoid hiring blacks, where was that located? Was that located on Court and Chase?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Mm, that was on Court—</p>
<p>Skinner: Which is, it’s 20<sup>th</sup> now, but it used to be Chase.</p>
<p>Pruitt: That’s right. Chase.</p>
<p>Skinner: Used to be Chase. Was it located around that area?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Mm-hmm, yeah.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, you also said it, the City of Pasco, that you were the first black that was employed by the City of Pasco?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes.</p>
<p>Skinner: What year was that?</p>
<p>Pruitt: 1960. I was employed through East Pasco Improvement Association. They fought the city. Shirley Shepard and Mrs. Heidlebaugh, Mr. Heidlebaugh, Mrs. Merricks and all of those people, Kenny Moore, he was a councilman at that time—city councilman. And they called him the East Pasco Nigger Council.</p>
<p>Skinner: Mm-hmm, tell us some more. Who was the mayor at that time, can you recall?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Let’s see, who was the mayor? Ted—what was old Ted’s name? Oh, god. I can’t call the last name. But Ted was the mayor there in 1960. He was the mayor. He was a real racist. Real prejudiced.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, you also said that you were the first black Boy Scout troupe leader in the Tri-City area, Pasco area or whatever. And you mentioned you had 22 scouts at that time. What else were you first in, Jim, in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I was the first black man to run a service station. 76 Union Station down on 4<sup>th</sup> Avenue at the Dodge place. I worked for Mr. Don Hammer. He went in, he was talking to his buddy in there, and he said, I got a man here needs a job. Because my son was going to be born in February and we couldn’t work on the dam because there was too much ice, and I needed the job. He was from Louisiana, and he said, man, black guys worked the station there all the time. He said, I’ll give you a job. He gave me a job working for him and I would run the station at night.</p>
<p>There was people come to the station to get gas and I’d go out to serve them, and they’d ask me for Mr. Hammer or Bob. They was out to lunch or if they was going some place, I’d say, well, they’re not in right now. Can I help you? No.</p>
<p>So one day—one evening—one night I was there, and this lady came in and I went out to fill her tank, because I know she come by to get it full. And she asked me where was the boss? And I say, he’s gone home. He might’ve not—he wasn’t going home that night, but he went and got him a sandwich and he said he was going to leave and he was going home. So I said, he may be going home, I don’t know. Well, where’s Robert? And I said he may be going home. I’m the only one here. I said, can I help you? No.</p>
<p>So about that time, he went back up in the driveway. He got out and he says, what’s wrong? I said, I don’t know, that lady want to see you. So he goes over to her and he says, ma’am, can I help you? She says, yes, sir, she says, fill ‘er up. He said, James work here. He said, why couldn’t you fill her car up with gas? I said, I asked her what does she want and she asked for you. She didn’t tell me she wanted no gas. And he said, why didn’t you tell him? I didn’t want him putting gas in my car. He said, well, I tell you what, ma’am. He works here. And if he can’t put gas in your car, then we don’t need your trade.</p>
<p>Skinner: So this female customer, because you were an African American refused to do business with you at a station that she does business with on a day-to-day basis.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes. She would not let me fill that car up that day. So he said, if he can’t fill it up, I won’t fill it up. So she said, fill it up. And he went on the inside. So she asked me if I knew where she could get six black chickens. I said, no, I don’t. And I called Don and asked him. I said, Don. The lady ask me if you know where she could get six black chickens. He’s very squirrelly anyway. He says, well, let me see, but I don’t know, but if there’s any around I could sure get them for you. He say, why? Why you want six black chickens? She said, I want them for pall bearers. My cock is dead. [LAUGHTER] Those were the kind of things that that you get from them kind of people. A lot of people come in didn’t want me to serve them. Yes.</p>
<p>Skinner: And is—that’s interesting and I know it was true, Jim, but it’s really pathetic that people were that shallow and that small to not want to give individuals the same extension of the hand that they would extend to other people. It’s really sad that we have individuals in this world this way that feel that they’re out here by themselves. Jim, is there any other firsts?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, when I was working for the city department, Buck Whistler was the supervisor there. He was so racist, he’d tell me one thing that the foreman—Herb Carr was the foreman—he would give me a job to do, and Buck would come on after he’d leave and tell me something else to do and then go tell him that I wasn’t doing what he told me to do, I was doing this. Buck Whistler was the supervisor. He didn’t want me on the job.</p>
<p>Skinner: So he was doing everything he could to undermine you and get you run off.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Until the last minute. He did it too many times. He did that one day, and Herb come to the shop. I was threading some pipe, I was cutting some water joints and threading them. And he says, why weren’t you threading them joints? I said, Buck told me to go out there and cut weeds and leave that alone. He said, Buck says you wasn’t doing what I told you to do. I said, I was there threading pipes, man. These two-foot pipes, I had to thread them at each end. I said, I was cutting pipe and threading them. He told me to go out there in the yard and cut them weeds out. He say, he did? I say, yeah, that’s what he done. So Buck came down, and I was so mad, I couldn’t wait. When he come down, I run at him. I was going to kick him up one side and down the other. So he took off.</p>
<p>Skinner: So, again, well, then it seems to me that you were being set up.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, yes, but I had got tired of that.</p>
<p>Skinner: Being set up, as far as African American men or women, it didn’t seem like it was—</p>
<p>Pruitt: The thing was, John, we were trying to get unionized. He did not want a union, the city employees. So he laid three of us off in September. In 1961. It was two white boys and myself, Robert Noonan. Because we was organizing a union. Even though we did get it, oh yes, we got it.</p>
<p>Skinner: So Jim you trying to tell me you was a union organizer also?</p>
<p>Pruitt: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. There’s a lot of things, John, that I tried, you know? Because I always never had a chance when I were growing up. And I always wanted to do something to try to help young people. I’m still trying to do the same thing today. I live in Alaska, but I’m still doing it.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, let me also ask you about—you were also employed for the City of Pasco and you were in the capacity of a community relations officer between the Pasco Police Department—</p>
<p>Pruitt: As a liaison.</p>
<p>Skinner: A liaison—and the African American community. Could you tell me some parts of that job description? You’ve already shared with us on some, as far as the what they called riots or demonstration, Kurtzman Park, and also volunteer across for the Franklin County Courthouse. And you were there mediating that crowd. It sounds to me that you were able, was effective in your mediation to quell the crowd and you promised that you, as far as your involvement—tell us about that involvement with that liaison position.</p>
<p>Pruitt: When I went to the police department, I went there with this in mind, to bring about a better relationship between the police department and the people in the city of Pasco. Not only in the African community, but also in the white community. That was my goal. I had ballgames set up between the people and the police department, softball team. And we also had a pigs-and-the-freaks game with the police to bring about better relationship with the police department.</p>
<p>The police had been pretty rough on black people in Pasco. That was one of the things—I had an office set up there in the Matrix Building. And when people would be involved with the police in any way, form, they’d come to me, and I would investigate it. Police would be harassing certain people, oh yeah. That was quite a bit. That was my thing, to investigate it and find out and see what was happening and what was going on. I also got the guns out of the police department—I mean out of the cars, they were sitting up in the—they had them in the trunk. Because that’s intimidation. Intimidation to people when they see, and knowing that you got something to kill them with.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, following up a little bit more on that community relations job, liaison job you had for the City of Pasco, James, the question I want to ask of you now, what kind of cooperation did you get from the City of Pasco and Pasco Police Department? Were they committed of trying to establish better community relationship, or was it lip service?</p>
<p>Pruitt: No, they did. They worked very diligent with me. The city manager and the chief of police. You had a few guys in there that regretted me. There was a joke told one evening and I cussed them out. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, did you say that, at that time was the city manager, did you mention Marv Wenniger?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes.</p>
<p>Skinner: Was the city manager?</p>
<p>Pruitt: City manager.</p>
<p>Skinner: And the mayor was?</p>
<p>Pruitt: The mayor was Ed Hendler.</p>
<p>Skinner: Ed Hendler at that time?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Ed Hendler was the mayor at that time. Yeah, they’d work with me, and one thing the chief set up when we went in, he told the police that my job was not to investigate no cases for the police department. And he told me these words, he said, if any policeman come to you and ask you any questions about anybody out there that he should be working on investigating, I want to know about it. You see? And he will pay for it.</p>
<p>And any time that a person would come to me with some type of action between them and the police, and I investigated it, if there were some wrongdoings in there, that policeman was reprimanded. There was some police reprimanded. I’d write them up. I’d write them up, and I would give one of the write-ups to the chief and one to the city manager. There were some police left the department because of that.</p>
<p>Skinner: So they were committed to making the changes. And when you did the investigation and on your findings that there was some activities that was inappropriate, they dealt with it effectively.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes. And Al Tebaldi thanked me many times for opening doors to him that has not been opened to the police chief by inviting him into east Pasco and to different organizations and into the night spots and getting to know people and setting up the ballgames and stuff where we could have some interaction with each other. That was good. He was for all of that.</p>
<p>Skinner: And you say that at this time the chief of police of the Pasco Police was Al Tebaldi?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Al Tebaldi. Yes. And he worked with me on that very, very well. I appreciated that.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, again, you’re a person that’s multi-faceted, like I say, and involved in an incredible number of different things in the community. You also mentioned that you were involved, not only with organizing, but you also were involved with the Ironworkers and apprenticeship programs. In your involvement with the apprenticeship program, I assume—or let me ask you, were you involved in minority recruitment? Raising that window for blacks to have opportunity in building and construction trades?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, that was a part of my job.</p>
<p>Skinner: Tell me, Jim, some of the encounters that you had, some of your success rates of recruiting black young men and/or women into the program. Tell us something about that.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Well, I’ll tell you, it’s very understandable that young people, young black men, didn’t know anything about the four crafts that black men could not participate in. It was electricians, the pipefitters, sheet metal and ironworkers. Those were four crafts that the judge recommended that no other person [UNKNOWN] could be hired except blacks for five years. We had to graduate 625 black men and women through these four locals.</p>
<p>Skinner: Well, this was through Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action, was it?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, Affirmative Action.</p>
<p>Skinner: Blacks, African American, were not involved in the building and construction crafts in those four crafts.</p>
<p>Pruitt: No, that’s right.</p>
<p>Skinner: The reasons why they were not involved, was it closed to the father-and-son type of—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes.</p>
<p>Skinner: Because I can recall myself, as I was graduating from high school, I had no knowledge of building and construction apprenticeship programs such as Electricians’ and stuff like that. So you saying that, by mandate, you had to recruit as well as graduate a number of African American men or women in a specific period of time.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Both, yes. Both. Both, men and women.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, you also said that recently you ran across some of the young men that you were involved in recruiting in the Ironworkers’ and it sounded like they were thanking you for reaching out and showing them the way. Jim, how does that make you feel as far as that accomplishment and being able to reach down, reach back and provide the direction?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Well, it makes you feel very good, John, because these guys did not understand about these different crafts. And it makes a lot of difference when you are put out in a position and you’ve never been there before. And you’re out there with all the white guys, they’re going about their business, because their dad has sat around the dinner table and talked about these things. But my daddy wasn’t able to do that. So these young men’s fathers didn’t know anything about the Ironworkers’, the Electricians’, the Pipefitters’. So we had to have a counsel. I was—what’s it called, a counsel. I worked with these guys, I recruited them, and I went on the job to see how they would function, what they needed, what their weak places was, whether they needed help. They went to school five nights a week, two hours, to learn this trade. They had to do this. And if they didn’t, then they were thrown out and somebody else was recruited.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, let me ask you this, in your area of being a counselor of apprenticeship programs, was the success rates where you thought they should be? Were they good? Were they low? Did we have a good completion rate of African Americans in the apprenticeship program?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I’d have to say 87%.</p>
<p>Skinner: That’s successfully completed the program?</p>
<p>Pruitt: It was good. Charlene Bell was one of my ironworkers. Her brother, Alfred Bell, was one of them. And her little brother got killed up there.</p>
<p>Skinner: John?</p>
<p>Pruitt: John? Yes. There was Ron Howard coming under that, and Tony Troy. You know Tony? Faye’s son?</p>
<p>Skinner: Yes, yes.</p>
<p>Pruitt: He’s an ironworker now. He’s getting ready to retire. Some of the guys that I had worked with that I had to get in in the morning and call them if they didn’t go to work.</p>
<p>Skinner: You had to jumpstart them, Jim?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I had to jumpstart ‘em. I’d go and I always kept my little piece under my arm, because the guys were rough. And they’d be out all hours of the night and didn’t want to go to work the next morning. And they’d get up and go, I’ll shoot you if you come in here, I’ll do this, I’ll cut your head off. And I’d go in there, well, I’m going to shoot you back. I said, you going to go to work this morning. The man need you. If he hadn’t need you, he wouldn’t have hired you. You’re going to work. I’d make them go to work. Every day. And seeing that they go to school. Every night, I was at that school. I checked them out. Every night, brother, I was out there. If there was any problem, the teacher, he reported it. He reported it to me. And I would talk to these fellas. I went on the job to see how they were progressing. I talked to the foreman whom he worked with, these guys, the journeyman. I had some guys through 19 months were journeymen. So these are the kinds of things that we worked for. We had ladies that were ironworkers. Juanita was a good ironworker. She was just one here from Pasco. They was very good. They was very good.</p>
<p>I met some guys last summer in the park, in the shop that’s over on 23<sup>rd</sup> up there, in June. They rushed me and was hugging me and going on. Please don’t do that, people be thinking we’re sisters. They were getting ready for retire, and they were thanking me for what I had done for them, to give them a chance in life and have something to retire. They got good retirements from these jobs. It make me feel very good, very good, I have helped somebody.</p>
<p>Skinner: Good. Jim, you know, on opening some of these doors, and knocking some of these barriers down—it wasn’t done voluntarily, Jim. Certain action, whether it was civil disobedience at the time, because in the majority community, the majority community just wasn’t listening. Sitting down to the round table might have worked for certain groups, but in the black community, we have sat down to the round table any hundreds of thousands of times and we still did not get any effective change.</p>
<p>What do you think are some of the causes that moved, for some of the social change, to break down the barriers, to get the apprenticeship program, we’re talking about college education, where we’ve always had African American men and women graduating and going to college, but through Affirmative Action, we started seeing more folks, blacks, getting involved in apprenticeship programs, going to college and graduating college. But what I’m saying is, it didn’t happen by accident; it happened because of individuals out there on the line and were calling for social change. Do you agree on that? Or not?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes. I think a lot of us—our young people was misled. I worked in OM over there a lot with young people. Three years ago, I was in Walla Walla. I had breakfast over at the Black Angus. There was two young ladies walked up, they almost looked like twins, and grabbed me, I thought they were trying to get my money, so I started scuffling with them. And they said, Mr. Pruitt, you don’t know us? And I said, no, I don’t, I’m sorry. And they said, do you remember OM? And I said, yes, I do. And I looked—</p>
<p>Moore: Operation Motivation?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, Operation Motivation. And she said, I want to thank you and Trooper Kennedy for helping us to turn our lives around. She says, I’m a doctor, and the other one was a teacher.</p>
<p>Skinner: ‘Kay.</p>
<p>Pruitt: And—I’m sorry. [emotional] But those kind of things make you feel good.</p>
<p>[camera man]: We can stop it.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Pruitt: --and on a Saturday hit a little bit of blues. That’s about it. Sunday, all day, you would hear all gospel. And the sheriff would ride around the church, is everything all right, boy? See if everything all right. So you’d be ready to go to work Monday morning. As soon as Dr. King come along and said, let’s get up and do something. We’re going backward, not moving forward. What did they do? They started bombing the black churches and killing black folks, because they begin to move out.</p>
<p>The ministers should tell our young people, whatever your talent is, use it. I’ve seen Milton Norwood’s little daughter blowing trumpet in the church up there. Now, she done went through four years of schooling to learn how to blow, and the minister telling her to blow for God. Don’t get out there in the streets and blow no horn. Now who going to pay her salary?</p>
<p>BB King, I talked to him. He and I were 80 miles apart. I said, BB, supposing we had still been in Mississippi? He said, we’d be down there smelling behind them mules. But I’m able to do something for my kids and my grandkids. He’s got 29 grandkids. He got a club set up in Hollywood, he’s got one in Memphis, he just set up one in New York. To him, that’s a job. But to black folks, because the white folks said, if you sing the blues, you going to hell, we couldn’t swim on Sundays, we couldn’t play baseball on Sundays. A lot black folks wouldn’t cook on Sundays because they done told them it’s a sin. And we still living under that old tradition.</p>
<p>And this is what I’m telling you young people: get out from under that. Don’t believe that kind of stuff, because all it is, they taking the Bible and keeping you on the slave. Get up. And whatever is the pleasure in your life and other people enjoy, do it. That’s what I do today. Whatever people in Georgia are doing. People call me on the phone and ask me sometime to sing a couple verses of a song in New York—that’s the truth—or Detroit or some place. I sing. Why? Because I may not have that chance again. I don’t care if it’s the blues. I sung the blues plowing the mule—I learned how to plow the mule singing the blues. And the blues ain’t nothing but—the preacher says the blues is singing for the devil.</p>
<p>My little blind friend up there used to play at the Black Angus here. He was playing up there in Anchorage. He offered the church to play for them. They didn’t have a keyboard player, and he play in the club. That’s his living. You know they wouldn’t let him play in that church? Because he’s playing for the devil and you can’t play for the devil and to God. And then turn around saying, you got to earn your living by the sweat of your brow. If Satan ain’t sweating I don’t know what it is.</p>
<p>I can’t understand why the ministers are still going through these things. It’s a shame and holding the young people back. This is one of the reasons, John, that we can’t get nowhere, is because they got the kids’ minds poisoned. They not teaching them nothing. And we have to teach them that they’re number one in their life and whatever is available to them that they want to do—go out and be a policeman, go out and be a lawyer, be a doctor, be a city councilman, be the mayor—whatever you want to be. But you don’t ever hear them say that. You don’t hear them say nothing about the people that have paved the way for us along the way.</p>
<p>Reverend Allen has never contributed nothing to this community. Never. And he told me, Juneteenth day down there, he had a $4 million project in Portland. I said, Reverend Allen, what about here? You live here. Well, Reverend Allen say, it’s in Portland. He ain’t never contributed nothing. And people tell me, well, it’s because of the way his family is. I’m a man. Don’t let nobody tell you what you can and cannot do as long as you right. He’s the boss of the house. How his wife going to tell him he can’t be involved in nothing? He come to one council meeting.</p>
<p>But they ain’t telling young people nothing. You see? I tell them, you number one in your life. Your heart is the church. Your body is your temple. Whatever you need, you look within yourself. The inner strength, the god within you is the one that give you direction. See, that house over there is a house of fellowship. That’s where people go and communicate and swap conversations with each other. But this is the house of God. This is the temple, is here, your body. And when they start telling young people this and whatever—use it. Whatever your talent is, use it.</p>
<p>Love, you have to find it within yourself first. When you find that, you can go anywhere in the world and find it. I have no problem nowhere I go. Peace—people say, I’m going out here and find me some peace and happiness. It starts with you. Any change you want made in life, brother, you have to start with you. Because it’s not going to change if you don’t put forth an effort. And you can sit here and pray until doomsday. Until you get up and do what you’re supposed to do, you ain’t going to get nothing. See, and people is talking about, if you got the faith of a mustard seed, the Bible said, if you got as much faith as a mustard seed, cut into four parts, one little square, you can move mountains. Now, the preachers don’t explain that. You’ve heard that before, ain’t you?</p>
<p>Skinner: Yes, I have.</p>
<p>Pruitt: But now you know what he was talking about? You know what kind of faith he was talking about? You see these big machines they built, they move the mountains. See, that’s what he was talking about. If you got as much faith, you can build these kind of things. They blow a hole in the mountain and take them big Eucs and stuff and run it in and get it out. The way they tell you that, if you have enough faith you can stand and look and pray at that mountain so long it’ll move out of your way. If there’s something in your way that—no, you’ve got to be able to move it. You got to be able.</p>
<p>Skinner: So, Jim, you’re saying that before the black community can help itself, help ourselves, we’ve got to get up and take some steps.</p>
<p>Pruitt: That’s right. We got to find ourselves. We got to find ourselves, and that’s something we have not done. We’re still dependent on somebody else. And you all know, when you talk to people that are supposed to be Christians, they’ll tell you something that’s wild and is a whole lot different from what it is in the Book. It is. And the Book has been translated 15 times. It has been translated. And you look in the Bible, now they got pictures in the Bible. See how many black people in the Bible. See how many’s in there. And I’m very angry with our ministers. Not that I’m—but you try to tell them, and they all, you wrong. Where you get your philosophy from?</p>
<p>But I tell y’all something, I had an experience in 1966. I was driving from here to Bellingham. I was working on Whidbey Island, I was building some barracks out on the navy base. I was driving along one evening when something called my name. I was singing, “kindly take this message to the other side.” Something called my name at the double bridges. And you ever go into Canada, when you get between—before you get to Mount Vernon, there’s two double bridges there. And just as I crossed that bridge, something called my name three times, I’m driving. Said, James, James, James. It said, live your life that others may see the life you live. Because your life may be the only Bible that they will ever read. And it scared me so bad, man, I didn’t know what to do. I put on my brakes and I was sweating like mad. And I don’t know what in the daylights said that.</p>
<p>1986, I was working up on Mount McKinley. I built bridges out there for Samson & Sons. We stayed out there at the camp. So in the evening, I’d usually get in my truck after I’d worked 12, 14 hours a day, sometime 18. And I’d go out there, the sun didn’t go down until 12, 12:30. I’d get in my truck and go out there, and sit out there and look at all the animals on the side of the mountain, the bears and the goats and the moose and everything, doing they thing out there. But I sat there one evening, something call my name the same way, man. And I mean it just shocked me again. I’m sitting there and it scared me. And I asked a question when it said that three times to me. I said, why me? It said, because you’re you.</p>
<p>That time there was some little—there were some ducks crossing the road, had some little bitty baby ducks. And all them ducks was in a little hook following they mom. And one started off, and she turned around and pecked him. And he got back in. The Spirit said something to me. If that duck can train his duckies, looking at the bears—if the bear can train his little cubbies, if the goats can train their little lambs, the cows can train their calf, why can’t we, our people, our children? Why?</p>
<p>You know those things that—it’s because—I don’t know. I don’t know why. But these kind of things—I don’t know why they come to me, but it did. And I think about it. And I talk to young people about these things. I still work, brother. I’m still going to the schools. I’m still going to young people’s organizations and talk to them.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, you’ve always been active with the youth in the community. As I said earlier, as I was growing up, I know that you were involved in and organized baseball. And I know, James Junior and I were also playing ball together. And you’d take us to ball games—at that time, I believe it was the Tri-City Braves.</p>
<p>Pruitt: I bought a $50 Cadillac from his Daddy. [LAUGHTER] And I went everywhere, to Portland, Seattle. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Moore: We’ve got another one down there, too.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Do you?</p>
<p>Moore: We’ve got another one.</p>
<p>Pruitt: For $50?</p>
<p>Moore: A Cadillac, yeah.</p>
<p>Pruitt: I want it! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, again, you have a wealth of information about folks in the community, about the signs of the times, where we were, where we came from, and we measure it in different ways. Right now, Jim, I suspect, I guess you’re retired here, right now.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, I retired in ’89.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, I know that you were—you’ve done a multitude of things. I know you’ve been a contractor—</p>
<p>Pruitt: [LAUGHTER] Yes, yes.</p>
<p>Skinner: And you’ve been a sports official.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yup.</p>
<p>Skinner: And I guess when I interviewed you, you’re saying, I just had that intestinal fortitude to want to get up and want to do better for myself and see my people do better.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, especially young people. I want young people to have the opportunities I didn’t have. I want them to have that.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, in that same line is, where do we go from here? Do you think that African Americans acclimating more into the mainstream society, do we have a uphill battle from what you can see in the trends out here now?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, we still have an uphill battle. Because people is not yet grasped what is happening. They still, some of us still living back in the ‘20s and the ‘30s. You’ve got to leave that. If you don’t move with time, time will leave you standing still. We have a lot of people like that. They don’t believe in what—I mean, you look at the music today. You look at the gospel, contemporary. Young people—[COUGHING] excuse me—they don’t want to go back and sing the old songs that we sang. [singing] Lord, I wanna be ready. Lord, I’m getting ready. I’m going to meet my God. You see, when young people come to the world, black people, they start teaching you to die. You going. How to get to heaven. And this is my speech. How you going to heaven if you haven’t did nothing here? We have got to learn to live here first.</p>
<p>And this is what we are not doing. They’re not teaching us how to live here together, John, they’re teaching us how to get to heaven. But what we going to do here first? And a lot of people here, you can talk to them about that, child, I know I’m on my way to heaven, I’m going. Look, this is your heaven and hell right here on earth, son. When you leave here, your spirit will be left, but your body’s going back to the dust. That spirit will be in the body of some other human, not yours. You’ve finished here on earth and when you are done—ain’t nobody been back to tell you how it is over there, is that old folks’ comment. So that’s why he said, don’t put off today for tomorrow for what you can do today. Because there is no tomorrow. It’s either today or yesterday.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, you know, again, in a black community, uphill struggle from where we may have been 50 years ago to now, young people’s better access to education—quality education, maybe a little finer—I’m not going to say finer minds, but now they have some credentials because of their college education. Do you think that the young people and seeing more with a college education, are they going to be able to benefit and help blacks move vertically? Progressively vertical enough, vertical movement. Do you think because of more blacks are being educated that they’re going to be able to reach out and be more salvation because of their education?</p>
<p>Pruitt: I hope so. I hope so. I hope they’re not selfish. But a lot of us are. And I hope—they should reach back. And that’s what I always try to do. If I get three steps up on the ladder, I like to have someone on the second behind me. See, as we step up the ladder, we should always be able to look back and bring somebody else along with us. And I hope—and that’s what I tell young people each day that I talk to them. Don’t forget where you came from. Don’t forget your sister, your brother, your African American. Don’t forget where you come from. Always try to help those that need help. I hope it brings about a change.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, so you’re saying then, don’t forget from whence you came.</p>
<p>Pruitt: That’s right.</p>
<p>Skinner: And speaking of selfishness, the selfishness, you’re hoping that by having access to education, that we’ll be able to look at things conceptually and not keep starting back off at square one. That we can be able to move forward with the knowledge and progressively move up vertically.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Right. And I think—what I was saying, if our ministries, too, in the community. Because they have the crowd, they have the majority of the people. They have a chance to help young people more than what they do instead of holding them back. But they tell them what you can and what you cannot do. That’s not right. And I think if we could get them to understand, they’re not helping the young people in the way they’re teaching them. They’re not teaching them how to live here on earth and how to get out and do things and help that person that needs help that’s a little bit less fortunate than they are. They ain’t teaching them that. You don’t ever hear that. All they talk about is what Paul done and what John done and all of these people back—that’s fine.</p>
<p>But bring in some of these people. You never hear anything about Dr. Martin Luther King. You never hear them say anything about Randolph Philips. You never hear George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington. You never hear them say anything about that. You never hear them say anything about Jackie Robinson; you never hear them say anything about Muhammad Ali. And look at most of the things that have changed in the last 70 years since I’ve been living. Who has changed it? Black folks. Muhammad Ali, what did he do? He refused to go to service, didn’t he?</p>
<p>Skinner: He was a conscientious objector.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes. What did he do? Didn’t he change the way we go into the service now? Did he change that?</p>
<p>Skinner: Yeah, he was a modifier on a number of things.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Didn’t Dr. King change the whole world? You ain’t never seen people demonstrating and marching and—after Dr. King, all of this come about. Booker T. Washington. George Washington Carver. Granville T. Woods.</p>
<p>Moore: Thurgood Marshall.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Thurgood Marshall. Then you ask the average black person right now, who invented the first telephone, who will they tell you? Who invented the first telephone?</p>
<p>Skinner: They’ll say Alexander Graham Bell. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Pruitt: It wasn’t. Granville T. Woods was the first man who invented—he sold out to Bell. The first cowboy. The first cowboy hat was worn—who wore it? A black man. They taken that from him. The horseshoes, the cowboy boots. Black man. Pencil sharpener, the piano. The grease device you grease your car with. All those things. The two-cylinder gasoline, the refrigerator, the fan up there. You know why he invented that? The clock was a—all of these things. You ask black people, they don’t know anything about this. But the black man got tired of fanning all the time. They had to fan boss. And he invented that. He got tired of working from can to can’t. From the time I can see until the time I can’t, you had to work. He invented the clock. These things, we don’t teach our kids none of this stuff.</p>
<p>And when I tell young people, I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to have to go through what I went through. And I know you guys are young men, you haven’t through what I gone through from Mississippi and Louisiana and all those places where I’ve lived. But try to tell them they’re the best, because if you don’t, they want to slip you but right back in the same place you was in the ‘20s. And if you don’t tell them how you came through and what life is about so far as you can, then it’ll be easy for them to slip back in there. Because they don’t say anything about it in the church.</p>
<p>Now, see, white people do. That’s why they churches and their businesses—they don’t care about you being in there. Because they can’t talk about it when you’re involved. When I went to the police department, it made a great difference, a great change. Because I was sitting up in every meeting, and when something come down, brother, I was right there. And they couldn’t get in there and talk about us and call us names and different kind of stuff, because I was there. And that’s why I tell young people, get involved. As long as you’re on the outside, you don’t know what’s going on in the inside. But when I was on the inside—hey. A lot of people that I had to—they knew what was going on. Yeah. But they don’t want you there whupping his mom and his daughter and his sister. And he ain’t going to be whupping yours. But as long as he ain’t got nobody in there to protect that, he going to dog ‘em. Yeah.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, again, you have a lot of interesting information that we would love to glean. We don’t have a lot of time, because I know you’re getting ready to go back to Alaska tomorrow morning. But Jim, before we end this interview—and like I said, it’s been good. Jim, we want to thank you. There’s no question about it, we definitely want to thank you because you’ve definitely helped us out. But, Jim, I want to go back and I want to touch on one thing. Jim, and I know that you have been musically inclined, been involved in entertainment, singing, choirs, night club groups and stuff like that. Tell me—tell us a little bit about where you got—you also mentioned that you learned to sing the blues behind a plow line and a mule. Tell us something about how you—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Well, I’ll tell you, I started plowing when I was five years old. And all my folks sing. I started singing plowing that mule. I listened to the rhythm of the mule’s harness. The hames would be—you know what the hames is? Them things that go around his neck on the collar. The traces—the traces are the chains that run down to the plow. And the mule would walk, and he had more rhythm than the drum and his ears would flop just like—and he was stepping to that. And I learned to sing from that.</p>
<p>And I remember the first blues song that I learned to sing, it was Louise. And I started singing that song one evening. I’ma sing just a little bit of it for you. And the guys across the field over there—that’s why we didn’t have no telephone, because they could holler so loud. I was singing [singing] Louise, Louise. You the sweetest girl I know. Oh, Louise. You’re the sweetest girl I know. Well, you made me walk from Chicago down to the Gulf of Mexico. And somebody over there, the next cut over there would holler, say, hey, James, say, sing that one more time. [LAUGHTER] And I would sing it again. But my dad didn’t know no better, he said, boy, you’re going to hell, singing the blues. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>But I did. I learned—I remember the first gospel song that I learned to sing. I sang that in church when I was five years old. “There’s no room at the hotel.” And I still know every word of that song today. I’m going to sing a little bit of that for you. [singing] There’s no room, no room at the hotel. There’s no room, no room at the hotel. When the time fully come for my savior to be born, they said, I’ve no room, no room at the hotel. They said, bell boys, the porters and the waitress, high maids and cooks, will be a witness in judgment because they saw them overlooked. Well, they heard the manager say, when he turned poor Mary away, he said, there’s no room, no room at the hotel.</p>
<p>[APPLAUSE]</p>
<p>Skinner: That was the first that you sang, five years old.</p>
<p>Pruitt: That was the first. And I sang that up in the night club in Anchorage, Alaska. And people just, they were talking about they wanted to hear that.</p>
<p>Skinner: Well, Jim, as I’ve said, you’ve been involved in church choirs, different quartets, little groups around over the years. What was the first group that you performed with here locally in the Tri-Cities? Do you know the name of the group? Can you remember?</p>
<p>Pruitt: The Christian Travelers.</p>
<p>Skinner: The Christian Travelers?</p>
<p>Pruitt: The Christian Travelers, 1949.</p>
<p>Skinner: 1949? Who was on—</p>
<p>Pruitt: John Tharps, we called Peewee, was a tenor stringer. Joe Straws was the first lead singer. And Otis Denham.</p>
<p>Skinner: Who now?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Otis Denham.</p>
<p>Skinner: Denham?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, he lives in Spokane now. He’s 87 years old. He’s kind of feeble—my foster brother. I’m going up to see him probably before I leave. I gotta go up—I told him—he called me this evening. I said, well, I’m going to put it off. I was going to leave tomorrow, but I’m going to wait and go Sunday, because I don’t have to catch the plane until Monday night.</p>
<p>Skinner: Oh, okay, okay.</p>
<p>Pruitt: So I’m going to go up and see him. Otis Denham, he was the baritone singer. Me, I was the bass singer. They made me sing bass. I never sang bass before. Because I used to sing seven different voices. But since I trained my voice to sing down, I can’t go—I can go, [singing] oh—I can go down, but I can’t go up to the high no more. But Cassalee Turner was the first tenor. Peewee was the second tenor. Otis Denham was the baritone, and I were the bass. But I got something I’m taking up to him is one of the old recordings that we had back in the ‘50s.</p>
<p>Moore: You have a recording?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Huh?</p>
<p>Moore: You have a recording still?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, okay. Hmm.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yup.</p>
<p>Skinner: Well, you know, that’s interesting, also, Jim, because not only is that keepsake information for you, I know our group is interested in materials such as that. Having access or copies or whatever, because we feel it’s so important for us to document and put contributions that African Americans have made and things they’ve been involved with. We’re trying to gather this information. So that’s why it perked our interested that you have a copy.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, I think in 1952, we broadcast some Sunday mornings out of Pasco.</p>
<p>Skinner: Do you remember what station it was?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, Pasco.</p>
<p>Skinner: I know. Was there any call letters at that time?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Um.</p>
<p>Moore: It was KEPR, wasn’t it? That’s the only thing—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, KEPR.</p>
<p>Skinner: Was it? In ’52?</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm, I was there.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah.</p>
<p>Skinner: Well, I know there was—</p>
<p>Pruitt: We broadcast every Sunday morning for 30 minutes.</p>
<p>Skinner: Or was it K-I-M-A? K-I-M-A, being—I’m just trying to think because before we had the KEPR radio station here or television station, the broadcast was coming out of the city of Yakima.</p>
<p>Pruitt: No.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>[camera man]: Go ahead.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, again, you shared with us a number of things, again, on the last we were talking about your music involvement, being involved in some local choirs and entertainment in general. And I know that you’ve been involved in any number of groups, and entertained any number of businesses and night clubs around the Tri-City and around the country and stuff like that. Can you tell me the second group that you got in—became involved in as far as music?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, the Heavenly Harps, here in Pasco. That was the second group. And then I went down in Los Angeles and I was with the Rainbow Gospel Singers there for a while. And also in Las Vegas, the Clouds of Joy. I was with the Clouds of Joy in Las Vegas. We set up Local Number 11 down there with Odessa Perkins, was with the Ward Singers at one time. Ward’s was—Ward Singers were a professional group. I was with that group for a while.</p>
<p>Skinner: Well, Jim, again, as I’ve said that you—</p>
<p>Pruitt: But I would like to say this, John. When I first started singing, I remember, here—the first time I went to blues, I never sang blues in the club before until 1969. I was drawing $42 a week. Ed Jackson came to me and asked me if I would want to sing. I said, man, I don’t sing the blues; I sing gospel. But I was drawing $42 a week. He said, I’ll pay you $130 if you will sing, and I’ll give you the band. You take the band and you go ahead. I’ll pay you. It was easy $130 a week if you take that, if you sing and help keep the young people out of here. Because you know everybody, and keep them out of the club.</p>
<p>And I went and talked to my wife. She said, if I were you, I wouldn’t sing. I don’t know. Because people are going to say you ain’t nothing if you go and sing, because you’ve been singing gospel. I said, baby, I said, I got bills to pay, I got my kids to feed. I said, nah, you know? What am I going to do? $42 a week ain’t very much. I said, the man offered me that and I can still draw my unemployment and I’d make enough to where we can eat and pay our light bill and everything until spring come, maybe my jobs’ll come back. She said, no, I don’t think I would do that. I said, well, sweetheart, this is one time I’m going to have to overrule you. I’m going to take this.</p>
<p>And I went down and started to sing. I held no office in the church. I still went to church, but you know, nobody ever said anything to me about it. But they didn’t agree with me singing down in that club. But the members, the choir members of each church were paying $2.50 a night to come to Jack’s Pit and Grill to hear me sing. And we had more fun—because to me, it was a job. I wasn’t there women-chasing and getting drunk and all that. I was trying to make some money. That’s what I done.</p>
<p>People who got mad at me because they said I wasn’t a Christian. But I am a Christian. And a lot of people don’t know what a Christian is. You ask most people, say, what is a Christian? A Christian is Christ-like. A Christian is not a murderer; they don’t harm people, they don’t destroy. I’m not a peace-breaker; I’m a peacemaker. And anywhere you go, you will find that within me.</p>
<p>Anywhere I go in Anchorage, Alaska, they call me Mr. Pruitt. In Fairbanks, they call me King James. [LAUGHTER] They do. And I ask the young people, why y’all call me Mr. Pruitt? You think I’m getting old? But I get that kind of respect. I go to the Hilton, I go to the band, to the Sheraton, to the—any of those places I go. And if I go in there, I bet you I can go in there and stay in there for three minutes and my table’s going to be full of people. I don’t go and tell people, you ought to go do this, and you oughtta go—I tell how life has been with me. And what’s on the inside of me. And people enjoy that.</p>
<p>This is what I’m saying, the minister’s afraid to go out in the community and go into these places. See, if you were such a strong person, why should you be afraid to go in? I don’t want to go to where young people live. I’m where young people are. Young people keep you hopping. They keep your mind—you don’t have time to think about them aches and pains and them hurts. But when you sit around with them old folks, child, say, my old knee hurting me so bad and my old hip hurting me so bad, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t want to hear that.</p>
<p>My next birthday, I’ll be 78 years old. I get up and I go, I say, I got a little combo. I sing two nights a week. I sing gospel in the club. Black folks told me, you don’t sing gospel in the clubs. You don’t sing that. Mahalia Jackson turned out a million dollar contract. She didn’t sing in no club. Why not? That’s where you’re supposed to sing. That’s where the preacher’s supposed to go. He said, go into the hedges and highways.</p>
<p>And I go in there, old woman 89 years old, I went in the VFW and she said, Mr. Pruitt, do you sing gospel? I said, yes, ma’am. She said, will you sing some for me, please, sir? I did “Just A Closer Walk with Thee,” wasn’t a dry eye in the house when I got through. [LAUGHTER] There wasn’t any white people.</p>
<p>But I mean, this is what it’s about and what I’m doing. I’m not going in there to get drunk. Because drinking is something I ain’t never cared about. Now, I take a drink every now and again, but I ain’t never cared about no drinking and stuff. But I am concerned about people. Young people, man, I’d do anything in the world to help them. And I try—all my grandkids, I try to talk to them, try to show them the way and help them to understand. But you know, if you don’t have some backing sometimes, it’s hard.</p>
<p>Skinner: Yes, it is.</p>
<p>Pruitt: And like I said, you can go to church and everything else, but if you ain’t got some backings, you don’t learn. And I’m still—the preachers, used to be the preachers and teachers used to be the outstanding people in the community. The preachers sold out. They want some money. Bring the tithe. And they don’t think about what the young people going to do.</p>
<p>Skinner: Mm-hmm, yup.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Just do this today. And I wish that they would wake up and start doing something and taking the bridle off of young people and tell them to go. You know, whatever your talent is, go out there and do it. As long as you ain’t going out there and killing and robbing and stealing and doing things that’s not good for your life. But whatever your talent is, go out there and do it.</p>
<p>Skinner: Jim, I want to say this right here. The African American for an Academic Society History and Recognition Committee truly thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule and interviewing with us. And I want to say it was a pleasure. It was a pleasure.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.</p>
<p>Skinner: Yes, and we glad to have you. Jim, is there anything else you want to add at this time to the interview? If you want to ad lib or—just feel comfortable saying—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Well, I would like to say that it’s a blessing that you guys are doing this, because this has never been done before. I think a lot of people actually are afraid to come forward and say something. But me, I’m like Paul. Silver and gold have in number such as I have, I give of thee. So I’m glad to see you doing this. And I walked in and saw Lynn down in the park, I was surprised. It did me good to see you down there. And the few people on the chart there that I named, I saw that he was interested in that, and that’s good. That’s beautiful. I wish you could get some more young people involved in that, in this, to—</p>
<p>Skinner: Well, we’re trying now, Jim. That’s the whole reason behind this. We want to be able to reduce to paper, video, the contribution that African Americans have made, and with the hope that we can get the black community more involved in a number of programs and as you say, being on the inside. Again, Triple-A-S as far as an organization is invested in the young people. We’re just basically trying to get the information together and trying to get the information out. So we’re glad we’re able to do it and we’re hoping that when we do put the finished product together, that the community folks or folks in the community or folks that may see this exhibit would be appreciative that someone took the time to tell the story that my family or part of my family or someone I know came this way in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Well, I’d like to say something else. Kurtzman Park over there, the black men that put that park together that was given to us. Every tree that was sent out over there, these hands dug them up. Me and one white boy, Roy Hagerton.</p>
<p>Skinner: What was his name again?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Hagerton. We went out to Job’s and we went out there and worked four hours on a Saturday morning, and he gave us those trees. While we would go in there, other men was digging the trenches for the waterlines. Some of the guy were out at the old navy base up there digging up the pipes that had been given to us, and St. John’s Trucking was hauling them over to Kurtzman Park, free.</p>
<p>Skinner: Did George Kurtzman donate this land, was it to the City of Pasco, or—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Old Man Kurtzman?</p>
<p>Skinner: Or was it to—</p>
<p>Pruitt: He dedicated that to the park. Yeah, he dedicated that to us.</p>
<p>Skinner: So the initial work that went into what we now know as Kurtzman Park, but I remember it first as Candy Cane Park.</p>
<p>Pruitt: It ain’t never had been Candy Cane.</p>
<p>Skinner: It never had?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Never been. It’s always been Kurtzman.</p>
<p>Skinner: Well, you know, for some reason, I’m wondering why I’m getting the Candy Cane.</p>
<p>Pruitt: That’s Kurtzman.</p>
<p>Skinner: I know it’s Kurtzman Park, but I remember when they—now, we look at the park as the physical size it is now. When it was initially put in there, they had a merry-go-round, a monkey bars, an elephant slide there, and if I’m not mistaken it says Candy Cane Park, but maybe I’m wrong.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yup.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Kurtzman.</p>
<p>Skinner: It was right across the street—we had California Street and Wehe Street came together.</p>
<p>Pruitt: That’s right.</p>
<p>Skinner: So this is just interesting, because I do know it was a community involvement—</p>
<p>Pruitt: Project.</p>
<p>Skinner: --project, as far as the initial work as far as stabilizing the area and stuff like that.</p>
<p>Pruitt: And I will say this, I don’t think—two people in this, Joe Jackson and Webster Jackson, never got out in the ditches with us. I never seen them out there. And he’s the guy, Webster—I am the cause of Webster Jackson having the job he got today.</p>
<p>Skinner: For the City of Pasco?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes, sir. Webster—Oweda, you can ask Oweda. She’ll tell you. I begged her to take the job she can down there.</p>
<p>Skinner: Was that Weda Ran?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yes. Webster Jackson, Marv Wenniger gave me the authority to set up all—from the chief of police, the sergeants or whoever, that’s why I said they worked with me on that. I set up the screening process for everything. When they come down to the three people to take over Urban Renewal, it was Wayne Jackson, Herbert Houser or Webster Jackson. Marv Wenniger came to me and he said, I’ll give you the choice to pick whichever one of these men that you think would be suitable for Urban Renewal.</p>
<p>Skinner: Urban Renewal Project was around 1968, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Skinner: About 1968.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah.</p>
<p>[camera man]: Four minutes left, John.</p>
<p>Skinner: Okay.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Yeah, so I selected Webster over Wayne Jackson and Herbert Houser. Because I felt like Webster knew more about the community than anybody else. And that’s why I picked him. And a lot of people was dissatisfied with Webster.</p>
<p>Skinner: James, there’s a lot of unsung heroes and heroines, if you will, in the community. When I say unsung, individuals that were behind the scene and individuals that were out there in the trenches and never got the credit for it. Do you know some of those people out there, James?</p>
<p>Pruitt: Gilbert Owens, Emma Hawkins, Joe Bush, Cloy, Ray Henry, Herman James--he worked out there with his son—oh, it’s so many people that gave a hand out there. They worked with us. Even George Heidlebaugh, they’d come out there and they’d help. Whatever little they could do. That’s one thing they done, they really did. And we appreciated that. But there was Vanis Daniels and Willy Daniels. They worked out there.</p>
<p>Skinner: Anyway, again, James, we—when I say we, again, it’s African Americans for an Academic Society History and Recognition Committee, do greatly appreciate you taking this time out and sharing this information with us and we’re working towards successfully putting together this exhibit. With your help, I think we’re going to achieve it.</p>
<p>Pruitt: Thank you, and you know you’re like my son anyway. I worked with you quite a bit. And you’re grown up. [LAUGHTER] Yup.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/yPWOzm9FYj0">View interview Part 1 on Youtube.</a><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/blacQngZFTo">View interview Part 2 on Youtube.</a></p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1948-2006
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with James Pruitt
Description
An account of the resource
James Pruitt moved to the Tri-Cities in 1948 and was influential in civil rights movements.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/18/2001
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
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video/mpg
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Migration
Racism
Segregation
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Affirmative action
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F2746c4dd39426589c31531fc11589f22.JPG
e139e6816defff74fa770953d936012b
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8f930b67f07c50461f9388fd736c9fb9.mp4
656b1c721576a6c2dcc9d4c84d5a3b32
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
A related resource
RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Vanis Daniels
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Olden Richmond
Location
The location of the interview
Home of Olden Richmond (Pasco, WA)
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Vanis Daniels: My name is Vanis Daniels, II. And we’re here to interview Mr. Olden Richmond—</p>
<p>[camera operator]: You can start over.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah. Okay, my name is Vanis Daniels. We’re here to interview Mr. Olden Richmond for his information from Hanford and his contribution to World War II for our History—Triple-A-S, which is History and Recognition Committee. I’m from the History and Recognition Committee. And if Mr. Richmond doesn’t have anything, we would like to get started with the interview. Mr. Richmond, when did you arrive in the Tri-City area?</p>
<p>Olden Richmond: 1943.</p>
<p>Daniels: Approximately what month?</p>
<p>Richmond: It must’ve been around—about April, somewhere around about April, something like that. Far as I can remember, it’s been so long.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, I understand. Did you come by yourself, or did someone come with you?</p>
<p>Richmond: I had relatives come with me.</p>
<p>Daniels: And could you give us their names, please?</p>
<p>Richmond: Mr. Vanis Daniels—</p>
<p>Daniels: That’s the number one.</p>
<p>Richmond: And Edmon—wasn’t his Edmon?</p>
<p>Daniels: Yes, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Richmond: Edmon Daniels.</p>
<p>Daniels: And Mr. Edmon Daniels would be my great-uncle. Mr. Vanis Daniels would be my dad. And how old were you? Just say 29.</p>
<p>Richmond: Oh, around 29, 30.</p>
<p>Daniels: Right. Where did you live before you came to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Richmond: Kildare, Texas.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. What kind of work did you do there?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, I did most all around. I farmed some, and I worked in the sawmill. That’s about all, the farming and working on the sawmill.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. How did you hear about Hanford?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, I heard it on the radio. That they was going to put up a plant at Hanford, and so I checked with Mr. Daniels, my cousin, and got with him, and we made it up to come to Pasco.</p>
<p>Daniels: Well, that would tell me why you decided to come to Hanford. How did you travel when you came here, how did you come?</p>
<p>Richmond: Come on a plane.</p>
<p>Daniels: On the train?</p>
<p>Richmond: No, plane. Plane, caught the plane here. Okay?</p>
<p>Daniels: Where was the first place you stayed after, when you got here? Where’d you live at?</p>
<p>Richmond: Lived over here on Douglas in a trailer.</p>
<p>Daniels: Did you ever stay in the barracks?</p>
<p>Richmond: Yup, yup. We stayed in this trailer ‘til they got barracks fixed up for the laborers to go in.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, now, was that for the laborers to go in, since everything was segregated out there, was those the black barracks they built for the black workers?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, it was mixed, yeah. It was made for the laborers, for everybody.</p>
<p>Daniels: Oh, okay. And then how did they get you back and forth to work?</p>
<p>Richmond: Bus.</p>
<p>Daniels: And then what kind of work did you do, and the areas that you worked in?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, I’d clean up and digging the ditches and so on like that. Sometime, my foreman would put me with the concrete crew and I’d work with them.</p>
<p>Daniels: And then what areas did you work at?</p>
<p>Richmond: 200-West, and White Bluffs, we went all over, you know, cleaning up.</p>
<p>Daniels: Did you ever work at B Reactor?</p>
<p>Richmond: No, I don’t think so.</p>
<p>Daniels: Did you work at C Reactor?</p>
<p>Richmond: No.</p>
<p>Daniels: Did you work at D and DR?</p>
<p>Richmond: I think so. That was way out in—was that DR or—in White Bluffs, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, D and DR is at White Bluffs, yeah. F and H, right.</p>
<p>Richmond: It’s been so long, I can’t think of those things. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, because—we may edit this part out, but from what I understand, you guys started at B Reactor. And you worked all the way through all the reactors, including, and the last reactor is, F. You had B, you had C, you had K-East, K-West, D, DR, H and F. Those were the reactors out there.</p>
<p>Richmond: Yup.</p>
<p>Daniels: And you guys were some of the first people to even go to, for instance, F Reactor, except the surveyors. My dad said when you guys got down there, wasn’t nobody there but the surveyors and a bunch of stakes. He said, because when they sent you guys over there, you was looking for a building. And there wasn’t no building nowhere to be found. They was wandering around, he said, took them almost all day to find it. Because they was looking—they knew approximately where it was, but they thought it was a building of some sort down there. And wasn’t nothing down there but a bunch of stakes down there. They had a truckload of stuff they had to unload.</p>
<p>Richmond: That’s right, you’re right! Yup.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. And who did you work for when you were doing this—</p>
<p>Richmond: I worked for—what was that guy’s name I called?</p>
<p>Daniels: Butler?</p>
<p>Richmond: Butler.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, but what company was it? Was it DuPont--?</p>
<p>Richmond: DuPont.</p>
<p>Daniels: DuPont, okay.</p>
<p>Richmond: DuPont.</p>
<p>Daniels: Well, other than the fact that you came here because there were better wages—</p>
<p>Richmond: Right.</p>
<p>Daniels: --than you were making where you were, what did you like about working out there?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, I made more money. Came here to make a living and I had a family. So I liked it better here. Because I did fairly well when I come here.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, now, from what I understand, from what you were making where you came from, and a full day’s work after you got here, you made almost as much money in one day as you did in a week back there.</p>
<p>Richmond: Right, right, right. I worked a whole five days a week off the farm, $3.75. And I come here, they was paying a dollar an hour. That was with, running around when we was working out there for eight hours, and we run around maybe about three, pretty close to $500 a week.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. How did they treat you out there? And you can go on and tell me about what we were talking about.</p>
<p>Richmond: Yeah, well, I run into one redneck out there. I was down in the hole, cleaning out behind the ironworkers—you know what I’m talking about, when they burn those wires, you had to take it out, clean all of that, you know where they compose cement. So this one redneck he walked by me and looked down in the hole on me. He said, I should just kick your ass. And I looked up at him like that, and I said, no, you won’t kick my ass, I said. We will fight. And he started down in the hole, and I met him with the shovel. And he—the wire where the cement people were working at, just about tall as that fence there, and John Brown, he started to running and by the time he hit the ground, I was right on with him with that shovel. So Butler, he sees me running this guy, and he’s running off, he said, Olden, sir, what’s the matter? I said, this guy was saying he was going to kick my goddamn ass and I told him we were fighting, I told him, I say, we were fighting. So that settles that. So Butler fired him.</p>
<p>Daniels: So by that, you’re saying that your supervision would stand up for his workers.</p>
<p>Richmond: Right.</p>
<p>Daniels: Whether they were black, white, blue or yellow.</p>
<p>Richmond: He treated everybody the same. If you did wrong, you went.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. What was the hardest thing about adjusting to being away from home and working out there at Hanford?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well—</p>
<p>Daniels: Getting used to, you had to get used to it.</p>
<p>Richmond: I had to get used to it, yeah. From being away from home, you had to get used to it. And sooner or later, later on, I sent for my wife to come on and she went to work in the mess hall. So of course they had all the women, they had separate barracks. It had wire fences around it about like that tall at Charles Evans’ place there, and they wire all the way up. They’d let you up there at certain times and certain times you had to get out. You could go see—if you had a wife or something like that, you could go in there and stay until—well, you go around in there about 5:30, 6:00, what time you got through eating, then you go and stay with your wife until about 8:00, 9:00. Then they had guards at the gate. If you stayed too long, then he’s going to find you and get you out of there.</p>
<p>Daniels: Oh, I see. One question that I’d like to ask is, what entertainment—after you was off work, like on weekends and things, what did you guys do?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, some gambled, some gambling and they had—what you call those things? A music box. They had a music box—</p>
<p>Daniels: Jukebox.</p>
<p>Richmond: --and a beer joint and everything in the recreation hall. That’s where we—some gambling, some running and drink, all stuff like that.</p>
<p>Daniels: When you left off of the Hanford Site, where did you guys go for the weekend?</p>
<p>Richmond: We come to here. We come to this side of the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, and how long did you work out there at Hanford?</p>
<p>Richmond: I worked up to ’50, 1950.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Do you remember the name of any of the black people you worked with?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, let me see. I worked with Cooper—you remember Cooper, don’t you?</p>
<p>Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, I worked with your dad, too, and your uncle, Cracker. I worked with them.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, that would be Mary and Barton, WL Daniels, Vanis Daniels.</p>
<p>Richmond: We put in a railroad out there you know, remember?</p>
<p>Daniels: Yes, yes.</p>
<p>Richmond: And Willie Hicks, you know. You know Willie Hicks. I worked with him. Let me see, who else now? Russell, I worked with Russell out there.</p>
<p>Daniels: That’s David Raines.</p>
<p>Richmond: David Raines, yup. Well, I don’t know, it’s been quite a few. It don’t come to me right off.</p>
<p>Daniels: Oh, well. If it comes to you, we can come back to it later. Do you have any pictures or any old pictures or anything like that from back then at Hanford?</p>
<p>Richmond: No, I don’t have any pictures at all.</p>
<p>Daniels: Well, do you know of any other people that we may talk to and get some information from?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, right off, I—it’s just like I was telling you about Reverend Barnes and Luzell Johnson, they probably can give you some information, too. And most of the guys that I could recommend, they gone, they’ve passed, they dead. So that’s the old-timers, you know.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay then. I’ve got a couple of more questions. Since you retired from Hanford, or left Hanford, how has life been in the Tri-Cities for you?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, it’s been real good, far as I’m concerned. About as well as you’d expect.</p>
<p>Daniels: Oh, okay, okay. Well, could you tell me a little bit about your family, like how many kids you got, how many great-grandkids you got, great-grandkids, where they live in the Tri-Cities, whether they live in Pasco, Kennewick or Richland, and like that?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, John, Jr. he stays out there right across from K-Mart. And Stephanie, she stays in—</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, John, Jr. is your grandson.</p>
<p>Richmond: John, Jr. is my grandson and Stephanie is my granddaughter. And Sherry, she’s my granddaughter. And so, Melva, she’s my daughter.</p>
<p>Daniels: Right, okay, and she lives in Pasco?</p>
<p>Richmond: She lives on Sycamore over here in Pasco.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay.</p>
<p>Richmond: So, let me see. I’m five generations of great-grandkids. So let me see. About six, I got six great-grandkids. And let me see, Stephanie—one, two, three, four—well, I got two grandkids in Flint, Michigan. [UNKNOWN] So I pretty well got around ten to twelve kids and grandkids and great-grandkids and all.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, and you can tell me about your wives if you want to. If you don’t, that’s personal business. I mean, that’s your business.</p>
<p>Richmond: About my first wife?</p>
<p>Daniels: And your second one, too.</p>
<p>Richmond: And my second one? Oh, I had a second wife, she was a doll. I love her right in the grave right now. She was the sweetest, sweetest thing. We never did have a fight. Never did have a fight. She always called me babe, someone, so-and-so, we’d have little spats or something, but we’d get together on it and everything. So that was the way it went. Yeah, I’d stand up there now sometime now and look at her picture and water run down my eyes.</p>
<p>Daniels: I can imagine, I can imagine.</p>
<p>Richmond: That’s the best woman I ever had.</p>
<p>Daniels: And your first wife lived—</p>
<p>Richmond: First wife, she lived in Texas. She in Flint, Michigan. So, well, we didn’t—she was nice.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, we’re going—when did your first wife come out? ’44?</p>
<p>Richmond: I don’t remember what month she come.</p>
<p>Daniels: What year?</p>
<p>Richmond: She come out in the ‘40s.</p>
<p>Daniels: Oh, okay. I think she came out in ’44.</p>
<p>Richmond: ’44, somewhere in there. I don’t remember now.</p>
<p>Daniels: And now, you know, you went out there and you went to work, and you understood that it was a great big defense job. And you was making more money than you’d ever made in your life, per hour. Do you have any idea, I mean not now, but back then, did you know—did you have any idea what you were making, what you were building, or anything?</p>
<p>Richmond: No. No. Because we had FBIs, they’d come on through there, they walked all day long through there, asking questions. We did have no idea at all. We didn’t know what we doing. We don’t know what we were supposed to do, we were just there working, there to make a living.</p>
<p>Daniels: In other words, they gave you an assignment and you did what you were supposed to do.</p>
<p>Richmond: Yes. Gave me an assignment, I did what they told me to do.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, did they do any explaining to the workers and things as to whether what they were doing was top secret and that what went on out there was supposed to stay out there, or did they just not tell you anything, or--?</p>
<p>Richmond: Yeah, they said they didn’t want you to be talking.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, at that time, did you have to have different clearances to work in different areas and certain parts of the buildings and things that you worked in?</p>
<p>Richmond: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>Daniels: And how hard was it for them to get a clearance for you?</p>
<p>Richmond: Not too—it wasn’t hard.</p>
<p>Daniels: In other words, you gave them the information as to where you were from and where you born, where you worked, where you had been in your life, and they were able to get the FBI to do some checking and you got your clearance from there. Okay, Mr. Richmond. That about concludes all of the questions that I have. Now, is there anything else you can think of or anything you’d like to tell us, or anything you’d like to say?</p>
<p>Richmond: Well, that’s just about all I got for now.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Well, we thank you for the interview. And we can sit here and look at these pictures, because he’s going to cut that out.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/P1yJmnmnGgg">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1943-2012
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1943-1950
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Olden Richmond
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Migration
Description
An account of the resource
Olden Richmond moved to Pasco, Washington in 1943 to work on the Hanford Site.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
06/21/2001
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mpg
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5bc28da2712e92cc111e8a42f58162b2.JPG
b30c1468bb1898b28d47f878587786b3
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe5108d812a6ed53c862e9510df2a9ba5.mp4
0a83e145bb516d9fac87440969f5d45d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
A related resource
RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Vanessa Moore
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Thomas Moore
Location
The location of the interview
Pasco, Washington
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Vanessa Moore: My name is Vanessa Moore. I’m a member of the Triple-A-S History and Recognition Committee, and I’m here this afternoon with Mr. Thomas Moore to speak with him a little bit about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working out at the Hanford Site. How are you doing, Tommy?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Fine.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Good. Just have a few questions we’d like to ask you. First of all, when did you come to this area, when did you arrive in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Some part of ’39.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: That’s very early.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, I don’t remember just what month. That was a long time ago, you know.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Mm-hm. Did you come alone, or did someone come out with you?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No, one fella come with me.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay, could I get his name?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Golly, I don’t remember.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? About how old were you at that time?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: 19.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: 19 years old. Where’d you live before coming here?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Corpus Christi—I mean, Alice, Texas.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Alice, Texas, is that where you’re originally from? Why did you decide to come? How’d you hear about it?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Well, this friend of mine did. He was a cook. And he told me about the job, that they was paying a dollar an hour for cooks in Washington.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: How’d that compare to where you lived?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: $17 a week, 12 hours a day, seven days a week.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Wow. So it looked pretty good, sounded pretty good.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, sounded okay, yeah.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So you and he came together?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Mm-hmm, yes.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay. Did you come and do that type of work?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Once you got here?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No, we didn’t.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Let me back up just a little bit. How did you travel to the Tri-Cities or to Hanford at that time?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: To Hanford, we come on the bus. But—</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: From Alice?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No, from Alice we come on the freight.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Oh, on the freight train.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: And what made it so bad was that he smoked and we were both hungry. But he had double troubles. He wanted a cigarette and then he wanted food, too. I just was hungry. He—</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: It was a long ride, it sounds like. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Now, once you arrived here, where was the first place you stayed? Were there relatives, or--?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No, we didn’t have no relatives, no relatives here. No, we got off the freight in Pasco at that old depot down there. We didn’t stay here long. We just stayed—we just was hoboing.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No place to live or nothing. You got out of there the first—fast as we could and we went over there to Seattle. Went over to Seattle and got a room at the Jackson Hotel.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay, so this was in 1939, and this was sort of just a stopover, and you kept on going.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, I was on my way. To Seattle.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So, really you were headed for Seattle when you left Texas. Okay, I understand. But at some point, rather, though, you ended up back in this area.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: In 1949—in December, that I can remember good. In December, 1949, I come to look at a restaurant, cocktail lounge and everything that I purchased. The Poulet Palace.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: The Poulet Palace?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: That was the name of it.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay, where was that located?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: On Lewis Street.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So in Pasco, here. And you had mentioned to me prior to the interview that you did some work—you did do some work out at Hanford with regards to surveying. Can you tell me about that?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Oh, yes, we was working with—my job was I drove a jeep, and we had concrete on a sled. When they surveyors would put a stake down, I’d have to come along and take it back and dig it up and put a little concrete in there and put the stake back. Because when the wind blows so bad, the stake would blow all the way around. It was a little hard to blow that little wad of concrete that I had put the stake in.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: I see. Tommy, when you were working on the railroad with the surveyors, about what year was that?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: That, I don’t exactly remember, but I’m thinking it was in ’42 or a little later. Could’ve been a little later, but that was at the Hanford Site. E.I. DuPont.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: E.I. DuPont, okay.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: That was the name of it.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: That’s right.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: We all knew that he made shotgun shells, but we didn’t know—nobody knew he was making an atomic bomb.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Wow, they didn’t tell you too much about that, did they?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So how did you feel about working at Hanford? Were there big crews? A lot of other blacks, or just a few?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: It was quite a few. Mm-hmm. We had—don’t remember too well, but if I’m not mistaken, we had our own mess hall when we finally got a mess hall. But before that, we was eating at a basement in the little town of Hanford.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: The town of Hanford. So there was--</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah. Eating down in the basement.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So eventually, then, there was a separate mess hall from the blacks, separate ones for--</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, I’m thinkin’.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: I’ve heard that.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, I don’t know for sure.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Now, on the job, do you feel you were treated all right? Can you tell us about that?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Oh, everything went fine. Everything went okay.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: I have to ask you this, what was the hardest thing to adjust to when you first started out here? Obviously, you came from a different state, you came from doing a different type of work. What was the hardest adjustment for you?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: There was no hard adjustment. We just went along with the flow.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Just go with the flow, everything worked out all right?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay. Separate from work, what did you and your friends and coworkers do afterhours?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Well, sometime we would play baseball when we was working out at the Hanford Site. One time I remember—there was no women there, you know.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: When you came there were no women?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No, it was just all men.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So you had to find something to do.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: And what happened, we was having a baseball game one Sunday, and a lady showed up, but her husband had got hurt. We broke up the game because everybody wanted to go look at her.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Did they get over back and finish the game?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No, we was playing on our own.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Is that right!</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: That’s the truth. We broke up the whole game.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Is that right? Now, I understand there was a baseball field out there. Is that right?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yes. I don’t remember exactly whether that was the field we were playing on or not, but it was—</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: [LAUGHTER] How long did you stay and work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: I really don’t know that either.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Months? Years?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: I time-checked—that’s what they referred to it then—and moved back to Seattle.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Time-checked. Can you tell me what that means?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: We just—you just turn in your time and everything and quit.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: So it’s what you say, time-checking, they call it.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: And then you returned to Seattle? Okay. So it was a later date that you came back again to open the—</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, in ’49. In December, I come back to purchase the place in December ’49.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay. So you were one of the, if not the first, black-owned business in the Tri-Cities, it sounds like.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: I was.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: That’s great, that’s great.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: And my family was the first of doing almost everything in the Tri-Cities. My daughter was the first—Shirley was the first one to work at the US Bank as a teller.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: This was your daughter, Shirley.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah. And then my wife was the first one was a checker at a Safeway store. And my other daughter, my baby daughter, was the first one to win Miss Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Wow. So many accomplishments in your family.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: It really went—everything we went to, pretty good.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Mm-hmm. Since we’re talking about family, tell me a little bit more about that. Are there—maybe your other children or businesses that you’ve had, things that you’ve done since those days?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Since—from then, or before then?</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Since then.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Since then?</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Well, I left from the Poulet Palace and went over and opened up a pool hall. And from the pool hall—oops.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: That’s okay, you can just go ahead and hold that in your hand.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: And from the pool hall, I just worked in there and come on until, in 1969, I worked eight years for Chuck Ackerblade in the scrap business, two dollars an hour. And then I opened my own place—</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Scrap business also?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: In 1969. Hmm?</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Scrap business as well?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, scrap business in 1969. I worked for him just to learn the business. And then I’ve been in that for the last 32 years.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So that’s brought you a long way. That’s a thriving business here in the Tri-Cities, isn’t it?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Well, it’s holding its own.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Yeah. Any of your children still in the area, and tell us a little bit about them?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Well, I got—my son works with me. He started working with me when he could walk.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: [LAUGHTER] Probably not working too hard at that time.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Probably. He started following me when he could walk, and he been following me ever since. I got one daughter here and one daughter in Seattle. One son in San Diego and a daughter in Chicago.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Mm-hmm, but you’ve chosen to stay here.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Oh, I guess I’ll cash in here.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Long time ago since Texas, isn’t it? Okay, Tommy, I really do appreciate your time and the information and you mentioned—I’m going to take us back a little bit because I neglected to ask you this, that they didn’t really tell you what everyone was working on out there. Did you have an idea, or did you suspect what it was?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: No, the only thing we knew, that I.E. DuPont made shotgun shells. Now, that we knew. [LAUGHTER] That was all that everybody talked about. So when you compared to—well, it had to be something explosive.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: At least that much, we—</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: The fella with the shotgun business and the shell business—</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Was in charge.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Something. But we didn’t, nobody knew.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: You just do what you was told and get off and go back to the barracks.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: And go back to the barracks. Now, you did live in the barracks for a while?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Oh, yeah, it’s when I was living in the barracks and when I time-checked, I did.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Mm-hmm. Tell—can you tell us a little bit about what that was like? I mean, did they have rules like military barracks, or this was just the housing?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: It was just two men to the room, and there wasn’t nothing, you didn’t have no laws or nothing like that, you just went home and then they—full barracks and a washhouse in the center.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: It was attached to it, or--?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, it was a four units but then where they attached together, that’s where the showers was, the showers and the bathrooms and all that stuff. And then from that to the mess hall.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: For eating. So pretty much everything was—</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: So you really didn’t need anything else, you know.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: It’s kind of like a little town.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: They fed good.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Is that right?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Solid meals, huh? Okay, well, thank you very much. If there are names of others who worked out there, we’d like to know who those people were and maybe talk with them.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: I can’t remember nothing that’s been that far back.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Well, if something comes to you, let me know, I appreciate it.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Thank you.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Thank you.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Tommy, you mentioned before that you came to Washington state from Alice, Texas. I was curious about the type of work that you did in Alice.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: I was a cook at a restaurant. First, I started out as a dishwasher for five dollars a week and worked on up ‘til I got cook. But the reason why they wouldn’t give me a cooking a job, because I’d have to take a job as a dishwasher, because the restaurants was hard—they didn’t want to live any customers, and for a young kid, as young as I was, they wouldn’t hire you as a cook. But when the cooks—all cooks drink quite a bit. So when a cook showed up—or the cook didn’t show up because he was drunk, then I’d get in the kitchen and start from dishwashing go get on the grill.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So you were cooking anyway.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, and then I’d get the job. [LAUGHTER] Yeah that’s about it. And then I—it was 12 hours a day, seven days a week.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: And what kind of wages?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Oh, the most I ever made was $17.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: $17 a week, is that correct? Okay. So you had heard that in Washington State—</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: It was paying a dollar an hour.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: For the same type of work?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yes, and I had a 1935 convertible Packard, I bought it in 1937. They had a Plymouth, yellow with a black top, $875. I wanted to come and get it. It was 1940.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: So you were motivated, is what you’re telling me.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yeah, that’s right, I wanted to come and trade my Packard in and get that Plymouth.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Thank you, I appreciate that.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Tommy, there is a period of years between you leaving Hanford, leaving this area, and then coming back later on to purchase the Poulet Palace. What were you doing during that time and where did you live?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Well, I lived at the Jackson Hotel and then—</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: This is in Seattle?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: In Seattle. And then I was working for George Crawford Smith at a restaurant. He didn’t know anything about a restaurant, but he had the money to buy it. So I went to work for him. And then, after a length of time—I worked for him for about a year and a half—I bought my own place.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Still in the Seattle area?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yes. And he said that I wouldn’t make it. So I told him, I said, well, Mr. Smith, you were 48 years old before you made it, and I’m 21. I can go in and out of business a long time before I get 48. [LAUGHTER] And still make it. So that’s life.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Mm-hmm. Did you spend any time in the military at all over your career?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yes, I’d volunteered for the Army Transfer Service. And I don’t exactly know how many years I was in that, but I made 22 trips to Japan, eight trips to Hawai’i, and eight trips to Jeosang, Korea.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: You’ve been all around.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: I have been, yeah. I went more further overseas than I have in the United States.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Wow. Where were you stationed when you were in the service?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Bremerton.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Bremerton, Washington?</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Yes.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Okay. So you’ve covered a lot of this state, too.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Well, not too bad.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Not to mention, though, we’re all—well, Mr. Moore, we appreciate your time today. Thank you.</p>
<p>Thomas Moore: Okay.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/Ty7vVsnjTS8">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1949-2010
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Thomas Moore
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Seattle (Wash.)
Migration
Segregation
Description
An account of the resource
Thomas Moore moved to Pasco, Washington in 1949 and opened many local businesses.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
06/23/2001
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mpg
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F751fe2d10a51ca573640af9f812eb806.JPG
45735fa368174ec64ab6f85a07746382
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0972a37cea642f27a4da176071ad6e05.mp4
8c8102ed8125b4874d40e7b73279b517
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
A related resource
RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Luzell Johnson
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>[woman off-camera]: Can you see? Do I need to move that stuff out the way?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah, we’ll move.</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: I need to move up closer, too.</p>
<p>Daniels: We’ll move all this stuff out of the way.</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: And I need to move up closer. It’d be nice if we had him sitting back, away from the table.</p>
<p>Daniels: Sitting back a little bit?</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: Can you move back away from the table so we can—</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay.</p>
<p>[man]: So we get the—</p>
<p>Daniels: I can—now, you want me to just pull him back?</p>
<p>[man]: Well, he can stay right up to the table there where he is. I can just get on the end here. What I wanted to do was get it so we don’t have to pick up a whole bunch of stuff before we get to him. Because when we get ready to edit it, we’ll need to zoom it. We’ll need to do some zooming and stuff, too.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, we also can move the table back, too.</p>
<p>[woman off-camera]: That’s right. That might be easier.</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: Let’s just move the tables back. Slide it. Because I really don’t need nothing in front of us.</p>
<p>Daniels: All right. We should have enough room now.</p>
<p>[man off-camera]: That’s real good right there, I think.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. All right. You need this? You don’t? All right.</p>
<p>[man off-camera] These can come down a little more. That’s good. That should be good. That’s good right there. Now, we’re going to need a microphone on him.</p>
<p>Daniels: I don’t need a microphone. Ah, damn.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Mr. Johnson, we’re doing some work on the Manhattan Project here. You came to work on this area during this time, during the Manhattan Project in the 1943-1944 timeframe. Could you tell us or describe how you got here, how you heard about Hanford and a little bit about how you ended up here?</p>
<p>Luzell Johnson: My sister and her husband, Joe Williams, they was in California working on a plant. And they left there and come to Hanford. And when they got there, they started working on the Hanford Project. They come home in February, I think, and they were telling me about—they told me about the job. They asked me if I wanted to come move out there—</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: When you said they came home, where was home?</p>
<p>Johnson: Alabama. Finchburg, Alabama.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: What was that in Alabama again?</p>
<p>Johnson: Finchburg, Alabama.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Frenchburg, Alabama. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were doing in Frenchburg before they came home and talked you into coming here?</p>
<p>Johnson: I was working in a creosote plant.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: And at that creosote plant, what did you do there? What kind of—what were you doing, doing the work there?</p>
<p>Johnson: Toiling, working on crane.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: And then could you describe, what, when you got ready to come out here, or getting ready to come out here in the transportation in getting out here, could you tell us a little bit about that? And then what you did when you got out here.</p>
<p>Johnson: My brother had bought an old ’41 Plymouth, and he and Joe was working around places. He gave me the Plymouth. I drove the ’41 Plymouth out here. You want to know who come with me?</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Yes, I’d sure like to know who—</p>
<p>Johnson: Emmett Brown and Charlie Dart and—I can’t think of the other—</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: And those were all relatives of yours or were they just friends and relatives?</p>
<p>Johnson: They was Joe’s sister’s kids.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: When you arrived in the Tri-Cities or Pasco, could you tell us a little bit about what it was like, what you found when you got here?</p>
<p>Johnson: Well, I found the job was available when I got here. I went to a job when I was hired in, I was hired in as a cement finisher. And they didn’t have no spot to put a cement finisher. They put me as a laborer, sweeping floors. And I got a card to go to the army. I went to the superintendent and showed him the card, and he told me, why you didn’t come out as a finisher? I said, foreman told me they didn’t have no spots for a finisher. He told me, yes, we do have plenty of room for a finisher. Where’s your tools? I said, they back at the camp. He said, bring your tools out here in the morning, and I’ll put you in as a finisher. He put me on finishing. I got the card to go to the army. To go to the army, a 3-A, I think it was.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: On your living conditions when you got here, did you live in Pasco or did you come into Pasco and then go from Pasco out to Hanford, which is about another 40 miles?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: You lived in Pasco and then before you went off to the barracks, or did you come in and just go on out to Hanford in the next few days?</p>
<p>Johnson: I went on out to Hanford. My sister was running the eating place.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: That’s the mess hall out there?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Yes, and I believe that we interviewed her and she told us a little bit about learning to do the juggling act on how she could handle all the food on her arm, how they taught her how to do all of that. Towards the end of the Manhattan Project, when that was winding down in late 1944 and early 1945, could you tell me a little bit about, you know, did you just stay here in Pasco, or did you go to Tacoma or go back to Alabama and come back, or--?</p>
<p>Johnson: I went to Alabama, and I went down to the creosote plant. And the man offered my job back. I told him—he asked me what was I getting? And I told him I was getting a dollar an hour. And he said, would you come back? I told him, no, I wouldn’t come back for $0.35. I was getting $0.35 where I lived, an hour. So I come back there to Pasco. I come back to Pasco. I bought a little place in Pasco and that’s where I lived at 321 South Front Street in Pasco. I lived there for a good while and I decided to buy me a place, a bigger place of my own. I lived there on the place—George had a place out there, I lived on George place. And I bought some land and I built a house.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: During the time you came, during the Manhattan Project out there, I noticed there were some other people out there, African Americans, like my uncle Daniels, Willy Daniels and Vanis Daniels, and my father-in-law, David Casterburg also worked out there. Is that when you met those people for the first time, primarily Mr. Daniels, because I know you guys was great friends. Is that where you first met him?</p>
<p>Johnson: That’s right.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Tell us a little bit about what you guys did in the social life part of it. Would you go to church, play ball, or what did you do?</p>
<p>Johnson: Play ball. I would go and look at them playing ball. I couldn’t play ball. I wasn’t good enough to play on the league. But Vanis and Daniel and the tall black man, I can’t call his name—</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Noble Johnson?</p>
<p>Johnson: No.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Was it Noble Johnson?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-mm. Marion Zack.</p>
<p>Daniels: Talking about Zack.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Marion Zack? Zack Johnson? I’d forgotten about them, man. Well, and then you went back to Alabama. So kind of like what my relatives did. They worked and then they went back home, found out that, like you said, the pay was about what you said, from what I remember, and then when I came in ’47 it was kind of that way. So knowing what was out there, you came back out here and this is where you’ve lived since then.</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: Thank you, Mr. Johnson.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay. Mr. Luzell, we’re going to back up, I need just a little bit of background information, okay? Now, what is your full name?</p>
<p>Johnson: Luzell Johnson.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: No middle name. Okay, what year were you born?</p>
<p>Johnson: 1912.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: 1912?</p>
<p>Johnson: May 11<sup>th</sup>.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: May the 11<sup>th</sup>, 1912?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay. Do you remember how to spell the name of the town where you say you were born in—</p>
<p>Johnson: Remember what?</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: The name of the town you were born in?</p>
<p>Johnson: Finchburg, Alabama.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Is that F-L-I-N-C-H?</p>
<p>Johnson: F-I-N-C-H.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: F-I-N-C-H. Finchville, Alabama?</p>
<p>Johnson: Burg.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Finchburg, B-U-R-G?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay. What’s your parents’ name?</p>
<p>Johnson: Byas Johnson and Frances.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Miles and Frances Johnson?</p>
<p>Johnson: Byas Johnson was Pa’s name.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Miles Johnson, okay.</p>
<p>Johnson: Byas, B-Y-A-S.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay, I’m sorry. And your mother’s name?</p>
<p>Johnson: Frances.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay. Were they born in Finchburg, too?</p>
<p>Johnson: I don’t know, I think.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: You don’t remember. How many brothers and sisters did you have?</p>
<p>Johnson: Three sisters and five brother.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Are any of them alive now?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: How many?</p>
<p>Johnson: Two.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Two brothers. Any sisters?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: How many?</p>
<p>Johnson: Two—three.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Two brothers and three sisters?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay. What kind of work do you remember your parents doing?</p>
<p>Johnson: Farming.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Farming. Did they own their own land? They were sharecroppers? Sharecroppers?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yes.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay, so you came out here with your brother named Joe? Okay, and he had been out here already previously?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yes.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: He had come out here before and worked for a while?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: And then he wrote and told you about it and that’s when you knew you wanted to come out here?</p>
<p>Johnson: He came home.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Oh, he came home. Okay. And do you remember exactly what year that was, Mr. Johnson, that you came out here?</p>
<p>Johnson: ’33.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: ’33? Okay. Okay, and then he came home, what did he tell you exactly about this area when he came home? What did he tell you?</p>
<p>Johnson: That I could go to work and get more money.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: He told you—did he tell you what kind of work you’d be doing?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: He just told you you could come out here and get a job. And then as I understood, you guys came by car. Did he come with you, or did you come by yourself?</p>
<p>Johnson: He came with me.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: He came with you. Y’all drove the ’41?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay. And then, after you got here, tell me exactly, Mr. Johnson, when you got here, how many other blacks do you think were here at that time?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh, quite a few working on the job.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Already?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: In ’43. Mm-hmm. Now tell me, when you got to Pasco, did black people have houses? We’ve been told—I’ve been told that black people didn’t have houses in ’43. Did they have houses?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: They did? Can you remember any of the blacks that were when you got here already?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mr. and Mrs. Coleman.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Mr. and Mrs. Coleman.</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Anybody else?</p>
<p>Johnson: I can’t think of his name—</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Was Katie Mooney here when you got here?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: She was not? Was Miss Arlene Johnson here?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: She was not?</p>
<p>Johnson: I didn’t know them.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: You didn’t know them, but they could have been here? I see. Now, where did you live when you got here?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: The time you got here, where did you live?</p>
<p>Johnson: I lived in the barracks.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: In the barracks at Hanford? They was segregated?</p>
<p>Johnson: I guess they was.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Blacks were in one area and whites were in another?</p>
<p>Johnson: I don’t remember.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: You don’t remember.</p>
<p>Johnson: I don’t think they was, though.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Do you remember anything at all about the barracks? Tell me what you remember.</p>
<p>Johnson: I remember you’d sleep in the barracks and you’d get up and go to the mess hall and eat.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Get up and go to the mess hall and eat. And how long did y’all work out there? What kinds of work days did you guys have? Like, long work days or just eight hour work days, or what?</p>
<p>Johnson: Eight-hour days.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Eight-hour days. And the pay was a dollar a day?</p>
<p>Johnson: An hour.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: An hour. And then, Mr. Johnson, when you were out there and you’d go to work and you’d come home to the barracks and to sleep, what did you do after work? What was the average day like? You didn’t just go to work for eight hours and come, go back and lay down. What did you do after work?</p>
<p>Johnson: Go to a ball game.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Go to a ball game? And that’s the Negro—the team that they had out at Hanford, do you remember the name of it? Okay, anything else they did out there for social life, other than the ball games?</p>
<p>Johnson: I can’t really remember.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: You can’t remember. The lunch room, was it like a café sometime too?</p>
<p>Johnson: No—</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: At night?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, it was like a café.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: A café, didn’t they sell alcohol?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: They didn’t? Didn’t they bring entertainers out there? Do you remember any of them?</p>
<p>Johnson: Lord. I picture them. Oh.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: That’s all right if you can’t remember that. Okay, tell me, tell me about when the church came. When was the first time you went to a black church over here in this area?</p>
<p>Johnson: I didn’t go to a black church. I started a church in my home.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: And that was Morning Star?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: What year was that?</p>
<p>Johnson: I don’t know.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: About 54 years ago now, huh?</p>
<p>Johnson: 55.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: 55 years ago. And that was the first black church in this area? What did y’all do for church before then? You just didn’t go?</p>
<p>Johnson: No, that wasn’t the first Baptist church here. The Holiness Church is the first Baptist church.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Oh, it was the Holiness Church here?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: How long had it been here? Was it here when you got here?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: And that’s where the black people went that went to church? Were there a lot of women working out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Just in the mess hall? How long did you work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Johnson: Worked until 1935, I think.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: You mean ’55?</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: ’45, is when--</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: 1945?</p>
<p>[Interviewer 1]: That was the end of the Manhattan Project.</p>
<p>Johnson: When the war ended.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: When the war ended. Then what did you do next after you went back home and came back out here? What kind of work did you get when you came back out here?</p>
<p>Johnson: I did—I was a cement finisher.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Okay. Were there soldiers here during that time?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Where were they living at?</p>
<p>Johnson: Navy base at Big Pasco.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Were there a lot more men here than women during those days? ’43, ’44, ’45?</p>
<p>Johnson: It was just soldiers here, more men.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: It was more men. What year did your sister come? Did she come right behind you? Sister Rae did?</p>
<p>Johnson: Sister Rae? No, she—I came out here with them.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Oh, she was with you when you came out here. Let me ask you something. When you—how long were you here before you got married? Did you get married out here? You didn’t?</p>
<p>Johnson: I think I did get married out here, but I sat back and got my girlfriend and we got married at the courthouse here.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: I see. And how many children did you have?</p>
<p>Johnson: Just one by that wife.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: How many do you have altogether?</p>
<p>Johnson: Five.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: All living?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mm-mm. Three are living.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Just a couple more questions I want to ask you if you can remember now. Just take your time on this one. What do you remember as the worst thing that was going on here when you got here for black people?</p>
<p>Johnson: Drinking and shooting dice.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: Drinking and shooting dice, that was the worst thing that was happening for black people? That’s not too bad for some people. Okay. What was the best thing that was going on here when you got here, beside the pay? I know you like the pay. What else good when you first got here from the South, what was the best thing that you liked other than the pay?</p>
<p>Johnson: Ball games.</p>
<p>[Interviewer 2]: The ball games. Okay, Brother Johnson, thank you very much.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/NArRQGHWChs">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1944-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Luzell Johnson
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Segregation
Description
An account of the resource
Luzell Johnson moved to Pasco, Washington in 1944 to work on the Hanford Site.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
02/18/2002
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
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video/mpg
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F460bf0c069b1509c1f5405507db163db.JPG
d96569e00082f37da75221e8187f7896
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F511064dbbb642366c99c1617861762f1.mp4
09d0aef4fe35ec11b9eb26e2b32c44dc
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
A related resource
RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Vanis Daniels
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Benny Haney
Location
The location of the interview
Home of Benny Haney (Pasco, WA)
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Vanis Daniels: Okay. Could we ask you your full name please? What is your name?</p>
<p>Benny Haney: Benny. Benny Haney.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Mr. Haney, can you tell me when you arrived in the Tri-City area or in Pasco?</p>
<p>Haney: In January ’44. 1944.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Did you come by yourself or did you come here with a group of people?</p>
<p>Haney: No, I came with a group of people.</p>
<p>Daniels: Who were the people that you came with?</p>
<p>Haney: Charlie Harper.</p>
<p>Daniels: Charlie Harper, okay. Did you have any relatives here in the Tri-Cities before you came here?</p>
<p>Haney: No.</p>
<p>Daniels: Approximately how old were you when you came?</p>
<p>Haney: Around 21.</p>
<p>Daniels: Where did you live before you came here?</p>
<p>Haney: Kansas City.</p>
<p>Daniels: Kansas City, Missouri?</p>
<p>Haney: Yeah.</p>
<p>Daniels: And before Kansas City, Missouri, where did you live?</p>
<p>Haney: Arkansas.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay.</p>
<p>Haney: Texarkana, Arkansas.</p>
<p>Daniels: Texarkana, Arkansas. What kind of work did you do before you left Arkansas?</p>
<p>Haney: After I left?</p>
<p>Daniels: Before.</p>
<p>Haney: Before?</p>
<p>Daniels: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Haney: The same thing you done. [LAUGHTER] He know what that was. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, but when you got ready to leave Arkansas, were you headed to Hanford, or did you go—well, you already said you went to Kansas City, but while living in Kansas City, how did you hear about the work at Hanford and Pasco?</p>
<p>Haney: Charlie Harper, he was already here. And he come home for Christmas. I come back with him.</p>
<p>Daniels: Mm-hmm. So, how did you travel when you came to Pasco? Did you come by train, car?</p>
<p>Haney: Car.</p>
<p>Daniels: And after you arrived here, where was the first place that you lived?</p>
<p>Haney: What now?</p>
<p>Daniels: Where did you live when you got here?</p>
<p>Haney: Hanford.</p>
<p>Daniels: At Hanford?</p>
<p>Haney: Oh, overnight here and then went Hanford the next day.</p>
<p>Daniels: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>[off-screen speaker]: In the barracks?</p>
<p>Daniels: And was it in the barracks or at the trailer camp?</p>
<p>Haney: Barracks.</p>
<p>Daniels: In the barracks, okay. Were the barracks segregated, or did white, black and all live together, or did the blacks have their barracks and the whites—</p>
<p>Haney: Oh, no, they’d bust up the men. They would separate the men when I got here.</p>
<p>Daniels: So they would separate you when you got here. Okay. And when you got your job, from the barracks to work and back, what was your transportation mode? How did you get there, did they have buses?</p>
<p>Haney: Bus.</p>
<p>Daniels: So you rode on a bus, okay. What kind of work did they have you do out there?</p>
<p>Haney: Labor.</p>
<p>Daniels: Like digging ditches?</p>
<p>Haney: The lumberyard.</p>
<p>Daniels: Lumberyard, okay. Can you remember the name of the company that you worked for?</p>
<p>Haney: DuPont, but I don’t—</p>
<p>Daniels: DuPont?</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>[camera operator]: Okay, go ahead.</p>
<p>Daniels: How did you feel about working at Hanford? Was it better than Arkansas and Kansas City? What I mean by that, how did the people treat you?</p>
<p>Haney: The people did me all right. Yeah.</p>
<p>Daniels: Did you work on a segregated crew? Was it all black or was it mixed with black and white?</p>
<p>Haney: All black.</p>
<p>Daniels: An all-black crew. Do you feel that your boss at the time stood up for you? In other words, did he—if you had a problem with, let’s say, a white worker, did he stand up for you? In other words, he didn’t let them mess with you while you were working?</p>
<p>Haney: I had no problems.</p>
<p>Daniels: What was the hardest thing you had to adjust to, coming from Kansas City to the Tri-Cities and living here?</p>
<p>Haney: What now?</p>
<p>Daniels: The hardest thing you had to adjust to? In other words, you came from Kansas City, which was basically a city, to Hanford, which is the country and dust and—well, there’s nothing here other than what you’re working for! I mean, how did you feel? Did you feel like that you would rather be back in Kansas City for the entertainment part of it, or—</p>
<p>Haney: I did right then. Back in Kansas City right there and right then—there wasn’t nothing here. No nothing.</p>
<p>Daniels: Yes. And did you—did they furnish any kind of entertainment or anything? Did they like bring singers or quartets or did they have dancers or anything for you?</p>
<p>Haney: No.</p>
<p>Daniels: None of that, huh? So, in your off time, like on weekends when you wasn’t working, what did you guys do?</p>
<p>Haney: Well, right here at Hanford, nothing. We’d go to Yakima, on weekends, go to Yakima on the weekend.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, when you got to Yakima, did you have motels that you could live in?</p>
<p>Haney: No, I didn’t go stay all night there, just go and come back.</p>
<p>Daniels: I see, okay.</p>
<p>Haney: There was girls in Yakima.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, what did you guys do up there when you got up there?</p>
<p>Haney: In Yakima?</p>
<p>Daniels: In Yakima, yeah.</p>
<p>Haney: I just sat around and talked. Have a little snort once in a while.</p>
<p>Daniels: Well, all right! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Haney: That’s where the company was. There wasn’t no company at Hanford. Just the barracks, you go for bedtime, and you get tired of going there. The girls all liked that one place. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, yeah! Well--</p>
<p>Haney: It was top-rated.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, when you got to Yakima and you was able—could you go in the tavern and sit down and drink?</p>
<p>Haney: No tavern.</p>
<p>Daniels: No tavern.</p>
<p>Haney: It’s like a house.</p>
<p>Daniels: I understand. [whispering] We’ll do this one and then the next one.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Daniels: Do you remember any other black people that you worked with out there at Hanford?</p>
<p>Haney: Now?</p>
<p>Daniels: Do you remember any other black people you worked for at Hanford, their names?</p>
<p>Haney: Worked with me?</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, that worked with you.</p>
<p>Haney: Reverend Singleton.</p>
<p>Daniels: Reverend Singleton?</p>
<p>Haney: Yeah.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Can you think of anyone else?</p>
<p>Haney: They’re all about dead. They’re all gone.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, you want to tell me about your job at Hanford? What did you guys do, other than work in the lumberyard? Describe what you did.</p>
<p>Haney: Well, I worked on—[stuttering]—I learned digging then—shovel—digging.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, in the lumberyard, were you in charge of grading the lumber—</p>
<p>Haney: No. I didn’t grade number. I pulled the nails. They called it boneyard.</p>
<p>Daniels: You worked in the boneyard, mm-hmm. Now, did you do any other type of work, other than that? Do you have any funny stories or anything you can tell that happened while you was at work? Anything, maybe something that happened that’s unusual on the job, or something while you was at work? Anybody ever get hurt?</p>
<p>Haney: No, no.</p>
<p>Daniels: At work, anybody ever get killed out there? Anything that you know of?</p>
<p>Haney: That I understand, no.</p>
<p>Daniels: Well, you got anything else you want to talk about that may have happened, not only out there at Hanford, at work, but since then? I mean, you’ve gotta have some stories you can tell me that happened after you moved here to Pasco. Tell me a little bit about your family, your mom, your dad, your kids.</p>
<p>[camera operator]: I want to—</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>[camera operator]: Go ahead.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Did anyone ever—did you know what you were working on while you were out there working?</p>
<p>Haney: What I was working on?</p>
<p>Daniels: Yes. Did anyone ever tell you that, we’re building—well, let’s say for instance like, we’re building a car?</p>
<p>Haney: Nobody tell me nothing.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, now, did you know what you were building when you were working out there?</p>
<p>Haney: No, no.</p>
<p>Daniels: Did you have any type of—anybody ever come around and tell you that you wasn’t supposed to talk about what you were doing out there? Did anybody ever tell you that?</p>
<p>Haney: Yeah. I couldn’t talk about that now. I couldn’t talk about that.</p>
<p>Daniels: So what you did out there, you did not know what it was for?</p>
<p>Haney: No.</p>
<p>[off-camera conversation]</p>
<p>Daniels: I mean, were you curious? Did you ever ask anybody what, say, what are we building here?</p>
<p>Haney: Nope.</p>
<p>Daniels: As far as clearances go, did—what kind of clearance did you have? Did you have L clearance, Q clearance, or just a right-to-work—</p>
<p>Haney: Right-to-work.</p>
<p>Daniels: Just a right-to-work permit.</p>
<p>[off-camera conversation]</p>
<p>Daniels: How were your wages compared to—working out here at Hanford, how much money did you make, compared to when you left Kansas City?</p>
<p>Haney: I made more in Kansas City than I made at Hanford.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, then, you made more at Kansas City than at Hanford, but did you make more in Kansas City and Hanford than you did in Arkansas?</p>
<p>Haney: I made nothing in Arkansas. You didn’t get nothing. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Daniels: After Hanford, what made you decide to stay in Pasco?</p>
<p>Haney: I already told you that. I got a past I ain’t told you. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>[Off-screen]: Go ahead.</p>
<p>[Off-screen]: Say it.</p>
<p>[Off-screen]: Go ahead.</p>
<p>Haney: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Daniels: So when you left Arkansas and came to Pasco, you considered yourself coming from a bad place to a better place.</p>
<p>Haney: A better place.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. So you decided to stay here. You want to tell me a little bit about where you lived and what you did after Hanford?</p>
<p>Haney: Come on with that again, what you said?</p>
<p>Daniels: What you did—</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, when you came back, I understand that your mom and dad owned a trailer court and you rented little houses and—</p>
<p>Haney: That was in 1947. When they owned the trailer court, ’47.</p>
<p>Daniels: Well, when did your mom and dad come here?</p>
<p>Haney: My dad was here in ’43.</p>
<p>Daniels: Now, can you give me the names of your other sisters and brothers that was here with you, including your mom and dad’s name?</p>
<p>Haney: I ain’t go no brothers yet. And then my sister here. My sister came here in ’44.</p>
<p>Daniels: When did Joe Baby and Johnny and all them come?</p>
<p>Haney: I think it about—I think it was in ’46. He come out in ’47 here, Joe Baby. Johnny was cantankerous. He couldn’t make it. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, now, you—how many kids do you have?</p>
<p>Haney: Oh, phew.</p>
<p>Daniels: “Oh, phew”?</p>
<p>Haney: By that noise—by that noise—five.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, do they stay in the area? Do they live here?</p>
<p>Haney: Yeah, one of them, my daughter—your [unknown] and my daughter. Their home, they raised them in my daughter’s home.</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about Pasco and the things that have happened to you that you know about that have happened around here since you’ve lived here?</p>
<p>Haney: What now? What now? How’d you have that?</p>
<p>Daniels: Tell me a little bit about Pasco. Were there any businesses here? Did black people own businesses here?</p>
<p>Haney: Well, not really, yeah, in the east part. Yeah, in part of the state, black people have their business. Apex has their business out there. You couldn’t go to no—you couldn’t go in no white place now. No café, nothing, no tavern.</p>
<p>Daniels: That’s some of the things we’re trying to get you to tell us, about like Apex, that you couldn’t go into taverns, you couldn’t stay downtown in motels or hotels or—</p>
<p>Haney: No, no.</p>
<p>Daniels: --or nothing like that. But what was the east side like?</p>
<p>Haney: What now?</p>
<p>Daniels: The east side, the east side of Pasco. What was it like?</p>
<p>Haney: There wasn’t no businesses, nothing.</p>
<p>Daniels: Wasn’t nothing over here?</p>
<p>Haney: Wasn’t nothing. Millie’s house down there, about all. Baby’s house and Joe’s house up there.</p>
<p>Daniels: About all that was up here, huh? Okay, your mom and dad had the trailer court. They rented to the people that worked at Hanford?</p>
<p>Haney: Yeah.</p>
<p>Daniels: [whispering] I asked that wrong.</p>
<p>[off-camera]: Yes, you did.</p>
<p>Daniels: Boy. [LAUGHTER] Now, did they—I mean, did they have families that lived on their trailer court, or were they just rooms?</p>
<p>Haney: Some had families.</p>
<p>Daniels: Did she also have a place for entertainment and stuff for the people after they got off work?</p>
<p>Haney: No. No, they had a café. They had a café, that type of a place. It was a pool hall.</p>
<p>Daniels: And in later years, for the people that worked out there and lived on her trailer court, there was, you said, a café, a pool hall. Was there a record shop and a barber shop there?</p>
<p>Haney: Wasn’t no barber shop. It had a pool hall and a café. About it. And it had a tavern. The Caterpillar Café.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Daniels: Okay, were there other places like maybe Kennewick or Richland or even on the other side of town that black people could live while they worked at Hanford?</p>
<p>Haney: No, Pasco was all for Hanford. It was recent. Couldn’t stay in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Daniels: They couldn’t stay in Kennewick and they couldn’t live in Richland.</p>
<p>Haney: In Richland and in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Daniels: What about west Pasco?</p>
<p>Haney: What?</p>
<p>Daniels: What about on the other side of town?</p>
<p>Haney: Pasco’s all right. It was Kennewick.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Daniels: Mr. Haney, is there anything else you’d like to tell us? Well, anyway, we thank you for the interview, and you were real helpful. So this concludes our interview with Mr. Haney.</p>
<p><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/gGxbbzdXO6A">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1944-2012
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Benny Haney
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kansas City (Mo.)
Yakima (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Migration
Segregation
Description
An account of the resource
Benny Haney moved to the Tri-Cities in 1944 to work on the Hanford Site.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mpg
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F82dcdba7c4df618133ad558cac24be65.JPG
207a1551c47f5fd4414658a7299c8eb4
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8320bb80772d2eab849c90d8c36275a6.mp4
ef9406b4fef35c9c6a5b78ec9e9d5161
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Vanessa Moore
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Virgina Crippen
Location
The location of the interview
Home of Virginia Crippen (Pasco, WA)
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Vanessa Moore: --Vanessa Moore. I’m a member of the Triple-A-S History and Recognition Committee. This afternoon, I’m sitting here speaking with Miss Virginia Crippen. Virginia is going to talk with us a little about her experience here in the Pasco area in the early years in the ‘40s-‘50s timeframe and after that. So, Miss Crippen, we’re glad to be here and we appreciate you taking time to talk to us. First I want to start out by asking you, when did you first arrive in town?</p>
<p>Virginia Crippen: In 1948.</p>
<p>Moore: And how did you come? Did you come alone?</p>
<p>Crippen: I come alone.</p>
<p>Moore: What made you decide to come to this area?</p>
<p>Crippen: Oh, well, there was work here. I opened up a business here.</p>
<p>Moore: What kind of business?</p>
<p>Crippen: Chicken. I sold chicken and barbecue.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, so you had your own restaurant?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes, I had my own place.</p>
<p>Moore: I see. Was that the type of business that you had prior to coming here?</p>
<p>Crippen: No, I didn’t.</p>
<p>Moore: And where did you come from, what state?</p>
<p>Crippen: I was born and raised in Texas, but I come from Portland, Oregon here.</p>
<p>Moore: What had you been doing there?</p>
<p>Crippen: Working in the shipyard.</p>
<p>Moore: What kind of work?</p>
<p>Crippen: I was a sweeper, they called it, at the shipyard.</p>
<p>Moore: So you decided to leave there and—</p>
<p>Crippen: Mm-hmm, I heard there was work here and there was no place for blacks to eat. So I come to Pasco to better my condition, I guess, that’s what you would call it.</p>
<p>Moore: And so then also provide something for black people that they didn’t have.</p>
<p>Crippen: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: So was this just something you read about, that there were opportunities, or you knew someone who was already here by any chance?</p>
<p>Crippen: Not—yes, very few people.</p>
<p>Moore: Could you think of their names?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yeah, I knew Bertha Smith. No, I met them when I come here. Really didn’t.</p>
<p>Moore: Not too many people.</p>
<p>Crippen: Not too many people.</p>
<p>Moore: Where did you set up your business, your restaurant?</p>
<p>Crippen: On 8<sup>th</sup> Street, east Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: And why did you choose east Pasco?</p>
<p>Crippen: Because I didn’t have no other choice.</p>
<p>Moore: Why was that?</p>
<p>Crippen: Because they didn’t allow the blacks to have business no place else.</p>
<p>Moore: So there were restrictions for where blacks could work and live also?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes.</p>
<p>Moore: At that time, about how many black people or families do you think, would you say there were living here?</p>
<p>Crippen: You know, there was—it wasn’t too many, but so many lived in the barracks. You know, men that couldn’t bring their families right away. They would come over.</p>
<p>Moore: So they lived in the barracks but they would come to—</p>
<p>Crippen: Yeah, and have chicken on weekends, barbecue.</p>
<p>Moore: What was the name of your business?</p>
<p>Crippen: It was really the Montana, but they called it the Chicken Shack. Or let’s go to Virginia’s.</p>
<p>Moore: Let’s go to Virginia’s?</p>
<p>Crippen: Uh-huh, or the Chicken Shack.</p>
<p>Moore: That’s good. Got to be pretty well known, didn’t it?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yup. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Moore: Let’s see here. Over the years, how did things go? Did you hear about what was going on out there? Did your customers say much about work out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Crippen: No, they really didn’t. Because I worked mostly by myself and I was the cook and the bouncer. [LAUGHTER] So I didn’t do much talking.</p>
<p>Moore: Did you serve liquor there?</p>
<p>Crippen: No.</p>
<p>Moore: Tell us what you think about the conditions for people in general living here, for black people living and working out here. Was it good, bad?</p>
<p>Crippen: Talk about Pasco, you know, I didn’t work out there. But we had it tough here. The bank wouldn’t lend you no money. It’s just luck that I worked all my life and I saved a little money to establish my business and make it the best I could. Because we couldn’t even borrow money from the banks. Even in Kennewick, you couldn’t borrow no money from no banks. They didn’t even want you in Kennewick, period, black people. Pasco wouldn’t lend you no money. It was just tough. But if you had your own money, you could survive in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: And it sounds as though it’s a good thing that businesses like yours were here.</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes.</p>
<p>Moore: Because what other choices did the blacks have? Could they go eat anywhere they wanted to?</p>
<p>Crippen: No. No, we couldn’t even go to the Top Hat, none of those places, and eat when I come in ’48.</p>
<p>Moore: Stop for a second. I’m trying to--</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Crippen: Don’t put it on my yet until you tell me—</p>
<p>[off-screen]: That’s all right.</p>
<p>Moore: Virginia, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your business. Did you have any specialties? What did the customers like to come in there most for?</p>
<p>Crippen: Chicken or barbecue.</p>
<p>Moore: Chicken or barbecue. Special recipe?</p>
<p>Crippen: Not really. But everybody think it was a special recipe, because I—I have told people how I fix it, and they say they go home and fix it and it didn’t turn out like that.</p>
<p>Moore: Did you only have black customers? Did other people come in?</p>
<p>Crippen: No, I had Spanish and white. And black.</p>
<p>Moore: Tell me a little more about that. You said something when we were off-tape.</p>
<p>Crippen: Well, I fixed orders to take out, and I barbecued, fixed turkeys for people to take out. They was white. But I did have a lot of white customers that come in and sit down and eat, and Spanish, and blacks. So we mixed and all got along good.</p>
<p>Moore: And you were willing to serve everyone?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes. Didn’t refuse nobody.</p>
<p>Moore: Now, was it like that throughout the area, or were there other businesses who did?</p>
<p>Crippen: Oh, no. We couldn’t eat at the bus station, we couldn’t eat at Pay Less, we couldn’t eat at Top Hat. We couldn’t eat no place. In fact, they wouldn’t serve us.</p>
<p>Moore: So this was during the ‘40s, during that time.</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes. It was ’40—</p>
<p>Moore: Were there signs saying no coloreds? How did—</p>
<p>Crippen: No, I didn’t see a sign. But when you get there they say, sorry, we just can’t serve you.</p>
<p>Moore: For no reason. Were there other black-owned businesses?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes, Mrs. Wright had a trailer court.</p>
<p>Moore: Was that located in Pasco?</p>
<p>Crippen: East Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: And tell us again why most blacks lived in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Crippen: Because they didn’t have no other choice. They lived in tents, cardboard houses, made the siding out of cardboard, the top canvas. The best they could do, because there was no place to live and it was work out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Moore: Is that where most of the blacks worked?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes.</p>
<p>Moore: So we have to presume the money was pretty good.</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes.</p>
<p>Moore: They’re willing to live in those conditions to stay here.</p>
<p>Crippen: Miss Haney.</p>
<p>Moore: Miss Haney?</p>
<p>Crippen: Had a restaurant, too.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, she did? What was her restaurant called?</p>
<p>Crippen: I don’t know, but Miss Haney—Haney’s Place.</p>
<p>Moore: So later on as Hanford kind of wound down and people stayed in the area, could you tell us a little bit about how the area changed? Or maybe even before that, what did it look like when you got here? Were there a lot of houses, or just a small—</p>
<p>Crippen: No. It’s sagebrush. [LAUGHTER] There wasn’t many houses. East Pasco didn’t have—very few. And then white people lived in east Pasco. Because it wasn’t many blacks when I come. But it was some blacks but it was no more—I can’t remember but five families at most, or four.</p>
<p>Moore: This was in the late ‘40s?</p>
<p>Crippen: Been here for years, yeah, when I come here.</p>
<p>Moore: So the Manhattan Project had actually finished up by ’48 when you came, but blacks had remained.</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes.</p>
<p>Moore: Are the names of any people that are still here now that were here back then that you can recollect?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes. Luzell Johnson and his sister, Velma, sister, Bertha, they were here when I come here. The old-timers was here when I come here. They’d been here for years, but they all dead now. And I can’t really remember their names right now.</p>
<p>Moore: Now, did you raise a family here, too?</p>
<p>Crippen: I had one son.</p>
<p>Moore: One son. And is he still in the area, or--?</p>
<p>Crippen: He went to school here, finished school here.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>[off-screen]: Go ahead.</p>
<p>Moore: Virginia, I want to ask you a little more about some of the other businesses. Tell me about Johnny Reed.</p>
<p>Crippen: Johnny Reed had a club.</p>
<p>Moore: It was a dance club?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes, they could dance. And I had barbecue and chicken, too. It was like an after-hours club.</p>
<p>Moore: So he served liquor there, and was it a popular place?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes, it was. Now he had practically all white, but blacks went, too. But he had a lot of white customers. In the beginning—it was afterhours.</p>
<p>Moore: Where was it located?</p>
<p>Crippen: On 8<sup>th</sup> Street, east Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: Another local business owner, Tommy Moore, could you tell me a little bit about him?</p>
<p>Crippen: Oh, yes, Tommy Moore had a business downtown by the underpass. It was a beautiful place, a brick—a hotel and a downstairs restaurant, very nice place.</p>
<p>Moore: Do you remember the name of his restaurant?</p>
<p>Crippen: No, I don’t. Been so many years. So we just said—everybody just said, going down to Tommy’s. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Moore: There was somebody named Jackson, Jackson’s Tavern?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes, he had a nice little tavern. He built it. It was nice and had a restaurant in it. It was really nice.</p>
<p>Moore: And then Sally’s.</p>
<p>Crippen: Sally sold good food, very good food.</p>
<p>Moore: You had a little competition.</p>
<p>Crippen: [LAUGHTER] Really? But Sally sold lunches. I didn’t have nothing but chicken and barbecue, but she had pies and everything. She had good food.</p>
<p>Moore: And was there a business owner named Lillian that you recall?</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes, her and her husband had a barber shop. Then she started building a business, but she didn’t finish it. She left and went to California. She never finished her business, but her and her husband had a barber shop on Oregon Street.</p>
<p>Moore: So there were business owners that had restaurants and places to eat and places to go for recreation and there were other services that blacks needed, of course, like get our hair done or the barber. Were there people to provide that?</p>
<p>Crippen: No, not really, until later. Then Mrs.—she had a nice beauty shop.</p>
<p>Moore: Maybe Mrs. Newborne.</p>
<p>Crippen: Mrs. Newborne, yeah. Mrs. Newborne had a nice beauty shop on Oregon Street in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: So there were more opportunities for people to come in and set up businesses.</p>
<p>Crippen: Mm-hmm, yes.</p>
<p>Moore: Now, before that, what was the experience like trying to have some of these things, just at white-owned businesses? If I needed to have some dry cleaning done or my hair done?</p>
<p>Crippen: Well, that was out of the question. We couldn’t even eat at the bus station. We couldn’t eat at Pay Less. We couldn’t eat no place in downtown Pasco, the white-owned. That’s the only place they had places to eat that I know about, was downtown. And we couldn’t go to those.</p>
<p>Moore: How about shopping for clothing or groceries?</p>
<p>Crippen: Oh, yes, you could go in all the grocery stores and dress shops and all and spend your money. And they treat you nice. You know, you spending your money. But you better not go to the bank and ask to borrow some money. You could put money in the bank, but you sure couldn’t borrow any money from the bank.</p>
<p>Moore: So there were just certain boundaries that were set.</p>
<p>Crippen: Yes, yes. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Moore: Okay. I want to thank you for taking time to give us this information. If there are names of other people that we should speak with, we have some—also some photos that we’d like to show you here later and there may be individuals that you recognize and we do appreciate—the History and Recognition Committee appreciates your time and the information that you’ve provided and everything you’ve done for the community. Thank you very much.</p>
<p>Crippen: You’re welcome.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>[camera operator]: Okay, go ahead.</p>
<p>Moore: Testing the microphone to see if it’s working.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: --but I can’t remember where I know him from. She look a little bit like Miss James. Miss James’ sister.</p>
<p>Crippen: Oh, Miss James had a trailer court! Y’all got that?</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Crippen: On Front Street in East Pasco.</p>
<p>Daniels: She just got through telling us that.</p>
<p>Crippen: Sure, she didn’t lie when she told you. Wasn’t no black church. I remember when they built Morning Star. And he died, little old short guy.</p>
<p>Daniels: Mm-hmm, Reverend—</p>
<p>Crippen: And he had children here. You know she played piano for New Hope—not New Hope, Greater Faith all the time. She hasn’t been dead that long. Mary?</p>
<p>Daniels: Yeah, Mary Calhoun.</p>
<p>Crippen: Mary Calhoun played the piano. But he sure did, he—</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/7KrDyWUYEbg"> View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1948-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Virginia Crippen
Subject
The topic of the resource
Pasco (Wash.)
Restaurant owners
Discrimination
Segregation
Description
An account of the resource
Virginia Crippen moved to Pasco, Washington in 1948 and was a successful business owner.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
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African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mpg
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Faf8bf2f6d81c67e9ef7b69c434942a5d.JPG
892474e4e04b14d934a370dec4b58640
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F946842f661eb058d45b55d8d452c8e62.mpg
0d55695013e65fd959b507d2a6d5dd91
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Vanessa Moore
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Edward Ash, Sr.
Location
The location of the interview
Home of Edward Ash, Sr. (Pasco, WA)
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>[camera operator]: Sound check.</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Sound check? For me?</p>
<p>[camera operator]: Yeah, for both of you.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay. State your name and address one more time for me, Mr. Ash.</p>
<p>Edward Ash, Senior: Edward L. Ash. 923 West Leola, Pasco, Washington.</p>
<p>[camera operator]: Okay.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Ash: --L. Ash--</p>
<p>[off-screen]: Look this way.</p>
<p>Ash: Huh?</p>
<p>[camera operator]: It doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>Moore: We’re just checking the sound. Go ahead.</p>
<p>Ash: Oh, you want me to look at you, huh?</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah.</p>
<p>Ash: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Moore: --story that goes with whatever I’m asking about to tell that, or kind of elaborate on the answer, rather than just if I say, what year were you born, or—well, that’s not a good one. But if we were to say something where you could just say “yes” or “no,” it helps us to hear a little bit more, okay? And I’m gonna try to talk not too much so that we can allow you to do that and he won’t pick me up on here—</p>
<p>Ash: Oh, that’s okay.</p>
<p>Moore: --so much. So if I hesitate and I go like this, I probably mean, keep telling me about that, okay? [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>[off-screen]: You might want to tell him to stop.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Moore: That’s all right, that’s all right.</p>
<p>[off-screen]: If you get him started, sometimes, boy.</p>
<p>Moore: If I get him started, he’ll keep going? Oh, that’s good! That’s what we’re after. So you ready to go?</p>
<p>This is another interview that’s being conducted for a project for the Triple-A-S History and Recognition Committee’s Hanford Project. My name is Vanessa Moore and today we’re speaking with Mr. Edward Ash, who worked here in the Hanford area, back in the 1940s and later. So, Mr. Ash, I appreciate you taking time to talk with us today, and just wanna ask you a few questions.</p>
<p>First of all, I would like to know when exactly did you arrive in the Tri-Cities and tell me a little bit about that.</p>
<p>Ash: When I was over in Tri-City. Let’s see. We went over to Tacoma. Let’s see what year—’46—wasn’t it in ’46 we came from Tacoma?</p>
<p>[off-screen]: I think it’s ’47.</p>
<p>Moore: ’47?</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, ’47 was when we came from Tacoma.</p>
<p>Moore: You came from Tacoma?</p>
<p>Ash: I came from Tacoma over to Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm. You said “we,” now who came with you?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, Forrest Lee White, he came over with me. We was a little north of Tacoma. I came over here because I was working over in Tacoma and I forgot about that job. He had been here once before, he had, during DuPont time. I wasn’t over here during the DuPont time, so he said, let’s go back over there. So we went over and he said—when we got over here, well, you understand that J.A. Jones was moving in to start back the Hanford Area.</p>
<p>So we went down to the union hall that day and we sit up at the union hall all day long. They were calling people to go to work on the Hanford Area. So Forrest Lee said I’m going over to the pool hall and shoot some pool, he said, because, oh we may not get out now because we got to wait. I stayed at the union hall and they kept calling up and the business agent was saying, we’re calling just the union members now, and everybody that’s going over are union members, union. I said to myself, I said, why is all them folk union members?</p>
<p>So I sit down there until 12:00, and the guys sort of scattered. So I walked up there and I said, I’m from Tacoma. I used to be in the union myself, I said, but since I worked in civil service, then I went back to the union told me I had to, if I come in and pay all my initiation fees up, that I could go back in. So I said I’d come over to Pasco and rejoin the union and get back in the union. If I wanted to go back to Tacoma, I’d go back to Tacoma.</p>
<p>Moore: What union was that? Which union?</p>
<p>Ash: Laborers’ International.</p>
<p>Moore: Laborers’?</p>
<p>Ash: So I said, well, one thing I might like to ask you. He said, what? I said if I pay all my initiation fees and everything, could I get in? He said, can you pay all the initiation fees at one time today? I said, yeah. He said, okay. So he wrote down a receipt for the job. So then I didn’t have no way of going to the job, because Forrest had the car. So I went over to the pool hall and I told Forrest, boy, I got hired out. He said, yeah? I said, come on and go with me.</p>
<p>Moore: Tell me your friend’s name again?</p>
<p>Ash: Hmm?</p>
<p>Moore: Your friend’s name?</p>
<p>Ash: Forrest Lee White. We went on back over to the hall, and I asked him what about—this guy got the car. Could we get him out, too? He said, yeah. And so we got him out. So then we went on out to Richland the next day. J.A. Jones just moved in and they didn’t have no tools over there to go to work. So we got there and they told us, well, we just gonna sit around until the tools come in, but nobody have to leave the personnel office. You have to come in here at 8:00 and you stay here and sit out there and go to sleep or whatever you wanna do until 4:30 in the evening.</p>
<p>Moore: That’s easy work.</p>
<p>Ash: He said, y’all will get paid for sitting up here, he said, until we get the tools and start up working. So we went there everyday for two weeks and we draw a paycheck before we ever did a lick of work.</p>
<p>Moore: [LAUGHTER] What kind of work would you eventually be doing?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, I worked in the Laborers’ all the time. The Laborers’ District.</p>
<p>Moore: Uh-huh, with J.A. Jones.</p>
<p>Ash: Let me see, J.A. Jones had the Hanford Area until—you see, they had taken the whole Hanford Area.</p>
<p>Moore: This was for construction work?</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, construction work. Construction, and then after construction work, why, then they’d take you over to the reactor and everything over there, too.</p>
<p>Moore: What buildings did you work on?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, I can just about call every building they have. I worked on first over in 300 Area, I worked on there. Then I worked at 34-5. I worked at 100-H, B, C, D, DR, K East, K West, all of the N, and I worked at K East and I worked at all the other Hanford buildings. But I done worked over the whole place from every building from 300 and all the 105s and everything. That was on the river, on the riverside.</p>
<p>Moore: Could you describe for me the type of work that you did?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, the type of work that I did, I first went there, I started working in the construction part. I helped to build, I built all the 105 area. We got them built and then we helped them putting in the machines and everything in.</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm, so was it like concrete work?</p>
<p>Ash: It was concrete work and I worked some of everything. You know when you’s a laborer, you do some of everything. I worked with the cement finishers, I worked with the electricians, I worked with the pipefitters, I worked—I just worked with every craft that was there. Then when they got the building all finished and then they went in, then you—I got my Q clearance. I think me, myself and another white guy was about the first ones that got a Q clearance. The reason I got my Q clearance as quick as I did because I worked for the US Navy supply base in Tacoma during the war. So I got my Q clearance about the same week when I put in for it.</p>
<p>Moore: So it didn’t take a long investigation for your clearance?</p>
<p>Ash: No, it didn’t take no investigation at all, it didn’t. Because when I put in for it, why, I’d just left Tacoma from the US Navy supply base. I worked there all during the war, see, I did.</p>
<p>Moore: What kind of work did you do there at the Navy?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, I worked there shipping and receiving and all. Then I was working in the warehouse, and we were shipping stuff overseas where the people were fighting at, and armor. Then they come to the place where we had to—everything that was going overseas had to be waterproofed. Like jeeps, all that different stuff going had to be waterproofed. So the ship would sink, all that stuff would float and they can pick it up later.</p>
<p>So after they classified me in army for number one, I suppose, I went in the service. Then one of the head lieutenant come out there one day and asked me, how would you like to be deferred? I didn’t know what deferred was. I asked him, I said, what’s that gonna be? He said, well, your supervisor said you’ve been doing a good job of waterproofing all of this stuff that’s going overseas. He said, they done give you your papers. I got a bunch of women and men both, you’re the overseer of it. So they want to keep you here because you’s qualified for this. So I said, okay. So then he went and fixed up the papers. I didn’t have to go the army, so he said, now, you, in a few years, you probably have to go when this run out. But it didn’t run out until V-J Day when the whistle blow. The whistle blow like the day that my papers run out, tomorrow.</p>
<p>Moore: And that’s when it was time to come to Pasco?</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, after a while, I worked for another building there in Tacoma. So then I came to Pasco because I didn’t like that job. But we came over to Pasco and I started working. I worked out there for J.A. Jones construction. We worked, when we first started, he wasn’t in the radiation and all of that. We built, or we helped to build, finish that high school in Richland. We built the first jailhouse, was in Richland. And the school on George Washington Way, we built that. And J.A. Jones built all the houses going up George Washington Way going down to the river, we worked in there. That school up there and going to north Richland and all those houses up there, J.A. Jones built them. So then they started to moving up, they got all the barracks built and all the trailer camps built and little things. Then we started moving out into the Hanford Area.</p>
<p>Moore: I see. Where did you live, when you first arrived, where did you settle down? Where did you live?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, I lived in Pasco.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay, were there many African Americans or black people in Pasco at that time?</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, there was quite a few, there was. I lived in Pasco ever since I came from Tacoma. I been living in Pasco ever since.</p>
<p>Moore: So you must like it here.</p>
<p>Ash: Hmm?</p>
<p>Moore: You like it here. You settled down and stayed.</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: And you raised your family, you have—your wife is here with you.</p>
<p>Ash: Well, I was only here one week and then I went back and got the wife and the two children and the other two were born over here in Tacoma. So we went and got them and we came back. Because I couldn’t stay over here by myself. So I went back and got my family.</p>
<p>Moore: So you never lived in the barracks.</p>
<p>Ash: No, I didn’t live in the barracks, mm-mm. The water got so high one time that you couldn’t get across from Pasco to Richland, you couldn’t. You had to go way around down there and come across the ferry, and come all the way around from back on the other side of the river—</p>
<p>Moore: The ferry was—</p>
<p>Ash: Come over there and we had to stay overnight until the water went down. But it worked it out okay. But I just never did like to stay in Richland. One thing [UNKNOWN] I didn’t. And I got to Pasco, and I went and people was in Pasco, so I just stayed there.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. Do you recollect the names of some of the people who were here when you came?</p>
<p>Ash: Oh, boy, let’s see. I can remember Newborne. Newborne was there. And [UNKNOWN] was here. Boy, I tell ya, it would really take me a good while to remember lots of little peoples.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay, we can come back to that then. Tell me, Mr. Ash, how did you feel about working at Hanford? And I mean by that, the kind of working conditions, treatment of people, interacting with other workers?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, after I went out there and started working in the area, I worked with lots of different people, and I got along because I tried to do my job well. I worked steady, I did. And I got with some good foremans and things, I did. And after they started Q clearing peoples to going in the Hanford Area, then I went down in the Hanford Area and we were going from building to building, started working in the radiation and stuff like that. When I got going in the Hanford Area, my superintendent was Ralph Erickson, and that’s the first superintendent that I was under. And I stayed under him 27 years, under Ralph Erickson. He really was a good superintendent. He was over all the whole 100 Area, starting at the river, plumb back all over the 100 Area, he was the superintendent over that whole area, he was. And after I went over to 2-East and all those different places, and got in there with him. I stayed in 100 Area from that time I went in there until I retired. But he didn’t stay there himself that long. I was under him 27 years, and then they sent him to another job out back down South some place—</p>
<p>Moore: And you remained there. What year did you retire?</p>
<p>Ash: Huh?</p>
<p>Moore: What year did you retire?</p>
<p>Ash: I retired, I got that in my—right in my purse here.</p>
<p>Moore: You keep that with you.</p>
<p>Ash: Well, you want me to get it out right now?</p>
<p>Moore: Sure.</p>
<p>Ash: Okay. So then they had another superintendent in the Area. He was a good guy. There’s one thing about it. I got along with black, other peoples. Now, I retired Seven and 31<sup>st</sup>, 1981. And I served out there for 35 years.</p>
<p>Moore: 35 years.</p>
<p>Ash: Mm-hmm. I raised up my whole entire family, raised, put all my children through school, everything on that one job. But I can say one thing, my daily prayers were, when I started working out there. I worked for lots of good peoples. I worked with lots of ornery peoples. You gonna find that everywhere you go, see. But I seen peoples quit, I seen people leave. But one thing I had in mind, I wanted to take care of my wife and children, I wanted to raise them up. And my prayer was, each day of my life, it was the good Lord to bless me to stay on that job and get along with my foreman, my supervisor, raise my children up while they get an education and put them through school, all for that one job.</p>
<p>Moore: And your prayer was answered.</p>
<p>Ash: So the good Lord blessed me to raise all my children up to get grown and to finish school. Me and my wife have been together for 80 years—62 years. We’ve been married that long.</p>
<p>Moore: Congratulations.</p>
<p>Ash: And I can say one thing—61 years. I can say one thing, one thing we can say a lot of people can’t say, we never passed a lick through fighting or mad or cussed one another out in our whole life. We really helped and we raised up our children.</p>
<p>Moore: And that’s saying a lot.</p>
<p>Ash: And we’ve taken care of them off of that one Hanford job. See? So I give the good Lord the credit for that.</p>
<p>Moore: Mr. Ash, you tell me you have raised your children here and I was just curious if you could tell me the children’s names and where are they living now?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, Angie, she’s in Pasco. And Betty’s in Pasco, and Mary’s in Pasco. They all three of them are. And Ed, he’s in Texas. What is it, the name of the Texas town? He’s in Texas.</p>
<p>Moore: So you have four children, and three of the four are still here.</p>
<p>Ash: I have four, mm-hmm, three girls, one boy. So after we—then we started going into the radiation and all like that. We really went through lots of radiation and laying houses, going through there. It was a job. I must say I met good peoples, I met some bad ones. But I tried to get along with everybody, and so—</p>
<p>Moore: Let me ask you a question about that, because some of the people we’ve interviewed have talked about a time when at least the barracks, say, were segregated. Could you tell us about segregation that you observed, or was that on the job, off the job?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, one bad part, before we went into the Hanford Area, we were in downtown Richland, and we were building all them houses and barracks and all like that, they had one superintendent over the whole job down there, he did. And when they got started, they had—this guy tried to segregate the peoples in the restrooms. He wanted the black over here and the white over there, this superintendent did. And so I just remember now who was it that reported that guy. But it was somebody reported him, and one of the head peoples came down there and told him, said, we’re not gonna have that. You’re gonna build one restroom—one for the men, one for the women. And they’re all gonna go in there. They fired that superintendent and took that job away from him. J.A. Jones put in another—J.A. Jones were building them houses.</p>
<p>Moore: So this was not a J.A. Jones policy.</p>
<p>Ash: Huh?</p>
<p>Moore: J.A. Jones didn’t have a segregation policy.</p>
<p>Ash: No, uh-unh. I didn’t have one. Of course they had peoples working there, you know what I mean, this and that. Just like, one time when I was out in the Area over there, we had—we used to—they had a big animal farm. They were testing radiation through lots of these animals. They were testing peoples, you know, through there. And so I was in there. So one guy, my superintendent, and then they had another superintendent, and then they brought in the little superintendent from somewhere down in Arkansas. And you know how a bunch of men get up. They had cows, they had a few hogs out there, and they had some hog that they were testing all kinds of animals to see how much radiation could an animal take. We had several black guys up there had a good job feeding these animals radiation to see how much can they take. Then they had a bunch of sows and a bunch of dogs and had pigs, I think. So, a bunch of men got together to come up with one standard one time. I had a couple of problems with this guy, this assistant superintendent.</p>
<p>So we all men were working in there with the animals and all. So you know how a bunch of men get, say, oh, I’m gonna take this here for my girlfriend, I’m gonna take this here. So we had—talking about them pigs. So they had some sheep and they had—so this superintendent that they brought from down in Texas or something. Now, I’m the only black guy in the whole bunch. I worked in there one time with 60 white people, and I was the only black guy in the bunch. Course, I finally got along with them, because I’m like this, I can work with a guy all day. If he don’t want to speak to me, I don’t have to speak to him. That’s just the way I am. But this superintendent, he come in there, he ends up. So they had this little shed, and they had a whole bunch of white Chester hogs. So everybody picked hogs, some had picked a little dogs, some had picked—you know a bunch of men. So he jumps up said, he says, Ash, I pick one for you. Because he said, those sheep over there got a black head, so you pick out you one of them with a black head. I said, okay, that’s fine, that’s okay, I said. That’d give me a girlfriend, too. He said, I’m gonna take these sows, he said. They’re my girlfriend. Clean, white girlfriend, that’s mine. I said, okay.</p>
<p>So it rocked on there for months, oh, seven, eight months. So they were trying to breed those sows and things and get a whole bunch of pigs so they could have more animals to, you know, they could feed radiation. So they had a white male in there and he stayed there, and that sow come up with piglets, and that sow got pregnant. So they killed him. They killed him. I went down there one day, there was a black male pig in there, didn’t have a white spot nowhere. I don’t think his tongue was even red. I mean, he was black from head to foot. About three months, all the white sows were coming up with pigs.</p>
<p>So this superintendent—at that time we had a whole bunch of supers—the head superintendent and all, they were down there, going over, they’d go over and do different things. So here come Lee—that was that little superintendent I was telling you about that told me, you could—so, me and truck driver standing there, and Lee come in there. I told him, I said, watch, I’m gonna make Lee mad. I knew it would make him mad. I said, hey, Lee, come here. And he come up there. I said, look at me and all these white girls in here. I said, just look at me, all these white girls. I said, boy, we got white pigs, and I got a white pigs, I got white children here. That Lee turned red, oooooh, he turned red, he got mad, he walked on out.</p>
<p>So the head superintendent come up there and said, what’s wrong with Lee? So the truck driver told him, Ash told him look at me and him with all these white girls. He said, Lee got that mad? He said, we can’t stand for nobody being here like that. Said, I thought Lee was a better guy than that. So they got rid off Lee. They told Lee, he’s got to get it right otherwise he’s not gonna stay. But Lee was so mad, he got rid of Lee anyway because he just didn’t like it, so they told him he had to—they got rid of him. That’s the one thing I have. Of course, it tickled me, everybody was in my favor anyway.</p>
<p>So I had to call the business agent on one superintendent. So I got that scrape. At first, before we started, before I was union, [unknown] were getting double time for all overtime. Why, then, we had another agreement, if I were working with another guy overtime and he got double time, we got double time. Until we got [unknown]. So we had this assistant superintendent, he had just got set up there. So when I was working there, I told him, I said, don’t forget the double time now of working with these ironworkers. He said, just ‘cause you working with the ironworkers is no sign I’m gonna pay you no double time. I said, well, I’m supposed to get it. I says, that’s a union agreement. He said, well, I’m not gonna put it on your card. I said, okay, that’d be fine with me. So that Friday when I got paid off, my double time wasn’t on there. So I called the timekeeper and he said, well, let me get in touch with downtown. And the people downtown said, well, he told him not to pay me the double time. So then I called the union hall, called my business agent. He said, okay, I’ll be right out. So he came out and got with the head superintendent and had a dealing with the superintendent over the whole entire rig. He told him about it. I done called this superintendent downtown to the head office and asked him, the union told us, now listen. He said, I pulled up the main office here. I put up a picket here and then nobody would be down here working. Because the union that time had this agreement. If one union put up a picket, the other members can’t cross it. They had this agreement. No union could cross another union picket. So, he called that superintendent down there and told him. He said, well, I just felt like I had the power that I didn’t have to pay. He said, you don’t have that power. He said, I’m the only man who had the power to say what they can get. He said, you out there, you got to follow union scale. So he said, now the business agent is here, and the business agent said Mr. Ash has got to get his money before the day is out. That was Friday. He got to get him his money back out there what you was supposed to pay him.</p>
<p>So this timekeeper brought my extra money back out there. So here come this superintendent that the timekeeper brought my extra money back. And the old superintendent passed by me. I shook my check in his face. I said, here it is, big boy. I said, it ain’t over your dead body, but I got it. [LAUGHTER] And he worked around there—we worked around there about three weeks before he would speak to me. But he found out he couldn’t do nothing about it and he finally calmed down.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, sometimes you have to do what you have to do.</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s about the only problem I really had had.</p>
<p>Moore: I have one other work-related question. You’ve talked about radiation and construction. Did you have any idea what everyone’s mission was and what they were working on?</p>
<p>Ash: On radiation? Yeah, we had quite a bit of radiation.</p>
<p>Moore: And what it would be used for? I guess I should go back, because you were after the Manhattan Project, so it wasn’t necessarily for the bomb, was it, at that time. So the mission was different.</p>
<p>Ash: Well, you see, when we was out there, all the reactors was under radiation. Every spring of the year, they would close the reactor down and they would go through them and remodel them. They would do about five months of work remodeling them, fixing this, putting new stuff in this. All that work was radiation. You works in there for the whole time you’re remodeling. You did. See, you worked in there. I worked in radiation. I worked in the Hanford radiation. Lots of days I worked in that radiation for weeks and weeks at a time.</p>
<p>Moore: So were the reactors producing plutonium?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, no, we were remodeling. But the building is all crapped up with radiation. Now, some places like the Pipefitters’, now, if they had a job that they gave to them to put in some pipes, they said the radiation was too high or too strong, it had to be cut down. You know, go in there and sterilize it and cut it down to a certain point to where a person could work in there. Well, that was the laborers’ job. I was in that job like all the time. Every time I had to go in there and decon radiation, clean it up to where some crafts could go in there or leave it where we could go in there.</p>
<p>Moore: So you were involved in decontamination.</p>
<p>Ash: I was in that deal. Every one of the 105s had that deal. But every year, they would close down to remodel. And then you’d go in the remodel, back there, everybody went back in there, I don’t care what craft you were, you were in radiation. You had to put on, oh, we had shoes you had to put on, pair of boots you had to put on, we had to put on an extra pair of clothes. You put off all of your clothes and then you dressed in the radiation. Sometime you got a mask on, sometime you got—oh, just anything, because then when you get in there to work, you got a timekeeper in there to check how much time you can stay in there. You got a pencil in your pocket—</p>
<p>Moore: That’s a dosimeter pencil?</p>
<p>Ash: No, that’s just a pencil that picks up the reading of what you’re getting. You got that in your pocket. Then you got another little deal that they puts on you, that if you got radiation it’d beep—a beeping pencil. So you had an RM that do the check you out. He’s standing right out there. And if you’re out there deconning a place to where these guys can work, the RM would get you with a machine.</p>
<p>Moore: The radiation monitors?</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, radiation monitor. He’d tell you, say, well, this place then is clean. This guy can work in here now for eight hours. Or he can work in here for four hours without picking up radiation. That’s what we were doing. In some places it was so hot, you can work in there under an hour, then they got to change peoples. Then when they got through decon, we got to go in, pull of our clothes, and you got three step-off pads. You got a guy helping you to undress. Now all the clothes you got on now is all hot and full of all that junk. One guy got to pull all of that off of you. He got to pull them boots off of you, and then you step on this pad. You go to the second pad, and you pull the rest of your clothes off. They supposed to be cleaned. Then you step on the next pad, and the only thing you got on there is just your shorts. Then the man come down, he check you all over. You don’t put nothing in your mouth, you don’t smoke a cigarette until you wash your hands. Until he done check you out, you don’t, until you wash your hands.</p>
<p>Moore: So they were very careful.</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, mm-hmm. So then you go and you’d come out there and you’d sign out. You got to sign in on a piece of paper when you go into radiation zones, and you’ve got to sign out. And when you sign out and that’s just the way it is. And if you go in there and you got all sort of crapped out with the radiation, then they’ve got the monitor to come out there and they’ve got to clean you up. Sometime it’d take half a day to get you all clean. They got to scrub you down, wash you down, then they got to put this on, and wash you down, wear that, and check you all over again. I got so heavy one time, they had to cut a piece of hair off my head and scrape my head quite a bit. So it’s—but if a person fall into radiation, follow the—the only time a person really got crapped up, and some guy—now, I know several people have got it in their skin. If you had a cut place on yourself, you supposed to come out of there right now. But some guys, some of the people feel like they got more education than other people, they can stay in there for a while. Oh, I can do this and I can do that. That’s the time you’re gonna get caught up with it. So that’s what happened with quite a few people. But I got crapped up several times. Several times, they’d taken two and three hours to get you clean. But they gonna clean you before you leave away from there. And then you’d come back the next day, they still gonna check you again.</p>
<p>Moore: They can’t risk it spreading.</p>
<p>Ash: Huh?</p>
<p>Moore: Can’t risk it spreading?</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah. Because it is a risk. Yes, if you get it inside, you get sick. It just stay in there as long as you live, and that’s the way it is.</p>
<p>Moore: So when the work day was over and you go home at night or it’s the weekend, what kinds of things did people, did you or your friends do away from work? Did you have social things that you did?</p>
<p>Ash: Things we did away from home?</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Ash: Oh, well, I’d say I didn’t do too much. I come home and stay home. Stay home with the wife and children sometime. Sometime we’d get up there and we would go downtown some place. Sometimes we’d go out of town but by the time we’d go out of town, me and the wife and children would go in Oregon someplace, drive around. Just about everywhere where me and my wife would be going, the children was with us anyway.</p>
<p>Moore: Was there much to do in Kennewick and Richland and Pasco?</p>
<p>Ash: Well, I didn’t find too much to do. Of course a lot of them people I guess were going in taverns, drinking, they probably were having beer. But I wasn’t drinking so I didn’t need to go in no tavern.</p>
<p>Moore: I hear you.</p>
<p>Ash: So my place was, I’d go to church, this place right there. I’d go out of town some weekends. So that’s about the size of it.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay, well, I appreciate all the information you’d given me today. After retirement, have you kept in touch with people from the Site at all?</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, well, since I’m retired now, I just really couldn’t, I’ve been working taking care of myself ever since I was 14 years old, 15 years old. So I just can’t—some people retire—I can say this, but we got what you call the whole J.A. Jones retirement picnic. We go to Prosser every year, there’s a big picnic, I guess you’ve heard about it.</p>
<p>Moore: I think you told me something about it in August.</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, I did. And we got about three or four women there. You go there, they call the roll, how many’s gone, how many J.A. Jones left here. They call the roll, all of them J.A. Jones people that died and all of us that’s left. And you know, I go over there and I look just at the people that retired and just sit down. Boy, coming out there that can’t walk, they got on crutches and canes staggering around. But I found out one thing about it is the second—you can take a brand new car and you can sit it in that garage for two years and it’s no good. That’s right. You can’t start it. It won’t never run good. So that’s the way it is when a person just sits down. But I feel better doing something. I do a little odd jobs now since I retired. I didn’t retire and just sit down. I got me a little odd job to do. I’ll do a little hedge trimming. I fool around, I got experience on trimming shrubs and like anybody want ‘em, what shape they want ‘em, I can trim ‘em.</p>
<p>Moore: Keeps you busy, keeps you young.</p>
<p>Ash: Huh?</p>
<p>Moore: Keeps you young.</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, so? I got some good peoples. I got [UNKNOWN]. I got my doctor, I been taking care of his place for 23 years. And I got another business guy over there. I’ve been taking care of his yard and shrubs there for 27 years. The whole west side, I worked on their yard, because I used to take care of them when I was over at Hanford part-time. So I just got to keep a-doing something. Now, you want me to feel bad, and loaf, if I can sit around here for a whole week or something like that, I’d go out of town for a whole week, I ain’t got nothing to do, when I get back here, I’m just about [unknown] I gotta get out there and get to doing something.</p>
<p>Moore: [LAUGHTER] Well, I think you have the right idea, because it’s keeping you fit and keeping you young.</p>
<p>Ash: It do. Well, like they say, if you used to doing something, then you got to keep active. They said that. I’ve seen too many people—I worked with a guy, him and I worked together. And I was somewhere in the neighborhood and I was way older than he was. He retired since I retired. And I met him one day down there, and looked at him. Here you come, some peoples on this side of him, other people on this side of him, holding him up so he could walk. And I’m somewhere over ten years older than he was. I asked him, what’s wrong with you, fella? He said, well, when I retired, I was gonna take it easy. He said, so I retired and I went home, I got me a case of beer, and I sit up and drink beer and I watch the football game. That case out, I go get me another case of beer, sit home and watch the football game. So I says, now, you just watched the football game too long and now you can’t walk. He said, mister, that’s about the size of it. But if you believe it or not, if you used to working, you gonna have to keep something to do. It may not be much, but you got to be active. If you gonna sit down, you ain’t gonna be there long, and that’s for sure. If you go sit down, you just gonna be—</p>
<p>Moore: That’s good advice for all of us. It sure is.</p>
<p>Ash: Rip Davis, one time, he was a guy—he was a head man over at the operators. He retired but like I did, and he went home, he went home and he said, I’m gonna take it easy. He hired a guy to take care of his yards, he hired a guy to take care of his shrubs and everything. I said, Rip, what you doing? He said, oh, I got everything hired out. I said, Rip, you better start a-doing something. He said, oh no. And about, oh about a year after that, I seen him, he come dragging along. He said, Ash, you looking awful good. I said, yeah! He said, you know one thing, I’m gonna run that guy off of my yard and I’m gonna start doing my yard myself. He went up there and he run all them people off his yard, he started doing it and the man looked better the next time I seen him, he looked better. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Moore: There you go. Yeah. Oh, okay. I’d like to ask permission, if it’s okay for us to film some of the photographs of your family just so we have them on tape.</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, that’s fine with me.</p>
<p>Moore: And the editor may bring some of those into the final tape. So thanks for all of that information.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Moore: The other one is 20. He lives at home still, works for Leonard. But, yeah, they’re big boys. I wish we could recognize some people in this one, but there’s just too many shadows on their faces. Some of those workers? With those hats and everything.</p>
<p>Ash: Yeah, those are some hardhats. I know about them. I wore them a lot. Them hardhats. You had to wear them hardhats.</p>
<p>Mrs. Ash: When we first came in, they had a little joint down there on Lewis Street, and boy that was a jumping new place. All the peoples went. But you know it was never much [inaudible]</p>
<p>Moore: Virginia Crippen, I heard about the Chicken Shack, and Tommy Moore’s Poulet Palace and some other places.</p>
<p>Mrs. Ash: Virginia, she found herself having chicken [inaudible] really good.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, we interviewed her too. I guess she came up just because—she didn’t ever work out there, but she heard that people were here and they could use some places to eat. And she lived out in California or Portland or somewhere and came up and opened her chicken place.</p>
<p>Mrs. Ash: She did!</p>
<p>Moore: She did all right, I guess.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
J.A. Jones Construction
300 Area
345 Building
100-H
100-B
100-C
100-D
100-DR
K East
K West
100-N
100 Area
200 East Area
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1947-2012
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1947-1981
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Edward Ash, Sr.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Tacoma (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Migration
Nuclear reactors
Segregation
Racism
Radioactive decontamination
Description
An account of the resource
Edward Ash, Sr. moved to Pasco, Washington in 1947 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1947-1981.
An interview conducted by the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society (AACCES) as part of an oral history project documenting the lives of African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
African American Community Cultural and Educational Society
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
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video/mpg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
08/25/2001
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdb9a8ea9be9f00d6ba6f3188d6d9d9f4.png
2fa7b460111a708fe614a230c0e2c9cb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Wally Webster
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: We ready? Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Wally Webster on July 20, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Wally about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Wally Webster: Wallace Webster. I go by Wally. That’s W-E-B-S-T-E-R, is the spelling of my last name.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what about the first name?</p>
<p>Webster: The first name is W-A-L-L-A-C-E.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Thanks, Wally.</p>
<p>Webster: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: So, tell me how—well, let’s talk about, let’s start by talking about your life before Hanford. When and where were you born, and where did you live before coming to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Webster: Okay. I was born in a small town east of Mobile, Alabama, called Theodore. And if you go down there, they say The-do. But I graduated from high school. I immediately left Alabama and made a very quick stop in Oakland, California, and then headed for Pasco, Washington.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what—</p>
<p>Webster: So I’ve been here since 1962.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1962. And what year were you born?</p>
<p>Webster: I was born in 1944.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what—so you said you had graduated—went to school in Theodore, Alabama. I wonder if you could talk about your education there, back in Alabama and kind of the prevailing situation there.</p>
<p>Webster: Okay. That’s a good point, because it lends to my activities in Pasco. I went to school in a segregated school system. I graduated from high school. It was still segregated at that time. So, when I graduated from high school, I knew then that there was a better place that I could live. I didn’t know where that was, so I went to Oakland, California for a short period of time to live with my brother. Then I get an opportunity from my uncle to move to Pasco. In fact, he asked me to help him drive to Pasco. When I helped him drive to Pasco, I didn’t go back to Oakland. So that’s how I got here. And again, I was very, very familiar with segregation whether it was de facto or institutionalized. When I got to Pasco, I was surprised at the de facto segregation that I found in Pasco, which was very, very similar to what I experienced in Alabama.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Wallace: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: More similar to Alabama than in Oakland?</p>
<p>Wallace: Yes. I didn’t stay in Oakland very long, so I can’t speak a lot to Oakland. But when I got to Pasco, all the black people, or 90% of the black people living in east Pasco. The schools that—the elementary school was Whittier School. It was completely black, with the exception of maybe a few white students that came from the north side of Pasco. That didn’t seem right. I thought I was leaving that behind me when I took the Greyhound bus and left Alabama. Matter of fact, it was somewhat disturbing after a while and learning the city, that I became very active—and some people would say an activist—but I became very active in helping, or doing something about breaking down that system.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What did your parents do in Alabama?</p>
<p>Webster: My mom was a stay-home mom. My dad was a laborer and a minister. He worked at an air force base. It’s closed now. It’s called Brookley Field Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama, which was about ten or twelve miles east of Theodore.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your father—what were your parents’ levels of education?</p>
<p>Webster: My dad was quite literate but he only went to the eighth grade, and my mom was probably the sixth or seventh grade. They had five kids and four of the five got advanced degrees from universities. And the older one, he left home and became a construction laborer and became a journeyman painter and drywaller. Of the five of us, as I said earlier, we all got advanced college degrees and they insisted on us getting an education and doing better in life than what they were doing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was Theodore—so Theodore was a segregated town as well?</p>
<p>Webster: Yes. And it was segregated from the standpoint of all black people lived in one section of Theodore and all the whites lived in another section. Sometime that may have been across the road, but there was a dividing point. When I was going to school, a school bus would pick up the white students that lived down the road from me, but we all had to walk to school. So I saw that kind of discrimination all of my life.</p>
<p>The one thing that I will point out is you become acclimated to that condition after you’ve lived in it a long time, and it became another way of life—or a way of life. You don’t really understand it until you go someplace else and see the difference. Maybe the first eye-opener I had was the very short time I lived in Oakland. It was more integrated than where I lived in Theodore. Then when I came to Pasco, I was more shocked, because I could see identically to what I saw and experienced and lived in, in Alabama.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned your uncle asked you to help drive a truck up here. Did you have family in the area?</p>
<p>Webster: In this area?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Webster: He was my only.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how did he get here?</p>
<p>Webster: As I understand it, and I think I’m probably 90% accurate, when he got out of the military, out of the Army, he joined the labor movement. At that time, the labor movement, or migration, was from the Oakland military installations down there up to Hanford, where they were constructing all kinds of buildings and programs here. And then they migrated on up to Anchorage, Alaska and worked there during the summer months and then they came back to this area. He decided that he no longer wanted to migrate with the construction industry. He worked construction here for a while. But he built a building and in it he housed three businesses. One was a restaurant, the other one was a pool hall, and the other one was a beer tavern.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was this in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Webster: In east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Do you remember the names of these places?</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, it was Jack’s Grill and Pit, was the name of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that was, the three businesses were Jack’s Grill and Pit?</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, and they were all under that title. And they had separate walls and separate buildings. When he came down to Oakland, it was about October, I think, and he came down to the World Series, as a matter of fact. I think the Giants and the Dodgers were playing at that time. And then I came back up here with him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. What were your first impressions when you arrived in Pasco?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, I liked the city, I liked where I lived. Like I said earlier, once I got here, I never did go back to Oakland. So I liked it a whole lot better than I did Oakland. But as I got to learn the city, I became more aware that it was not much different from where I came. And as I studied it more, and got to know more people, those individuals came from the same states and cities that I was familiar with: Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana. They had come here, also, with the labor migration. I couldn’t understand for a long time why all of the black folks was concentrated east of Pasco, which was on the other side of the railroad tracks. So as I got to talk to more people and got to learn about them, I quickly learned that many of them were very pleased to have a job and to work and make a living for their families, and accepted the housing that was available. That housing was in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. And they kind of accepted—for a time, accepted the de facto segregation.</p>
<p>Webster: Oh, absolutely, yes, yes.</p>
<p>And I’ll tell you, the thing that I liked about east Pasco, a great deal, which was similar to where I lived in Theodore, we all knew each other and knew each other very well. I don’t know if there was a person in Pasco at that time that I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, after I’d been there for six or eight months or so. So that’s how I got to know who they are, where they came from, who their families were. And then it became obvious that something was wrong.</p>
<p>And a little bit more about myself, when I first got to Pasco and enrolled at Columbia Basin College, on the way up, my uncle was talking to me about my goals and opportunities and what I wanted to do in life. We had thirteen, fourteen hours together to do that. And I said I wanted to go to college, because that’s something my dad and mom had popped into our head. But I left home before I enrolled in college. So he took me to Columbia Basin College in January, that was the beginning of the quarter. After meeting with counselors and talking to them, I was told that I was not college material. That my education was not up to par, and they didn’t think I could make it through college. That was very disappointing to me.</p>
<p>I met a gentleman that I admire to this day. He heard my story. He was an administrator or coach or something at Columbia Basin. He talked to me about majoring or taking accounting. He explained it this way: he said, it can take you three hours to work a problem; it could take the next person 30 minutes. But if you come up with the same answer, what difference does it make? As long as you have the fortitude to stick with it and get it done. You also can check it to make sure it’s accurate. That’s what steered me into accounting, finance. And I spent 30-some years in banking and finance.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember his name?</p>
<p>Webster: His name was Sig Hansen.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sig?</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, S-I-G. I never will forget his name the rest of my life. He was probably one of the most inspirational individuals, from an education or career that I’ve met in my life.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did you graduate from CBC?</p>
<p>Webster: Twice. [LAUGHTER] They didn’t have a WSU campus out here at that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. What did you get degrees in?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, one was applied science and the other was business, with a business emphasis, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, that’s great. What was the first place you stayed in after you arrived here?</p>
<p>Webster: It’s no longer there, but I stayed at 725 South Hugo Street in east Pasco. It was A Street going towards Sacagawea Park. That’s where my uncle, not only had he built a business with three entities in it, he also had built an apartment building on the hill up there that had three or four apartments in it. The one apartment, he built especially for himself to live in. So I lived with him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your uncle sounds like quite the entrepreneur.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, no question about that. He left here after Urban Renewal purchased his property, and went to California. He went to Oakland because we had a lot of relatives in Oakland. He went there and opened a couple of businesses. So, yes, he was definitely an entrepreneur.</p>
<p>Franklin: So it was basically an apartment.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, it was an apartment.</p>
<p>Franklin: An apartment in a building that he owned.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, yes. It was an apartment building with four units in it, and he lived in the major unit in that building.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gotcha, gotcha. What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, after I started Columbia Basin College, I never will forget for the rest of my life—this. I was in a business class, a business machine class. I had never operated a full-key add machine at that time. So I’m struggling. And this young lady sitting behind me came over to help me put my hands on the right home keys on this machine. She just came over, and she leaned over, and her hair fell kind of on my shoulder. A white female. And I can remember—I became so petrified that I could not move. My whole body froze. Because I was conditioned in Alabama that not only didn’t you look at a white woman, especially, but to have her hair hanging over your shoulder, across, is tantamount to being lynched. That was an absolute no-no. And I never will forget. It frightened her, it frightened me. We remained friends for a long time after that, but that was one of the things that helped me understand that I had been preconditioned to something that I had to get over.</p>
<p>The second thing was—I mentioned Whittier School. I went to a segregated school, and I knew you can get comfortable. And I knew that when I left there and I went over to CBC, they told me that I was not up to par with my education. Something said to me that these kids are probably not up to par, either. So there has to be a reason why all black kids are going to school here and all white kids are going to school someplace else. Well, I know that a few of the parents were comfortable sending their kids to Whittier because it was close to home, they were afraid that if—because I was advocating close the school down, as opposed to bussing white kids in. They felt that it would drop the property value, also. Not only convenient as having their kids going down the street, but property values. But I was able to prevail in the thought and we pressed upon the school board, we marched, we demonstrated with enough parents, and they made the decision to close Whittier School. Later they tore the building down. But I just did not feel that they could get the right education.</p>
<p>And then in this process, I learned that a lot of people were not registered to vote. This is a story—I guess the statute of limitations is expired now. But I was only, at that time, I was 17 or 18. But I was not old enough to vote. The voting age at that time was still 21. Went to a couple of the—well, the two major parties, the democrats and republican parties to get a voter registration going. The democrats in this case said I was too young to register people to vote. I learned from that experience. I went to the republicans and they agreed that I could register people to vote, but I could not sign the application as the registrar.</p>
<p>So I took it upon myself at that point to conduct a voter registration drive, and we registered more people—I would basically hang out where my uncle’s business was and went in the community some organizations. I don’t recall this day how many people we registered, but it was definitely in the hundreds. That was one way of getting people engaged in changing the environment in which we lived.</p>
<p>In Alabama, you could vote, but you had to play a poll tax. You had to pass an exam, then pay a poll tax to vote. And here all you had to do was go down and fill out the application and then turn it in.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think that the poll tax and the exam is something that’s so foreign to a lot of people these days, especially younger generation. Could you talk about in a little more detail about what that was, and how that stopped black people from voting?</p>
<p>Webster: Yes. Think of it in the context of your earnings, number one. Even if you were educated enough, or learned enough about the exam through some basic classes to pass it, they impose this tax. This tax was compounded. So they’ll look at your age, for an example, and say, oh, you’re 50 years old, so we’re going to charge you a dollar a year since birth. Now your tax is $50, for an example. So before you could get your voter registration approved, you had to pay the $50. And it increased every year thereafter. Well, if you’re only making enough to put bread on the table and pay the rent, that wasn’t your number one priority. So it discouraged—and it was intended to discourage. Each county kind of set their own tax levels. Some may be $.50; some may be $2 a year. But they raised it to a level that it discouraged African Americans from voting.</p>
<p>Franklin: And there was no poll tax on whites.</p>
<p>Webster: There were—now, I’m going to assume there were poll tax on whites. I don’t know the answer to that, to tell you the truth.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what about the exam? Was it—what kinds of, from your knowledge, what kinds of questions and things were asked of people?</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah. As I recall from listening to my father and others that took the exam, it was more white history. You learned about General E. Lee, you learned about the Civil War and why it was fought, but not that it was a war that was fought to end slavery; it was a war that was fought to preserve the economy of the South. So it was more, if I may use the term, white history, than who were governors at this point in time, the legislators, the senators, as opposed to African American history.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hm. It must’ve been—I can’t imagine the feeling of being black and having to answer questions about why the Civil War was fought in order to vote.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, yeah. And I’ll tell you another thing that—you just triggered a thought. We would always get our books and materials and school buses and everything else, they were kind of the hand-me-downs. They came from the whites. Those books that had anything in it about black history, those pages were torn out before we got the books. I can remember, some people in the community would go and order books directly from the publisher. But we didn’t take those books to school; we took the books that had the N-word written all through it and everything else. Drawings of lynchings on front pages of the book, on the blank sheets of it. Those are the books that we learned from. So after a while, you just kind of—it just kind of rolls off.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, it becomes normalized.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes. Exactly, exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that kind of terror. Wow. You’d mentioned earlier that when you came here and you started to talk to people, there were people from Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma. Were most of the people—African Americans you met in east Pasco—were they all recent migrants from the South?</p>
<p>Webster: There had been somewhat recent, but generations came with parents. Because, mind you, I came in 1962. A lot of those people had worked at Hanford for 40 years at that time, or longer. But if you stop and think about it, if you have a family, and you have migrated to Pasco, and you’re working every day, and you’re earning two or three times more than you were earning when you were in Louisiana or Texas, and you were able to bring your family, you felt pretty good about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Webster: And you got pretty comfortable. And you did not necessarily think about upsetting the apricots, so to speak. So they became conditioned. It was nothing—you didn’t take a second thought about having to go shop at Grigg’s Department Store to get what you want, and you go underneath a railroad track and up to go to Grigg’s. You just did it. And you earned enough money to be able to go to the department store.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you didn’t have to go in a separate entrance.</p>
<p>Webster: That’s exactly right.</p>
<p>Franklin: But if you went to Kennewick, you could go during the day, but you couldn’t go at night.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, yes. Yeah, Kennewick was branded at that time by one of the regional NAACP/civil rights leaders as the Birmingham of the Northwest. Locally it was referred to as the sundown town. You could be there during the day, but by sundown you had to be out. It was basically, for all practical purposes, it was segregated. Just like Birmingham. It didn’t even have an east Pasco. It was white almost 100% all over.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because covenants had kept—</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Had kept African Americans from purchasing a home.</p>
<p>Webster: Until the Fair Housing Act was passed, they had these covenants of first right of refusal. So if I was selling to—if one of the owners decides to sell to a black person, someone could step in and say I’m exercising my right of first refusal and buy the property. But if they were selling it to a white person, they would not exercise that right. So they used that as a means to keep it segregated.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it wasn’t until the mid- to late-‘60s, right, where the first African Americans—</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: The Slaughter family.</p>
<p>Webster: The Slaughter family, yeah. And that was done a little bit as a challenge to the covenants, to see if the Fair Housing Act would be enforced. So it was kind of a demonstration to that, a challenge to that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you meet any Manhattan Project—people who had worked on the Manhattan Project that had come up for construction and had stayed in Pasco?</p>
<p>Webster: I met a number of them that have passed on now, of course.</p>
<p>Franklin: Of course.</p>
<p>Webster: And had an opportunity to interact and talk with and, matter of fact, two or three of the individuals who were my—I consider my strongest supporters, had come up through the Manhattan act.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were they?</p>
<p>Webster: One name, E.M. Magee. He was head of the NAACP. Another one was Luzell Johnson. He was a very, very quiet, unassuming man, but very powerful. When he spoke, people listened.</p>
<p>Franklin: He helped found Morning Star.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, yes, exactly right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right? In his home with his wife.</p>
<p>Webster: Very wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man. Another one, his name was Ray Henry. When I call these names, a lot of times, these may not be the formal names on their birth certificates, but these are the names we got to know them by very affectionately. But I’m pretty sure his name was Ray Henry. E.M. Magee, Luzell Johnson, I’m pretty sure those are their correct names. Those three individuals were very, very helpful in keeping me grounded as a youngster.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, I knew that there was a shortage of labor, and I knew that they went to the states where there were high populations of African Americans and brought that labor to Hanford. Subsequently, I learned from some of the declassification of information back relating to that time, that there was a systematic strategy to get the work done, but not to bring social justice along with it.</p>
<p>What do I mean by that? When they brought African Americans here, they maintained the segregation. They maintained the separate chow halls and eating facilities and living facilities. They would post signs, this particular chow hall is for Negroes and this for whites. And they basically kept whites as supervisors. So they brought the segregation system, picked it up and moved it here in tact. Because, as I understand it, they wanted to build buildings as opposed to do social engineering. So that’s another reason why blacks were in east Pasco, is that’s where they each agreed that they could go and live, as opposed to Kennewick, and Richland, which was a government town. There were a few blacks in Richland, but very, very few that met the criteria for living in Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and that criteria was a job with AEC—</p>
<p>Webster: At a certain level.</p>
<p>Franklin: --at a certain level, which would’ve been a challenge to say the least, for most African Americans to have that education and to prevail on the standard hiring practices of the 1940s and 1950s.</p>
<p>Webster: That’s exactly right. There was not the predominate number of people coming in from the labor supply that they were looking to build the plants out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: But there were several black families in Richland, is that right?</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you name them?</p>
<p>Webster: You know, I don’t know all of their names. I think the Wallaces were one. I don’t know names, but I do know there were several black families. I did not know them personally, to be honest with you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. Let’s see here. We kind of—oh, I wanted to—from your perspective, thinking about the African Americans that came during World War II to help build Hanford and who stayed, what were their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, number one is, this does not necessarily relate to civil rights, but I saw a very, very strong sense of family, a very strong sense of community. Even though by my perception, it was a segregated community. But there was a very strong sense of community. There were a lot of African Americans who worked at Hanford after it was built, and they were part of the downwinders. I don’t know if you got into that a whole lot, but they were part of the folks who were contaminated and were actually compensated for their illnesses from working out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that because of the location of east Pasco, or were they—was it due to exposure on the job?</p>
<p>Webster: Both the job and where they lived.</p>
<p>The one other thing that I really appreciated, even though they went to an elementary school that was segregated—and it’s part of this family values—there were siblings who their kids were encouraged to go to the high school—which, Pasco then only had one high school. And was encouraged to go on to college. There were Pasco-ites that went on to the NFL and there’s some wonderful things as a result of the experience that they got here at Hanford.</p>
<p>So, I don’t mean to say that the quality of life was so bad that they couldn’t overcome the challenges. But I saw challenges in my generation that I thought was not necessary. And I thought we had overcome in other parts of the world.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you feel that—you’d mentioned how Pasco kind of surprised you that Pasco was so much like Alabama. Did you think, leaving Alabama, that you were leaving that kind of segregation behind?</p>
<p>Webster: Oh, no question. When I left Alabama, I was so determined to leave—and I was very young and I can think back now how my parents must’ve felt with me saying I’m leaving home. I had a fried chicken in a cardboard box, my mom cooked a pound cake, and I bought a loaf of bread. That was my meal. And then when I bought my ticket at the Greyhound bus station from Mobile, Alabama to Oakland, California, I had $29 left. With those kinds of resources, going from one part of the world that you’d never been in before, going to another part of the world you’ve never been before, it took some determination and something to say you have the motivation to leave here. I guess from TV and other places, I decided to pack up and leave. Then when I got here, and again I found the same thing that I was experiencing in Alabama, I thought, my goodness, why did I make the sacrifice?</p>
<p>But I could see, just because I was able to go over to Columbia Basin College, and the fact that I could walk n the front door and go in the registrar’s office—even though the counselor told me I would never ever matriculate in college. That was an incentive. And I’ll tell you something else, when I got my master’s degree, I went over and I took a photocopy of it and I left it in his office. He wasn’t there, so I just left it in his office. But the thing that I appreciate most is arriving in this town of Pasco, the east side, and getting the level of support that I had as a newcomer. But I think they saw me as a teenager, as a youngster, who wanted to do something. And all the folks just said, let’s get behind him and do something, because he’s trying to do something positive. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. Kind of still a segregated environment, but one that maybe had more opportunity than the South for you, and for others?</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, but you know, in the South, there’s one thing, at least when I was growing up: you had an opportunity to go to college, but you went to, again, a segregated college.</p>
<p>Franklin: To an HBC?</p>
<p>Webster: To an HBC. You had an opportunity in many times to be a professional, whether it was a school teacher or an administrator. You didn’t have the options of being a medical doctor unless you went to another school in another state. Like in Alabama, my brother wanted to go to medical school and back in the days, they would pay you—the state would pay, if you would accepted in medical school, let’s say in Tennessee or something, to an all-black school. They would pay the tuition, because they didn’t want you going to University of Alabama, for an example. So they would pay your out-of-state tuition to go there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why would that be?</p>
<p>Webster: To keep it segregated. It was segregation. “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.” You’ve probably—</p>
<p>Franklin: George Wallace, right?</p>
<p>Webster: That’s exactly right. So to keep it segregated, they would pay for you to go to another state. So it was—people who lived here were aware of that. And I think they just needed someone to be an advocate for change.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did you attend church?</p>
<p>Webster: Here?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I was a member, active member of New Hope Baptist Church, which was right up the hill from Morning Star.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. How long did you go there for?</p>
<p>Webster: I’m going to say probably ten years.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did church play in the community?</p>
<p>Webster: The church was the foundation of the community. Almost everything positive came out of the church. I’ll give you an example. I felt that in order—it’s kind of going back to England and where they have piazzas, the places you can go and congregate and community, things like—I thought that Pasco needed a place, a neutral place, where people could go and they could call it a community center. And I could see the value of people gathering. We had a little place over in east Pasco called Kurtzman Park. It was a little building there. And I thought that we could do better.</p>
<p>So I studied up and found that HUD had what they call block grants. They would give block grants for certain amounts of dollars depending on your application. I worked and worked and worked and got the city, the city manager, Mar Winegar, one of the finest city managers I think that ever held a city manager job anywhere, agreed to work with me in helping to complete an application. We completed a HUD application and got some $440,000-$450,000 to build what is now known as the Martin Luther King Center in east Pasco. The central labor council owned the land where that building is. We worked with them, and they deeded that land as part of the in-con contribution to match the HUD block grant. We were able to put that together.</p>
<p>The way that we—part of Mar Winegar’s help and assistance—we were able to work out a strategy where the Pasco Parks and Recreation would somewhat manage the building. But to get the revenue, we went to get the various state agencies and other organizations to rent space in the building to help maintain it. So DS&HS, I think, had a small office there. Employment, security, had a small office there. Central Labor Council had a small recruiting office. So there were different offices in this building to help maintain it.</p>
<p>And it became a community center. And not only did the community need the services of the agencies that were there, but it became a—but to answer your question, all of that came out of the basement of Morning Star Baptist Church. Reverend Allen was the pastor at that time. So I think if you point to almost any significant accomplishment, the genesis of it came from the spiritual and religious community.</p>
<p>Franklin: It functioned as a meeting place.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: In the community.</p>
<p>Webster: That’s where the people went. I mean, when you wanted to do something, you go where the people are. On Sunday morning, that’s where you’re going to find them, and that’s where you make your point. You convince the pastor that it’s worthwhile, and then they’ll let you get up and make announcements and talk to the congregation where you’ve got a captive audience. That’s how you got your message across. So it was—because you didn’t have a newspaper or TV channel or radio station or any of those, except for a routine newscast or something. But if you wanted to tell your whole story, you had to go to the church.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. How would you describe life in the community, in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Webster: It was probably one of the best lives that I have lived. And I say that because everybody cared for one another. People lived in harmony. Didn’t have much, so it wasn’t economically driven; it was more social- and spiritual-driven. Everyone was treated with respect. You’d hear very few disagreements. You didn’t have what they have today with solving disagreements, you know, with violence. It was probably one of the best places I’ve lived in my life.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Webster: Now, or then?</p>
<p>Franklin: Then.</p>
<p>Webster: Then? I didn’t have any spare time, because I was going to college at the time, and I was also very active in the community. I was president—I went on to become president of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. I was president of the Tri-City chapter although I was very young, but again—</p>
<p>I want to make this point, something that I did not experience in Alabama. There were white people of quote-unquote high stature with very high moral commitments to help bring about this change. When I say that, I’m talking about lawyers and educators and scientists out here on the project who helped to bring about this change. You know, if I named—if I started naming like the Ed Critchlows—I don’t know if you’ve—the Critchlow, Williams and Ryals law firm, I think, is still in existence here in Richland. A guy named John Sullivan was a lawyer. Dick Nelson was a scientist here in the Project. I mean, there were just a number of people who migrated to this area from other places, highly educated, technical backgrounds, could see the same thing that I saw and was willing to give their time and knowledge and energies to bring about this—the Brouns, Dick and Nyla Brouns. They gave of their time and talents and financial resources to help bring about this change. That was one of the better learning experiences I’ve had.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you said that was different from Alabama.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes. I mean, I never saw, in my generation, and certainly years later where there were whites in the North that was part of the Freedom Ride and other movements, Martin Luther King’s movement, that came to the South. But you didn’t find folks that lived in Theodore, Alabama helping to bring about a change for black folks in Alabama. So that was my first opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder with white people to bring about this change.</p>
<p>When we were marching on Pasco, for an example. Pasco City Hall was a totally white city hall that was supposedly serving the whole city. There was not a police officer, or anyone in public works, engineering, or any of those places. So, we were marching on city hall for employment opportunities. The Pasco Police Department, for example, had never had—at that time, had not had any people of color working. I applied for a grant that paid the salary of the first police officer in Pasco, on the Pasco Police Department.</p>
<p>Franklin: There were also some issues between the Pasco Police Department and residents of east Pasco. There was some tension there, in that relationship in the ‘60s?</p>
<p>Webster: As I recall, not to the extent that you have today, and not for the same reasons that you have today. I don’t recall any shootings of unarmed black people or anything like that. I look back and I think there probably was some collusions on the part of the police department and some of the elicit activities that were going on, you know. Because some of these things operated in broad, open daylight, that if you had a police department that was cracking down on them, it wouldn’t have been possible.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was just looking back on an old interview with James Pruitt. I don’t know if that name is familiar to you.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, Jim Pruitt? Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: He had been—Jim, yeah, sorry. In the interview, the interviewer keeps calling him James, and he’s like, Jim, my name is Jim.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: He had been—he was appointed as a liaison between east Pasco and the police department, because there had been some excessive force arrests or something to that nature—or, it just seemed like there was a relationship that was a little rocky there for a period of time that would’ve warranted a liaison, right? Or was it just that maybe there was no interface between city government and east Pasco?</p>
<p>Webster: I think it was more that than—I’ll be honest with you, I don’t recall. I just don’t recall where there were racial tensions or anything like that between the police. I just don’t recall that. And I do—I know Jim well—knew him well. It was more during the Urban Renewal and when that was going on. I think you may have talked to Webster about that. It was more during that time, when we were looking at bridging the gaps, the communications gaps and all that, because Jim was a liaison, I think, at the time that I got the grant to hire our first police officer. So I don’t recall that it was racial tension as we know it today.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. But there’s certainly—a big part of your efforts was a big push to make the city more representative of its citizens.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes. Streets and sidewalks were an example. Things that we didn’t have that the west side had. Education, where kids could go to school and get the same quality of education that the west side got. Those were kind of—jobs where they could—not just the labor jobs at Hanford, but jobs working in the City of Pasco, whether you were working for the surveying group or—as a matter of fact, I think I went to work for a while as a member of a survey team in city hall, going out surveying streets and looking at improvement districts and stuff like that. So it was that kind of—but we had to push city hall and city management to move on those areas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Webster: And that was pushed with a lot of leather on the streets.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you mentioned that you had been president of CORE, the Tri-Cities chapter of CORE.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And CORE was a pretty young organization at that time, right?</p>
<p>Webster: Correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did it draw from all the three cities?</p>
<p>Webster: Yes. Oh, yes. Matter of fact, a number of our meetings were actually held in Kennewick. A lot of the organizing and strategizing meetings were held in Kennewick. And many of the folks that was part of it came from Richland as well. And a number of them worked on the Hanford Project in very professional managerial roles.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah, I’ve interviewed several folks who were involved with that. You mentioned the Brouns and then we had interviewed the Millers here—</p>
<p>Webster: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And Jim Stoffels who was secretary.</p>
<p>Webster: Right, right, right. The Millers, especially. They were involved as a family. I guess so with the Brouns. But I can remember the Millers were involved as a family. They were right there every day, working side-by-side. And we organized marches. We went from Pasco to Kennewick to emphasize the sundown.</p>
<p>Franklin: Over the bridge?</p>
<p>Webster: Over the bridge, over the bridge.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that the green bridge?</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, it was. It’s kind of comical now when I look back. We were marching over, arm-in-arm and walking across, and there some cars on the other side of the bridge, they were standing there with the rebel flag on them, and they were raising the engine, and you can hear the engines roaring. I was arm-in-arm with Jack Tanner, who was the regional NAACP president at that time out of Tacoma, very influential lawyer at that time, and went on to be a federal court judge. I looked over at Jack. I said, Jack, what are we going to do? Because we thought they were revving up these engines to just run the cars. And he looked at me and said, can you swim? [LAUGHTER] I never will forget that. I said, no, I can’t swim in that water! Across the Columbia River. And he said, well, let’s keep on marching then. Okay, so we just kept marching and went on to the other side.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. How did that feel to see that symbol, which you must’ve grown up seeing the Confederate flag all over the place. How did it feel to see that in Kennewick and Pasco, in Washington State, where—</p>
<p>Webster: I’ll tell you. By that time, I was somewhat sensitized to what’s happening here and learned about. But it took me way back. I mean, it took me to the guys that was riding around on horsebacks with hoods over their heads with same flags. I mean, the only difference was that these individuals were in muscle cars with flags on them. But it was scary. It was scary.</p>
<p>Franklin: That symbol was meant to—</p>
<p>Webster: Intimidate.</p>
<p>Franklin: --intimidate you, right?</p>
<p>Webster: Intimidate, no question about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: They weren’t showing up to promote Southern heritage.</p>
<p>Webster: No, oh, no, no, no. It was to intimidate. But it was intended, in my judgment, to say to us, we’re going to keep Kennewick white. That’s what—and we’re going to challenge you on it. And, not in our backyard.</p>
<p>Franklin: You know, if I could share an anecdote real quick with you, a few weeks ago I went to the march for immigrants here in Richland.</p>
<p>Webster: Mm-hmm?</p>
<p>Franklin: And we were marching right by the courthouse, did a big loop around Howard Amon Park. And a gentleman in a truck—I thought this was really interesting—with a Confederate flag and an American flag, was rolling down the street revving his engine, yelling obscenities, flipping us the bird. Which, to see those two together is strange enough, but then to use that as a symbol of intimidation against immigrants. It still is clear as day what the intent of that symbolism is.</p>
<p>Webster: Right. And in the South, I think even to this day, the Civil War was just like it was fought last week.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Webster: I mean, with the rebel flags and the sentiments and beliefs and values is just like it was yesterday. And how those kinds of feelings can be carried forward for generations is just amazing. It’s amazing to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Do you remember any other particular community events, from—during those years in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Webster: You know, we had a number of—I’m trying to, you know, there’s—it’s kind of coming back to me now. I can’t remember the incident, but we had a number of meetings in Kurtzman Park that was very tense meetings. As a matter of fact, what used to happen is Carl Maxey from Spokane, prominent civil rights lawyer in Spokane, other lawyers from Seattle, would come to Pasco, because we didn’t have any African American lawyers here at that time, and help us with civil rights issues. I remember I was having a meeting in Kurtzman Park where it got pretty heated, just among the—I don’t remember the issues, but there was one bombing that took place here in east Pasco. It was this gentleman, who lives in Richland, had built a business—</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. I interviewed him. Oh, shoot.</p>
<p>Webster: Carter.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, Dan Carter.</p>
<p>Webster: Had built a business, janitorial business as well as he had a ceramic store. And somebody set off a bomb. We were all in Kurtzman Park, having a big powwow when that happened, because everybody jumped and ran. Not to say there were not some very tense times back in those days, but I don’t remember any killings or anything like that that were associated with our movement or anything.</p>
<p>Franklin: When I interviewed Dan and a couple others, they had alluded to—there was a disconnect or a tense relationship between African Americans in Richland and African Americans in east Pasco. And sometimes the two—not that they didn’t see eye-to-eye, but that people in east Pasco kind of felt that those in Richland or from outside the area who were trying to help were kind of outsiders or maybe they didn’t understand the Pasco issue. Would you say that’s the case?</p>
<p>Webster: I would say that’s somewhat true. There was this feeling that African Americans that came to Richland came after the African Americans in Pasco had really built Hanford. So they were being recruited for the best jobs, and they had the best quality of life. And often did not relate very well to the people of east Pasco. And, yes, that’s when this intra conflict started to exist. Although there were individuals in Richland that related very well. But it was more of an economic divide, and a social divide than a racial divide.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. Kind of a class thing.</p>
<p>Webster: Right, that’s exactly right. Right, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Related to kind of violence or destruction of property, I had heard in an older oral history, someone said that Luzell’s daughter had tried to move to Kennewick and someone had—the house had burned down.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, there were a number of incidents that happened right after the—and before the Civil Rights Act. I remember one individual—excuse me—who moved to Kennewick and it was Jones. Her last name was Jones. And they moved to Kennewick. She worked for the telephone company in Pasco. Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone had an office right on Lewis Street. At night, we would take turns driving immediately behind her from the time she got off at Bell to the time she walked in the front door. So somebody would be with her. We would not let her go home by herself, because of all the threats and stuff like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Like phone, telephone and mail?</p>
<p>Webster: And notes left on her car, and you name it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, wow.</p>
<p>Webster: Yup. Rocks thrown against the doors of her house. They were trailblazers, in a sense, like the Slaughters, some of the first ones to live in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Wow. I guess kind of a happier shift, do you recall any family or community events or traditions, including sports and food, that people brought from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Webster: [LAUGHTER] Yes. We had some big events in the park and folks had their specialties, whether it was their black-eyed peas or their fried chicken. You know, there was another business that we had that she would always provide the chicken. There was the chicken shack.</p>
<p>Franklin: Virgie’s?</p>
<p>Webster: Virginia’s. Virginia.</p>
<p>Franklin: Virginia’s Chicken Shack.</p>
<p>Webster: And then, believe it or not, she was in a building. She lived in one portion and the Chicken Shack was on the front. She didn’t start serving chicken until maybe 10:00 or 11:00 at night and would go all night because of folks that went to the tavern and everywhere else that would go there after hours, right? But then across the A Street, down further in almost like a private home was another lady, her name was Sally. I can’t tell you what her last name, but it was Sally’s, and that’s where you went and got all the barbecue. I mean, this lady would barbecue for days. So all of those things would come to the park. And then we would have the Juneteenth gathering. You probably got the history on that, on Juneteenth, but that was a time to come to the park, celebrate, put the benches out, bring your best dish, and people just kind of congregated, just from everywhere in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Franklin: That was the celebrating the arrival of the news that slavery—</p>
<p>Webster: That’s correct, had ended. Two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. And that was not exclusively but primarily a Texas event, right?</p>
<p>Webster: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: But there were a lot of—</p>
<p>Webster: Some in Oklahoma, but mostly in Texas, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because there was a pretty big contingent of families from, especially from Kildare that had moved up and—</p>
<p>Webster: Mm-hmm, you got it.</p>
<p>Franklin: --and brought that tradition with them.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, yes. And it’s kind of celebrated throughout the African American community to this day. But the point is that that was a major day in the park that people got together and brought their foods and their specialties there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So we talked a lot about opportunities. You—so I wanted to shift kind of to some of your work—I don’t exactly know your timeline, so I don’t know where to start, but I wanted to talk about your work at Hanford, but also your work with the Urban Renewal. So I don’t know which one of those is a better one to start with first.</p>
<p>Webster: Well, Urban Renewal was first.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Let’s talk about that first.</p>
<p>Webster: It was going on at the time that I was the executive director of the Benton-Franklin Community Action Committee, which was in the late ‘60s, ’69, probably, to ’73, somewhere in that timeframe.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were doing all of this in your late 20s, huh?</p>
<p>Webster: Oh, oh yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like 20s and early 30s.</p>
<p>Webster: Oh, yeah, and my teens.</p>
<p>Franklin: And your teens.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, early teens and early 20s. As director of the Community Action Committee—the Bi-county Community Action Committee, that was more of a continuation of some of the work that I had done as a teen in Pasco. As a matter of fact, I was offered a job almost the day I—I left as a teen because I got inducted into the military at the time—the draft. I should say, I got drafted into the military.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, for the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>Webster: Vietnam War. And then when I got out and came back to Pasco, discharged and came back to Pasco, I was immediately offered this job as the executive director of the Benton-Franklin Community Action Committee.</p>
<p>Franklin: What years were you gone?</p>
<p>Webster: I was gone from ’65 until ’69.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah. So in April of ’69 I became director of the Community Action Committee and again, continued some of the work that I was doing. Of course, that program was federally funded; it was part of the Economic Opportunity Act in the Johnson Great Society program. So you were limited in terms of how you could get involved in partisan politics, but city government and all those things were not considered partisan. They were considered non-partisan so I could be very active in those activities and working with the various organizations. So we created neighborhood councils and we were trying to get neighborhood councils to address issues in their specific neighborhoods.</p>
<p>One of the neighborhood councils that I worked closely with was the East Pasco Neighborhood Council. And there, we worked closely with the Urban Renewal, which, Webster Jackson headed that. There was tension and conflicts there from a program standpoint. Not necessarily from individuals running these programs, but from a program standpoint. The Urban Renewal program did not have a major component to it in terms of what was being renewed. We knew that they were buying houses that they considered to be dilapidated and moving people out, but there was no housing being developed to give people an option to stay in the neighborhood or another section of the neighborhood. So all those people who were in east Pasco next to the railroad track and somewhat west of Oregon Street or west of Wehe Street were being, property being purchased under the Urban Renewal program, like I said. But there was no replacement housing. So it became more and more industrial. We were kind of fighting to get housing.</p>
<p>Matter of fact, as part of that, Mister Romney, George Romney’s dad who ran for vice president or ran for president—</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, right, George Romney—for Mitt Romney.</p>
<p>Webster: From Michigan. Mitt Romney’s dad physically came to Pasco—</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Webster: --to meet with us. Yes, yes, I’ve got photos with him. Because we were concerned about that displacement.</p>
<p>It just so happened that that program lasted longer than I did, and I didn’t see it through. But I believe to this day that was probably one of the biggest failures that I encountered in the sense that, for me, that we didn’t see it through well enough to say if you buy this house, then you should have another affordable house to move in and hold the community together, as opposed to dispersing a community. A lot of people went to rentals and moved out of the area and so the neighborhood that we knew as east Pasco was basically, from a homeownership standpoint, was basically cut in half, if not more.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Yeah. I had heard that from a couple others that had been involved in Urban Renewal.</p>
<p>Webster: It’s all big industrial stuff now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. But it’d succeeded in getting rid of some of the very questionable and dilapidated housing, but it’d fragmented the community.</p>
<p>Webster: Exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: And didn’t replace that with better housing.</p>
<p>Webster: Right, yeah. Yeah, because a lot of people had taken—I wouldn’t say a lot, but some had taken their railroad cars that had been surplused I guess, and got them hauled in and joined them together. And they were putting them on cinder blocks and they were living in some of these places.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Webster: Very warm and nice and comfortable inside, but very limited space. But it was home.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, it was a home, and they fought to—it’s not like the government was allowing them to get home loans. But now the government was coming in and saying, well, you know, you got to get rid of this.</p>
<p>Webster: And buying it out, but no real place to go.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there pushback? From people in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Webster: There was pushback, but not from an organized pushback that I would’ve liked to have seen or that I think would exist today.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm, it was just individuals?</p>
<p>Webster: Yes. And again, I was a young kid, you know? I didn’t quite understand the whole dynamics and everything that was going on, so I couldn’t provide what I feel today is the leadership that that issue should’ve gotten to get the results that you were looking for.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. That’s a sad but kind of common story in American cities with Urban Renewals, is describing that same effect, is a lot of the attention is paid to the clearing-out but very little is paid to—</p>
<p>Webster: The building-up.</p>
<p>Franklin: And finishing the program.</p>
<p>Webster: That’s correct, that’s correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then what did you do—you mentioned you didn’t finish with the Community Action Council, or you didn’t finish with the program, what did you move on to?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, when I left there, I worked for a while after I got out of the CAC on completing the application and providing the infrastructure and the funding for the community center. I guess it’s called the Martin Luther King Community Center now. Got that all completed, got the construction.</p>
<p>But at that time, I moved on to Central. As I mentioned, I got two AAs from CBC. Then I had an opportunity to move on to Central and finish undergraduate and graduate there. And after I left Central—and I also worked at Central. I was their first community affirmative action director, in helping to bring about diversifying their faculty. That went well.</p>
<p>Then I came back to Hanford and worked at Boeing Computer Services as a employment manager. And had the opportunity to work there for quite a while, before I moved to Seattle and went into the banking business, and that’s where I retired.</p>
<p>Franklin: You said at Boeing you were a—</p>
<p>Webster: Employment manager.</p>
<p>Franklin: Employment manager. What’s—</p>
<p>Webster: HR.</p>
<p>Franklin: And was your job, was it a similar, for affirmative action type job?</p>
<p>Webster: That was included, but at that time, we were on an employment build-up. I had the authority, with the limitations of security clearances, et cetera, to offer jobs to individuals onsite as we went around the country interviewing. We had selection criteria of course, and if we felt that a person—and the competition drove a lot of that as well. Because if you’ve got to come back and wait to explain and help a manager understand why this person is good, someone else has hired them and they’re gone and no longer available. But we had the authority to offer the jobs right onsite, whether it was in San Francisco or Texas or wherever we were recruiting.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there many African Americans in similar positions to yours at Hanford, or was the workforce becoming more diversified?</p>
<p>Webster: Yes. At Hanford, the workforce was becoming more diversified, because I think that was driven a lot by the Department of Energy. There were two gentlemen, well, actually, three, that worked in the human resources area at Department of Energy. And these individuals were also active in the community, who drove a lot of that. I don’t know if you’ve heard the name Bob Hooper? Bob Hooper, Fred Rutt. I’ll get Chandler’s last name—first name here in a minute. But Fred Rutt, Bob Hooper, were in the employment area for Department of Energy. They influenced these contractors to do the same thing. As a matter of fact, Bob and Fred were also involved in community, like CORE and the Central Labor Council, which we worked very closely with in apprenticeship programs and recruiting there.</p>
<p>Then after I left, I left Boeing and went to—at that time, Rainier Bank, and I went into Rainier Bank in Affirmative Action. They were operating under a consent decree. But I had an agreement, after reading the consent decree and talking to executive management, that if I can meet the requirements—get the company to meet the requirements of this decree, which had to be signed off by a judge—that I would be able to go into the mainstream banking. We had a handshake on that. And the president of that bank, when the judge signed off on the decree, which was about two, two-and-a-half years later, I moved right into the mainstream of the bank. That’s where I stayed until I retired.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, wow. I wanted to ask you—you sent me a few newspaper articles, by mail, and thank you very much. There’s one of you receiving an employment application. Do you remember that photo? I wish I had brought it.</p>
<p>Webster: I think that was where I was leading a group to get employment applications.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think at the city.</p>
<p>Webster: At the city. That’s where we marched down to city hall and, as I mentioned to you, the city did not have people of color working. And in a challenge, they would tell me that we don’t have anybody working because no one ever applies. So I went and gathered up about ten people and we all went down to city hall at the same time to make applications for jobs that they had available. That’s when the photo was taken of us at the counter, applying for jobs, yeah.</p>
<p>I was—whether you’re talking about a voter registration drive, whether you’re talking about unemployment, whether you’re talking about school desegregation, I always thought there had to be an endgame. There had to be tangible results to say that you’ve done something. It wasn’t enough to march from Pasco to Kennewick or march around city hall or go to a schoolboard meeting and have placards in your hand. I had to be able to see African American teachers being hired. I had to see students going into a different class and graduating. I had to see people getting a job.</p>
<p>Man, I’m trying to remember the name of the company. It was a company when you go out to West Richland that relocated. They were processing potatoes and potato chips and all this—</p>
<p>Franklin: Lamb Weston?</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah. I went out there and was talking to the manager and he said, we don’t discriminate. We’ve got x number of jobs, and if you bring the people, we’ll hire them. The next day, I showed up with a carload of people and they walked in, and they did just what they said they would do. They hired them. And those folks had jobs. So, that’s how I tried to measure my success: on the results, as opposed to the activities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. If you had to summarize the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here, what would they be?</p>
<p>Webster: Summarize the activities?</p>
<p>Franklin: Issues.</p>
<p>Webster: Issues.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Webster: I would say, number one would be at the top of the list would be education for younger people in the elementary level. Second would be jobs, more than just minimum wage kind of jobs. I worked very closely with Hanford to do that. Bob Hooper, Chuck Chandler—I remembered his name—and Fred Rutt were very helpful in paving the way. A guy named Ralph Eckerd who headed up an electrical company here, but also sat on a labor board, was very instrumental in helping to get apprentice employed on the way to journeyman. Being able to become a journeyman, not just in electrical, but in any other field. Matter of fact, they were instrumental in having an office in that neighborhood center in east Pasco to be able to recruit. And then they hired an African American guy to head that office to go out and do the recruiting for them. So employment was another major factor.</p>
<p>I also think the voter registration and the participation in civics played a major role that resulted in both an African American woman being appointed and an African American man being elected to the Pasco City Council. Then after that, another African American man being elected and then becoming mayor.</p>
<p>Franklin: That was Joe—</p>
<p>Webster: That was Joe. And so I think the voter registration and the awareness of the political scene and what you can do if you have representation in the right place. And the right place was not on the street; the right place was where the decisions were being made, sitting on the council. And I think that was important. I also pushed very, very hard to have an African American appointed to the board of directors of Columbia Basin College.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, as part of this whole political theme, and the republicans giving me the opportunity to go out and do some registration—and this decision was based solely—solely—on the individual—I opened the first republican campaign office in east Pasco. That office was for Dan Evans, when he ran for governor. Like I say, I don’t know of a politician today, bar none, that was more honest and more fair, more equitable, than Dan Evans.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did that early experience with republicans—or did that—are you a lifelong republican?</p>
<p>Webster: No. And that is—you know, I just told you that I’m from Alabama and grew up and the r-word down there—if you’re African American, you may as well leave town, because you have tar and feathers all over you. So I’m probably as democratic as anybody can ever get from the bottom of my foot to the top of my head. But that was not—and I went to the democratic party first, to register people. When they turned me down, I went to the other alternative with the republicans, and that’s what gave me the opportunity to register people to vote.</p>
<p>But in Dan Evans’ case, he was political in the sense that he was running as a republican governor. But I was not. I was looking strictly at the individual. And the integrity that he brought to the process, and what I felt that he could do. I was never disappointed in that. And I—yes, I took some heat from, even in the African American community, for supporting a governor—well, you show me somebody that’s better. And I believe that to this day that that was the right decision.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was just curious.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: More than anything.</p>
<p>Webster: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were, in your opinion, what were some of the notable successes of some of the civil rights activities in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, I think, number one, is probably the biggest one outside of jobs and having individuals, like heading up the lab in Richland—</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, Bill Wiley.</p>
<p>Webster: Bill Wiley. I think, if I had to pinpoint what I consider the biggest, was the ability to enforce the Fair Housing laws and get African Americans living in Kennewick. And there are individuals in Kennewick now—and this is our fault, as an African American community—have no idea, when they come to town, they just go right over to Kennewick and rent an apartment and live without any repercussions whatsoever. They don’t have any idea—no—but bringing that about, don’t need the credit. You just need to know that it’s happening, is the most gratifying thing as far as I’m concerned. That they can go and live anywhere in the Tri-Cities that you want to live. All you got to do is be able to pay your rent or pay your house note, and you can live there.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges, or maybe failures?</p>
<p>Webster: Again, I think the biggest challenge that I saw was getting the right people to rally around a cause that—I’m going to use the word “I” at this point—that I felt was most critical at that moment in time. That’s where the Luzell Johnsons of east Pasco came in, to get the right—I call him Junior Smith, he was another one, too—to get them rallying around you and supporting you.</p>
<p>I think the biggest challenge—the other biggest challenge was breaking the barrier between Pasco city government and Pasco residents who were African American. If you just stop and think about it, east Pasco was kind of like a throwaway place. Y’all or they or whoever, you can live over there. The streets were all dirt roads, there were no sidewalks, nothing, you know. They had some sewer and water, but no sidewalks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, it didn’t even have sewer or water originally.</p>
<p>Webster: For a long time—originally, yeah. But my day, when I came along, it was pretty much. But there were hardly anyone investing or developing except for down near the railroad tracks when the industrial went in. And to say that we’re part of the city. We want to work, we want to live, and we want to play in this city. And we pay taxes, and we deserve streets, sidewalks, curbs, gutters, et cetera.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Webster: And we deserve employment in the city that we live. Those were the—making that connection was a huge challenge.</p>
<p>Franklin: I had Pastor Wilkins describe it—he described it as, you could tell what the city thought of the black residents in east Pasco because they were on the other side of the tracks, and then he said there was, like, a dump and a highway and then a stockyard.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that’s what they thought of us, because that’s where they put us, was next to the trash and the—</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, and whichever direction the wind was blowing, you knew it. Yeah, the big stockyard was directly across the street from where I lived. I mean, directly across.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, those don’t smell pleasant.</p>
<p>Webster: No, they don’t. No, they don’t. So we were, like I say, we were the throwaway part of the city. To bring about the sensitivity to change that mindset was a challenge.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. How did—oh, sorry.</p>
<p>Webster: I was going to say one of the things, one of the other elements or factors that played a role was WSU. Glenn Terrell, I don’t know if you heard that name or not. But Glenn Terrell was the president of WSU. He made many trips down and worked with us in east Pasco. He also—I shouldn’t say he, but the Department of Sociology also sent students down to help us formulate ideas and do research and make sure our positions were strong and backed up with supporting data and reasonableness. So, that was before you had an extension or a campus or whatever they call it now, here at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I’ve seen some of the theses produced by the sociology students.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, and we worked closely with Bill Wiley who was also a trustee at WSU, right? To help bring to bear some of the resources—human capital. Not necessarily money, but human capital to help us overcome some of the difficulties we were having here at the—</p>
<p>Franklin: How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, I mentioned that I was from Alabama.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Webster: I marched a couple times with Dr. King.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Webster: I’ve heard him preach two or three times. My wife is from Montgomery. And I’m from Mobile. But when I would go up there, we would go and hear him preach. But what really moved me was I was sitting on a bar stool in my uncle’s tavern, watching TV, and was watching the march on Washington. And I felt extremely guilty. I felt like I had walked away from the movement in Alabama. I should’ve been there. I should’ve been marching. I should’ve been, I should’ve, I should’ve never left, I should be there, contributing there, instead of here. That was also that connection, and that connection with CORE, getting James Farmer’s information. All of that was part of the eye-opening experience here. What they talked about on TV in Alabama, I could see it in east Pasco. I could see it in Kennewick. I could see it in Richland. Those were all connected, in terms of the motivation to do something.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. From your perspective and experience, what was different about civil rights efforts here?</p>
<p>Webster: I think we had been lured into a comfort zone. We had gotten somewhat complacent with what we had. That had a lot to do with that we were better than where we came. But to say we can still do better took a bit more convincing than I originally thought it would.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like, you maybe felt that some people—like, it was better, so it was good enough?</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah, it was—you know, you and I probably have to really get our heads around the same thing. I’m doing 50 times better than my dad, so maybe I’m doing enough. And so, I’m comfortable. And I don’t need to get involved with Black Lives Matter. I don’t need to get involved with some of the immigration fights that’s going on now. I’ve done that before. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. Now it’s their turn. There are all kinds of ways of justifying being in your comfort zone. And there’s something that’s got to kick you out of that comfort zone and say, you need to be involved today. As long as you’re breathing, you need to be helping to move things forward. And that’s a challenge sometime, depending on how long you’ve been in that comfort zone and your motivation to do something.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Well said. So, when you left, you left Boeing to move over to Rainier Bank, how come you left the area that had been your home—why’d you move over to the west side?</p>
<p>Webster: That’s a good question, and the answer is not as logical as you might think. We had purchased our first home. We had our—we have two kids, and the baby, my wife was literally nine months pregnant with the second. And here I come home saying that we’re moving.</p>
<p>But what happened was, as part of my employment management job at BCSR, Boeing Computer Services Richland, we interfaced with certain jobs with our professional recruiters. This recruiter called me up one day and said, Wally, I have a client that’s looking for—and he described this Affirmative Action job in banking in Seattle—do you know of anyone? I said, no, I don’t know of anyone. I said, but send me a copy of the description, and I will pass the word around. It was just that; conversation over.</p>
<p>About three weeks later, he calls me up and said, Wally, you remember I talked to you about that Affirmative Action job? I said, yeah, I said, I don’t—you didn’t send me the description and I don’t have anybody. He said, well, we were thinking about you. I said, oh, no, I don’t want to move. That’s not for me. I don’t want to live in Seattle; I’m doing well right here in Richland. He said, what would it take for you to just go over and talk to them? I said, well, I’ll tell you what it would take. Send me over on a Thursday night, I interview on Friday, I get to spend the weekend in Seattle and come back Sunday night. He said, deal.</p>
<p>So I went over and interviewed on Friday. The guy called me up and said, we would like to hire you. Would you consider coming? And I said no. And then about a day or so later he called me up again and said, how much would it take for you to come? And I’m being a smart-butt. I just threw out a number. And the first thing he said, you got it.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Webster: And what do you do? I mean, you’ve made a commitment, right? And he met it. So now I’m—not only that, we’ll do this, we’ll do this, we’ll fly you home every weekend until you have your baby, and then while she’s recovering, you can go home every week, and you can do this, and we’ll buy you a house, and we’ll move you, and we’ll put you up for 90 days while you find another house, and we’ll provide you with a mortgage on your new house and—I moved.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. How were your experiences in Seattle different from Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Webster: That’s a very good question. As a matter of fact, I’ve thought about that a little bit. I’m not as involved in social organizations as I was here. But I’ve tried to make change from the inside based on my experience. I went through a succession of bank changes. So I sat on Seafirst Bank Foundation, for an example, to advocate for change through grants and stuff like that going. I currently sit on the chief of police advisory committee of the chief in Lynnwood where I live, to help bring about the communications and changes there. I’ve kind of learned that if you’re at the table when the decisions are being made and you can influence them at that point in time, is that you can be more effective than reacting and waiting for the decision to come down and then going to react to it.</p>
<p>Governor Locke appointed me to the Legal Foundation of Washington. At that time I was the only non-lawyer on that foundation. And then Governor Gregoire re-appointed me to the foundation. They distributed $15, 16, 17 million a year to legal aide organizations throughout the state. Being able to influence that, and being able to determine the kind of organizations that would get money to carry out the legal aide for civil issues as opposed to criminal, and who got how much. Like Northwest Immigration Project was one of the major ones that’s now helping to fight the immigration laws that’s being—to be able to be a part of that, to me, is how I have been functioning. And that’s how it’s different from when I was here. I was on the outside, working from the outside. Now I find myself on the inside, working from the inside. If that makes sense.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And, yeah, because you kind of—you went into that world.</p>
<p>Webster: Yes, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What surprised you, if anything, when you moved?</p>
<p>Webster: Well, a couple things. Number one, contrary to what most people think, Seattle doesn’t have a “black community.” They think of the central district as the black community in Seattle. But if you walk through the central district, it’s just as diverse as anywhere else you can go. That’s not to say that a lot of black folks don’t live in central district, but a lot of black folks live in south Seattle as well. So that kind of surprised me.</p>
<p>I worked on a campaign of several African Americans, like Mayor Rice, the first African American mayor of Seattle. Matter of fact, he was at Rainier Bank when I went to Rainier Bank. We worked together at the bank before he left to go to run for councilor and then the mayor. So the politics is a lot different.</p>
<p>And it’s different from the standpoint that I don’t think even to this day, that I am part of the nucleus of the political power in the black community in Seattle. I’m still an outsider. Whereas in Pasco, three weeks after I got here, I was inside of the political structure of the black community, if there was such a thing, and able to go and meet with the mayor even though they might disagree, or the chief of police, or the captain of the police department.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, you know, when I started this project, everybody was like, oh, you got to talk to Wally Webster, you got to talk to Wally Webster. It’s almost like you were still here.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah. Well, I think that’s because I was involved in so many things at such a young age, and like I said, I measured myself on progress. Whether it was the first black police officer, or whether it’s the East Pasco Neighborhood Council, or whether it’s the voter registration drive, whether it’s the hiring processes in Hanford and with the apprenticeship programs in labor unions, taking somebody out to Lamb Weston to go to work there. I just believed that you go based on results.</p>
<p>I want to brag a little bit and just say the other thing is—not that the other way was bad, and it takes both—but I was not a—and still to this day, I’m not a militant person. I don’t try to threat to get the results that I’m looking for. I kind of use the analogy of water. You may get to the bottom of the cliff, but you can take the path of the least resistance to get there. So you try to manoeuver your way—it may take a little bit longer, but eventually you get there. You get there with less roadkill. And to me, I’ve always—I learned early, it’s not always just the what, but it’s also the how. So I treat people that way. That might be another reason why.</p>
<p>Even though I’ve been in Alabama and faced segregation and grew up going to the other side, stepping off the sidewalk, and keeping my head down, and going to inferior schools—which you didn’t know you were going to an inferior school until you got someplace where you were challenged, right? In spite of all of that, I’m not bitter. I think all of those situations made me who I am today. And I think that made me a better person today. So I don’t know if that’s why, but that’s what I think.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Tri-Cities during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Webster: I think the most important thing for them to know is why they are here and what happened. There was one incident I didn’t talk to you about, and this is—when they were building the Federal Building, we went to talk to the Federal Building to see how many African American jobs were going to be there, and we couldn’t get anybody to talk. Couple of us just sat right down in the middle of the—you know the gates that they put around the building when they’re doing construction and they open them up in the daytime for workers to go in and out? Dozers and everything. We just sat right down in the middle of the street, in the middle of the gateway, demanding to see somebody to tell us how many jobs going to be in this building. Not while it’s in construction, but after it’s finished.</p>
<p>So I would like for them to know, especially those that are associated with Hanford, what went before them to create an awareness that got them there. It wasn’t just their education, the school that they graduated, and the degree that they hold, because there are a lot of people with those kinds of degrees that don’t have a job like they have at Battelle. But somebody paved the way. And they’re standing on the shoulders of somebody. And they just need to know that, as my dad used to say, if you see a turtle sitting on a fencepost, somebody helped him get there. And they got to know that they’re a turtle on a fencepost. They got to know that somebody helped you get there. You didn’t get there all by yourself. Because your legs are too short to wrap around a fencepost, you know?</p>
<p>Franklin: I want to just—that’s an interesting story. So you sat down—you kind of blocked the construction way. What did you find out about the jobs there? Was there a direct action from that, or a result from that action?</p>
<p>Webster: To be honest with you, there were direct actions from the construction employment. But I didn’t get immediate knowledge of a direct from the folks who occupied the office—occupied the building. I didn’t get direct results. But I will tell you that after working in the community with Hooper and Rutt, after coming to work in that building as employment manager for Boeing Computer Services and interacting with everyone there, I was able to influence. I was able to influence who worked there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that—</p>
<p>Webster: And there are people working today on this project, that I was telling you that I had the ability to recruit and hire on the spot, whether they were at Southern University or whether they were at Grambling State University or whether they were at some other school in Atlanta, Georgia, when we went to the Consortium of Historically Black Colleges down there, or we were in LA and hiring people there. Competing with Lockheed and others and when they were having layoffs. So I know people on both sides of the outlet today working at Hanford that came from my signing off a piece of paper, make them an offer, here’s an offer, subject-to.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Webster: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right on. Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Webster: I think I’ve said it all that I can recall, but I would like to say that, again, that the Tri-Cities is where I grew up, where I matured as a man and as a person. It shaped my life. It gave me the incentive to do, not only more for myself, but it demonstrated to me what you can do for others, if you just take the time to do it. I am extremely pleased that my uncle plucked me out of Oakland and drove me to Pasco. Very, very pleased and happy that that happened.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right on. Well, Wally, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to interview with us.</p>
<p>Webster: This was a pleasure.</p>
<p>Franklin: Same here.</p>
<p>Webster: Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, awesome.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/qlfBMQp8Y-k">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1962-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Wally Webster
Subject
The topic of the resource
Mobile (Ala.)
Oakland (Calif.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
School integration
Migration
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
African American colleges and universities
Description
An account of the resource
Wally Webster moved to Pasco, Washington in 1962 and was influential in local and national Civil Rights movements.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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06/20/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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ae8d37a31f4f12937d8d6885f09cefef
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F502a26d806a6426eb62a58555a9abfab.mp4
ef746618043499209119789934947ebb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Edward Wallace
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: So, I wanted to ask you, going back a little bit, I wanted to ask you about education. You’d mentioned the schools you went to, but I wanted to ask, how did segregation or racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Edward Wallace: It wasn’t bad by the time I came along, you know? Pretty much blended in with the class. Wasn’t like my sisters’ or something like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were they older?</p>
<p>Wallace: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did it affect them?</p>
<p>Wallace: Well, the one you were going to talk to, I guess they got called names all the time. So, I said, well, what about the two older ones? The brothers? And she goes, oh, they loved those guys, because they played sports. You know? They go, but us girls, man, nobody would date us or ask us out or—you know? They go, forget about prom. I think my oldest sister went to prom, and I remember the picture of her. But I think that—yeah, I think his family lived in Richland, too, but I can’t remember, they didn’t live here very long.</p>
<p>But as far as me, I was just always shy anyway. I grew up pretty much they had to walk up to me and tell me where we were going and I’d show up. [LAUGHTER] Because I was concentrating on, after school I was usually either picking up my brother or sister—my little brother and my sister—or I was going to go practice with somebody or something else. I remember this one girl asked me, are you going to the football game Friday night? And I’m like, well, I really hadn’t planned on it. But I’d been saying hi to her ever since junior high and smiling at her. It wasn’t until, like, two hours later after school, I’m thinking, what the hell is wrong with you? She was basically asking you if you were going to be at the game, so you know. So I go to the game and I know exactly where she sits because I’d been there before and her and her buddies sit in one spot. So I walked by there looking for her and she’s not there. I’m like, oh, man, that’s too bad. Didn’t see her after that, except around school. And she didn’t talk to me after that or nothing, so I said, oh well.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were some of the people that influenced you as a child?</p>
<p>Wallace: You mean, just people?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Like people who were important in your life. Family members, friends, teachers.</p>
<p>Wallace: [LAUGHTER] Well, that’s a funny question. Probably my parents.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Wallace: My brother that’s two years older than me. Because he had an opinion about everything pretty much. I was kind of like, oh, okay, that makes sense, you know, even though it didn’t. But probably more them than anyone else. Because I didn’t go out much, like I said. I was—for me to actually go out and just hang out with people and stuff like that, it was not very often. I was pretty boring guy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, come on now.</p>
<p>Wallace: No, I was. And it wasn’t until I got to know somebody a little bit that I would talk with them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Wallace: I remember in high school, a couple of girls walk up to me and go, how come you’re not on the basketball team? And I go, because I don’t like being yelled at. They go, I’d think you’d want to be popular. And I go, I don’t. And they’re like--they gave me this look like they couldn’t believe it.</p>
<p>Anyway. As far as teachers go, I don’t think I paid enough attention to any of them to really—[LAUGHTER] I think, elementary school I remember three teachers’ names, and junior high maybe two. High school, you’d think you’d remember most of your teachers’ names; I only remember a couple. So, I know elementary school, I remember Mrs. Hutchison, which was my kindergarten teacher. And then I think Mrs. Graham was my second grade teacher? Then Mr. Lane. Mr. Lane, he’s the one who gave me hacks for not bring my book to school. So I remember him.</p>
<p>He gave us—I was a patrol kid, one of the patrol boys. And we were folding the flag one time, and one of the kids dropped one corner. Before it touched the ground, I grabbed it and pulled it back up and we finished folding. And the next day, we got hacks because someone said that it hit the ground. You can’t let the flag hit the ground. So we got hacks for that. Of course, it didn’t hurt. I remember the other kid walking out of there crying. And they go, god, Wallace, how come you’re not crying? And I go, well if you ever got a spanking from my dad, you’d know why. Because when he spanks you, he spanks you. I mean, you jumped and as soon as your feet hit the ground, he got you again. But you know, it wasn’t like he beat you up or anything, he just, hitting you with a stick or a belt or whatever. So we weren’t brutalized or anything.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you have any other—did you have any role models in the community or anything? Or anyone that when you were coming up, anyone you kind of looked up to?</p>
<p>Wallace: Nah. [LAUGHTER] I really don’t—I don’t know if I’m just a negative person or not, but I really don’t remember—I probably looked up to Mr. Piggy, because he had a pretty calm demeanor, and he was kid of like me in a lot of ways.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who was this?</p>
<p>Wallace: His name was Mr. Piggy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, one of the families.</p>
<p>Wallace: Yeah, yeah. His name was Robert Piggy. He worked out there as a coal handler. But we kind of had the same demeanor, in a way. He was a little more outgoing, but he cracked me up. And he always drove a Volkswagen bug, and he had a hat kind of like yours on all the time, different hats. But everything he did was like on the money.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the—what were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time there?</p>
<p>Wallace: During my time?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Wallace: I would say, during my time there, the fact that I got fired because of a racial thing. That kind of did a couple things to me. First, I realized that—well, see, he wrote me up, first thing was for sleeping on the job, okay? It didn’t matter how long I slept during the day when I could get sleep, when I got to work, got changed for graveyard shift—only for graveyard shift—that first two hours, I could barely stay awake. Matter of fact, I started smoking just to stay awake. That’s how I started smoking, was just to stay awake, and even that didn’t help. I’d put it out, and—chh—be gone. But after that first two hours, I was good for the rest of the night. So, I used to get up and go walk around just to stay awake. And as soon as I went back and sat down—pff—gone. But he wrote me up for sleeping on the job. But not because I was falling asleep in front of everybody. And believe it or not, that first two hours is when he made his rounds.</p>
<p>But there was a guy that came back from vacation, and he would go into the break room and go to sleep. So when he got back, he told me, Ed, I want you to be with this guy. You’re not asking enough questions, you’re not really learning the things we want you to. So I want you to hang around with this guy. Okay? Now, before this guy got back, we had some kind of birthday party and the chief was back in the lunchroom, and the alarm went off, saying boiler pressure was going up too high. So I went back and told him. And I said, hey, the boiler pressure’s going up and the alarm’s going off. And he said, yeah, go ahead and acknowledge it and I’ll be out there in a minute. So I acknowledged it, and it’s still going up. So I go back, and I tell him again, and he goes, yeah, just go ahead and acknowledge it. He goes, what’s it up to? And I told him. He goes, yeah, just go ahead and acknowledge it.</p>
<p>So, yeah, I’d read the whole manual, how to run this thing, right? So, third time, I go up there and acknowledge it and I turn the water flow down. Because, you know, it was getting a couple of ticks away from going into the red. He comes back, probably 15 minutes later. And he goes, man, that pressure’s just about where I like to keep it. And I go, yeah. He goes, I thought you said the alarm was going off. I said, it was, so I just cut it back a couple notches. He goes, well, how’d you know to do that? And I go, well, there’s no adjustment on the flames, there’s no adjustment on how much oil you put through it, which creates the flame, of course. I go, you can’t adjust how much flame you’ve got, so the only thing I could figure was you had to turn the water down and I believe, if I remember right, that’s what it said in the manual anyway. The pressure gets high, you cut back the water flow. And he was like, damn. You should be a chief. [LAUGHTER] He goes, most of these guys wouldn’t know what to do. And I go, I’ve always tinkered with stuff, you know.</p>
<p>Anyways, so for the boss coming in and telling me, yeah, you’re not learning anything that we want you to learn, so he puts me with this guy. And so that guy goes, well, after we did our rounds, he goes, I’m going to go in and take a nap. And I go, well, I’m going to try and stay awake, so I’m going to hang out here and talk to the guys. I’ll probably fall asleep anyway, but—and he goes, well, nope—his name was Freymeyer, my boss. He says, Freymeyer said to stay with you, stay with me. He goes, so, you’re going to stay here with me. And I go, oh, okay! So they had some magazines, so I see one on cars, I pick it up and start reading it.</p>
<p>And next thing I know they’re like, busting the door open. And they’re like, oh, you guys are in here sleeping. And I’m like, what’s the deal? This guy does this every night, you know? Well, I’m going to have to write you up. Well, I didn’t know he wrote the other guy up, too. I guess he decided he just didn’t like him. So, I found out later he wrote him up too. He never fired him, but he did write him up.</p>
<p>So the next thing I got wrote up for was coming in late. I come in one night within five minutes. My boss is standing out there with his boss, the operations manager. As soon as—I’m looking right at him, I recognize him from the parking lot. And as soon as I come through the gate, they kind of turn away and start pointing at other stuff. And I’m like, I know that guy’s out here just for me. I’ve never seen those two stand and have a conversation. So sure enough, a week later, I got wrote up for being late.</p>
<p>Now, the next time, I’m waiting for—I’m unloading—they brought the oil in in trucks, tanker trucks. So I’m waiting for another shipment, and I guess we’re really low because there was going to be like three of them that night. So I’d had the job before, and I knew the sign said, stay at least 20 feet—or no smoking within 20 feet. So, I’m not only 20 feet from the place; I’m like down here where you load the truck and start the pump to pump the oil over. So I know I’m at least 50 feet away, right? And I’m just kind of walking back and forth. But I’m not walking towards the tank, I’m just going back and forth vertically the other way. Between the river and the road. Him and his buddy pulls up, his little fat buddy, Rich. He pulls up and they go, hey, Wallace, what are you doing? And I go, I’m waiting for the next truck to come in. Well, I’d noticed when I got there, the tanks had been painted, and there was no signs up. But I already knew I had to be at least 20 feet away. So I’m 50 feet away. And they go, well, you’re not supposed to smoke within 20 feet of those tanks. And I go, I’m not smoking within 20 feet of them. I go, this is at least 50. And he goes, nah, you’re within 20. So he writes me up for that.</p>
<p>So a few weeks later, I’m on vacation, I get a phone call from HR. They say, well, you’ve been released from work. And I’m like, for what? They go, well, you’ve been written up three times. So I go, well, it’s nice you called me while I’m vacation, you know? I’d taken the week off, and they called me like on the second day. So I’m like, it would’ve been nicer to do this in person, don’t you think? And they just hung up the phone, right? So, they called me back a few hours later and told me where to turn my badge in at and everything. So I went and turned my badge in. Walked away, thinking, wow, what assholes. I’m going to sue them.</p>
<p>So, I got this lawyer up in Seattle. Because I know all the lawyers around here were bought off a long time ago. I was pretty much told that by one of the union reps. And I had a consult with him. He said, yeah, he goes, let me get the records and everything and then you can come back up and we’ll talk about it. So I walk in, and he goes, well, Ed, he goes, I would really like to represent you, but it’s not going to do any good. And I go, why not? He goes, well, you signed every one of those. Which meant that you’ve seen it and you acknowledged it. Even though you made the note on there that you don’t agree with it, just the fact that you signed it is enough. He goes, but that’s not all. He goes, and then there’s this. And he reaches over and he gets this thing that’s this thick. And I go, what the heck is that? And he goes, well, that’s all the other things about your behavior and everything. And I’m like, what?! He goes, oh, yeah, this guy spent some time on this. There’s notes in there from people you probably don’t even know. And I go, how do you know that? He goes, well, because where they work. They work in town. You worked out at the Site. And they’ve got comments about your behavior in there. And I go, oh. I’m like, I guess the joke’s on me. This guy’s really got his act together as far as getting rid of someone. So, I said, well. Wasn’t about two days later this guy calls me up and goes, Ed, I’m going to start up a band. I need another guitar player. And I said, hmm! Sounds like fun.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, that’s when you started the band?</p>
<p>Wallace: So that’s when I started playing.</p>
<p>Franklin: So, I’ve got one question left and hopefully it won’t take too long.</p>
<p>Wallace: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: My favorite question to ask. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Wallace: What would I like future generations to know? Well, first of all, the government is great. And it basically does what it’s supposed to do, for the most part. But there are things that they don’t tell you, and there’s things that can harm you that they don’t tell you about.</p>
<p>I’ll give you a for instance. When I hired on as a janitor, a guy that was showing me around said, I’m going to show you two places you never want to go. He took me down to C Plant. He goes, okay, that’s a place you never want to get a job at, because once you go in there, you can never get out. He said, you see that place across the street? And I go, yeah. He goes, I don’t know for sure, but you need a higher clearance to even walk up to that building. He goes, and I’ve been told that they’re making these lenses for being able to see from outer space back to here. But that’s just what I heard; I don’t know anything about it. He goes, and neither do you. But stay away from that building. No matter what. He goes, I don’t care if your truck breaks down, you go someplace else and make a phone call. Do not go near that building. Okay?</p>
<p>Years later, I come back and we’ve been in the—my group of 35 had been in the building working for about two years, and the training was right there in the facility. Well, they moved training out to that building. So we spend about five, six years going to that building for training, take our tests and our recertifications and everything. And then all of a sudden, that building is shut down and the training is back in the building, the main facility, and then they put up a trailer at the end of the parking lot. That’s the new training department.</p>
<p>Okay, so another five years goes by. You’re like, you’re looking at this building going, I wonder why they shut that thing down. No one ever tells you anything. So five years later, you’re in this class and it’s about beryllium. And then they tell you, well, these are beryllium facilities and if you’ve worked in any of these facilities, you need to be on the list to be checked for beryllium sensitivity. Then they tell you how beryllium builds up in your lungs and how your body attacks it. But it can’t do anything, and once it happens and you start having a reaction to it, you need to go in every now and then to have your lungs cleaned out just so they can function. And you’re on oxygen. These are the buildings. And guess which one one of them was? The one we’d been going to training for five years that they—I mean, they didn’t leave part of it open; they closed the whole building up and sealed it up. Everybody else is like, laughing and joking. And I’m like, pissed.</p>
<p>So I’m like, I asked the teacher, I go, why’d you wait so long to tell us what was going on with that? Because we’d started hearing about the beryllium tests and stuff. They were testing our tools and we had beryllium tools that we used, they called them non-sparking tools that were made of beryllium. We used them for opening cans and stuff that might have gases in it. So I’m sitting there, and I’m just getting pissed off. I’m like, well, you mean in the building that we spent five years doing training in is filled with beryllium? And we’re just now hearing about it? That’s the reason they closed it off? And now you’re telling us what beryllium will do to you? And he goes, well, you know, the truth is, people used to not live that long. People used to live to only like barely past their 60s. So most of the stuff, they figured it would never affect you. But now we got guys living into their 80s who are coming down with this beryllium problem. I go, so you’re taking these 80-year-old guys and washing their lungs out? I’m like, you got to be kidding me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Wallace: So you know, I used to always wear my coveralls. And when all the new kids came in, they would run around the place in their regular street clothes. And I told them, I said—they’d always ask me, Ed, how come you wear your coveralls all the time? And I go, well, number one, when I get hot I sweat a little bit. So I might as well just take a shower, put on my clothes that I wore in this morning, and go home with it. I go, plus, when they say places are clean, like where we’re at now, I go, if you want to take that home, you got to take it in to the HPT office, which is radiation protection, they have to go through it, make sure it’s thoroughly clean before they’ll release it so you can take it home. I go, now you’re sitting in the lunchroom. So you don’t know what you’re picking up along the way when you go to do any job. I go, so I’m not going to sit here in my street clothes and wear my street clothes home not knowing what’s on them. They said, oh man, get out of here. I go, okay. I go, you keep wearing your street clothes. I go, but one day when you slip out of here with something on you and the detectors don’t pick it up outside, and you get home and you’ve crapped your wife up and your kids and your whole house has to be cleaned, I go, don’t say I didn’t warn you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, Ed, I don’t want to keep you too much longer.</p>
<p>Wallace: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: But thank you. Thank you for the interview. It was a pleasure.</p>
<p>Wallace: All right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming down today.</p>
<p>Wallace: Ah, no problem.</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Edward Wallace
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
School integration
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Edward Wallace conducted as park of a National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
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04/10/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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32f08072f06ed989d1d0de4d112e9771
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1ce147caacde437decefd3f6942428e0.mp4
88f1f286260106c3af59884404438778
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
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English
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
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Jim Stoffels
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Jim Stoffels on July 13, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Jim about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and his involvement with the organization, CORE. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>James Stoffels: James Stoffels. J-A-M-E-S. S-T-O-F-F-E-L-S.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thanks, Jim. Tell me how you—well, I guess we’ll start from an earlier point. When did you come to Richland?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I came to Richland in June 1962.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1962. Okay. Where did you first live?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I rented a two-bedroom prefab in Richland on Smith Avenue. 1026 Smith.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1026 Smith.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Which is no longer there. It’s been replaced by a modern home.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes. Yes, it has. I live like right by there, off of Thayer. It has been replaced. How did you first—did you have any involvement with civil rights before you came to Richland?</p>
<p>Stoffels: No. No, I didn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you first hear about the Congress On Racial Equality, or CORE?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, some neighbors moved in to the house next to me, and they were Herb and Rindetta Jones. And Herb was the head of the local chapter of CORE, the Tri-Cities chapter. That’s how I got involved.</p>
<p>Franklin: And it was you and your former wife.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your former wife’s name?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Georgia.</p>
<p>Franklin: Georgia. Do you remember what, approximately, year that was?</p>
<p>Stoffels: No, I don’t. I know it was probably a couple years after I moved here, but I don’t remember.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. The first year I found a mention of you or Georgia was 1965.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Does that sound about right?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah. I was going to say ’64, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: ’64, ’65, okay. And what was your role within CORE during your time?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, I became the secretary of the organization.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what about your former wife?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, she didn’t have an official position, but I took the minutes of meetings and she typed them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Stoffels: But I was the designated or the—I don’t know if we were elected or what—I was the secretary.</p>
<p>Franklin: What drove you to join CORE?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, I certainly knew about the black civil rights movement, and certainly supported it. So that was it.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, segregation was one, certainly, because at that time, all of the African Americans, the blacks, the Negroes, as they were called then, lived in Pasco, literally east of the railroad tracks in Pasco. But other than that, I really can’t speak to what other issues there were. I imagine, discrimination probably in employment and in housing, certainly. Because, for example, Kennewick had no black people living in that city.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did CORE do to address the situation in Kennewick?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, I don’t recall if we specifically did anything in terms of Kennewick. The thing I remember most is the one march we had in Pasco. There was quite a considerable turnout for that. We gathered in front of the courthouse in Pasco. I guess we had some kind of a program there, but then we marched from there over to east Pasco. And I think our destination, as I recall, was Morning Star Baptist Church.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the goal of the march? Or what were you raising awareness for?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, just the general issue of, you know, civil rights for African Americans. Discrimination, segregation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you work with any African Americans out at Hanford? Did you see many African Americans out on the job?</p>
<p>Stoffels: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: No?</p>
<p>Stoffels: No. There weren’t any in the group that I was in. I did know—yes, I did know one or two. They were not professionals; they were, you know, blue collar workers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did it seem that African Americans were mostly restricted to blue collar work at that time?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I would say yes, yeah. Yeah. You know, I didn’t think about it at the time, I don’t think, in that context. But I would certainly say that was the case.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember a march in Kennewick at all?</p>
<p>Stoffels: No, I don’t, I don’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So you said that Herb and Rindetta were your neighbors.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And they were African American, right?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And I assume over the years you developed a close relationship with them?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, I wouldn’t say I was close, because it didn’t last that long. I can’t remember when they moved away. And then I think that’s when, probably, the chapter of CORE here went out of existence.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you remember about Herb and Rindetta?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, just, you know, they were a nice couple and they had two children. I don’t know what Herb did, what his profession or employment was. But then they moved away to Yakima.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. What do you remember about anyone else in the Tri-Cities CORE? Did you form any other lasting relationships or professional or personal relationships with anyone else?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, I remember the Brounses; Dick and Nyla Brouns were in it, and we belonged to the same church. And Norm and Shirley Miller were in it. In later years, they were active in World Citizens for Peace. They were regulars on the sidewalk when we were protesting our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, later in the 2000s.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Stoffels: And the ‘80s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, right, right. Yeah. What were the concerns of CORE in Richland? Was there a problem with housing or employment in the City of Richland?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah, there was. And there was—at one point there was some kind of, I think, a housing commission set up by the city. I remember some meeting I attended that had to do with that issue, and there was a gentleman there, a black gentleman. I can’t remember what his name was, but I think he was an attorney. At any rate, I went to this meeting, and the members of this board, at least some of them, were realtors. And I didn’t understand that. So I went up after the meeting and talked to this man, and he just—you know, I was very naïve, and he just, you know, set me straight about, that’s the way it is. That some of the people that are on that board, not to promote the intended purpose, to frustrate the intended purpose of housing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. What was the concern of the realtors in selling homes or renting homes to—</p>
<p>Stoffels: I can’t speak to that. I don’t know. I just—</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What do you remember about efforts to end discrimination at private clubs like the Elks?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I think we had some demonstrations over at the Elks in Kennewick. But, you know, that’s about as much as I remember. I remember that it was an issue.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Stoffels: And I think we did some demonstrations. But I can’t be sure of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any threats or intimidations to either CORE members, white or black, or to African Americans in the Tri-Cities during the civil rights era?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Not to my knowledge, not to my knowledge.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. How did the rise of black nationalist groups, like the Panthers and Nation of Islam, affect CORE?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, I think by the time that happened, I think our local chapter of CORE was out of existence. And I don’t know how long CORE nationally lasted. I mean, it doesn’t exist nowadays. NAACP is the main black/African-American civil rights organization promoting that cause.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the relationship between CORE and NAACP?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I don’t remember, you know, I don’t know when local NAACP formed. I don’t know if it was before or after CORE. The fact that CORE arose leads me to believe that perhaps NAACP hadn’t organized yet. But I don’t know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Hmm. To your knowledge, did any of the black nationalist groups form in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Stoffels: No. No. No, there was no one that was that militant.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the relationship between Richland residents working for the betterment of African Americans in east Pasco and the residents of east Pasco? Was there ever tension between the groups?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Not that I’m aware of. I mean, we in Richland were comfortable and isolated and weren’t bothered.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What were some of the notable successes of CORE in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I don’t know. I don’t know what we can point to as a success. I don’t know what we could take credit for. I think, you know, our purpose was to raise awareness, and certainly working for equality and open housing, integration and those things. But I don’t know that we, as a group, can claim any success in that area. But I think it’s certainly part of what ultimately did take place, in terms of integrating. And certainly—well, the fact that a black couple, family, in CORE was the first family—white family—to move into Kennewick. The Slaughters, John and Mary Slaughter, and their children. So they personally can chalk that up as a victory.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, kind of helping to break the—</p>
<p>Stoffels: Break the color barrier.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, to break the color barrier there. What were some of the biggest challenges?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I don’t know how to answer that.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned working to raise awareness. How—was one of the missions of CORE—was there a general acceptance of the group in the Tri-Cities, or kind of, you know—or rejection or just kind of a antipathy to the message?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, I’m not aware of any general response. I mean, we were there and did what we did, and I’m not aware of any backlash from the community. You know, the African American members of the community could certainly address that better than I.</p>
<p>Franklin: The Brouns and the Millers, two other white couples that participated in CORE, told me that at times they felt social pressure or work pressure from their involvement in CORE.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Oh, really?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that they had had supervisors or friends question them or chide them for their agitation. I’m wondering if you had ever experienced—</p>
<p>Stoffels: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: --anything like that in your work or personal life?</p>
<p>Stoffels: No, I never did. And I wasn’t even aware of it, you know, on their part.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. I think that is all of my questions.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Stoffels: The other thing I remember is that Georgia and I once hosted a party at our house for the CORE group. I remember, we had it in the basement, and I remember the Barneses were there, Dallas and Lozie Barnes. And I don’t remember who else. One person I remember is Dick—god, I don’t remember his last name. Anyway, he—god, senior moment. He later moved to Seattle and he became—at one point he was, I think, a member of the state legislature. God, I can’t think—Dick—I can’t remember. And there were a couple of musicians there, and I was thinking of their names the other day. Now I can’t think of it. It was a member. White man. Zane Casey. That’s it, I think. Zane Casey. And maybe it was he and his wife that just were a little two-person band.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the purpose of the party?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I can’t remember if it was a Christmas party or what. It might’ve been a Christmas party.</p>
<p>Franklin: Any other memories from your time?</p>
<p>Stoffels: No. No. I’m trying to remember where we were when we met. I can’t remember if we met at the Morning Star Church or where.</p>
<p>Franklin: From the notes, it seemed like you—the group would meet twice a month, once in Pasco and then once either in Richland or Pasco. Morning Star seemed to be a popular place, as well as, there was like a diner in the east side of Pasco, I believe you met at. And then sometimes in Richland, you’d meet at—or sometimes at Richland or Kennewick, you’d meet at individual people’s homes.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And once I saw that—</p>
<p>Stoffels: Brounses, maybe?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, the Brounses.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And once at your house.</p>
<p>Stoffels: And once they met at our house, too? Oh, okay. Yeah, I don’t remember meeting at the diner. But I do remember Morning Star Baptist Church. We were there a number of times.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you have a close relationship with—did CORE work with Morning Star and the other black churches in its activities?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Well, you know, Herb is the head of the organization and, as a black person, I imagine, he did all of that. In terms of making those arrangements. I don’t remember—they might have gone—his family might have gone to that church. I don’t know.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you went to Christ the King?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Christ the King, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: With the Browns?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Brouns. The Brounses. And how did you get in touch with Kathy?</p>
<p>Franklin: I got her name from a friend of mine, Tanya Bowers, because people had mentioned—someone was in contact with the Brouns. There’s one or two of the sons still live here locally.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah, Tom does. I know Tom and his wife.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, and I called her or emailed her and we had a correspondence and she was—</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah, because Kathy lives over in Seattle.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, she was passing through on the way to Boise for a wedding and stopped by and she brought a file that I gathered a lot of information from.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Oh, for heaven’s sakes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it’s been a lot of good coincidences for the project. That’s how I found your name and I was like, oh, I know Jim.</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, let me see here, I might have one or other question. Well, I guess I’ll just go with the ending question. Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to segregation, civil rights, how they impacted your life or others in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Stoffels: I really can’t think of anything. I mean, the thing that I gained out of it is the sense of community with black people. I annually go to the Martin Luther King commemoration over at CBC and I see people there, like the Barneses and the Mitchells. CJ Mitchell is deceased now, but the Mitchells lived just a couple blocks from us. Their daughter, Vanessa, babysat for us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, really?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Stoffels: With our two young—our first two daughters.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Yeah, I know Vanessa really well.</p>
<p>Stoffels: So I always reminisce whenever I see her, and that’s at, usually, at that Martin Luther King event.</p>
<p>Franklin: So it was important, then, for you to be an ally of the civil rights movement?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, sure, I mean, that’s why I was there. Just like World Citizens for Peace. I’m there because it’s important to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did you transition to World Citizens for Peace after CORE or did your activism in CORE—</p>
<p>Stoffels: Oh, no, there was a long time between those two. Because we founded World Citizens for Peace in 1982. And that was in response to Reagan, President Reagan’s goal of building 17,000 new nuclear warheads in the ‘80s. In between, I was on the city council in Richland in the ‘70s for four years. I was elected in ’71, I believe it was, and served for four years. Couldn’t wait to get off.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah?</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah. Well, I didn’t want to—there was a specific issue at that time. And I and a whole group of people were—got together around that issue. It was that the city council was extending water and sewer lines to what’s now south Richland, to the Meadow Springs area. They were going to be paid through the bills of all the people in the existing city. They had no policies for extending lines and assessing the ones who are served by it. So, we, this group, wanted to replace the members of the council who had voted for that. I think there were three positions open. Two of them, members of the group filed an opposition to. And there was nobody for opposing the mayor. I tried to get someone else to, you know. And nobody would. So, out of a sense of responsibility, I filed, and I replaced the incumbent mayor. Not as mayor, because the mayor is chosen by the council.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Stoffels: But as a—so I never really wanted to be on it, but I was. That was like a half-time job for me for those years. It really took a lot of my time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. That certainly does.</p>
<p>Stoffels: And at the time, it was not a paid position like it is now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p>Stoffels: There was a stipend of $500 a year. And the last thing I did before I went off the council is I proposed an ordinance that the councilmembers should be paid, you know, as a part-time job. And it was adopted. Of course, I never got it, because something like that, you can’t get the benefit of, unless you’re elected again.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Interesting.</p>
<p>Stoffels: But I thought that was very important, because the lack of that meant that the councilmembers were predominantly members of the business community. So, they looked out for the business interests. And I thought, well, that’s not representative government. We needed to have that be a paid position, as a part-time paid position, so that the average John or Jane could run and be remunerated for their work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, yeah. Makes sense. Well, Jim, thank you so much for coming—</p>
<p>Stoffels: Yeah, you’re welcome.</p>
<p>Franklin: --and sitting down with us and talking about your time in CORE.</p>
<p>Stoffels: My pleasure. Good to reminisce about those years.</p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1962-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Jim Stoffels
Subject
The topic of the resource
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Segregation
Discrimination
Description
An account of the resource
Jim Stoffels moved to Richland, Washington in 1962 and was involved in local civil rights movements.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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07/13/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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d74b3388cc8683d3b332cc7063583428
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff5fb1faeada314afbef71a3db9e00f8a.mp4
1f76915136d411b2f4c27bbb5832e24e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Reverend Jeannette Sparks
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Reverend Jeannette Sparks on May 5, 2018. The interview is being conducted at New Hope Methodist Church—</p>
<p>Jeannette Sparks: Missionary Baptist Church.</p>
<p>Franklin: --Missionary Baptist Church, sorry. New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. I will be talking with Reverend Jeannette about her experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Sparks: You know to put the “Reverend” on it, and then my full name is J-E-A-N-N-E-T-T-E. And the last name is S-P-A-R-K-S.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, and thank you so much, Reverend. How did you come to the Tri-Cities area?</p>
<p>Sparks: How did I come where?</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you come here? And when did you come here and why?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, I was born in ’38.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: And my dad, we lived in Hermiston, Oregon for a few months, because my dad worked on the McNary Dam and John Day Dam. And then he bought the property here for his family and his mom.</p>
<p>Franklin: What year did you come to Hermiston?</p>
<p>Sparks: I came to Hermiston in ’48, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did your dad do on the dam?</p>
<p>Sparks: We didn’t do—my dad went down, he was put in the big tubes with Mr. Shaw, and they’d go down and screw the boats in the water, until one day they had one of the cranes going across and it fell off and hit my dad in the head while he was down in the water.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, no.</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he die?</p>
<p>Sparks: No, he survived. They had to wear those steel brick—you know, those steel hats? And the steel hat even had an inner lining in it. But it just shook him up for a while.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow, wow.</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, yep.</p>
<p>Franklin: And when did you come to Pasco?</p>
<p>Sparks: We moved to Pasco—we was in Hermiston for three years, and then Dad say he didn’t want us to stay in Hermiston, because he was moving around a lot. So he moved us to Tri-Cities, here to Pasco. And I went to elementary school where they have Pasco—across from the court house, is that the Pasco City Hall—no, it ain’t the city hall where you go pay your utilities. I went there. I went to elementary school and then I went to junior high school there. And then I went to Pasco High School. Then Sue Williams and myself, we played basketball, and we had to be on the guards when we went to Kennewick to play Kennewick. Because during that time, Kennewick, didn’t allow no blacks across the bridge at a certain time. But we’d beat them every time. [LAUGHTER] Yep.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever have any trouble in Kennewick?</p>
<p>Sparks: No, Daddy didn’t believe in that. We never had any problem going to school. And then when we moved to Pasco, Daddy bought the property on the corner and two houses for—because he put his mom in one house, and our house was on that upstairs/downstairs on the corner of 712 on Douglas Street there. That’s where we grew up at, mm-hmm. We grew up right there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where were you born?</p>
<p>Sparks: I was born in a little place called Kildare, Texas. My dad said, this wasn’t where he wanted his family to be. And he took his mom and all of us—I think it was just five of us then. Me, Opal, Bobby, and Thee and Donnell. It was five of us. We rode the train all the way from Texas. We was on the train when the high water—when they had the flood in St. Paul, Minnesota. We had to be there for weeks and weeks and weeks. But during those days, when you travel, see, they packed lunch. You wasn’t buying all that stuff they had in the kitchen. So my grandmother had a box, and, oh, that box was nothing like this, wasn’t even this wide. We had food all the way to Hermiston, Oregon. Didn’t have to buy a thing. Didn’t even get hungry. And you know, the peoples in Oregon were so—they were so much different than the people in Pasco, when we moved to Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, the peoples in Oregon, they didn’t act like you was any different from them. But when you come to Pasco, they say you can’t go across, can’t be caught across the bridge at dark, and Daddy say, well, now you have to obey their laws. And when we went there, we would have to be guarded. When we was going to school and playing basketball, you see? But all that done changed so much, ‘til—[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>They used to have a sign at the bridge. My daddy helped build the bridge. And they had a sign up there that said, No blacks in Kennewick after dark. They used to have that sign over there. But they eventually moved the sign. I wasn’t in Washington when they did it. I wasn’t here. [LAUGHTER] I married and moved to California.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, yep.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were your first impressions when you arrived in Pasco?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, it was—it wasn’t like Hermiston; it was like different. Because Dad would always tell us, you can’t go so-and-so-and-so, you couldn’t do this, you can’t do that, and you couldn’t—you know. But in Hermiston, it was no different. But we hated—we moved to Pasco. My Daddy says, it’s gonna get better. He kept telling us, it’s gonna get better. Gonna get better, gonna get better. And then we got old enough, we went to the grape field and helped pull the Welch’s grapes. Went and hoed sugar beets out on Road 68 where they got all them houses out there. It used to be nothing but fields. And you talking about hot. It is not hot here like it used to be. It used to be hot here. It ain’t hot like that no more.</p>
<p>Franklin: I guess there were a lot less trees, huh?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm. And we had—when we went to school in Pasco, we didn’t have no problem, mm-mm. Nope.</p>
<p>Franklin: It seems like a lot of black families left Kildare to come here. Are you related to anyone else that came up here?</p>
<p>Sparks: The Daniels is my cousins.</p>
<p>Franklin: So Vanis?</p>
<p>Sparks: Vanis, all them, mm-hmm, that’s my cousins on my dad’s side. And their uncle, CJ Mitchell? CJ Mitchell came up here with my dad.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you’re related to the Mitchells as well. Second cousin?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, on my dad’s side.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your dad’s name?</p>
<p>Sparks: Artis Miles, A-R-T-I-S M-I-L-E-S. And my mom was Bernice Weaver, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, you know, when you’re young, you don’t understand that—in Hermiston we didn’t have no problem. We mixed with all the other kids. But when you come to Pasco, we was hauled off, they was hauled off somewhere, and I never could figure out why all the blacks was over here and the rest of them was over here. It took me a while to get used to that. Because I wasn’t used to it. But I learned to get used to it, and then we had to walk to school, had to walk from the east side here to the Pasco High School on the other side.</p>
<p>Franklin: And go under the tracks?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, we had to go up under the underpass. And when we go under there, we’d be saying, aloha. [LAUGHTER] But after everything started changing—the Tri-Cities have changed tremendously. Because I see blacks all in Kennewick and everywhere. And my mom’s sisters and them, they lived all in Richland. Because they wouldn’t allow no black in Kennewick, so they lived in Richland. My cousin, CW Brown and Norris Brown, they used to call him the Sweet Georgia Brown. The Richland Bomber used to beat every team that was here, even Pasco team. Mm-hmm. Yep.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard about their basketball skills.</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah. The Richland Bombers. My two cousins was on that team, and boy, I’ll tell you, Norris Brown and CW Brown. And I mean, they’d win every game they had.</p>
<p>Franklin: They had a pretty big rivalry between Richland and Pasco, right?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I was only a cheerleader for a while, and then I said, no, I can go into something else. [LAUGHTER] Because it was okay as long as they was in the Tri-Cities, but when they had to go to Yakima or somewhere else, Dad’d always say, no, y’all ain’t going, because you ain’t got no good supervisors, so y’all ain’t going. And we didn’t go.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because he was kind of protective, huh?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ lives before they came to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, my daddy was a farmer in Kildare, Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: He was a foreman?</p>
<p>Sparks: He worked corn, peas—</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, farmer, farmer, gotcha.</p>
<p>Sparks: A farmer. And he used to tell us, he said, when Daddy make enough money, Daddy going to move you from here. He used to tell us that all the time, and finally one day, my dad, CJ Mitchell, and, oh, I forget his other cousin. Oh, he’s dead and gone, god. They still have got the house there, up from me, on Douglas. Oh!</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s not a Daniels is it?</p>
<p>Sparks: The Daniels?</p>
<p>Franklin: Willie, is it?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, the Daniels came on up, too. Daddy helped—the Daniels came up with Daddy, and all of them, they all came up and start working here. My dad worked with Mr. Shaw on the dams. McNary Dam, and, oh, I think it was about three or four dams he helped on, and he got hurt on the John Day Dam, down there, going to The Dalles, Oregon.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. What was it about the work up here that drew your dad and his cousins and things up here?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, my mom used to work in the Salishan. You know anything about Salishan?</p>
<p>Franklin: No.</p>
<p>Sparks: My mom used to work at the Salishan, where they buff sheets for the Army. You know anything about that?</p>
<p>Franklin: No.</p>
<p>Sparks: Yeah, my mom used to work at Salishan where, they call it bucking sheets. And I know what that was, that means you have to fold them a certain way. For the Army boys. And then when we was in Hermiston, they had an Army base not too far from where we lived. They’d come right by the house to get to the Army base. But my life growing up with my family was, oh, it was just out of sight. Dad didn’t let us go out to play with nobody, because he said there was enough of us we could play in the yard together. And that’s what we did. This was our recreation all the time, church. Vacation Bible School, Sunday school. And oh, how I thank him today, for him, because some of them that’s my age, oh, I look at them today, and just—and they still haven’t accepted the Lord. And I wonder, what’s going to happen when judgment day come? Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was the work different up here? Did the work pay better up here? Is that why so many men, so many people left Kildare to come here?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, my dad said that in order for them to progress, you just can’t stay in the same—you’ve got to span yourself out and see where the work is at. Because, see, when they was in Texas, all they talked about fielding and growing corn and all of that stuff, and then they’d take it to market and sell it. And Daddy said, no, that wasn’t for him. So he expanded out. I think the six of them came up in a T-model Ford. Six of them came up in a T-model Ford. CJ Mitchell and all them, they came up in a—and they worked at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your father work out on the Site?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, no, my father worked on the bridges.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: Yeah, he worked on—him and Mr. Shaw. I don’t know why he loved it, going under that, in that big tube, down, way down at the foot of the—putting boats in the—he loved it there. And we couldn’t—if Daddy was late getting in, we’d all get in a huddle and start praying, hoping nothing done happened to our Daddy. Mm-hmm, yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so did you attend this church here when you got here?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah, this is where I attended—I went to this church when the church was on—what’s that, Beech Street? Beech Street.</p>
<p>Bobby Sparks: What year was it though? What year?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, and then after Beech Street, we used to have church at the Elks Club. It used to be at the Elks Club. And then when they built this church up here, I was here. I got my shovel, went and dug the first dirt out here. Mm-hmm, yep.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role does church play in the community?</p>
<p>Sparks: What who?</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did church play in the African American community?</p>
<p>Sparks: In this community?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, our mission, we go out and help those that can’t help themself. We feed the hungry. A lot of time they bring, sometimes it’s three and four box loads of people out on the street and they just bring them here, senior citizens, and we cook food and feed them here in this dining room. We’re missionaries, we do all of that.</p>
<p>And we have a sweet pastor. He’s another one, he loves having everybody. [LAUGHTER] Yep. And I know this church, I don’t know about the other churches, but every Wednesday night we have Bible study and prayer meeting. And I mean, he teaches the Word, and it is awesome. We was here last night, oh, it was so good. Reading the book of Acts now. Yep, we done made it to the book of Acts. We just thank God—you know, it’s a blessing when you have a pastor that likes to teach those who want to be taught. So when he get here and preach it, then they can witness to it. But if you don’t know what he’s saying, you cannot witness to it. Because you don’t know if it’s in the Bible or not. And he’s strictly from the Word of God in the Bible.</p>
<p>Franklin: Does the church play a special role in the black community?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you talk about that, historically?</p>
<p>Sparks: We goes out, the missionaries, we go out, we help the homeless, and if any of them come in the church that need help, we always help them. If they’re trying to get a place, if they need clothes, if they need food, we do that. And you’d be surprised to see how many boxes of food lined up here in the kitchen, where they take it out and give it to needy peoples. And then the peoples tell other peoples, and they just come to the church to pick up the box. A lot of them pick up the boxes, you don’t see them no more, but you continue to pray for them. One day they will turn around, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions that people brought from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, I don’t know. I know one thing they had there. Bobby, what is that they had in Kildare? Oh, the Juneteenth.</p>
<p>Franklin: What’s that?</p>
<p>Sparks: That’s Juneteenth.</p>
<p>Franklin: The humanitarian award. Can you see that, Tom? Can you tell me about—can you talk about Juneteenth for those viewing this that may not know about it?</p>
<p>Sparks: We have it in the park over here, at the park on this side. I always say on the east side. The park on the east side, it used to be houses all down in there, but they made a big park down in there. And then we talk about the old time, we talk about our history and where we come from, how we got here.</p>
<p>Franklin: What does Juneteenth celebrate?</p>
<p>Sparks: Juneteenth celebrates our history. It’s our history. And this here, see that? Isn’t that a community award?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, the Juneteenth Community Council.</p>
<p>Sparks: I was a person that, I didn’t care who you was, or what color you was, or where you came from, if you needed help, I would go help. Because we are all God’s children. And God don’t have no respective person so why do we? We supposed to be able to help everybody, regardless. And that’s me. A lot of time, I go—if I go downtown and see somebody on the street needs some help, I’ll holler and say, hey, you want a hamburger? Come on. When it’s in you, it’s in you. And it’s been building in you from knee-high to adult, all the way up. We was taught from both sides, from the Weaver side, the Davis side, the Miles side, we was taught. And that’s what we supposed to do for one another, we shouldn’t have one respective person who we help regardless. Because when God call your name, he going to tell you, remember that so-and-so-and-so you passed by and you didn’t help him? I don’t want Him to say that to me. I don’t want Him to set apart from me I know you’re not. I want Him to know me, you see?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What about—I asked you earlier about traditions that people brought with them from the places they came from. But what about food? Did people bring a certain culinary or food culture with them from Kildare to here?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, they packed food, they fried chicken and they had cornbread. And then they made a lot of muffins, a lot of tea cakes, and a lot of people do that now when we have our gathering here at the church, people bring food that we used to eat. Old-fashioned Sunday. That takes us back to our grandparents and great-grandparents. Make dishes and bring them. And I mean, it seem like that Sunday at the church, we have to put chairs out for peoples to sit. But it should be like that every Sunday. Everybody should appreciate where they come from and what the Lord is doing for them and what other peoples are helping them with. You know? Some’ll come today and you don’t see them no more for a while until they need something. But you don’t turn them away; you still give it to them. That’s going to be between them and God. You see?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What about sports? Did anyone bring any sports traditions with them?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, I played basketball. I played basketball for Pasco High School and tennis, played tennis. Mm-hmm. Volleyball. Me and Sue Williams.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you or your parents came from?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, yeah! A lot of things here available that wasn’t available. Because that’s why my dad moved from Texas, because he said, uh-uh. He wasn’t born in no backdoor and he wasn’t going to stay here and continue to go in no backdoor to shop. That’s when we got the train and moved to Hermiston, Oregon.</p>
<p>Franklin: So segregation was a pushing factor?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, it was too much. And Dad said he wasn’t going to raise his family there. And he didn’t. Let me see. Him, CJ Mitchell, and cousin Vanis Daniels, and all of them loaded up in a T-model Ford.</p>
<p>Franklin: How was housing different from here compared to Kildare?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, I tell you what. In Kildare, the blacks stayed in they position, and the whites stayed in theirs. And the blacks never had a place to shop; they had to shop at the white store. And if you wasn’t light-skinned, you couldn’t go in the front door; you had to go in the back door. That’s just the way it was. And my mom and his mom, they all could go in there, because they looked like they was white anyway, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about education? What grades did your parents go through? What was their education level?</p>
<p>Sparks: I graduated from Pasco High School.</p>
<p>Franklin: But your parents?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, my parents?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, my dad didn’t graduate, but my mom graduated. My mama graduated. Because my dad had—they had to do work in the field and work for—my dad and them was Uncle Tom then because they had to work in the field. Daddy say he was sick of that. Mm-mm. They was getting out. And that’s why all them got together and decided to drive a T-model Ford to Hermiston, Oregon.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation and racism?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, none of the opportunities have lightened up a whole lot. Because when we first moved here, you couldn’t go across the bridge at night. If you did, the peoples in Kennewick would beat you up. Dad would always tell us, when Miss Booth take you all to Kennewick—and he would tell Miss Booth, you keep my girls with you. Because I don’t want nothing to happen to them. And she did, too. And they was teachers that are all Pasco High School. When we went to junior high we didn’t have no problem, because, you know. And then one of my cousins went with a girl named Marsha. Mm-hmm, yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe any interactions you or your parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: Do I do what?</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe any interactions that you or your parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities area?</p>
<p>Sparks: We ain’t had no problem. Mm-mm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever go to Richland to visit your cousins?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah, that’s as far as we went: to they homes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How was Richland different from Pasco?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, Richland was nice. It was Kennewick. Kennewick. Never had no problem with Richland. It was only Kennewick. And Kennewick didn’t allow any blacks over there after dark. They didn’t care if they was light-skinned or black-skinned or whatever. You wasn’t—and they used to have it on the bridge there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You mentioned that you went to Pasco High School. Where did you go to elementary and middle school?</p>
<p>Sparks: Where you pay the water bill over here across from the court house? You know what?</p>
<p>Tom Hungate: City hall. City hall.</p>
<p>Sparks: The courthouse? That’s where I went to elementary school at.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So you didn’t go to Whittier?</p>
<p>Sparks: No, I didn’t go to Whittier. They wouldn’t even have a bus to come over here and pick us up until my dad and them finally got a bus to come pick us—we had to walk.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you tell me, how did your dad and others get a bus here?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, they kept having meetings with the city, having meeting with the city, having meeting with the city, and finally they started the buses to come here. And the bus used to pick us up at Whittier Elementary School. But see, Whittier Elementary School is not there anymore. Elementary school is further up. But elementary school was there before you go under the underpass. That’s where the elementary school was. And it was houses there. I look where they have done put all these factories over here and there wasn’t nothing but a lot of houses over here, you know. And all the houses over here were mostly black on this side of town. All black families lived on this side of the underpass. And now they done put all factories over here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Part of the redevelopment.</p>
<p>Sparks: Yup, they done put a lot of factories over here.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did segregation and racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Sparks: None whatsoever.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, who were some of the people who influenced you as a child?</p>
<p>Sparks: Encouraged me when I was a child?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, I don’t know if Mr. Sundale was still living.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who was he?</p>
<p>Sparks: He was a teacher. And he said, no matter what, you get your education and you can look back on them. Mr. Sundale. Miss Stiggers. Miss Stiggers was a good—she’d always tell you, your education will take you a long ways. And Mr. One-eyed Harper. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he really have one eye?</p>
<p>Sparks: Yup. He had a marble eye, but he only had one eye he could see out of.</p>
<p>Franklin: And he was another teacher?</p>
<p>Sparks: He was another teacher, mm-hmm. Miss Stanley was, she say, your education, if you get a good education, it’ll take you a long ways in the world. And that was true.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did you graduate high school?</p>
<p>Sparks: I graduated in—oh, god, I graduated from Pasco High School. I don’t know what year. I should’ve bought that book, huh? [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you go to college?</p>
<p>Sparks: I went to CBC for a while.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you study there?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, mostly, I went to theological seminaries.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where was that?</p>
<p>Sparks: In California and a little bit here, before I went to California. I went to theological seminaries for my—to continue in my ministry.</p>
<p>Franklin: What made you want to go into church leadership?</p>
<p>Sparks: What did what?</p>
<p>Franklin: What drove you to go into church leadership?</p>
<p>Sparks: Because when we was growing up, Dad always told us, you can always depend on God when you can’t depend on nobody else. That’s the man I wanted to be serving, was somebody I could depend on. And my daddy kept us in serving the Lord all the time. We never could go to birthday parties, nobody birthday parties. He said it was enough of us to have a birthday party in the yard. And I thank him for that. When they built this church here, my dad was one of the deacons. We was in everything. We had a lot of plays that we used to put on when we was growing up. Old-fashioned Sundays and all of that. We used to dress up like they did in the olden days, sing the old hymns like they did in the olden days, mm-hmm. And I just love it, you know.</p>
<p>My little Sunday school students, I just love them so much. And I tell them, what your grades is in school? Let me see your report card. And they let me see—they bring that report card and let me see it. And sometime I say, here’s your few bucks you can get you a big hamburger and some French fries.</p>
<p>You know, it was done for me when I was growing up, and you just carry it on. And you don’t know what will help. I imagine the peoples and things gave it to me never thought that I would be a minister. But I loved this church. Loved to sing. All that. And my mom used to sing in the choir. My mom used to sing in the choir, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you sing one of the old songs?</p>
<p>Sparks: Me?</p>
<p>Franklin: That people used to sing, yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: [singing] Guide me over, great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.</p>
<p>Franklin: Thank you, that was really wonderful. So I wanted to shift into talking about civil rights activities in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Sparks: Some what?</p>
<p>Franklin: Civil rights activities in the Tri-Cities? You mentioned that you left the Tri-Cities area for a while. When did you leave?</p>
<p>Sparks: Leave what?</p>
<p>Franklin: Here, Pasco.</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, after I married. In ’57.</p>
<p>Franklin: And when did you come back?</p>
<p>Sparks: I’d come back every year.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: My husband and I, we moved to California. But every year, he promised me when I told my mom, he said, every year she can come back and spend the summer with you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: And he kept that promise until he died, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you live in California?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, God, how old is Chris? 60-something years.</p>
<p>Bobby Sparks: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: I just moved back here about 12 years ago.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: That was when my husband got sick and we moved. He wanted to be back home, so we moved back here and then I ended up on dialysis, and when I’d get off of dialysis they’d drop me off over there at Avalon, and I’d spend the rest of the evening with him, and then I’d come home and I’d make sure on my day off, I’d go to Avalon and give him his shower and feed him and everything. And we was married for 57 years, almost—in two months it’d be 58 years. That’s a long time to be with one man, ain’t it? [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, it is. When you were here, what were the major civil rights issues for African Americans in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, you know, when I was here, my dad was involved in that. Him, and Mr. Vanis Daniels—oh boy, what was the other heavyset man lived on—CJ Mitchell, Primmer Brown, let me see who else. Katie Barton, Mother Katie Barton. She stayed on it all the time, Katie Barton did. And she was the one, Katie Barton was the one that took that sign off the bridge.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Sparks: Uh-huh. Where it says, no blacks allowed. She went and took that sign off the bridge.</p>
<p>Franklin: When was that?</p>
<p>Sparks: Katie Barton?</p>
<p>Franklin: When was that?</p>
<p>Sparks: That’s when I was going to junior high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, so it came down in the ‘50s?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, back in the ‘50s. Because Miss Booth—because I played basketball, me and Sue Williams. Oh, Mr. Williams was involved, too, in helping. Mr. Joe Williams, Mr. Joe Bush, Daddy, Vanis Daniels, all of them, they was involved in getting stuff together, you know.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of things were they involved in?</p>
<p>Sparks: In getting the civil rights to be like it should. Trying to let peoples know the world is just not belongs to the whites or the light-skinned; it belongs to all the peoples created under God, one nation, one God. And that’s what they was doing. They finally got it through.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any big issues that people worked on that stand out to you?</p>
<p>Sparks: Because they didn’t want any blacks in Kennewick. That was a big issue. They didn’t want any blacks in Kennewick. And if you caught—you couldn’t even be caught over there after dark, even if you worked over there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was housing or sidewalks an issue for folks?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, you couldn’t—in Kennewick, you couldn’t be caught in Kennewick after dark.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about in east Pasco, was there a lack of services in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Sparks: No, we didn’t have no problem over here. No problem whatsoever.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about in employment?</p>
<p>Sparks: Unemployment?</p>
<p>Franklin: In employment, getting jobs.</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, they was able to get jobs. They was able to get jobs at Hanford. All of them, a lot of them worked at Hanford. My momma, when we lived in Seattle, my mom worked in what they call, a place called Salishan. That was bucking sheets. They had to do the sheets for the them to buckle, fold the plastic on them, and bag them up and put them on the market for sale. That’s why mom did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Besides removing the sign, you said Katie Barton helped that, were there any other notable successes of the civil rights movement in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah, a lot of black people living in Kennewick now. [LAUGHTER] But there’s nothing wrong with Kennewick, like it used to be. Everybody just is nice and—you know. The younger generation that came along after the old generation, a whole lot changed. It was the older generation. But when the younger generation started coming in, and my cousin and them were going and playing basketball, and we’d go over there for cheerleaders and all that kind of stuff, the younger generation changed Kennewick. Not the older. The younger generation changed Kennewick. Because they wasn’t having all that, mm-mm.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the biggest civil rights challenges, issues that were challenging for folks?</p>
<p>Sparks: Was Kennewick. [LAUGHTER] It was Kennewick. Pasco, you never had a problem. Never had a problem in Pasco. Kennewick was the problem. Never had a problem in Richland. Never had a problem in Richland. Kennewick was the only one. And after—you know, after the older folks moved on, then Kennewick started changing and changing, and blacks live in Kennewick and everywhere else, you know, all down in there. And I was just over that way not too long ago, and I said, my land, I remember when you couldn’t even come down this hill. When they put that freeway in and got that freeway going everywhere.</p>
<p>But the younger generation, they brought by the change. That young generation did. Like our age and like that, they the ones that changed Kennewick. Now some of the elder people, boy, they’d tell you, they’d call you all kinds of colors and curse you and, don’t walk on the sidewalk, walk in the street and all that kind of stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did that ever happen to you?</p>
<p>Sparks: I never had a problem. [LAUGHTER] Mm-mm. Nope, I never had a problem. But when Daddy would take us over there, he’d just hold my hand and go on. Mm-hmm, yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about when—did you ever have any—were there problems with eating at restaurants or shopping or anything, problems with services or being treated less-than?</p>
<p>Sparks: I’ve never ate a restaurant in Kennewick. Up to this day, I still won’t. Nothing that—it’s not prejudice or anything like that, I just don’t. I say, it’s enough restaurants over here, it’s the same thing. So why would I go over there to go out of my way to go over there to bother somebody else, you see?</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there ever any problems with folks on the west side of Pasco?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-mm. Don’t have no problem with none of them. All of them on the west side of Pasco over there in them new homes and everything, I grew up with a lot of them. And some people moved here that go to my church here, live out there on Road 68. That’s where I go out there for dialysis. If you want to, you can go out there and dialysis in there and say, I wanna ask you something about Sparky. Oh, Sparky? Oh, sit down. They’d tell you about Sparky, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you have memories of the Hazel Scott case in 1950? Where she was refused service at the Pasco bus station?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever hear about that?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-mm. What happened?</p>
<p>Franklin: She was a very famous singer in World War II and afterwards. She was married to a congressman. She was African American and so was her husband. I can’t remember his name; he was a congressman from Harlem. And she was on a tour, and the bus stopped at the Greyhound Station in Pasco. She went to the lunch counter, and sat down and the waitress refused to serve her. And she said, why are you refusing to serve me? And the waitress said, I can’t; the owner said I can’t serve you. And the owner came out and said, we don’t serve blacks here. They had a sign up in the Pasco bus station. So she was pretty famous and had a famous husband, so she sued in Washington State court, and she won the lawsuit. And they had to pay her and they had to take down the sign.</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, Dad always tell us where to go eat and where to stop, and when you come from school, you come straight home and your food is all ready in the kitchen. You see? And if he give us lunch money and we didn’t eat lunch at school, he’s going to say, well, since you ain’t eating lunch at school, you wait until you get home and eat. Did you remember the Dew Drop Inn? Right there by the underpass?</p>
<p>Franklin: I’ve heard of it.</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh. [LAUGHTER] That’s where, when Daddy was working on the dam, and we got out of school early, and we’d know if we came home, Momma was going to have something for us to do. We’d stop at the Dew Drop Inn.</p>
<p>Franklin: What would you do there?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, we danced and do whatever we wanted to do. Buy hamburgers and stuff. Save our lunch money and wait. Are we going to the Dew Drop Inn today? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And then sometime, one of the elder people said, Miles, did you know the kids didn’t go to school all day today? They’d come down and tell Daddy. Daddy’d say, y’all didn’t go to school all day today? Where you been? [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>But I thank God for my parents, because they raised us in the admiration of the Lord and told us that God has no respective person, so why do you? And that’s the way it is with me, you know? Even when I’m on dialysis, I’ll pray for them all, because we’re all God’s children. God just wanted a bouquet of roses when he created all of us. And He did. It’s different colors and every denomination. So, this one guy said, how come we all can’t get along? [LAUGHTER] But I don’t have no problem with it. I don’t have no problem with any of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any other important landmarks, like the Dew Drop Inn, from that era?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, it was all houses over there.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about Virginia’s Chicken Shack?</p>
<p>Sparks: Virginia down here? You know, Virginia’s shop was right down here on the corner.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, I didn’t.</p>
<p>Sparks: Yeah, Virginia restaurant were right here on the corner before you go across the tracks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: On A Street.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever eat there?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, many times. You talking about, that woman could cook some biscuits. And her biscuits was—and you could get two or three biscuits out of hers and she’d put that jelly and preserves in between there and that ham, the ham they used to raise—shoot. Mm, mm. My dad raised his own pigs.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, really?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah, my dad, his pig lot was over there. He had his own pigs and he had his own beef further up there. Mm-hmm, yup. He had the cow, he had the calves, he had the pigs, he had the bacon and he had the beef. And he had to.</p>
<p>Bobby Sparks: How many kids he have?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm!</p>
<p>Bobby Sparks: How many kids?</p>
<p>Sparks: It was 15 of us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow! Where are you in that lineup?</p>
<p>Sparks: I’m the second.</p>
<p>Franklin: Second-oldest?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, I’m the second-oldest.</p>
<p>Franklin: What are your siblings’ names, starting from the oldest going down?</p>
<p>Sparks: Opal, Jeannette, Bobbie, Taylor, Ennis—where I have them at, all in the book? [LAUGHTER] Right there, in that folder. Right there in that folder there.</p>
<p>Hungate: Right there, whole family, 15 of them.</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yup. This was us. See, God, it’s even wrote all on the back. That’s a lot of us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Opal, Jeannette, Bobbie, Taylor, Shirley, Theartis, Donnell, Willy, Evelyn—that’s my wife’s name—LaWanda, Ennis, Theresa, Ervin, Gwendolyn, and Curtis. Wow. That is quite an age range, too. How old was your mother when she had you?</p>
<p>Sparks: I don’t know how old my mom and dad was when they had me. [LAUGHTER] But I know I’m 60. Opal’s 61, and Bobbie gonna be 60.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think you mean—</p>
<p>Sparks: My other sister up in Tacoma, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Here you go. Wow. That’s quite a large family.</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, you know what? When we was growing up, we had such a good time growing up together. And that’s why Daddy never would let us go to birthday parties. Because he would always tell us, it’s enough of y’all to have a birthday party out there in the yard.</p>
<p>Franklin: How big was your house?</p>
<p>Sparks: You know this house here on the corner of Douglas Street, upstairs and downstairs?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: That was our house. That’s where I grew up at.</p>
<p>Franklin: Just right down there.</p>
<p>Sparks: Off A Street on Douglas. Right on the corner, and it’s a little piece of lot still next to it there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where do you live now?</p>
<p>Sparks: I still live on Douglas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: 712 South Douglas. The oldest one, the two oldest ones had a choice when we got married. One could have a big wedding and the other one could have a down payment on a house. My older sister wanted the wedding. And I got the down payment on the house. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s a good deal!</p>
<p>Sparks: And I’m still in the house. I’m still in my house.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Sparks: I go to California, but when I go to California, I just lock it up and go ahead on. The gardener come and cut the yard and everything, but. My boys was born in California. But they would come and spend the summer with my mom and dad.</p>
<p>Franklin: How many children do you have?</p>
<p>Sparks: I have—one, two, three. I have four sons. Four sons, mm-hmm. I lost my Waynie. I lost my youngest son. The last one I had, I lost him. Mm-hmm, yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m sorry to hear that.</p>
<p>Sparks: But I enjoy them all. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Now, that’s where I’ll be going. My oldest son’ll be here in June so he can take me back to California because I won’t ride the train nor the plane nor the bus. So they’ll come drive me down, and when I get ready to come back, they’ll drive me back.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. To go back to the civil rights talk we were speaking of earlier. Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember when the schools in the South were desegregated? <em>Brown v. the Board of Education</em>?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah! The black school had they schools and the white had they school. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I remember when my dad couldn’t even go in the front door of the market, but my mom could. And I’m for sure his mom could, too. I’m pretty sure that Anna Mae could, too, because you see them, they could pass, you’d think they was white. They could go in the front door.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights movements in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, it helped out a lot in Kennewick. That’s the only problem they had, was in Kennewick. They never had a problem in Pasco and Richland. It was just Kennewick. Because when we’d even go over there to play basketball, Miss Booth would have to guard me and Sue Williams because we both was black.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you ever threatened, or--?</p>
<p>Sparks: No, because Miss Booth kept us right up under her. And we beat them by 20 points.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was different about Kennewick? Why do you think, looking back on it, what was Kennewick’s opposition to having blacks in their town?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, I don’t know, it was the older peoples. It was the old peoples who had settled there for a long time, had been there for a long time. But the young generation came behind them. Shoots, they was even going with the black boys. You know. And I say, it was just the older generation that had that going. But it’s the other generation came along, like me and I know my cousin, CW used to go with a girl named Marsha. She was white as I don’t know what and had blonde hair.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that shocking at all for some people?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, it was shocking then. After a lot of the old peoples moved on off, a lot of the elder people passed and went on that had—a lot of elder peoples in Kennewick had a lot of prejudice in them. But the young—the generation came behind them, they sure didn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you think changed in that generation?</p>
<p>Sparks: The generation came on after them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, what was so different between the old people and the young people? What was it?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, the generation came on behind them, they didn’t have no picks and no choices. Everybody was created equal. But the older generation, they just figured everyone was Uncle Tom and all that, you know, couldn’t do this and couldn’t have this and couldn’t have that.</p>
<p>I know when my dad was building the bigger house down there, and they was wondering what Mr. Miles was building. See, it didn’t bother Daddy because Daddy worked on the dam, him and Mr. Shaw. And he worked on the dams all over, you know. And my daddy was black as the ace of spades. But he was sweet as he could be. And see, my mom, you know, they got Indian and all that in them, so they could do whatever. You know, they was real light-skinned. They could go in anywhere. Momma didn’t have no problem in Kennewick; it was Daddy. But Momma couldn’t drive, so she couldn’t go unless Daddy took her. [LAUGHTER] And Daddy said, no, we’re going to Richland. We’re not going to Kennewick today. [LAUGHTER] And we’d go to Richland and Mom would go to Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you moved to California, were your experiences there, being black, were they different than here in Pasco?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oooooh, it was a whole lot of different.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Sparks: You could go anywhere you want to.</p>
<p>Franklin: In California?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: And where did you move to in California?</p>
<p>Sparks: I lived in—when I lived in California, I lived on 3<sup>rd</sup> Avenue, and I was right down the street from the Pasco High School.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, when you lived in California.</p>
<p>Sparks: When I lived in California.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where?</p>
<p>Sparks: I was down the street from Crenshaw High School.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, is that in LA?</p>
<p>Sparks: Uh-huh, that’s in LA. I worked at the school. And then I worked at the convalescent home, I worked everywhere, and I went to Providence Theological Seminary College. And it was mixed; it didn’t have no all-black. It wasn’t all-black; it was a mixture of us. And I fellowship with them now. When I go to California, I go to that church, and we just have a ball. And they say, Sparks, you finally came back! You know. I never had no problem when I was going to school here in Pasco. It was just that when we went to Kennewick to play basketball.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wanted to ask you about your husband. How did you meet him?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, my husband’s auntie lived there, this Smiths. Uncle Dave and Aunt Clement. They lived there. They lived, they got that big house next street over from me over there. QT come up and visit them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who?</p>
<p>Sparks: My husband.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you cutie?</p>
<p>Sparks: We call him QT but his name is Quilla. And we called him QT. Quilla Terrence Sparks. We called him Quilla. And he come up to visit his auntie, because his mom lived in Oxnard, California. That’s where he graduated in high school, in Oxnard, and played basketball.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you met him when he came to visit?</p>
<p>Sparks: I met him when he come to visit the first time. But I was still going to school. His mom and his grandma—his mom went to school with my mom.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Kildare?</p>
<p>Sparks: In Texas. His grandmother would come down to my mom house. Because my mom quilted a lot. They quilt a lot. And his grandma would come down and help Mom quilt. He came down and picked her up one time, and he asked me, who do you belongs to? And I said, my mom and my daddy. [LAUGHTER] You’d think your daddy would mind if I take you to get a hamburger? I say, you gotta ask my daddy. And from them on, he start—I was still in school. I was in high school. And he’d meet me everyday at the bus stop to walk me home. Mm-hmm. And I got married in my dad’s living room. In 1957, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you were 17, 18?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Sparks: And I got married in my dad living room.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then you moved to California with him?</p>
<p>Sparks: In three days, he said, we moving to California with my mom. And that’s where my sons was born. But every year, he said, he told Momma, he said, I’ll let her come back every year to visit. And he kept that promise. Me and the kids, we’d come every year. And then his grandmother came and she stayed whenever the boys was born, she’d come and stay with me so she could help me take care of the boys. He had a sweet grandmother, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: So did his family come up to work at Hanford or the dams as well?</p>
<p>Sparks: No. Not then. They came up later. I think Uncle Dave worked at Hanford. Didn’t Uncle Dave work at Hanford? Uncle Dave worked at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: That would be his uncle?</p>
<p>Sparks: That’s his uncle. That’s his mom—his dad—no, that’s your mom?</p>
<p>Bobby Sparks: His sister. My dad’s sister.</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm, yup. See this is my cousin on my mom’s side.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: His mom was on my mom’s side. His daddy is on my husband’s side. [LAUGHTER] Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gotcha.</p>
<p>Sparks: They all went to school together in Kildare, Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: That Kildare connection?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm. When one got a job, they made sure all the rest of them could get a job and come on out. We’re just one big happy family. Always have been, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s wonderful.</p>
<p>Sparks: You should come to our family reunion sometime.</p>
<p>Franklin: I should. I think I know—I’ve interviewed about half of you so far.</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, honey.</p>
<p>Franklin: I could get the other half in one fell swoop.</p>
<p>Sparks: This church here will not hold all of us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it’s a big extended family. I’ve been finding that out—</p>
<p>Sparks: That’s on both sides. That’s on both side, on momma’s side and on Daddy’s side. Now, see, I’m related to the Daniels on my daddy’s side. Mm-hmm, yep. And the Coles.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yup. Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration, work, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: I just love the Lord because He changed the situation it was in the Tri-Cities. And just like He did it here, He’s going to do it other places, too. Now I can go to Kennewick and stay all day and don’t have no problem. Go over there and gas up and hit the street by the tracks and come on up the hill. [LAUGHTER] Don’t have no problem. Mm-mm.</p>
<p>And you know, God can do anything but fail. And I always say, God had a purpose for you to go through something, so you realize what He could do for you. If you put your trust in Him. Now, you got to put your trust in God and depend on Him to open the pathway for you. And I’m a living witness, God have opened a lot of pathways that I didn’t think could ever be opened. Opened doors that I didn’t think would ever be open. God did all that. And I give Him the glory. Because He was the one worked on the people’s heart and caused them to have a turnaround and let them know that every one of you is My children. And I intend for every one of you to get along.</p>
<p>And now you know, when some have them on dialysis, they say Reverend Sparks, can you do this for so-and-so-and-so-and-so? And I just say push me over then, I’ll pray for them right then and there, mm-hmm. We always supposed to be helpers, one to another. And when you help with one to another, you don’t have no problem. God is pleased with the road you traveling. I don’t know nobody that I dislike. Red, yellow, black, white, blue, whatever color. We all God’s children.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, Reverend, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us—</p>
<p>Sparks: I thank you for taking time out to do what you’re doing in order to take the survey to help the peoples who have been here for a long time and know what you had to go through to get to where you at now. That’s a blessing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: Only God can do that. Nobody else but God. And I just thank God for His business in it. Because if it hadn’t been for God on our side, where would—that’s why you breathing today. God could take that breath any time he get ready. But He know you doing a good job, and you pleasing Him and he’s satisfied with the work you doing. He says, I’m going to let him live a while longer. But be ready when he come. [LAUGHTER] Don’t let Him catch you with your work undone.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: Okay? [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: I appreciate it.</p>
<p>Sparks: It pays to be with the Lord. Because he’s the way and the only way. I wouldn’t have no other before me except the Lord.</p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-1957 2006-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Reverend Jeannette Sparks
Subject
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Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
McNary Lock and Dam (Or.)
Basketball
Segregation
School integration
Civil rights
Description
An account of the resource
Reverend Jeannette Sparks moved to Pasco, Washington as a child in 1951.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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05/05/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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d6d018dc86ec42219474d096eac81420
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb7e5e93ecb8d86ccc4e43070311b6984.mp4
0e20f9e91d4739df06707ceee0bb1df1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Bobby Sparks
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Bobby Sparks on May 8<sup>th</sup> 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We’ll be talking with Bobby about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Bobby Sparks: My name is Bobby, B-O-B-B-Y, Ray, R-A-Y, Sparks, S-P-A-R-K-S.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is Bobby your given name?</p>
<p>Sparks: Bobby is my given name on my bible. It wasn’t a birth certificate; it was a bible. We recorded all the births on the bible. That’s my given name, yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. They just went straight to Bobby.</p>
<p>Sparks: They went straight to Bobby, yup. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Because I’m a Robert.</p>
<p>Sparks: They didn’t change to Robert later. They said he’s a Bobby, they left me as a Bobby.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right on. So, Bobby, your family migrated here during WWII, right? Or parts from your family migrated here during WWII from Kildare?</p>
<p>Sparks: Yeah. Part of them migrated. Actually some of them partially migrated. They was migrant workers, they came up and worked a few months and then they went back to Kildare. That was my grandfather, Connie Davis. He came up during, like you said, in the ‘40s and stuff to work at the B Plant.</p>
<p>Franklin: The B Reactor or B Plant?</p>
<p>Sparks: He was actually working on building the reactor. He was doing—yeah, the reactor building.</p>
<p>Franklin: You said his name was Connie Davis?</p>
<p>Sparks: Connie Davis.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Who else from your family came up?</p>
<p>Sparks: Connie Davis, he was the only one that I know of that came up in that generation. He was one of the older ones. My uncles came up later. They might’ve came up in the early ‘50s and stuff, but--</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were they?</p>
<p>Sparks: One was Dave Smith.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: James Sparks, and Alford Sparks.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did you come?</p>
<p>Sparks: I came to the Hanford in 1965.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1965.</p>
<p>Sparks: I was in the third grade.</p>
<p>Franklin: Third grade, okay. When and where were you born?</p>
<p>Sparks: I was born in Kildare, Texas in 1955.</p>
<p>Franklin: How come your parents moved up here?</p>
<p>Sparks: My father was a farmer. We had maybe 60 acres of land. So he farmed the land in Texas, in east Texas, and it was hard work, very hard work. What happened, his teacher, which was Vanis Daniels, moved to the Tri-Cities area.</p>
<p>Franklin: His teacher?</p>
<p>Sparks: He was one of his instructors, Vanis Daniels.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Is that Vanis Daniels, Senior?</p>
<p>Sparks: Senior, yeah. He sent a little note back and said, hey, this is not too bad! You guys need to join me in the Hanford Site. That’s how my dad got here. He came up before I did. He came up a year before the family moved, checked it all out and got us a home and then we moved up.</p>
<p>Franklin: What else do you know about your dad’s life before you came up here?</p>
<p>Sparks: My dad was farmer, like I said, he worked on the farm for years. He went to the military, fought in the war. He was just a hardworking man. What he did, he fed the family by hunting and fishing and gathering. We did a lot of fishing and hunting and raising animals. He built his own house down in Kildare, Texas. Basically, being a father of fourteen children, he didn’t have much time for anything else except for raising the children.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, so you have thirteen siblings?</p>
<p>Sparks: Yeah, I have thirteen siblings. And back in Texas, that was not very unusual, because they basically got married when they was very young, thirteen, fourteen-year-olds and they started having children.</p>
<p>Franklin: How old were your parents when they got married?</p>
<p>Sparks: My mother, I believe she was like fourteen and my dad, he might have been eighteen. They were very young when they got married.</p>
<p>Franklin: What is your mother’s name?</p>
<p>Sparks: My mother’s name is Annie May Davis.</p>
<p>Franklin: Davis, okay. So Connie Davis, your grandfather, was your mother’s father.</p>
<p>Sparks: Mother’s father, yeah. My dad’s father died when he was really young. So, what he did, he actually went up to eighth grade—no, no, it wasn’t even the eighth grade. I think when he was like in the sixth grade, he had to drop out of school and help raise the family. He ended up not only raising his brothers and sisters, but he actually, after they were grown, he raised us, also.</p>
<p>Franklin: Tell me about your mom’s life in Texas. What did she do, and her education and things like that.</p>
<p>Sparks: My mom, since she got married at a very early age, she dropped out of school when she was like in the eighth grade. Basically her life was, she took care of the family. She cleaned and took care of home, cooked, and just took care of the business around the house. My dad, he worked in the lumberyard, he actually worked on the railroad down in Texas also. And because the hours were so long, she had to take care of the children.</p>
<p>The weirdest thing about the house that we were born in, we had no electricity, we had wooden stoves. In order to wash the clothes they had a little creek in the back of the house, and we had to get the water. She was—basically, she didn’t have all the microwaves and the stuff that we have now, so everything that she did, she started cooking in the morning and cooked all day. So that was her job was to--</p>
<p>Franklin: Did the house have running water?</p>
<p>Sparks: Didn’t have running water, we actually had a well in the back of the house where she had to go in and pull the water up out of the well. When she washed the clothes, she had a washboard that she would use. It was from the old school, very old school; we had a wooden stove, we had to go gather wood. For Christmas, we’d go out into our property, cut a big tree and make our own decorations and decorate it.</p>
<p>The community we lived in, in Kildare was a very—it was a divided community, it was a black community and there was a white community. We were basically self-sufficient. We didn’t mingle very much with the Caucasians. So we kind of had our own little city, our own little things that we did. We canned, we hunted, we gathered; basically took care of each other in the community. It was kind of old school. If your house burned, we’d go over and help you build your house back up. If I start rambling too much, let me know.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, no. It’s really important to kind of set the stage from where—how life was there and why so many people left. What do you know about your parents’ initial experience of coming to work at Hanford and finding a place to live?</p>
<p>Sparks: As far as my mother, when they initially got here, there was this placed called the Navy Homes, Navy Homes in Pasco; that’s where a lot of the people moved into. You have thirteen, fourteen sisters and brothers, where do you live in? You go over to the military base and they had houses built in like A-frame homes that we lived in. So they had no issues finding a place to live. My dad, because he was a laborer, it was easy for him to find work in the Hanford Site. Because they were looking for—it was a big demand for hard workers, and my dad was a very hard worker. So he actually got into pouring concrete. Once they got here, their whole social life was around their community, the black people. They didn’t mingle much with the Caucasians.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, but they also—at that point, there was a pretty large amount of people from Kildare that had moved, that your parents were either related to or knew pretty well, right? Because you would’ve been related either by marriage or by blood either to the Daniels and the Mitchells and the Browns and that big network.</p>
<p>Sparks: We have a huge, huge extended family. The Miles, the Davises. The community, when we get together at Kurtzman Park, I mean, it was like a family reunion. Everybody was there. So they had a great networking of friends that they ran around with.</p>
<p>Franklin: How old were you, you said you came in ‘65?</p>
<p>Sparks: I was in the third grade.</p>
<p>Franklin: Third grade.</p>
<p>Sparks: Third grade when I came. I went to Longfellow Elementary School.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you came, what were your first impressions when you arrived?</p>
<p>Sparks: Because we didn’t have all the convenience, it was like it was the greatest place I’ve ever seen in my life. I can actually remember traveling up from Kildare in the station wagon with my uncle. And I remember driving into a restaurant and going in like an Arctic Circle, and having my first ice cream cone at the Arctic Circle. It was like, hey, this is the greatest thing in the world. And to get here, walk into the house and hit a light switch and the lights come on, we didn’t have the kerosene lights. It was actually great to me, I thought we was living the best life in the world, from what we came from to what we had here in the state of Washington.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. How long did you stay at the Navy Homes? It wasn’t your permanent residence?</p>
<p>Sparks: We actually stayed at the Navy Homes, we stayed there until I was, I think I was in junior high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Sparks: Is when my dad finally bought a house on Elm Street in Pasco, in east Pasco, mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to?</p>
<p>Sparks: As a kid, you don’t notice things. My mom and dad, like I said, they took care of us. We went to school, we came home. Because my dad was into spending a lot of time with his kids, we did a lot of fishing, a lot of hunting, a lot of gardening. We weren’t able, when I was in elementary school, to go play AAU baseball and all that stuff. So we weren’t mingling very much in the community, because we stayed to ourselves, because we were from Texas. When you’re from Texas, you kind of know what to do and what not to do, what you can get away with, and what you cannot get away with. We had learnt that at a very young age.</p>
<p>As far as elementary school, not an issue. Now when you start growing up a little bit and you get into junior high school and you start mingling, and kids are not very kind. They’re not, they’re very hard. I remember when I got in junior high—it was actually in my sixth grade in elementary school, because I had a Southern accent, very, very strong Southern accent, and I would say yes, ma’am, and no, ma’am. I was in a class with kids who didn’t talk like that. So right away they started criticizing. You can’t talk that way, that’s the way slaves used to talk. We don’t say yes ma’am or no ma’am; we say no. Even this older lady pulled me aside one time—I used to mow her lawns—and she said, no, we don’t talk like that. They made us do that in Texas. Don’t call me yes, sir and no, sir. Things like that we had to deal with.</p>
<p>Another thing that they did, when I noticed what was going on, the first class they put me in, they put me in a special ed. Class. Because I was Southern, they mistake the Southern accent for I had a learning disability. In that class, it turned out, they had all the other kids that were like the really bad actors, and so we were all in the same class. When you get in that class, like in the sixth and fifth grade, they normally take you all through that system in that class, special ed. type of class. What happened was, I had a teacher, his name was Ted Ogata, and Mr. Ogata, he pulled me aside and said, Bobby, you’re like in fifth or sixth grade now. He said, if you don’t get your act together, you’re going to be in this class for the rest of your life. And in that class you actually had a different lunches, you rode in a different bus to school--I mean, it was really isolated.</p>
<p>Mr. Ogata kind of became my mentor. He worked with me, took me to his home, and he was able to switch me from, at the time I was like a D to F student, flunking out of school. Within a year, I was able to increase my grades up to—when I got in junior high, they started putting me in honor classes, because I had one person that stepped in and influenced me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your parents ever talk about their adjustment here, and what their initial thoughts were or how they adjusted from Texas to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: Like I said, my mother, she worked in the home. And because they were from Texas, they knew, they were very polite. They didn’t have many experience, like when my dad would come home and say this man called me out of my name. Because my dad was a big man, I mean, he had arms like this, so not very many people wanted to cross my dad. My mother, she was the most loving lady you ever seen in your life. So when you’re nice, and kind, and loving, it’s kind of hard for people to treat you bad. She was the kind of person, she treated her enemies like she wanted to be treated. They kind of, what went around came around. Since she was nice, they kind of treated her nice. I never remember my mother sit back and say, this person spit on my face, this person closed the door on my face, I couldn’t go into this restaurant because there was a sign. They never shared that with us. They kind of sheltered us from that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about culturally? Was it a tough adjustment for your parents to leave the family and friends, and kind of culture of Texas and come to an environment where things were—because Texas, segregation had been on the books and it had been upfront. In the North, it had existed but it was more subtle.</p>
<p>Sparks: It was very subtle up North. And because my dad, when he came here, he didn’t experience the true issues that came with segregation. When he came here, he was in demand, we need workers. So there was a demand for laborers; he could get a job. Housing at that time was booming, and there was a community that he could move into to get a home. So he didn’t have those kinds of issues when he got here. His mother was already here also. She had a home, my uncles had a home. The east Pasco neighborhood was our neighborhood. And that community, it was houses, it was stores, it was restaurants, they even had a placed called a cotch ball, that’s where, if they wanted to go out to the casinos late at night, they had their own little casinos where they could hang out and drink.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was it called?</p>
<p>Sparks: Call it cotch ball.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you spell that?</p>
<p>Sparks: Cotch. Spelled it just like a cotch. I can’t spell it, but they just called it a cotch ball. Like a couch. Like--</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, I got you.</p>
<p>Sparks: And actually, these little places boomed up in east Pasco. When all the other bars and things closed, the Hanford workers would come out late at night and they could gamble and hang out at the cotch ball and have dinner and all kind of other activities went on at the cotch balls. They had their own community. Because my dad was used to that isolation in Texas, he would go and work at the Hanford Site, but all of his social life was in that little community that we had there.</p>
<p>That’s why, like I said, my dad, he never talked about it, my mom didn’t talk about it very often. Because my mom, taking care of the house, the only time she experienced stuff is when she went shopping. And even then, because she is a very quiet woman, she didn’t share those dramatic stories with her kids.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. How would you describe life in the community, east Pasco?</p>
<p>Sparks: It was—when you’re poor and everybody else around you is poor, it was bliss. We hadn’t been exposed to people that was very affluent and had the beautiful homes and stuff because we stayed to ourselves. I mean, I would get up and go to school, and hang out with all my buddies all day, just a normal life for us. The only time we started seeing issues is when we started becoming more aware of ourselves and what was happening in the community. When you get a little older in junior high, and high school and you go to college, and then you see that culture shock between what you got and what others got. And then you start mingling with people from all over the state, from the Seattle area, Spokane area, and then you start seeing the chaotic, the racism and stuff that was going on. But as a kid coming up, until I was in probably ninth grade, everything was—to me was—I had no issues. </p>
<p>Franklin: What did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Sparks: As a kid, like I said, my dad—we spent a lot time with my dad fishing in Eagle Lake and Moses Lake, and all over the state fishing and hunting, working in the garden. My dad, he was like, he brought up all of his Southern crops up here with him, the okra, the black-eyed peas, the cotter peas. And what he did was, he had a five-acre lot of land, and what he would do, he would farm that lot of land and people would come from all over the state to get his crops. He actually had a huge pig pen and we had pigs and cows and stuff.</p>
<p>My normal day would be getting up at like 5:00, going out with my dad, working in the farm. Then after I worked in the farm, we’d come home. My mom would always have a big breakfast with biscuits, and gravy, and ham. We would have a huge breakfast, and then we would go to school. Go to school all day, get off of school like at three, we would come home and my dad would always have chores for us to do. You create stuff. He’d say, son, go pull out those nails out of the boards. He’d have big piles of boards. So we couldn’t go out and play until we did our chores. Dad was very strict; it was only one rule: it was his way or the highway. Because he didn’t have time to negotiate with that many kids. He had to have a plan and he stuck to the plan. That’s how we were raised, me and all of my sisters and brothers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any particular community events from when you were a kid?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, we had so many events. The biggest we had was, we had the Juneteenth. That’s when the whole community got together and we celebrate the freedom of slavery at Texas, because all of us was at Texas. At that time, it was like the whole Kurtzman Park, everybody would show up at the park and we would and we would play baseball and have basketball tournaments, have fashion shows, and have preaching and singing. It was just a huge festival that we did. That was the biggest, is the Juneteenth activities, which we did once a year. But with my family, because we had such a huge family, we had a lot of—both side of my family is huge. So we would always have family reunions and everybody would come from down South, and from California, and we would get together, and just have a great time. Go out and rent a park and take over the whole park, get to know our family that we hadn’t seen for years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right on. Did you attend church?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yes, I attended church.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what church did you attend?</p>
<p>Sparks: All of us that came from Texas, there was a church called Saint John the Baptist Church, that’s in Texas. That’s where I originally started going to church. After we moved to the Tri-Cities, all of my uncles and aunties, and nieces went to New Hope Baptist Church. So our family joined New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, and that’s where we spent a lot of our spare time. They had vacation bible school, they had dinners, so a lot of our social life was centered around the church.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did the church play in the black community?</p>
<p>Sparks: Actually, the church, if you go back and look at it, it was one of the things that started the civil rights movement. You look at the fact that God created man and made all of us equal. So then you start looking at a lot of the preachers and stuff in our community. It’s like, hey, we’re second to none. You look at a man based on his character but not by the color of his skin. It was very instrumental, a lot of the meetings, Sister Barton, who is one of the city councilmen in the Tri-Cities, she went to my church. The Mitchells, sister Mitchell, their mom went to our church. So a lot of their training as far as speaking publicly, they developed that skill in the church. And their beliefs that all men are created equal and you should treat everyone like you want to be treated, that basic fact was nurtured in the church, and then it grew out into the rest of the community. Even now, the church is the springboard for what happens in that community over there. Because all the meetings, the influential people that’s into the movement came out of the church.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any opportunities here that were not available where your parents came from?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, there were so many opportunities. Because it was such a little country town, didn’t have the colleges, didn’t have the financial support. If I had have stayed in Texas—I got to tell you a story. My dad when he moved here, he came here first and he got set up in homes. What he did, he sent a letter back to my mother and he said it was really tough out here, because he was away from his family. He had left his children. He did like they did at Hanford Site; he actually left his crops in the field, because he had to move up here really quick. And because he had left all of that he went through a state where he was—you can imagine what he went through, leaving all his children. So he went to a state where he was discouraged. He wrote a letter to my mom, and he told my mom, he said, well, I think I’m going to come back, because he missed his children. My sister, Frankie, intercepted that letter and she knew we didn’t have the same opportunities in Texas as we would have here in the state of Washington, as far as education, homes, sending us children to some of the better schools and stuff. She didn’t give that letter to my mom. That’s why we got here, is because she saw that the opportunities here was really great for us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where are you in the sibling order?</p>
<p>Sparks: There is fourteen of us and I sit right there in the middle. I am number seven.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah? What is the range between the oldest and the youngest?</p>
<p>Sparks: My oldest sister is like 71, and my youngest sister is like 40, 42. So it was a huge range. So for many years—you asked what did my mother do? She made babies. And that’s a lot of labor, a lot of labor.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes. In what way were opportunities here limited because of segregation and racism?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, it starts back, if you were a black man and came to the Tri-Cities, you joined the labor local. The labor local took basically unskilled workers, and they taught you how to pull a jackhammer, they taught you how to dig holes. Now, it’s been developed a little higher than it was then, more skilled labor. But it was just—basically, the farmers came and they gave them a skill and that’s what they did. Now what has happened since the Labor Hall developed, then with the changes in the society that the labor unions had to start bringing in more blacks into the halls. When you get into the Electricians’, the Pipefitters’ locals, they had to open it up because of the laws had changed. And even in the Hanford Site, for years, they didn’t have blacks that was moving up through the ranks, but with the government organizations, you can’t do that.</p>
<p>They actually went out with the equal opportunity employee situation, they started bringing blacks in, making them managers, working in the mail rooms: not just the laborers anymore, they started becoming skilled laborers. With the skilled laborer and the money they were making, now they could afford to send their kids to college. The kid has more time to play sports now, he doesn’t have to work in the orchards with his dad. For my case, what it did for me after opening up and my dad started making money, it allowed me to start doing sports; I didn’t have to get up in the morning and work in the garden and stuff anymore. Because I had been a hard worker my whole life, I was just a natural in sports.</p>
<p>Franklin: Makes sense. What schools did you go to?</p>
<p>Sparks: I went to Longfellow Elementary School, I went to Captain Grey Elementary, I went to McLoughlin Junior High, and I graduated from Pasco High School in 1974. I got recruited to wrestle at the University of Washington from 1974 to 1980, and I graduated from the University of Washington in 1982.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you get your degree in?</p>
<p>Sparks: I got my degree in business economics.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did racism or segregation affect your education?</p>
<p>Sparks: Like I said, I ran into Mr. Ted Ogata, and one man changed my whole perspective on education. Before then, if I had stayed in the system the way that it was set up, I would not had the opportunity to go to the University of Washington. Because even though you get a certificate through the special programs, you cannot apply for the colleges and stuff. If I had not have had Mr. Ogata, I would not have gotten a scholarship to go to the University of Washington. So it would have affected me. Because I did have someone who believed in me and he saw great things that I could do, he pushed me so I got out of that program. But a lot of my buddies did not get out of it, so it did affect them. It affect their income now, it affect their lifestyle, because they didn’t have the same opportunities and opportunities to advance and go to college.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, they would have been shut out of a lot of--</p>
<p>Sparks: They would’ve been shut out, would’ve been shut out, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: To an education.</p>
<p>Sparks: And me, when I was in the University of Washington, one way it affected me—when I got to U-Dub, I started seeing the culture changes and I started seeing the culture shock, the difference in those that have and those that have not. I remember taking a—I think I was taking a logic class and I was struggling with this class. Oh, I was struggling bad. So I was barely getting a C. So the professor brings me into his office and says, you might as well drop out of school. What are you doing here anyway? You’re not going to graduate with a C. I looked at him and I said, well, I may not graduate, but I’ll tell you what. I said, when I get out of school, I’ll make more money than you are making right now. Because I know how much you’re making, and I can drop out right now and become and electrician and make double what you’re making right now. What I did, I wasn’t a nice guy anymore. You challenge me, then I would fight back. And that was a good thing, because you had to have tough skin to make it through the system.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Could you describe any interactions you or your parents had with other people from other parts of the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah, I had—because I did sports, I interacted with a lot of people from Pasco, Kennewick, Richland, Walla Walla, Wenatchee. I got to meet a lot of different people. Which was probably the best thing that happened to me because I was raised in an isolated community. So basically I had to end up learning how to speak two languages. Speak the language of my community and speak the language in college, you had to be able to relate to a lot of people. You know, it’s not integrated. If it’s segregated, you can’t get that interface, you can’t grow. You don’t feel comfortable. If you don’t feel comfortable around all races, you can’t go work at Pacific National Laboratory, because we got people from all over the country. You got to be able to get along with everyone.</p>
<p>Franklin: All over the world, right?</p>
<p>Sparks: All over the world. We got them from Japan, we got them from Russia, all over. So that interfacing works to your advantage when you get older. Because now when I interview you, I can speak your language, because I got to sell myself. How can I sell myself if I’m not interfacing with people in the community? So sports helped me a lot in that way. Because I was able to travel all over the United States, even in high school, going to Texas, going to Iowa, Denver, all over the world. I even had an opportunity to go to Japan to mingle with my teammates. We even traveled in a van together from here all the way down to Iowa, circle Oklahoma, go to all the universities, then come back. So we developed a lot of long-lasting friendships.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you graduated in ’82?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Then did you come out to work at the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, that’s a long story. [LAUGHTER] I graduated ’82. I had a degree in business economics. I went to University of Washington for five years, and I got out, and I said, I got to go make some money now. So my very first job interview, the guy said, you know what? I applied for a bank. Business economics, go to the bank and get a job. We’ll pay you eight bucks an hour to do this and this and this, and then after so many years, you’d be up to so many bucks an hour. So I went back to what I told that college professor. I said, I can make more money as an electrician than I can make working at the bank.</p>
<p>So what I did, I applied for the apprenticeship program, IBEW, electrical apprenticeship program. That’s how I got to work at the Hanford Site, as an electrical apprentice. And I guess I’ll go one year back. When I was in college, I had an opportunity to come out here and work as an intern. I worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory my sophomore year in college. And it’s the craziest thing. My job was, they put me in an animal research laboratory and they had beagles. And the craziest thing, my job was to smoke the beagles. And when Vanis was telling a story about the beagles, it was like identical to my story. But I did it as a summer intern.</p>
<p>So when I started there, I got my feet in the door for PNL, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, so when I came back—which was years later—and applied for a job there, the payroll number that they gave me when I was a kid, I got that same payroll number, which is 35810, to work for the laboratory. So, yeah, I did work at the Hanford Site as an electrician apprentice for four years. When I became a journeyman wireman, I applied for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and I actually became an electrician at the laboratory also.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did you work out at the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Sparks: I actually worked throughout the Hanford Site. I worked at the 221-T Plant, I worked at, there was a reactor, I never remember the name of it, but it was out by the river, the deactivated reactor, we did research in there. I worked at the 300 Area, throughout the buildings in the 300 Area, multiple buildings. I worked at FFTF. I worked at—actually, one of the jobs I had was they was going to automate FFTF, and my job was to make the panels that operate the computers and stuff and put those together, the interface panels.</p>
<p>Franklin: What on-the-job training did you receive, if any?</p>
<p>Sparks: Basically, I took four years on-the-job training as an apprentice. I had a journeyman wireman, and they basically take you from doing absolutely nothing about electricity, then you almost become like a plasma physicist. You know everything about it. Actually, I got to the point where I got challenged and I decided to start my business. So I actually started electrical contracting business along with working at the Hanford Site. Because always—my position was always—I knew if they ever let me go, then I would have my own business to fall back on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Good.</p>
<p>Sparks: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: [YAWN] Sorry, excuse me. Did you acquire any experience or skills on the job that helped you later in life?</p>
<p>Sparks: Like I said, the skills that I learned on the job actually led me into become a businessman. I actually opened my own business, electric contracting business.</p>
<p>Franklin: What’s that called?</p>
<p>Sparks: J and B Sparks Electric. Jevon, my son’s name is Jevon, my daughter’s name is Brittany. So I named it after my son—J and B Sparks Electric.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of a good coincidence that your last name is Sparks.</p>
<p>Sparks: Sparks! Everywhere I go, it’s perfect. Automatic advertisement. That’s the Sparks. Pick that guy up! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you describe a typical workday out on the Site?</p>
<p>Sparks: Now? Or when?</p>
<p>Franklin: [COUGH] Sorry, excuse me. I have something stuck in my throat.</p>
<p>Sparks: Now?</p>
<p>Franklin: No, like when you were out on Site as an apprentice when you were working out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Sparks: Actually, as an apprentice, I worked at the WPPSS plant. So my typical day at WPPSS plant would—I would come in at work, there was a crew of probably 50 electricians, we’d meet together. They’d have this guy who would be assigned to me, he would be my journeyman wireman. His supervisor would come up and have a plan of a day meeting. At the plan of a day meeting, he’d give us a task to do. Today, we want you guys to go in those manholes—because all around WPPSS there’s manholes—and we want you to take every manhole up, and we want to drill a hole in that manhole and we’re going to have a pipe to come up through it. So my very first job as apprentice—you’ve seen the movie Conan, when he’s walking around—remember that one deal he had a job where he was actually walking around the whale? My first job was like Conan the Barbarian. I’m out there walking with this big old tap, making holes in these big old huge manhole covers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Sparks: So that was my typical day. You go out, you get a job, and a lot of your jobs would last for, you know, six months. So then once you get your job, you can report to your job site and do the work. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you recall about working at B Reactor or any of the other buildings and structures still present on the Site today?</p>
<p>Sparks: What I recall is—I was from University of Washington. So I’m coming from a college that’s got 40,000 people or more. Big, huge structures and libraries and stuff all the way, all around the place. So my very first thing, driving up to that reactor, it’s like somebody dropped a nuclear bomb on it. This whole area was just—nothing was there. Nothing but desert and weeds, and I’m thinking, oh, man, what happened here? How did I—I died and went to hell. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>So my first day on the job site, I drive out to that reactor, and my car break down. So I’m in the middle of this desert, it’s cold and ice, and my car broke down. And that’s when they had the bus system come through. This guy came through in a bus and picked me up and took me back downtown. But it was really bad. It was really—the rules were not the same as the rules we have now in the building.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Sparks: I remember one building that I worked in, I walked into the building and there was a research project set up. And I looked at the floor, and I said, it looked like the concrete had melted away. It turned out they was doing some type of research and lost whatever they were using, and it actually built a hole in the concrete. And I’m looking at that and said, I don’t want to work here. Because I thought it was not safe. But then over the years, the safety did improve and things are better out there now.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors or management?</p>
<p>Sparks: I would have to go back to when I was an apprentice. During that time, because a lot of the guys that was working here was what you call travelers. And the travelers that were guys, like out of, say, Texas, and they were up here looking for work. So the travelers had a different attitude about the people that they work with. Most of them was very humble people, and they taught me everything that I needed to know. But every once in a while you’d run into one who wants to treat you like an apprentice. He want you to run and get his coffee, run and get his lunch and stuff for him. But because I was from a background where, being a wrestler, I had been exposed to the senior guy on the team, you would—that’s the way he treated you. The fraternities, they treated you that way in the fraternity. So in my mind, I said, this is just a pecking order. Because the money is so good, no way in the world am I going to walk away from this.</p>
<p>One of the worst incidents that I had on a job site was at WPPSS number 2. Actually, this is when I was in college and I came there to work as an intern. And I was working with one of the older guys there. We were carrying two-by-fours on our shoulder and we was taking them over and stacking them in a pile. Well, he walked past me and hit me upside the head with the two-by-four. And the guy looks at me and I said, oh, that was an accident, huh? He said, yeah, just an accident. But then he came back again. This time, he hit me again, he swung it around, and hit me upside the head. I said, you can’t do that again. Then he looked at me, called me out of my name, and he say, you know what? He said, you took my son’s job. You shouldn’t even be out here. He said, I’m going to kick your butt. So he was behind—there was a big wall like that wall over there. This guy jumped on me, tackled me to the ground—and I’m thinking I’m making more money in my life, but if I don’t get this guy off me, he’s going to hurt me back here. So I actually had to put something on him, get him off of me, control him. And the weirdest thing about it is that we were working in this area where it was like wall was here and wall was there, and it turned out the guys at the job were sitting up there looking at us, and they did not stop it. And I said, why did you do that? They said, oh, we figured it was just a matter of time before you take care of this guy. So yeah, it was some cases of that out there. It wasn’t all good. Yeah.</p>
<p>And another, to go back to the social part of the life, I used to go bowling a lot in Kennewick. After a wrestling match, me and my cousin was out bowling. And we were sitting there bowling. This is when bowling was big time, I mean, the bowling alley was full. Everybody was there, that’s where everybody hung out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was this the mid-to-late ‘70s?</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah. It was big time. I’m sitting there bowling, having a good time. And I look up, and there’s two policemen coming in. And I say, what in the heck is this? So everybody—because he comes right out to the bowling lanes. He say, everybody up against the wall! So he makes everybody go up against the wall. He say, you two! He grabbed me and my cousin, and he say, you guys over here. And they took us out. I mean, the whole bowling alley, everybody’s watching—common criminals. I said, what in the world is going on? What happened? He said, a store had got robbed, he said it was a black guy—two black guys, one was tall and one was short. Well, I’m 5’9”. My cousin, he’s about 6’4”, so we fit the description. And the weirdest thing about it is that after he grabbed up, threw us up against the wall, because I’m a wrestler, my next, first reflex is to react. And he went just like this. And if I had reacted further, I would have been shot.</p>
<p>So anyway, he took me to the Kennewick police station, they booked us. And I said, can I call my coach? And they said, why? I said, if I call him, he’ll tell you where I was at when this crime happened. You said the crime happened around 6:00. So I get my coach on the phone, I say, hey, I’m in jail. Can you get on this phone and tell this guy where I was at at 6:00? So he gets on the phone, he said, that is Bobby Sparks, and at 6:00 he was out in Walla Walla. We had a wrestling match in Walla Walla. Because he’s our lightweight, he was on the mat at this time. Will you please let him go? So anyway it, like I said, as I got older and as I started mingling, I started seeing a lot of the racism. Even, this was in, like you say, in the early ‘60s and early ‘70s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Let’s see here. You already kind of covered some of these. How did your racial background figure into your working experiences?</p>
<p>Sparks: You know, it’s the craziest thing. Here I am, let me give you my credentials. I went to University of Washington; I got a degree in business economics. IBEW Local 112, I got electrical training, journeyman wireman. I got my business license, which is electrical administrators for the State of Washington when I started working. So you look at all of my credentials, you say, this guy can go in, and he can get a job anywhere he wants to, based on his past performance. You know, if you look at my application for the companies that I applied for—which, I just found this out recently, and it kind of pisses me off—which is a good deal, I guess, I shouldn’t complain. But instead of going in and hiring me based on my credentials, based on the skill level that I had, they brought me in as an equal opportunity employee, as a special employee. And to me, because I’ve always been a competitor my whole life, I’m thinking, why you got to bring me in that way, instead of bringing me in just normal? So that kind of insulted me, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because that idea is to counteract the bias inherent in hiring and to get us to a world that would be strictly merit-based, that’s the ideal. Even though it doesn’t exist. But you’re saying, I’m coming in under merit, but we’re so far away from that for blacks, that you’re going to bring me in under equal opportunity.</p>
<p>Sparks: Equal opportunity employee. And I looked at that—because I’ve been a competitor. I was a national wrestling champ coming out of high school. I went to University of Washington, I went to NCAAs and I wrestled and I competed at that level. So then to say, you got to change the playing ground for me to get hired, it blew me away. Yeah, blew me away. But anyway, those are some of the things that, because we are in the state of Washington, it’s the unspoken things. And I found this out after about two, three years ago, when I was looking at some of my forms that had the special Affirmative Action stamp on it. And I’m thinking, affirmative action? And the amazing thing about it is that after I’d worked there, and that’s one of the things that I was going to show you, is the accomplishments that I have received after I got there. From EFCOG, which is one of the biggest DOE operations out there, they gave me a special award. They take me to Washington, DC and I got the DOE Secretary appreciation award. So that affirmative deal on my application just blew me away. But anyway.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s interesting, though, because it seems like one could still argue that without that program you might not have been hired at all. Right? I mean, because that was set up to—because blacks weren’t being hired on merit to begin with.</p>
<p>Sparks: You’re correct. If that had not existed, I would not have been hired. But to me, that’s a slap in the face. You bring in a man who meets all the merits, but he’s not given the opportunity because of the color of his skin. But if I hadn’t have gotten hired, I would have been successful anyway. Because I would have just stepped out on my own and probably become a contractor. Which was what I did. But anyway, that’s just a twist.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s an interesting wrinkle into the whole thing. In what ways did the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Sparks: Hm! Even after, like you say, after the early ‘40s and stuff, there was still a lot of proprietary type of things at the Hanford Site and a lot of secrecy. Because a lot of work we was doing was still with—you couldn’t go out—I can’t share right now on this some of the things that I do. So it’s still—it’s not the fact that we building the bomb, but it’s fact that we have companies that we’re working for that were proprietary type of stuff. I can’t just go in and take a picture and give it to you and you show it on this. So the secrecy is still there. But it’s just for other reasons.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned how you were treated on the job. What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Sparks: Outside of work, it’s like they say, the church is the most segregated thing on Sunday morning.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s funny, Vanis and Edmon said that yesterday.</p>
<p>Sparks: It is, it’s the same thing. So it’s kind of the same way with—I go to Dallas to a convention and stuff, and one thing I’ve learnt because I’m from Texas, I don’t want to go to convention and hang out and drink with you. Because I’ve been on a wrestling team, and we go to, say University of Minnesota. And as a team, we sit around at a bar and we drinking and we having a good time. Then all of the sudden a little boy who’s got a little problem with me wants to challenge me. So in order for me to stop having those confrontations, then before we get too drunk, I’m leaving. So I learned that a long time ago, at U-Dub, at Arizona State, a lot of the college, you know. You get too much liquor and the tongue gets kind of loose and I get a little upset if you call me out of my name.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yup. You kind of mentioned some of your first impressions of the working conditions, with the concrete melting—you know, the spill and things. What were the most difficult aspects of the job?</p>
<p>Sparks: Because I was from sports, at the time, I was in great physical shape. So as far as the physical side of the job, there was no challenge there. I did have issues with some of the double standards on the job site.</p>
<p>Franklin: Such as?</p>
<p>Sparks: Such as, you and I sitting here, right, and they having a plan of the day meeting. I’m a journeyman, you’re an apprentice. Normally, at a plan of the day meeting, they come to the journeyman and give him the job. But it got to the point that they started going to the apprentice, give the apprentice the job for the day, and then we would walk out. So, I don’t even think they were aware of it; it was like, that happens. So, just that type of deal. The unfair treatment on the job site. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Let’s see here. So, you mentioned that you worked kind of all over 300 Area, 221, FFTF. How did you feel at the time, during the Cold War, about working on the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Sparks: See, I’m not that old. I’m only 63. So I didn’t have anything to do with the development of the nuclear weapon. My job was more, after the weapons were developed, I got with the research and development laboratory, and our mission was a little different. Our mission was to clean it up.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, but in the ‘80s, Hanford was still producing plutonium for the US nuclear weapon stockpile.</p>
<p>Sparks: They were producing plutonium, but, like you say, they weren’t using it. It wasn’t like it was a secret, we’re going to drop this on a country because we’re at war. To me it was more like, especially research, they were finding the effects of it, they were trying to find some medical use. Because I went with research and development. We were more into separating it out than stockpiling it. But you know, it was just like, the threat wasn’t there, we were just trying to compete with Russia, let Russia and all these other countries know that we have it. But Battelle’s mission was different. And a lot of their funding was not for the development of plutonium. The majority they worked with was research and development, maybe for the cigarette companies, automotive companies, and other type of technology.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, what do they call it? It’s like non-1830 or something?</p>
<p>Sparks: That type of work. And most of the jobs that I did was that type of work. I wasn’t into the development of the bomb.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Sparks: The most important legacy of the Hanford Site—I saw the guy from Japan. He came here and he saw the bomb and stuff. And they talked to him, because I guess he was from Nagasaki. And he saw the effects of it. Then after he saw the effects of it, then he comes out here. And we were still praising the bomb. So for him to look at that, and see his family’s affected by it and stuff—it was like, a bad thing.</p>
<p>But now, because it’s cleaning up and trying to rebrand itself and show that we’re trying to get away from the mission of doing this, and now our mission is to help and develop, like you say, different isotopes to help for cancer, isotopes for prostate cancer and all that stuff. Even though they developed that bad stuff, as long as you can use it for some good things, then that is great.</p>
<p>You look at the guy that cried when he saw the bombs, the Richland bomb out there. But you look at it, and I look back at it and I say, if we hadn’t have dropped the bomb, then how many lives would have died, and how many lives was killed at Pearl Harbor? So some good things came out of it, but you can also see the power of the bomb. Now man is able to wipe itself out. So now we have to have some ways of controlling that energy out there after we release, let it out.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you—so you came here in the mid-‘60s and then grew up here, what did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Sparks: The prior history? The only history I had of the African workers is, like I say, when I visited my granddaddy in Kildare, Texas, and he had a picture of the Hanford—I think it was one of the old pictures of the Hanford Site. He showed me that picture. So the only history I had was the history of my grandfather gave me of the workers coming out here. They don’t talk about the hardship. They’re from Texas, and they’re real private guys. They’re macho men. We just suck it up, put up with it. So he didn’t go into great detail. It was more, to him, it was like, he was proud, because he knew that I was working there at a place where he had built and he was instrumental in pouring the concrete, getting the concrete in.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he talk about that pride of having—</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, my granddad is a huge man with a booming voice. I’d walk into the house and, boy, how you doing?! He’s yelling at me and stuff. I heard you work at the Hanford Site! He’d say, don’t you know I worked there in da-da-da-da-da?! And he talked a little about the storms and what he did. But he, and a lot of our other family members have land in Texas. So what he did, he didn’t stay here. He made some money, went back and paid for his land, bought him some apartment complexes and homes and stuff, and he lived a great life based on the money that he made at the Hanford Site. So he was really proud of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: So it really kind of changed his life.</p>
<p>Sparks: It do. I mean, I don’t know the exact amount of money that they were making in Kildare at the time, compared to what they was making there. But I heard it was a huge increase in income.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it certainly was.</p>
<p>Sparks: Huge boom. So, it did, it changed his life drastically.</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective, what do you—what were their, the African Americans that worked at Hanford and the Manhattan Project, what were their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life, and civil rights?</p>
<p>Sparks: The guys that work at the Hanford Site, like you say, you look at community life. Not only did they work, but they look back at the community, and they’re saying, dude, you’re back here, you’re breaking your back, you’re making absolutely nothing, just enough to feed your family. If you actually come to the Hanford Site, then you can not only feed your family, but you can raise enough money for your kids to go to college. There’s some opportunities out here that you would never, ever get in Texas. Because in Texas, you couldn’t become an electrician, you couldn’t become a laborer; they didn’t have those trades. You’re a farmer. Either a farmer, or worked in the lumber mills, or you worked on the railroad tracks. And the amount that they paid was below minimum. So there was some huge economic advantages of coming here and moving your family up to a nice home and education. Even sewer system—we didn’t have a sewer system down in Texas. So it was all kind of advantages for coming and working at the Hanford Site.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: The main—it’s weird. I bought a house. Originally I applied for a home in Pasco. They said I didn’t make enough income, money, to buy the home in Pasco. Which is crazy. So then I applied for a home in Kennewick. And they said, oh, yeah, we can let you. It was the same price; it might have just been the institution, but it was weird to me. So I bought the house in Kennewick. And before I bought the house, I had the real estate company that was working for me, and it actually was my buddy. What she did was she brought an old form up, and on this form they even had statements, like no blacks allowed, and this is like, has slave quarters and stuff out there on this form that she gave me. So a lot of discrimination. Ask the question one more time—I think I got kind of sidetracked.</p>
<p>Franklin: No problem. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Sparks: Okay. So that’s the one, is housing. The second one is the double standards. You go to east Pasco and we had dirt roads and no sidewalks. So it wasn’t—</p>
<p>Franklin: Compared to west Pasco, right--</p>
<p>Sparks: Compared to west Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: --which had sidewalks.</p>
<p>Sparks: Sidewalks, yeah. Another thing is, when I was put in the special class, they didn’t grade me and put me in a special class because you’re special. They put me in the special class because—you know. Because of the color of my skin, is what I assumed it was. So there was issues like that. So those were the main ones to me, is housing and education.</p>
<p>Franklin: What actions were being taken to address those issues?</p>
<p>Sparks: Back then?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: Basically what they did, it got to the point where people start protesting for equal housing. They knew that in order to make a change, we had to get on the city councils, we had to get into touch with the congressmen to change the way that they looked at the black community. Urban Renewal came in, and one thing that they did—a lot of the houses was really not up to code. So one thing that they did, they removed a lot of those older houses that was out of code which didn’t have septic systems in. They brought new septic systems in, they put sidewalks in. In the schools, they started hiring more black teachers so the kids could have a mentor that they could relate to, and counselors. So those are the things that they did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Sparks: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Sparks: Well, one of the big leaders was, I call her Sister Barton. She was one of the leaders of the civil rights in the area. They had another gentleman by the name of Fletcher, he was another great leader and spokesman for the civil rights movements. They had Jackson, who was—most of these people got into the political side of it—</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that Joe?</p>
<p>Sparks: Yeah, Joe Jackson. They knew if they got on the political side of it they could make a change. They actually had not only Joe Jackson, you had Wayne Jackson also. He was involved in coming in and working with the cities to improve the conditions in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some notable successes of the civil rights movement?</p>
<p>Sparks: Notable successes? Well, I guess I’m one of them. I’m a notable success. Because they made us—they made the government—the unions started counting how many people of color they had working in their armed forces and the services and stuff. And they started seeing there was none, and it wasn’t compatible to what the population was. So then they tried to go in there and ratify that—to take care of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges?</p>
<p>Sparks: The biggest challenges? The biggest challenge is to change the culture. You have people who have believed for a long time that this is right. So you have to change that, to show them that it was not right. It was just wrong.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. And you’ve stayed at Hanford since you came here in the apprentice program, right? Or you stayed at Hanford/PNNL?</p>
<p>Sparks: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you move away at all, or--?</p>
<p>Sparks: No. When I left college in ’82, I started working at Hanford, and I’ve been out there for 34 years. Actually, I’m getting ready to retire from the Hanford Site. So like I said, the conditions are really good. They question the safety of it, but the safety is probably—their record is better than any other records in the state of Washington when it comes to safety. So I’ve enjoyed working there. It’s been a great career.</p>
<p>Franklin: Good. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Sparks: During the Cold War? Future generations? Basically, asked me that a long time ago. It’s that basically you got to treat a man the way you want to be treated. If I was to bring my child out there, and he was to get a job at the Hanford Site, I want them to come in there with the knowledge that you are equal. The amazing thing about the Hanford Site is you can be everything from a plasma physicist to, you can be a laborer. There’s so many different jobs that you can do out there, and so many different people, and so much knowledge that you can get from the Hanford Site. Because, like I said, you got the science, you got the biology, you got fishing—I mean, you name it, PNNL has it. And then you got the other sites, which they’re in the process of cleaning it up and making it better. So they still have that also. As far as a place to work, and not only do you work at the Hanford Site—Hanford reaches out to all over the United States. There’s jobs in Seattle and Sequim, Washington. Places you can work doing research with fish, with animals. So it’s very diverse. It’s the most diverse place that you can find for work, is at the Hanford Site.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Sparks: I think I covered it all.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sparks: I think I dipped into everything.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, you did a really great job.</p>
<p>Sparks: I think I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, thank you, Bobby. I really appreciate you taking the time and coming to interview with us.</p>
<p>Sparks: Oh, thank you for interviewing me. Yeah.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
B Reactor
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
221-T Plant
300 Area
FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility)
WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply Systems)
WPPSS-2
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1965-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1982-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Bobby Sparks
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Migration
Segregation
School integration
Discrimination
Civil rights movements
Sports
Wrestling
Electricians
Racism
Affirmative action
Civil rights
Description
An account of the resource
Bobby Sparks moved to Pasco, Washington in 1965 as a child and began working on the Hanford Site in 1982.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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05/08/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1e1b99b59b66ae39b01a6307c5306428.JPG
885b0ad06a7807c10d6ce80f42a0e019
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa232d0c77186ed1562def6a34ee0f2aa.mp4
e24eab87fe4af71c6f5828c8dd18fed8
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
John Slaughter
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Camera operator: You are recording.</p>
<p>Robert Franklin: All right. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with John Slaughter on February 28, 2018. The interview is being conducted at The Brookstone in Kennewick, Washington. I’ll be talking with John about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>John Slaughter: John H. Slaughter. J-O-H-N. H. S-L-A-U-G-H-T-E-R.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thank you so much, John. Tell me how and why you came to the area.</p>
<p>Slaughter: I was working with the Snoqualmie National Forest. We ran into some things—this is another—why don’t I just give you the background—</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Slaughter: --and you can do whatever it is you want to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Slaughter: I graduated from Tennessee State University, and I applied for a job working for the Snoqualmie National Forest. And I was hired. So I worked for about five years for the Snoqualmie National Forest. And what caused me to want to get away, I had a bigot for a boss. He was forever talking about I had a white man’s job.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he actually say that to you?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yes! Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: On one occasion, or more than one occasion?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Oh, all the time. All the time. So I decided, well—excuse me—I’m going to kill that son of a bitch. And I had set about how I could kill him and get away with it. I could not do that. There’s no way I could do that and get away with it. Unless I did something to provoke him. See, he did a lot of things to provoke me.</p>
<p>So I decided—oh, right out—Naches, at the Naches Ranger Station, there, that’s where I lived. We had about 14 houses, cabins I mean, there. And that’s where I stayed. So we had to—I didn’t have a car. That’s about 35 miles from Yakima, where some civilization was. Some people were very, very kind to us. They knew the situation. See, I accepted the job, because I had—by the time I got that job, I had three kids. So hard times. So whenever they said, you’re hired, I just struck out and got on the train with my family and came out here. The people saw what the problem that I had, and many of them helped us out. Every time they had to go to Yakima or anyplace shopping, they’d stop by our cabin and ask, anything you want me to bring you, you want to go shopping with me? That kind of thing. Some were the other kind, but the vast majority of them, of 14 families, probably about two of them were bigots. Of course, that didn’t bother me. So I had to work to get two full paydays enough to go buy an old used car so that I could function.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Slaughter: We’d go to town, my wife needed her hair done. Well, we didn’t know anybody that did black people’s hair. In fact, we didn’t know anybody from Yakima. [LAUGHTER] The point is, we met Herb Jones, a fella. He was—we would go to see one another. He lived in Yakima and I lived out in the woods there. So I got to know Herb. There was an organization called CORE. He became the president of CORE, and so complaining about my situation, he suggested that I apply at the Atomic Energy Commission. And I did.</p>
<p>Well, the first answer, they said they didn’t have any meaningful work to suit my talents. [LAUGHTER] That’s a way of saying go fly a kite. But after a year, complete—a whole year had passed by, I received a letter from the personnel at the Atomic Energy Commission here at Hanford, asking if I was still interested in a position there. And I just jumped for joy. In the first place, I got paid more money and they didn’t have the same level of—I didn’t have anybody trying to beat me down, trying to bend me over, trying to force me to do something to give them an excuse to fire me.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s what your boss at the forest service would try to do?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yeah, Melanie. Yeah, he was. So, I couldn’t figure out a way to kill him. So I just—I just lived with it. He was this—the headquarters for Snoqualmie National Forest was on 2<sup>nd</sup> Avenue in Seattle. So I’d have to live—where we lived out in the woods, and, let’s see. I don’t know if I’m telling this in the right sequence or not, but the point is that he tried to—Melanie tried to convince the people to fire me because I didn’t know what I was doing. He wouldn’t give me credit for knowing anything. And it did rattle me quite a bit, but they wouldn’t fire me. Snoqualmie—the government would not fire me. Come to find out, Melanie, he was a guy from close to my hometown, Chattanooga, Tennessee. He used to relate some areas that I knew about.</p>
<p>Anyway, after I went for the interview, and of course, I had to wait a long time because it was working for the Atomic Energy Commission, you had to have a security clearance. That was no problem. But when they hired me, they gave me the dates and the money that I’d make and what-have-you. And I had a problem of trying to find a place for my family. So by this time, Herb Jones, he was head of CORE in Richland, Washington. So they put me up for a couple of nights while I looked for a place for my family. I heard them talking. They had meetings all the time. I heard them talking, saying, well, we’ve got to find somebody who’ll go move over into Kennewick. And voila. I’ll go! [LAUGHTER] Seriously. I said, I will.</p>
<p>Well, they found us—they located a situation where a man school teacher was—he was having problems with his superiors and what-have-you. I don’t know whether he did it to be vindictive or not, but I got with this man who was going to move out of the area anyway. So I signed a lease, six-month lease for his house on W 6<sup>th</sup> Avenue, pretty close to 395.</p>
<p>I started hearing all the rumors and all of the forebodings from people, saying, be careful. So what I did—I’ma tell you the truth. I had a station wagon, and so when I moved in, moved into that house—it was a nice house—I systematically brought stuff out of my station wagon and put it in the house. And the last thing I did that night, I brought my—I had a target pistol, a .22. But also, some of the activities that I engaged in when I was living at the ranger station was go hunting and fishing. I had to learn to hunt and fish if I was going to be a part of that society.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Slaughter: And I did. And I shot—the first time I went hunting, I shot a deer. So I had a rifle, a .30-06 rifle. I made sure that the whole neighborhood saw me bring my rifle into the house. Because I had been conditioned that I’m not going to take too much of this. So I was conditioned to that. Whenever I needed to. It just so happens—I don’t know, I’m pretty sure nobody was afraid of me—but I wanted to let people know my disposition. I was for real. And I said, anybody walk up on this—you just walk up on this lawn, I’m going to shoot him. Well, nobody walked up on the lawn.</p>
<p>There were a lot of whispering around in the neighborhood, what-have-you. And this one lady, I think it’s this lady who lives here now. She had two daughters, but she didn’t want her daughters to get to know my daughter. So, we did like I always do. I just treat them like they’re not even around. See, one thing I learned, people cannot stand to be ignored. If you ignore—that’s how you get to people. So, if I transacted my business just as if I was the only person in Kennewick.</p>
<p>But suddenly, there was an outpouring of welcome to me. The ministers, I got invited to a lot of churches, I got invited to different civic organizations and I was a Kennewick Jaycee. I remember that. And of course there was the other kind, too, because I was just leasing that house. And I’ll skip the part where I moved out of that man’s house and into a duplex in Richland. I stayed there one year, and decided that, well, I needed to have a house.</p>
<p>So, I got enough money for a down payment. It was at 7404 W Yellowstone. It wasn’t actually in the City of Kennewick, but it was close enough for the purpose. There was a vacant lot next to lot that that house was on that I was trying to buy. Because I wanted to build a bigger house. And they had for sale signs on that lot. I went to the appropriate place to find out who owned it, and I wanted to buy it. He says—I told him who I was. And he said, I know who you are, John Slaughter, but I’m not going to sell you my lot. And he did not. So I just lived in that house until—well, I stayed there, and I was working, and I was doing very, very, very, very good. I had to prove to myself that I was good enough to be an engineer, because everybody around me did not see me as being qualified to do anything.</p>
<p>Franklin: Um—oh, sorry, go ahead.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Well, I could go on. Oh! When the time came to close on the house—and I’m there right now, we’re about to close on the house that I own. [LAUGHTER] That’s why I’m here. We got together on a whole lot of paper and what-have-you. And a document fell out of the bundle of papers that the guy had. It was a—I don’t know what they call it, a promise that you would not sell to a black person. I actually saw that, that was in that. But the one guy, they had been talking, he said, throw it away. So they picked it up. But they couldn’t get it up fast enough for me so that I could not see what that was. That was a covenant. I actually picked up that covenant and gave it back to him. That you don’t—and I was able to buy the—Incidentally, probably the reason it was so easy for me was that was during the time that the federal government was cracking down on these kind of covenants.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh. Do you remember around what year that was?</p>
<p>Slaughter: 1965.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1965. Why do you think the realtor was so willing to break the covenant?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Because—</p>
<p>[ALARM SOUNDING]</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, my goodness.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Slaughter: --where we were living. That’s how we got along. Maybe when people saw my weapons, they decided they wouldn’t raise any [inaudible]. I didn’t have any problem. Everybody got to know me, John Slaughter, just like I was some celebrity or something.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Slaughter: Really! And I was so proud to be a part of that civic organization, the Kennewick Jaycees. That we would, during Christmas, the Christmas holidays, we’d do some projects to make money to help some of the people who was not as well-off as we were. There were several incidences where you’d see my picture in the paper for what we were doing. I can remember that year, it was close to Christmastime, a little blonde girl, I picked her up and playing with her, and she got snot all over my face. I still remember that. But that didn’t matter. That was something that I really felt that I was part of, and everybody around had made me feel that I’m part of the society. And so that’s, that’s basically, in a nutshell, that’s basically how I got to where I am.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. I’d like to back up a little bit and ask you when and where you were born.</p>
<p>Slaughter: July the 30<sup>th</sup>, 1932. I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did you grow up at in Chattanooga?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Absolutely. Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And was Chattanooga an officially segregated town?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, what your life was like growing up with segregation.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Okay. We had our neighborhoods and they had their neighborhoods. To the extents possible, we avoided each other. Because most of the—99% of the black people had absolutely nothing, but they had quite a few white people who were in the same boat that we were in. [LAUGHTER] I still remember, as a little kid, when the railroad—when the train would come by, some of the young men would climb up on there and throw coal off the—onto the ground. And those of us on the ground, would pick it up and take that coal to our houses. [LAUGHTER] And that is true. That is true. I still remember that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, hard times, huh?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Well, ’32—I was born in ’32, that was the worst economic [unknown] that this country’s ever had.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Slaughter: I was born right in the middle of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah! And you went to segregated schools?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Went to segregated school. I’ll tell you that we didn’t have any school buses. There were school buses around, but none for us. We’d have to sit in the back of the bus. Just like—you know. You’ve heard all of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Slaughter: And it got to the point, sometimes I’d figure on doing something to get something started. Because I decided that I was not going to be a second-class citizen. And I had to pay by tokens to ride the bus. And I just got to the point where I don’t feel like getting up today. I never got up. And he stopped the bus. He said, boy, get to the back of the bus. I told him, you put me back there. I have some of my little knives someplace. I had a knife about that long, about that big. Just as soon as the white boys decided they were going to make me go to the back of the bus, I got out my knife and started trimming my fingernails. They knew what that meant. Nobody said a thing to me. This is before Rosa Parks did that. She was a matronly lady, and she was nice and kindhearted and what-have-you. I was just a guy who decided that today I’m going to raise hell.</p>
<p>Franklin: How old were you when this happened?</p>
<p>Slaughter: I was in high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And the white people that were accosting you, were they around your same age?</p>
<p>Slaughter: This was just a regular bus system. They didn’t have—not for black people, they didn’t have school buses. Oh. I went to Orchard Knob School, which is a monumental place, kind of a park. It was a park. If you go down South where the Civil War was fought, you can see all the statues and names and what-have-you, like that.</p>
<p>Camera operator: Can we pause here? My card says it’s full.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, sure.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Franklin: Are we ready?</p>
<p>Camera operator: Yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So you were talking about going down to the park where they had Civil War monuments or something?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Oh, yeah. Called the Battle of Orchard Knob. It’s on a big hill and adjacent, across the street, was the school that I went to through the ninth grade. Then after that, that’s when we’d have to ride the bus across town to go to high school. We had to ride right by city—I don’t know, it was Chattanooga’s City High School. Right by, we’d have to ride the bus to be on the other side of town where our high school was. You probably heard of the situation where I still got the same new book that I was given in the ninth grade, and that book was the one where we learned first aid by the Red Cross. I still got that book. That was the first new book I ever had.</p>
<p>Franklin: New book, as in, the books in school previously would’ve been—</p>
<p>Slaughter: They’d been used and torn up and then they ship them to us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Slaughter: They’d buy some more books, but they wouldn’t give us the new books.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, the new books would go to the white schools and then the black schools would get the older textbooks.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You mentioned that you had graduated from Tennessee State University.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: What made you want to go to college, and what did you get your degree in?</p>
<p>Slaughter: I was the only person in my family who finished high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Slaughter: And I had enough inner change—or I want to say, moxie, I might say, that people start thinking, boy, he’s smart, boy, he’s smart. With them saying that I’ve got the intelligence to go farther. So I decided that—oh. I sang in the glee club, in my high school glee club. Some people thought I had a fair enough voice. In fact, the music teacher, after I graduated from—just before graduating from high school, the ceremony and all, she gave me a $50 check. That was a scholarship. That was the only scholarship I ever had. And I had to take it back to her and tell her, I can’t go—give this to somebody who’s going to go to college. Then after the graduation, just immediately after graduation, I received my letter from the United States government saying I had been selected. [LAUGHTER] So I was drafted.</p>
<p>Robert Franklin: And that was—the Korean War was going on at the time, right?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how long did you stay in the Army for?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Those two years. I’ll tell you now, that’s the interesting thing, because you’re looking at a man who—I loved those military parades. I thought that was entertainment for me to—I enjoyed it. But I tell you one other thing, when we got—a bunch of us trainees got there at the same time to set up battalion headquarters and what-have-you, I was assigned to be a supply specialist, to take care of all the property that the government had given us. And so things were going fine. Of course, I didn’t know a whole lot about that, either, but that’s what—I went to supply specialist training school. When those guys—we called them boy wonders, the National Guardians—when that outfit—there was an outfit of guys who hadn’t had basic training like I had, but they had National Guard. They put a corporal in my place, and he didn’t know anything about being a soldier, either. He just had that uniform on. At any rate, we were put into details to be taken down to Taegu Air Base. We had to camouflage the facilities, just in case they attacked us. And we did have a great number of times when we thought that we were going to be attacked. But I never had to fight; I never had to shoot a bullet, except at the target. Oh, after so long a time in Korea, my outfit, the whole battalion—oh, I’m trying to tell it in sequence and I’m getting it all screwed up.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s okay.</p>
<p>Slaughter: But there were a bunch of us assigned to go and camouflage tanks on the airport base. Well, that didn’t sit well with me. It was hot as all get-out there in Korea. And so a bunch of us, we’d go down further where the civilization was, where they had day rooms and they had decent living conditions and what-have-you. We’d get up 5:00 in the morning and be shipped down there, and then just as soon as they left, we’d go to the place and shoot pool and do stuff. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>And I remember, the one time, I sat there in the chair, I must have lost at pool. But I fell asleep. And I heard somebody, all of the sudden, Slaughter! Slaughter! Woke me up, my first sergeant was right between my legs. What the hell are you doing in here? Mixing. To shorten it, we were done busted. I got an Article 15.</p>
<p>Are you familiar with an Article 15? That’s like going to court and having a trial and mete out the punishment. Well, my punishment—and this is the company commander, he was a first lieutenant. He said, is there anything else you want to say before I employ the sentence? I said, no, sir, but yes. I said, I came on this job and I was doing a good—I was having—I was doing the work well, satisfied—suddenly, when those cowboys came in, you took all the authority and interest away from us, and you put them in there. I told him, I’m a little mad, and I don’t plan to be out working out there in the sun. So, if I got to go back out there, you’re going to find me doing the same thing.</p>
<p>This was a man from Massachusetts. He didn’t have any interest in trying to be hard on anybody. So he said, okay. So I was sentenced to seven days of extra duty in the kitchen. So I did that standing on my head. In fact, we would look forward to getting where the officers had all the little steaks and things, we just cooked our own food—[LAUGHTER] So I’d look forward to that, every night. Let’s go, let’s go to work. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>But after that time was over, by the time I’d fulfilled my requirement, we had our orders. We were going to leave and go to Guam. So they needed somebody to be in charge of all of the goods and what-have-you. So they assigned me to be in charge of that. And I’m strolling around there with my clipboard, seeing all this stuff. I was quite proud. They gave me some responsibility, and I was quite proud to be able to do it the best I could. And nobody ever said anything anymore about it. Except if it was justified.</p>
<p>But when I got to Guam—I don’t know if you guys know anything about Guam. That’s the South Seas—one of a string of islands called the Marianas Islands. I’m told that that was—and it was a B-29 air base. I’m told that it was from that place that the atom bomb was loaded and sent to Japan to be—I don’t know if that’s the truth or not.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think it was Tinian Island, was the island. Right? Yeah, Tinian. A different island in the South Seas.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Well, Tinian, it was one of the string—it was part of the Marianas Islands, though.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. So jumping forward a bit, you went to Tennessee, Tennessee State University.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Oh. I was one of the few people who were married in my outfit. So when payday came, I’d take my money, and I’d send it home to my wife, until I had enough to—you know, a fair amount of money. That, along with the GI Bill, that’s what I used in order to go to college.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did you get your degree in?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Civil engineering.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, civil engineering, okay. And how did you hear about this job in Snoqualmie? And why did you apply to go to Washington, so far away from Tennessee?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Because they had fliers out. You could look on the bulletin board and see who needs who to go where. And I flunked one course in college. That was my first quarter of calculus. I still don’t know calculus. [LAUGHTER] Dang, I lost my train of thought. Oh. Oh, all the people in my class, they were getting ready to go. They were filling out applications, and I’m one quarter behind, but I just couldn’t stand it any longer, because I was the only person who had so many kids at home. I needed a job. So I filled out the application, too. Four applications. I received copies of three of them; they wanted to hire me. And then I had to tell them I won’t be eligible until the summer of 1960. They wrote me another telegram, we’ll hold the job for you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Slaughter: This is a part of the move to integrate black people and white people in the service. If Kennedy had not taken it upon himself to go personally down to the South to see what the conditions were, we’d probably still be sitting in the back of the bus. Kennedy is the one who built a fire under people. And Johnson, now, he was a southerner. But he was an aristocrat. He didn’t know what the little bitty people were doing, either. So when Kennedy got shot, Johnson took over, he looked for himself what Kennedy was doing, and he just carried it on forward. And I remember reading the paper—one of the papers, big headlines, Johnson, That Son of a Bitch. Because he had been in—he was one of the good ol’ boys before, but he saw how awful it was that black people had to live. And he carried on Kennedy’s interest in integrating the whole thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you started on at Hanford, what was your first position?</p>
<p>Slaughter: I was an engineer.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what were you doing there?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Construction engineer. Oh, I did a little—I had done a little bit of surveying. That’s what I did when I was working for the National Forest, surveying and designing roads and bridge approaches, that kind of a thing. So I got to the point where my qualities were well-respected. In fact, when they saw how some of my performance—I skipped a grade—</p>
<p>Franklin: In the Forest Service?</p>
<p>Slaughter: No, no, Atomic Energy Commission.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, at the Atomic Energy Commission.</p>
<p>Slaughter: I’ve told this story to a whole lot of people, and I will never fail to tell how those guys took me under their arms—under their wings, and they trained me how to be an engineer.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who was that?</p>
<p>Slaughter: The people at the Atomic Energy Commission. I learned a lot, you’d just be surprised. You’ve been hearing here lately about the leaking field tanks—the leaking waste tanks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Well, I managed the contracts. Some of those very tanks—we had a lot, a lot of tanks—but this was a new kind of tank. This was a tank-on-tank situation. Not only that—what do they call that? I can’t think of the name of it now. Stress relief, those tanks. Are you familiar with stress relieving?</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of. There was so much pressure in them, right, from the heat and the radionuclides—</p>
<p>Slaughter: So much pressure, it created stress in the corners. And so therefore, it started to corrode—erode quite a bit. So in order for it to last a long time, you bend the tanks—the steel a certain way. Then, you weld all those welds—10,000 welds per tank. And then to stress relieve it, there’s one bit of knowledge that you need to know. Carbon steel will fold and fall down after 1,250 degrees Fahrenheit.</p>
<p>I want you to imagine having to try to stress relieve every bit of a million-gallon tank. And it has to be—it can’t be a whole lot of stress here, and then—it had to be uniform. And that was a job that I had. I used to stay up all night trying to get them to be just as hot in one place as it was in the other. I think we had to be within 250 degrees all the way through. And I learned to stress relieve—see, I learned this on the job. And also, it had to be radiographed. Each foot—</p>
<p>[POUNDING ON DOOR]</p>
<p>Slaughter: Come in.</p>
<p>[Woman off-camera]: John, are you coming down for lunch?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Huh?</p>
<p>[Woman off-camera]: Are you coming down for lunch?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Not right now.</p>
<p>[Woman off-camera]: Okay. Okay, sorry.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Okay, that’s another one that I’m going to be friends with, I think. I don’t know why she came in and asked me if I was coming in for lunch. I don’t know what she wanted.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were talking about the stresses, if you will, of trying to stress relieve these things.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Oh, yes, and I learned how to rig—I didn’t have to do any of it myself, but I learned how under the guy—he was the main inspector. I did the management and all that stuff, but this man, he knew what he was doing, and he taught me everything—well, I don’t know if it was everything he knew, but he taught me a considerable amount. I learned how to look at the radiograph to see if it’s—if you got any bubbles in it—it has to be good, welded steel all the way through, all the way. And 10,000 welds per tank.</p>
<p>And I learned how to do that, and they even tried to—well, it was just marvelous that I learned the technology, and here I am with a degree in civil engineering. But I had more knowledge than most of the people around that. Because Don, was his first name, he taught me everything he knew. And I was so grateful.</p>
<p>I’ll tell you, this was kind of related to what you want, but at Savannah River, you know they’ve got a nuclear reservation there, too. They had a different design than what we used. So we had a delegation of top engineers from here, we went to Savannah River, that’s in South Carolina, in order to see what they’re doing and how theirs is different from ours and try to figure out the ramifications.</p>
<p>And I remember Babcock and Wilcox—that’s a firm that makes asbestos. Asbestos, you know, is dangerous. But we didn’t recognize that danger then. So what we would do, build the tank and then pour asbestos about that thick into the inside of the tank. Whereas, you have all the way around the tank, you’ve got a crawlspace about that wide. And we had all kinds of pipes and different things coming up. So they used those holes, different holes in the top. Yeah, it’d be about—I can’t explain it to you.</p>
<p>But I remember going to—it was time to go to lunch, and this man, he was kind of a high executive with the Babcock and Wilcox Company. So that’s where I got my first look at Augusta, Georgia. It was Augusta where they took us to the Green Jacket. Now those guys, usually, they respected me and my position to the extent that they didn’t want me to be rejected. And I remember, since I was with the government and all these other guys were contractor guys, so that made me boss. [LAUGHTER] The only guy—they knew so much more than I did, I couldn’t even attempt it. But they made me boss, so the man opened the door to the Green Jacket. Now, you’re familiar with the Green Jacket?</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m not.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Okay. Augusta? Master’s Golf?</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Slaughter: That’s where the Master’s are done. In August, Georgia. And I remember them opening the door for me and showing me a place to sit. And I looked around and all the black heads peeking from around the corners and what-have-you. They thought that was the greatest thing in the whole world, seeing a man being treated with dignity. And that never left me. That’s why I made it my business—I’m going to be a first-class citizen. It may only be for an hour, but that hour is going to be with dignity. And I did. And I’ve been trying to pull everybody else around up with me, and I think we’ve done very well.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did you work with any other black engineers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Slaughter: No. No, I didn’t. No, I didn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’ve mentioned that you were, to your knowledge, the first black person to own a home—</p>
<p>Slaughter: In Kennewick.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Kennewick, yes. Over time, did other black families start moving to Kennewick?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there a community and there, and were you instrumental in—or were you part of that community?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yeah. Herb Jones, he’s the one—after I had done—he decided he was going to buy a house, too, down there, by—well, I don’t know where it was, I’ve forgotten where it was. But somebody did something to their car. Had a relative with a brand new Ford, I remember. Something happened to it. But nothing ever happened to me like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: It was like vandalized or something like that?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Huh?</p>
<p>Franklin: Their car was vandalized or something like that?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it wasn’t terrible. You could wash—could give it a paint job, and you’d be good as new.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where was the center of the black community in the Tri-Cities? Was there kind of a community in each city, or was east Pasco the focal point?</p>
<p>Slaughter: East Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did you go to east Pasco often; did you have any friends in the area?</p>
<p>Slaughter: I tried, but—it’s kind of hard to—some of them, it’s kind of hard to get along with them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why was that?</p>
<p>Slaughter: I don’t know. I think it’s upmanship, you might say. They even—I noticed that they stopped now, I mean, I guess they did. They tried to circulate the fact that I was not the first black person to live in Kennewick. One of them did it. And that wasn’t my purpose.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were just trying to have some dignity, right, some respect and live where you wanted to live?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Oh, yeah. My wife, bless her heart—people just—oh, that’s another thing. I learned how to talk a little bit better—a little bit different than being a Southerner. My wife never—she never lifted one eyelid to change how she talks. And the people who befriended her, they just—it was refreshing. See, even the bigshots’ wives, they’d get sick of people scraping and bowing to them. Well, my wife didn’t do that. And they liked her because of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you ever—how were you treated on the job at Hanford? Did your racial background ever figure into any mistreatment at Hanford?</p>
<p>Slaughter: No, it wasn’t. No, it wasn’t. I had my run-in, but it wasn’t because of race. I know what it was. It stemmed back—remember way back then, when I was being an engineer in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and I decided that when I retire, where do I want to live? And so I decided that I wanted to come back here and live. People ask me, why? Because I love the people. The people just opened their doors to me, and I appreciate it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Besides moving to Kennewick in ’65, and really, I think kind of participating in Civil Rights in that way, did you participate in any other civil rights activities in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yeah, I remember when things were really hot and heavy and the pot was starting to boil over with anger and all. There were a number of us who did not, for some reason—I didn’t hear—nobody did anything to me. Gus Wiley, he used to be the head of Battelle there. Nothing happened to him. And there was a bunch of us. I just named the two, because Gus and I were—we decided to put a stop—to pour some water on this heat, this boiling over. So we decided we’d follow the police around, so whenever they had an encounter, we could see with our own eyes who’s starting the unrest. Because they were just accusing one another. I for one, I’ll die for my cause, but I’m not going to die for somebody else’s cause, see. Gus and I—it just happens that he and I hooked up together. We followed—and we just kind of made the police kind of nervous. Until somebody started some dialogue with the windows down, and we’d talk with one another, the police and us. And after—it didn’t take long for them to see that we weren’t—we were doing what we can to keep a riot from happening. We’re not trying to help one side or the other, but I know somebody’s lying. So before I put my head on the chopping block, I’m going to find out why I’m putting it on there. That was all of our intentions. Once they found out that all we’re trying to do is keep the peace, actually, they just kind of helped us keep the peace.</p>
<p>Franklin: What cities were you doing this in?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Pasco. And what were your findings?</p>
<p>Slaughter: I didn’t see anybody do anything. Nobody broke the law or anything. And I came home just as satisfied. I don’t look for trouble. I’m trying to prevent any trouble. But there were some hotheads over on the other side, in Pasco. They were fomenting unrest. They were trying to stir up some things that we were trying to undo.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you say hotheads, do you mean—</p>
<p>Slaughter: People out—black people. Trying to raise hell. And we met with those people to tell them, I’m not going to stick my neck out for you. You’re trying to—a risk is what you’re trying to do. Nothing ever—all that time we were—it lasted for several days. And all that time, when we were doing that, nothing ever happened. Nothing. Good or bad. Nothing ever happened.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why do you think they were trying to stir up trouble, in your opinion?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Well, hell-raisers will do it. You don’t have to have a reason. You don’t have to have a reason. They want to get a job that they’re not qualified for, for example. They want to be thought of as being the biggie. It’s pride—false pride. And we were not interested in that. Anytime somebody let me participate in something with the credentials that Gus Wiley had, I’m more than satisfied. Not Gus Wiley—Gus, that’s his wife. [LAUGHTER] I can’t think of his name right now.</p>
<p>Franklin: I can’t think of his first name right now, either.</p>
<p>Tom Hungate: Bill.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Bill.</p>
<p>Franklin: Bill Wiley.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, yeah. Head of PNNL. I’ve heard there were some protests in Pasco in, I think, ’67, around there. Did you participate, or hear, or do you have any memories of those protests?</p>
<p>Slaughter: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, okay.</p>
<p>Slaughter: I know there might have been some people who were trying to stir up stuff, and I just ignored them.</p>
<p>Franklin: My last questions are kind of like closing, open-ended questions. In what ways, if any, did the security or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Slaughter: It didn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: It didn’t? Were you able to talk about what you worked on with your family and friends?</p>
<p>Slaughter: No, I made it a policy to not—there were times when I needed to get some information, I would read a document—a confidential or secret document. But that was just incidental to my work. My work had nothing to do with that problem.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. How long did you work at Hanford for?</p>
<p>Slaughter: Let’s see. I came to Hanford in 1965, and ’73, I went back to Oak Ridge for the purpose of trying to move up the ladder. Didn’t work, but it didn’t hurt, either. So after I’d gone at work at Oak Ridge another eight years, I decided to try to figure out, where should I go. And believe it or not, my home town is exactly 100 miles from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But that’s not where I wanted to live. I liked the small town air here. And so that’s why I wanted to come back here to live. And the rest is history.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, it is. Speaking of history, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Slaughter: That’s a biggie. [LAUGHTER] That’s a biggie. I’ve learned—I don’t know. I just don’t know. One thing that I do know that I used to love going, certain parts of the year, the eagles would land in what used to be Hanford. I’d go down there and look at the eagles. I don’t know of anything else.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration and segregation and civil rights in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Slaughter: You know, I mentioned before, some people thought I had a nice singing voice.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Slaughter: I especially, that church I started going to. Incidentally, I’m still going to that same church, but it’s got a different name and it’s a much, much bigger church. I’m still—I’ve been instrumental in—okay, the pastor we have now, I was instrumental in getting him to be at our church. I got guided to the committee, the pastor search committee. In the beginning, I wasn’t part of it. But it was an older man. They tried to represent older people, younger people—different differences. So going through what is kind of—it’s a hard job, trying to decide who was best suited to be my pastor. That’s not an easy job. Anyway, the guy who was supposed to represent the older people, he backed off. So they asked me to be part of it, and I did. And we—if you go to hear a sermon of our priest, you know that it was a success. I had something to do with his being there. That’s because I just went up to him and asked him, how come you don’t fill in an application? And he said, oh, what’s-his-name is my friend. I said, that has nothing to do with being your friend. I talked him into being interested in being our pastor.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Just edit that out, all right?</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure. Well, John, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Well, there’s so much that I’ve forgotten. I hee-hawed all the way through this thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, you’re great. We’re really happy to get what you have, and what you told us is really great. Some really great history there. So thank you for letting us interview you.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Well, thank you. This makes about the third interview that I’ve had concerning Civil Rights, et cetera.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’ll have to look for those other two.</p>
<p>Slaughter: Well, only one had all this stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Well, great.</p>
<p>Hungate: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
Atomic Energy Commission
Battelle
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1965-1973 1982-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1965-1973
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with John Slaughter
Description
An account of the resource
John Slaughter moved to Kennewick, Washington in 1965 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1965-1973.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Chattanooga (Tenn.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Discrimination
Civil rights
Segregation
Korean War, 1950-1953
Civil engineering
Civil rights movements
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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02/28/2018
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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bc53339af15a2920bba8e308061271cb
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F75acc14b070ab69b463520ab9835d311.mp4
903cb1901c035c5d398ddd6c0ca3859a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
A related resource
RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Rickie Robinson
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Richie Robinson—</p>
<p>Rickie Robinson: Rickie.</p>
<p>Franklin: Rick—sorry, I keep doing that. Rickie Robinson. On February 16<sup>th</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Rickie about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Robinson: My name is Rickie Wright Robinson. R-I-C-K-I-E, W-R-I-G-H-T, R-O-B-I-N-S-O-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thank you so much, Rickie. So usually I start by asking people about how they came to the Hanford area—or to the Tri-Cities—but your parents were the first ones in your family to come here, right?</p>
<p>Robinson: Yes, they—</p>
<p>Franklin: So what—oh, sorry, go ahead.</p>
<p>Robinson: They moved to Pasco in 1947 and opened a little restaurant. They called it the Queen Street Diner.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And why did your parents move to Pasco?</p>
<p>Robinson: They were recently discharged, if you will. My dad was from the Navy. Because he fought in World War II. They were actually planning on moving from Seattle—they were living in Seattle at the time. They were actually planning on moving to San Diego. They told me that they heard about this place over in southeastern Washington where you could go and make a lot of money. Because there was this Hanford thing going on. Wheat country, and all that, and so forth. So they drove over here, and liked what they saw, and decided to stay. They always used to chuckle about that, because they had already sent all of their stuff to San Diego. When they got here, they said, whoa, we’d better stay here. So they came, bought a piece of property over in east Pasco, just adjacent to the railroad tracks there on Queen Street, and opened the little restaurant.</p>
<p>Franklin: Besides the economy, what also was—why else were your parents attracted to the area? Was there already a pretty large black community in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Robinson: Not really. Not at that time. In 1947, there were black people that were starting to come into the Tri-Cities, as with all of the Pacific Northwest, mostly because of the economy that was happening here in the State of Washington. Western Washington, of course, there was Boeing and all of that. Over here, it was Hanford, and these big farms and all that kind of stuff. But what attracted the black people here at that time was the work that was available in construction and so forth, here at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your parents—either of your parents ever work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Robinson: A little bit. My dad, he worked as a carpenter for a little while, and he also worked in one of the plants out there, I think it was B Plant. But not for very long. For the bulk of his time at work here, he worked at the Tri-City Country Club. He was the assistant manager of not only the Tri-City Country Club but the Walla Walla Country Club and Yakima Country Club. So, as a family, we lived in all three cities, but we spent most of our time here in the Tri-Cities. My mother, she was a social worker for the Pasco School District.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your mom left a pretty big imprint in Pasco, right, and the school district.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yes, she was hired by the superintendent at the time. His name was Lewis Ferrari. Dr. Lewis Ferrari. He was concerned about the lack of communication between the Pasco School District and the African American community. Of course, this was in the early-to-mid ‘60s, and of course, if you read your history books, you know what was going on in the country in the time about Civil Rights and all that. He was extremely concerned about that, and since my mother had some experience in doing Campfire Girls and other things like that around the community, he hired her and created a position that was called ombudsman. So her job was to do outreach, to make sure the kids got to school, got what they needed to perform well in school like that. Kind of an outreach of that, she interacted with a lot of families and so forth. This was also the time when a lot of the migration started taking place with the Hispanic people moving into the Tri-Cities to work on the farms and so forth like that. And then something started to happen with that population of people: they started to stay, as opposed to come up for seasons and then go back to Texas or Mexico or wherever they were from. They started to stay. And she had—she interacted with a lot of Hispanic people as well as the black families in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: So the early-to-mid ‘60s, then, that’s that moment where Pasco really starts to diversify—where the Hispanic population starts becoming more permanent?</p>
<p>Robinson: More permanent, and of course the black population was becoming more pronounced, more vocal. Pasco had its share of marches and things like that to articulate their need for fair treatment for housing and all the other things that were going on all across the country. And it was happening here in the Tri-Cities as well. Predominantly in Pasco at that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any specific events in Pasco connected to the civil rights movement?</p>
<p>Robinson: Yes, I remember some marches that were taking place. Of course, I was a young kid and a teenager at the time. I remember some strife that was going on at Pasco High. Because I went to Pasco High. There was some strife going on at Pasco High. School got closed down a few times.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What for?</p>
<p>Robinson: As I recall, there were some bomb threats that were phoned in. No bombs were ever found. But when a bomb threat would come in, then they would close the school. And there were fights and things like that. Thankfully, no shootings. You know. But we had our share.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Where were your parents from? Where were your parents born?</p>
<p>Robinson: My dad was born in San Antonio, Texas. My mom was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but she was raised in Saginaw, Michigan.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Robinson: And they met in Douglas, Arizona. Never could figure out what my mother was doing in Douglas, Arizona, because she got married at an early age, age 16—not to my dad, to another guy. So from age 16 up until just before she met—married my father, she lived in Chicago. She was a waitress and things like that. My dad, on the other hand, was on his way to Los Angeles from San Antonio, because his family had a long history of culinary work, working in hotels and things like that. He worked in some of the prominent hotels in San Antonio, Texas. I can’t recall the name of this big prominent hotel, but it’s adjacent to the Alamo. And I remember the last time I took my dad home to San Antonio, he said, that, that was my first job there. It was this big hotel, and it’s adjacent to the Alamo. But he had a long history of that. Anyway, he was on his way to Los Angeles to work with his uncles who had moved to Los Angeles. There were a lot of opportunities for culinary work down there. When he was in Douglas, Arizona, where one of his uncles lived, he got his draft notice for the Navy. And he ended up in Seattle. So he never made it Los Angeles. He and my mother met in Douglas, Arizona. My father was also coming out of a marriage that was falling apart. The two of them met. When he got drafted, he went to Seattle and so forth, and then he sent for my mom, and they got married in 1945.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Robinson: And then moved to the Tri-Cities in 1947.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. I wanted to ask a bit about segregation, both formal and informal. So your parents, at least where they were born, would have experienced formal segregation, Jim Crow. But the North was kind of an area of informal segregation.</p>
<p>Robinson: Informal, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your parents ever talk about their experiences with the informal segregation of the North and in Pasco specifically?</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, yes. They told me a story—of course, back then, when black people moved to the Tri-Cities, they were only shown property in east Pasco, which was east of the railroad tracks. So there were not any black people, that I can recall, that lived on the west side of the tracks. They told me some stories that had happened. In fact, a real incident of segregation, if you will, happened to my aunt, who’s my mom’s sister. She was pregnant with her second child, and it was in the middle of the summer on one of those 100-degree-plus days here in Pasco that we all love. She was pregnant, she walked into a Payless Drugstore—at that time Payless Drugstore was located on the corner of 4<sup>th</sup> and Lewis in Pasco. And she wanted a glass of water, and they wouldn’t give it to her. She just wanted a glass of ice water. They wouldn’t give it to her. So that’s one incident that they used to talk about. There’s also another incident that kind of happened like before my time that they used to talk about. There was an incident at the Greyhound bus station in Pasco. I can’t recall the details of it, but because of that incident, the Washington State Human Rights Commission was formed. Because, I think they would not—this story was told to me—they would not let this woman use the bathroom there. It turns out that that woman that they would not let use the bathroom was the wife of Adam Clayton Powell.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes. That she—and her name escapes me—it wasn’t the bathroom; they wouldn’t serve her lunch.</p>
<p>Robinson: Okay, I knew it was something, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And the reason she was given—this was in 1949—was that we don’t serve blacks here. You can get your food to go, was the—</p>
<p>Robinson: Right, yeah. And so that was the wrong woman to do that to.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Robinson: So, anyway, that’s a thing of—a good thing coming out of a bad incident.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, you mean the formation of the civil rights commission—</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah, the civil rights commission and things of that nature. And, you know, incidents like that, they’re ugly, but oftentimes, they turn out to be good things, because they spur people into motion.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, yeah, definitely. What about—to your knowledge, were people ever shown property in Kennewick? What was the relationship between Kennewick and Pasco at that time, vis-à-vis African Americans and housing?</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, we grew up—when I was growing up here, there was this—I don’t know if it was an unwritten rule, or if it was a written rule someplace, that all black people had to be out of Kennewick by sundown. They used to say there was a sign there. I personally never saw the sign. But there was that kind of unwritten rule. I will say, an incident that happened to me personally—and this was after I was old enough to have my own car; I think I was maybe 19, maybe 20 years old at the time, so that would have been in 1970, 1971, or ’72. Somewhere in that neck of the woods. I was driving in Kennewick in my car in the middle of the afternoon, and I was pulled over by the police. He wanted to know what I was doing in Kennewick. I’ve never been—I’m no angel, you know, but I’m not a square, either, but I was never on the police radar, if you will, as somebody that they needed to keep an eye on. So I thought that was weird, that he would pull me over and ask me what I was doing in Kennewick at 3:00 in the—</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he give you a reason, like for a traffic infraction or something?</p>
<p>Robinson: What he told me is that there was a report of somebody doing something inappropriate over at Kennewick High School. I wasn’t anywhere near Kennewick High School when that went down, whatever he was talking about. I don’t know if the description was of my car or whatever. But that was it. Now, he did let me go. I wasn’t arrested or anything like that. But, you know. It was just an odd question to be asking somebody at 3:00 in the afternoon, why are you in Kennewick?</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and you felt you had been singled out because of your race.</p>
<p>Robinson: Oh, definitely.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, let me see here. We actually already covered quite a bit of my—oh, so you had mentioned that blacks were only shown homes in east Pasco. So that east Pasco seems to be kind of the locus of the black community in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Robinson: It was at that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: It was at that time. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit more about growing up there. What were the important institutions? What was community life like?</p>
<p>Robinson: Oh, it was nice, because we were a close-knit community. All of our churches were over there. I went to St. James CME Church, but there was also Morning Star Baptist Church, there was Church of God and Christ, there was Greater Faith Baptist and New Hope Baptist Church. So we would do a lot of things over there. The focus of our activities as kids in east Pasco was Kurtzman Park. That was the spot. And it was originally, I remember, it was called Candy Cane Park. Because I remember it had these little candy cane things on it when I was a little kid. But it was later renamed to Kurtzman Park, because I think the gentleman who donated to the city that land that he owned there, with the specificity that it be made into a park for the kids that lived in east Pasco. So that was—I never—I don’t know anything about that guy or—nothing, but that was what was told.</p>
<p>Franklin: Cool. What kind of housing did you live in? Could you describe it?</p>
<p>Robinson: I was fortunate. I lived in a regular house. Like I said, my dad opened a restaurant when he moved here. They bought a piece of property, and my dad—I mentioned he was a carpenter, along with being a culinary artist, he was also a carpenter—so, he made a portion of that house—no, I’ll take that back. He found an overturned trailer and pulled it up onto the property. It had been abandoned. He went through all of the legal hoops that you have to jump through for a trailer and so forth. Got it licensed and so forth, fixed it up and made it into a restaurant, and it was right adjacent to our house. So I grew up in what would be called middle class. So my housing was fine, and there were many people in east Pasco who had built their own homes. Because many of the people who lived in east Pasco, they came up here, they were tradesmen. They were bricklayers, carpenters, et cetera, et cetera. So they had built their own homes. And of course there were other homes that were not so good. But for the most part, life was fine. We had dirt roads for streets. One of the biggest pieces of amazement for me as someone who grew up in Pasco is Oregon Street. Because when I was little, Oregon Street was all but a dirt road. And now it’s this big, wide boulevard that goes all the way through, across the tracks and so forth. Back then, it didn’t. It kind of ended down where we lived.</p>
<p>Franklin: So that trailer that your dad found, that’s what became the Queen Street Diner.</p>
<p>Robinson: That was the first one, yeah. And before we actually named it—well, he named it the Queen Street Diner, and his thing was Texas fried chicken. Because, you know, he’s from Texas. But around town, they used to call it the Squeeze Inn.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because it was—</p>
<p>Robinson: Because it was just a trailer. And it was kind of like the hot spot at the time for people to come and socialize and so forth. So you know, you could only get so many people in a trailer. So they called it the Squeeze Inn.</p>
<p>Franklin: [CHUCKLING] That’s really funny. Yeah. Did your parents ever talk to you much about working at Hanford? And what exactly they did, or what kind of projects they worked on?</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, like I said, my dad was a carpenter. And also he worked at B Plant. I think it was B Plant; I could be wrong about exactly where. But not really in terms of the details about they did—what he did out there. My mom never worked at Hanford. She always worked in social work kinds of things. Most of that—she was like a 25-year employee with the Pasco School District. So they didn’t talk about that that much. Again, like I said, most of the time, when my dad was working, he was at the country club. So he’d go to work with a suit on and everything like that. Everybody thought we were rich. But we weren’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your dad ever talk about experiencing any discrimination or segregation at work?</p>
<p>Robinson: Mm, not at work. Most of the time, when they talked about segregation and things like that, it was stuff that would happen in the community. Not necessarily at work. He never came home and told me stories about, do you know what happened, do you know what they said at work? And that’s not to say that they didn’t happen, but my parents had a way of dealing with that stuff, and they taught us how to deal with that, in such a way to be productive about it. Because we were always taught that we weren’t any better than anybody else. But believe me, nobody was better than us. And so we were to act a certain way that demanded respect and to give people respect. I remember--kind of a sidetrack to that—when urban renewal came through—because we lived on the east side when I was a little kid—right there kind of where Tommy’s Steel and Salvage is now, that’s where we used to live. And it’s kind of funny when I drive by there now, because I can still see some of the trees that were in my backyard at the time. They’re still there all these years later. But when urban renewal came through—and I think this was at the onset of the Johnson Administration—so they came and bought my parents out and so forth, and we moved to the west side of town. Right across the street from what is now a Boys and Girls Club in Pasco. Shortly after we moved there, there was a gentleman that lived across the street from us who actually knew my dad, because my dad worked at the country club and he was a member of the country club. He put his house up for sale, shortly after we moved there. And he came over and told my dad that he’s putting his house up for sale, he says, but believe me, we’d been planning on doing this for a long time. He was very apologetic to my father. Because you know, back then, there was the thing about white flight.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. Very well documented.</p>
<p>Robinson: And so what my dad told him, and I’ll never forget this, he said, that’s okay, he said, because I’m going to put my house up for sale, too, but I’m going to get it while it’s hot. That’s how he handled that kind of stuff. Because, again, he always taught us—they always taught us—that we’re equal to everybody. So if the housing market is hot, he’s going to take advantage of it, and not be insulted by the fact that somebody put his house up for sale because this quote-unquote black family was moving in. Now, kind of ironically, they never did move. [LAUGHTER] The people across the street.</p>
<p>Franklin: I guess the market wasn’t all that hot.</p>
<p>Robinson: Exactly, I guess not.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, that is a very well—you know, white flight occurred all across the—did you hear anything else—did that happen other places in west Pasco? How did west Pasco react to the urban renewal?</p>
<p>Robinson: You know, I cannot say how it was. I can’t—because I was a kid. At that time, Pasco’s a small town. So as kids growing up together, black and white—we were kids. We’d always know what was taught to kids in their own homes about us, but we as kids would interact like kids do. Of course, there were times that we would fight, like I said earlier, there was a strife. And of course, if the wrong words were ever said, oh, it was on. But we never experienced seeing that kind of stuff to that degree that we see on TV, like people out protesting, keeping the black people out and stuff like that. I mean, again, we’re in the Pacific Northwest, so things were a little different here. I also shared with you the story about my aunt and being refused a glass of water. I’m sure it was 110 out that day. They wouldn’t give her a glass of ice water and she was pregnant! So, sure, there was that kind of stuff going on. But organized activities, demonstrating against black people moving places—I cannot recall that ever happening. But I am sure that—we would go into a store, and you could notice sometimes that people were kind of watching out, and watching you. Sometimes, it weighed on us. It was sorrow. We—at least in my household, we were taught how to deal with that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I think, subtle’s a really good word for that kind of—</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s there, but it’s sometimes hard to get a real handle on it.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah, it’s subtle, it’s subtle-slash-sleazy. I mean, because—you know what was going on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right, it’s like, clear, but subtle at the same time.</p>
<p>Robinson: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of opportunities were available for betterment in the community for folks that came—like, maybe educational or monetary or job training or things like that?</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, by the time—if you’re talking about me, by the time I reached the age of where those things became important, I—I got jobs. The first job that I had was, ironically, with the Pasco School District as—you know, I was a student—what do they call that? Oh, I sold ice cream during lunch hour. That was my first little paycheck. Oops. Take that back. My first job was with the Pasco School District, but it was as a janitor, because they had some kind of program—again, it was when—the ‘60s and so forth. So it was one of those social programs to give kids the opportunity to do work and earn some. So I was a janitor—a part-time janitor with the Pasco School District. Then I became the lunch—that was my senior year in high school, when I became the lunch guy. That was cool, because I got both lunch hours. I sold ice cream. I was a senior and had all my credits, so it was kind of—my senior year in high school was kind of a picnic, if you will.</p>
<p>Franklin: And everybody likes the ice cream guy.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah. And then my first job out of high school was with the City of Pasco. I was a lifeguard. And then I worked at Grigg’s. I did not feel—and maybe it was because I was too young to know what was going on—but I did not feel any discrimination that way. Again, it could be because my family—you know, we talked about my mom a little bit. She was pretty well-known; our family was pretty well-known in the Tri-Cities at that time. Maybe it was because I was that Robinson kid. I don’t know. But I didn’t feel any of that. Educational opportunities—you had to leave town, because there was no WSU Tri-Cities at the time. You had to go out of town to go to college. I went to Eastern, myself—Eastern Washington State College. And then it became Eastern Washington University. Yeah. And then I am part of the first class to graduate from Eastern Washington University.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah, when I went up there it was Eastern Washington State College, and then they got the designation of university. So I’m in the first class that graduated from Eastern Washington University.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s cool.</p>
<p>Robinson: Shows my age. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did you get your college degree in?</p>
<p>Robinson: I got my degree in applied psychology. I got kind of a weird degree—undergraduate degree. My degree was in applied psychology, but I minored in education so that I could get a teaching certificate. I actually came back to Pasco and I taught school for a couple of years, which makes me the second black person to graduate from Pasco schools and then come back and teach. The first person to do that was a lady that I grew up with; her name was Angie Ash. Yeah. She also grew up in Pasco schools, graduated, and went to—I think she went to Eastern, too, if I recall. And she came back and taught school, too. She did all of that a couple of years before I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And so you mentioned you ended up getting your teaching certificate.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then did you go on to school beyond that, or--?</p>
<p>Robinson: Yes, but it wasn’t until years later. I went and got my master’s degree in business administration. But I had left the area by then. All of that kind of stuff happened over in the Seattle area which is where I live now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. And what eventually—you mentioned you came back to Pasco for a few years; what eventually drew you out of the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Robinson: More opportunities for what I was trying to do. I taught school for a couple of years, but after I got to teaching school, I discovered that teaching in a classroom wasn’t really for me. I used to joke around and say, I was worse than the kids. ADHD and all—that’s all me. But I love working with kids. I worked with kids all the time. During the time when I stayed here in Pasco, I was doing a lot of things with kids, with young people. I coached women’s softball, my wife and I, we organized a black Junior Miss pageant. This was back in 1976 when we did a pageant. It was an opportunity—we saw it as an opportunity for black people in the Tri-Cities to express themselves culturally, and then also it was a vehicle for us to give scholarships away for young people. We did that for ten years, before we left the area. I left the area in 1986.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, that’s really wonderful. What kind of education did your parents have?</p>
<p>Robinson: They both got their GEDs. I remember—I am old enough to remember when that happened. They got their GEDs from CBC. My dad had a ninth grade education. He dropped out of school because he needed to go to work to help his mother. My mother had a third-grade education.</p>
<p>Franklin: Third-grade education!</p>
<p>Robinson: Yes, she dropped out of school because her mother got sick. She was the oldest child.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Robinson: So it was on her to take care of her family, her siblings. She was the oldest child of two sisters and a brother, and then they also were raising a cousin. And that cousin now lives here in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Is this when your mother was in Michigan?</p>
<p>Robinson: Yes, this was in Saginaw.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of work was available to her with just a third-grade education at that time?</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, when—</p>
<p>Franklin: What did she do to support her family?</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, by the time I came along—I was born in 1952—and by the time I came along, and when I was a little tyke, I remember that Mama would work at grocery stores, she was a checker and things like that. When we would live in Yakima, she worked at a little grocery store and so forth. When we lived in Walla Walla, I think she was a stay-at-home mom. When we moved back to the Tri-Cities, that is when she—and that was in 1963, when we moved back to the Tri-Cities for good—that’s when she started doing the social work things that became who she was as Virgie Robinson. She started a little Campfire group because she had three daughters. So she started a little Campfire group and so forth. And then she got hired on as a community liaison for an organization that was called Higher Horizons. She was a social worker and things like that. And then she got the job with the school district. But it was during that time when—I kind of think it was—I’m trying to—yeah, it was after we moved back to Pasco, and I remember when the two of them got their GED. Because they were jumping up and down. They were excited about getting their GED. I didn’t even know what a GED was. But I remember that. They were both—and they kind of got it at the same time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah. So it was something that they were doing as adults, that they were—</p>
<p>Franklin: With kids.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah, with kids and all that kind of stuff. I mean, they didn’t set us down, because, me, I was the only one old enough. Because I had—I grew up with three little sisters. I was the only one that was old enough to remember, kind of, that stuff. But they never sat us down and told us, okay, we’re getting our GED and this, that and the other.</p>
<p>Franklin: But education was clearly pretty important to your—</p>
<p>Robinson: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: To your parents.</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, it was very important to them. It was very important for them to see their children get educated. And I can say, all of us have now gotten our degree in one form or another. So, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so we’ve gotten through quite a bit of—Hazel Scott, that’s her name. The lady who was in the Greyhound bus station in 1940—</p>
<p>Robinson: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: She was a very famous entertainer in the 1940s, and played all around the US and Europe. That’s right.</p>
<p>Robinson: Okay. All right.</p>
<p>Franklin: I just remembered—I went down my questions, and I was like, oh yeah, the Hazel Scott case.</p>
<p>Robinson: Okay, well, it was that incident.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I looked through the files of that incident recently in the state archives. It was very—yeah, they really picked the wrong person, because she could afford a much better lawyer than the guys that owned the Greyhound bus station restaurant could.</p>
<p>Robinson: Absolutely, way out here in the boonies at the time. Because back then, this was way out in the middle of nowhere, the Tri-Cities. I mean, it’s still kind of isolated, but now we’ve got freeways all around. Back then, no, we were really isolated. I mean, I remember a trip to Seattle taking all day. Because it was all two-lane road between—the freeway—and I use that term generously—didn’t even start until after you come out of Cle Elum. And the house still sits there where the road would open up into what was called the freeway, which was, like I say, I use that term—[COUGH]—excuse me—generously, because it was just a four-lane highway, and they called that the freeway.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, certainly nothing compared to over there on the west side.</p>
<p>Robinson: Oh, no.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, let’s see here. I think I have gone over most of my questions. I want to talk a bit about the modern-day impact of your parents. So you’re back in town for an event named after your mom, right?</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, yeah, we talked a little bit about the work that my mom did. When she passed away back in 2003, the Pasco School District was in this big building mode, because Pasco’s growing by leaps and bounds. At that time, you know, Pasco, I think, was the fastest growing city in the entire nation. So Pasco was building schools after schools after schools to accommodate all the kids that were coming in. So they decided to name one of their new elementary schools after my mom. So the Virgie Robinson Elementary School exists now. So what my sisters and I—I mentioned that I grew up with three little sisters—what we did, along with a niece that was also being raised with us, formed a non-profit organization called the Virgie Robinson Scholarship Fund. We give out scholarships to kids who went to that school, because it’s an elementary school, if kids go to that school when they are in elementary school, when they graduate from high school, they’re eligible to apply for a scholarship that we give. So it’s just a little niche of a school, because we don’t try to serve all the kids in the Pasco School District. Just those kids there. And so I’m in town, now, because I have a Board of Directors and so forth that’s based on counselors at Pasco High, Chiawana High, some other community people here. Our big fundraiser every year is an annual golf tournament and also a silent auction event. That’s how we raise funds to give out the scholarships. So I’m in town because I have a board meeting tomorrow to continue organizing that. We do that in April every year.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned your dad worked at country clubs, so was he a big—I know golf is a major part of country clubs. Is that how you were introduced to golf or was he a big golfer?</p>
<p>Robinson: What’s funny about that is I’m not really a golfer. I’ve got a set of clothes that was given to me by my brother. I mentioned I was raised with three little sisters; I have an older brother and an older sister that were from my dad’s first marriage. My brother’s an avid golfer. My dad was a golfer, too; he was pretty good. He actually won a trophy. There’s a trophy in our house that Dad got. But golfing, per se, was for him, and not for me. I was into the regular sports at the time. You know, the football, basketball and baseball stuff. Because when I was coming up, golfing was square. This was before Tiger Woods and all of that. They wore funny pants. We used to say we would never wear those kinds of clothes: plaid pants and all that kind of stuff. So, today, I’m not a golfer. I go out every once in a while to the driving range. I’ve gotten to the place now where I can actually hit the ball straight. I think in my entire life, I may have played two, maybe three rounds of golf—you know, a whole thing. But I’m not a golfer. But I’m good at organizing stuff. So I’ve—with help—organized this golf tournament and so forth. Community events, I mean—maybe I inherited that from my mom. I’ve always organized community events. I mentioned a little earlier how I used to do things with kids, and we did that pageant and so forth. That was a community-wide event, too. A lot of people would come to that.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. Is there anything else that you would like to mention, related to migration, segregation, civil rights, and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Robinson: Well, like everybody else, during that time, we were gaining our consciousness as black people. Because, our history here in America is well-documented. When I came along, as a youngster, that consciousness was starting to form. We ceased being “colored”—“colored” with a small c. We migrated into “Colored,” with a big C, then we migrated into “Negroes.” And then we just—I don’t know who made the decision, but we just started to reclaim our African heritage. So thus the term African Americans. So, I was coming of age with all of that, that forethought and that thinking and so forth. When I went to college, I made sure that I took a lot of classes, just so I could learn a little bit more about our history as a people in this country, to go beyond Martin Luther King, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois. There’s a whole lot more to it than just that. There’s Carter G. Woodson and so forth. Inventors that were going. People that invented the—what is it? The telephone transmitter. That Alexander Graham Bell made big. But it was actually invented by a black man. I think his name was Granville T. Woods, was his name. The gentleman that invented the stoplight and stuff. We were never taught that kind of stuff in regular school. So I made sure that when I was in school that I took classes so that I could learn about that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Well, Rickie, thank you very much for coming and interviewing with us today and telling us about your life in the Tri-Cities and your parents and their struggles and triumphs.</p>
<p>Robinson: Yeah, well, thank you. Thanks for having me. My life growing up in the Tri-Cities, I have very fond memories here of growing up in the Tri-Cities. So, in spite of all the little stuff that happens, this is still my home.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Okay. Thank you.</p>
<p>Robinson: All right. Thank you.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
B Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1952-1986
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Rickie Robinson
Description
An account of the resource
Rickie Robinson was born in Pasco, Washington in 1952. Rickie's parents moved to Pasco, Washington in 1947 and were influential in the community.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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02/16/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Yakima (Wash.)
Migration
Northwest, Pacific
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Segregation
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F13896fdc609391071af3b38d7afdf2d1.JPG
e934fe7b23d724dd0466d8683b1a21b5
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F443c48154ed935540525182cdba1b8ce.mp4
aa4d01011e7e59e9b95562002c38f636
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Bryan and Rhonda Rambo
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Bryan and Rhonda Rambo on March 23<sup>rd</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Bryan and Rhonda about their experiences living in the Tri-Cities and/or working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, could you state and spell your full name for us, starting with Bryan?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes. Bryan, B-R-Y-A-N. Middle initial, Keith, K-E-I-T-H. Last name, Rambo, R-A-M-B-O.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: My name is Rhonda Rambo. Rhonda, R-H-O-N-D-A. Middle initial, M, and last name, Rambo, R-A-M-B-O.</p>
<p>Franklin: Thank you. So, where did your—your parents moved here, right, to come to work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your father did.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Our father did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did your father move from?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Bivins, Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Bivins, Texas.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yup. Thank you. You remembered Bivins, Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you know where that is?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: It’s between Arkansas and Kansas—Arkansas/Texarkana border.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Northeast Texas.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: East Texas, gotcha. And when did he come to Hanford?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I’m not sure when they came to Hanford, but my mom moved here first, and she stayed actually in Hermiston with a cousin and that was back in 1954. And then my dad was in the service.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, the Korean War at the time—well, he was coming back.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Coming back. And so once he came back, she was already moved—I believe she was already here in Pasco, east Pasco, and he came after.</p>
<p>Franklin: So your parents were married before they—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And when did they get married?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Ooh.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: That’s a good one.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I’m not sure.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I’m not—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Maybe in ’48? I wanna think 1948.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. I don’t know. It’s probably not super important.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Because I can’t remember what Artie—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, exactly, it would be either ’48 or ’47.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, because whatever Artie’s birthday year—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Artie’s ‘52. 1952.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: So, I imagine it’d be—well, yeah, then it’d mean about ’51. Because she was kind of pregnant, I think, at the time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah. That’s not uncommon.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: So, you said your mom came first; she came to Hermiston. Did she have family in Hermiston?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, there was a cousin.</p>
<p>Franklin: And do you know why they were in Hermiston?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I’m not sure. I think that cousin actually moved further in. But that’s where, that was the first place she stayed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What do you know about their lives before they came to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: My grandfather was a sharecropper with cotton, so they worked the land. He had his own farm.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: He also did truck farming, too.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. And my dad lived with his aunt. And I guess they were kind of—they had a little bit more money, I suppose, and so my dad didn’t have to work as hard. But my mom—they kind of went to school together and they had met up. After that, they had all of us kids.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you two born here in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Our Lady of Lourdes, I was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Lady of Lourdes.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Only one of us was—our oldest brother was born in Texas. Everybody else was born up in Washington State.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What do you know about their initial experience of coming to the Tri-Cities and finding a place to live?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: All I remember my mom talking about is the house on east Pasco, saying how bad the sandstorms would be. When the front door—screen door would be just blocked with sand and tumbleweeds, basically. That’s what I remember her talking about, living on the east side of town in that home that she stayed in. It was an apartment complex she stayed in.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Right around A Street, what is now A Street. Very dirty and dusty over there.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, that’s why she just kept saying how dusty it was, and dirty. Coming from Texas with the red clay and more—their land was more forestry, so it wasn’t—for her to come here and see all this dust and dirt and back there it’s more trees and red clay. I think it was a big change for her.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Let’s see here. Do you know what prompted your mom and then your dad to move up here from Texas?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: The relatives.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Other families from different counties in Texas moved up here and the word got out, and I think they just started migrating—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, the opportunities.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: --up here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because that was part of a pretty large migration of blacks from east Texas that came, I believe, initially in the Manhattan Project. So your parents were part of that word-of-mouth migration during and after World War II. Okay. So you kind of described the first place your mom stayed after she arrived. When did your family stay together—do you remember the first house that you guys were in, or your parents were in?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: The house that I have now, the family home, is on Clark Street. And prior to that, they lived in Navy Homes.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, we called it the Navy Homes over there, off of 10<sup>th</sup> and Court.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Court, yeah. That’s where most the families started out, in those homes. And eventually my dad saved up enough money to purchase the home that we’re in now.</p>
<p>Franklin: And where—is that home in east Pasco, or in—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: West.</p>
<p>Franklin: West Pasco.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what was the address?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: No, no, no, you mean the Navy Homes and stuff?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah, so I was—well, both, actually.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oh, Navy Homes is in more downtown but it’s in the northeast part of Pasco.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: But it’s downtown—still considered downtown.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I’m trying to imagine—like, I’m trying to look at a map of Pasco in my head.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: If you know where the Chinese Garden is? It’s straight across the street.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: And all those little houses there. That’s Navy Homes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: They actually rebuilt those. They’re still there. They remodeled them and they built them like they are today.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. They’re considered low income, I guess, too. And they were established I guess back then for the Navy families that might have been here at the time, too. After that, I think, just general families were just moving in there.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did your parents stay in the Navy Homes?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: It must’ve been until ’62. Because Tim--</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Because Tim was still—me, Sean was still there, I was still there, Dwayne and Artie. So we—it was about ’60—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: ’61 or ’62, because after that I was at the house. I was born in the house in ’65, so.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And I want to make a note, too, that before my father even got out to the Area when he’d come back, he was working for the railroads, too. Burlington Northern at the time—Great Northern. He was there. He was a brakeman there for a short time before he got out to the Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: So he must have traveled around quite a bit working for the railroad?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm. Well, he stayed local mostly because he was like a—they had the control switch men and all that. He wasn’t working, going up far, he was just doing the locking or—what do they call it? Switchmen. That’s what he was doing, basically. So he stayed close to town a lot.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. Makes sense. What was the hardest—did your parents ever talk about adjusting to life here in the Tri-Cities and what maybe was a struggle for them coming from east Texas to here, and maybe what was the benefits of coming?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I don’t remember my mom ever saying it was a struggle. But I think she liked it. Because after she—she took us all one time down to Texas for a family trip. After I seen where she grew up, I kind of understood, maybe, why she chose to come up here and stay and start over as a family.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was different about it down there?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: It was really—it’s rural. All rural.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I mean, you’re way out of town from anyone. When it’s dark, it’s dark. It’s pitch. You can’t see nothing. I mean, she warned us. She made me scared to go because she kept telling us how bad the snakes, the ticks, when you go out to the outhouse, you got to look in there and make sure there ain’t no critter in there. So I kind of had a fear of going. But, I mean, it was fun, but I understood why. And even after I went down again after I was older, I kept—I think you and me were together—and I kept saying, man, I could not live here.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: There’s no way. With the humidity, it being hot and just living like that. I wouldn’t imagine trying to live like that, but, you know, some people—what you adapt to when you’re growing up, you adapt to.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, yeah, that’s true. Let’s see here. So, tell me about your father’s work—when did he start working at Hanford and what did he do?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, as I say, when he got here, he did several jobs, but I knew he worked for the Burlington Northern. Then he got a job up in the Hanford Area and that was around 1950—actually probably the year I was born, ’58, ’59, he got there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Started working there.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what was his job out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Patrol.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, Hanford Patrol.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: He was a patrolman.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. That must’ve been—were there any other—do you know if there were any other African American patrolmen at the time?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I had—fortunately, I’ve had some documents that are local news about it, and I believe he was one of the first, if not the first black patrolman out there in the Hanford Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I would think so, too, considering that employment was still somewhat unofficially restricted to—most blacks worked outside jobs—outside the Area or more menial, more service-type-oriented jobs. Did he talk about his work as a patrolman at all?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I don’t remember that.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, we remember—well, basically all we remember, he had a blue uniform and his hat was a barracks hat. And he’d come in—he’d work—with the stripe. It looked like Richland PD back in the day, but—there was like a light blue uniform, he’d come in, his gear, his gun and stuff. Well, he wouldn’t carry his gun all the time. I didn’t see. He probably had it but he hid it.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: It was in the holster.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: But he always had the holster. It was interesting. He would come in, he would go talk to us to make sure we did our chores, see how we were doing. And apparently get good news from Mom that we hadn’t gotten in trouble or anything because he was going to get us later of course! But he was a hard worker. He’d come in—he didn’t talk much about it. But he did take us out there. He took me out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, really?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes!</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I don’t remember going.</p>
<p>Franklin: And when did this—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: You were really young then.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, I don’t remember.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It was interesting, because he brought us through what is now the Prosser Barricade. It’s off of 240 and I think it’s highway, what is that, Highway 4 now? But it’s not the Wye Barricade area, if you’re kind of situated with the 400 Area and all that. It’s like coming into 400 Area is closer. But anyway it comes off of Highway 240 and—gosh, I can’t remember—I think it’s Highway 4. But anyway, there used to be a barricade there and you can’t see nothing there but a parking lot there. But we actually drove in there, we went in, and he started showing us the Area. We didn’t go into the facilities, per se. We went through there, then we went through and drove through what is now the 100 Area. He took us way out there. He was just showing us the scenery, the N Reactor, the 100 Areas. He didn’t show us East and West too much at the time. And 300 Area, he showed us 300 Area and he kind of told us where he worked at, at the time. At the time, he told me, if I remember right, I think he was at 300 Area then. But he’s worked all the areas he said. But I remember 300 Area, he showed us a lot about 300 Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, yeah. I think they—most patrolmen kind of got stationed all over the place.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah. But we stayed in the vehicle, couldn’t get out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Of course.</p>
<p>Bryan: Rambo: We just drove around. But, no, I remember that. It was a great experience for me, because I didn’t—you know, I wanted to see where he worked out, what he do. And he just drove us around. And it’s so big, at the time. It was interesting.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your father ever talk about any challenges with his work at Hanford? Maybe ever any racial conflicts or things with supervisors or fellow employees or anything like that?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: No, my dad was a pretty quiet man. I mean, I don’t remember ever hearing him—I still don’t remember him even raising his voice. All I remember him is coming home, my mom fussing, and then he’d go out to the garage, and that was his place to kind of wind down, tangle with stuff. I don’t remember—I don’t even remember getting a whupping by him, but they said I did.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: You did. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: But I don’t remember. I remember him taking me and trying to show me how to drive a truck. You know, it was an old, what? That old Chevy truck he had, and the stick was up here. And I remember him trying to push the clutch and he’d tell me to go down with the gear. That’s what I remember. I don’t remember—I do kind of remember the uniform thing, but I don’t remember too much of him complaining about work. Like you said, he would come in, he’d have dinner with us kids and, you know. I just remember him being a mellow, quiet man.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, I agree.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: He enjoyed fishing when he had time off. He also had another business. He worked for Sandvik Metals doing their land.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, he had a landscaping business.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And myself and my other brother, we’d go with him and we’d mole and cut and weed-eat and all that stuff. For, like, you said, Sandvik’s. It was several homes in Richland and Kennewick we’d go to, and Pasco.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, he did that.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you guys grew up in Pasco and lived in Pasco your whole lives?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yes. Pasco High. Stevens Middle School, we went to.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. How long did your father work out at Hanford for?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Exactly ten years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Exactly ten years. And what—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: So it was ’58 through 1968.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and why did he leave Hanford?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Got sick.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: At the time, he was a—well, he smoked a lot, too. He quit smoking, but he had issues with emphysema and stuff. But he wanted to get in town—my mother, at the time, wanted him in town, and Garrett Freight Lines was opening a local delivery truck service in town. And he just decided to go ahead and work with them and stay in town and stop the long drive out to the Area.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that is a long drive out there from Pasco. I imagine, especially with the roads in the ‘60s. Okay. So let’s hear kind of about your guys’ experiences with growing up. So we talked about the kind of housing you guys lived in. Did—so I know east Pasco was kind of the hub of the African American community, but you guys lived in west Pasco.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you would’ve went to—did you—I imagine you would’ve went to schools that were predominantly white—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: As opposed to schools in east Pasco, which would’ve been predominantly African American at the time.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: And at the time, there was only one school in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, Whittier.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Which was Whittier.</p>
<p>Franklin: Whittier, right.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: And our older brother and possibly—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yep, Artie, he was the only one.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, Artie was the only one that went there. All the rest of us went to Pasco High.</p>
<p>Franklin: Pasco High, right. How large was the African American community in west Pasco where you lived?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Maybe, I can think of—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oh, man, everybody was basically on the east side at the time.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Well, the Robinsons lived up the street.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: There was maybe one family I could think of that was close to us.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah it was the Robinsons and that was it. We were one of the first families that went even on the west side of Pasco. For a long time.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: For a long time.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It was not many blacks would even be on the west side of Pasco, on this side of the—you know, of the town.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you face any challenges being one of the—outside of what had been formally and informally—you know, east Pasco’s formally and informally placed as where African Americans would live. And that line was pretty drawn sharp with the railroad there.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Our school, I mean, I remember junior high, not so much elementary, but junior high, I remember one time some girls were saying, well, why are you sitting with the white girls? And I’m like, you mean, my neighbors and my friends? Because they couldn’t even—they couldn’t see that me being black, sitting over here, but being growing up in a majority-white neighborhood, that’s who I grew up with. So I felt comfortable, but I felt a little bit like discriminated against, because I felt pressured into, like, oh, I got to go start socializing with these girls. So that was my first reaction, I guess. Someone showing some kind of discrimination.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Now, in addition with what she said, that’s when we moved—we did move from Navy Homes in to Clark Street.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Which was further west at the time. And that was considered growing, getting better and everything, as Pasco. And like I said, like she said, with just the Robinsons, I guess, and us, and not many minority or blacks were on that side of town.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. How big is your family?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Seven of us.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Seven--?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Seven children.</p>
<p>Franklin: Seven children, okay. And where are you guys age-wise on the--?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I’m now—I was the only girl out of seven—out of six boys. So I’m now the baby. Three out of the seven—six boys—are deceased. So he would be—I would’ve been second-to-the-youngest, first the baby brother, and then he would be third in line from the two older brothers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, cool. Did you guys attend church?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what church did your family attend?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Trinity Church of God.</p>
<p>Franklin: And where was that located?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: On the west side of town. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: On the—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, yes.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, it was on the west side.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, it was originally on the east side, though.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: No.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Was it? I don’t remember.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: We went to church on Ainsworth—it was off of—not Ainsworth, but off of A Street—it’s 1<sup>st</sup> Street. Not 1<sup>st</sup> Street. What’s the name of that street that there’s only partially of it left on east side, but the church was there. And that’s when we had—it was before Elder Knowles—Elder James.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Oh, I don’t remember him.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: See?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: [LAUGHTER] I was too young, probably.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I only remember the church on Shoshone.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, you were young. But it was—but then Elder Knowles taken over and that’s when you remember, and then we moved—the church moved from the east side to where it is now on Shoshone.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Shoshone. 4<sup>th</sup> and Shoshone.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes. And there were—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: 5<sup>th</sup> and Shoshone.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, 5<sup>th</sup> and Shoshone, exactly.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: 5<sup>th</sup> and Shoshone.</p>
<p>Franklin: So did its congregation follow when it moved or was it more of a mixed congregation?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: It was people from west—east and west—well, east Pasco that came there. Which was kind of nice, because those members, I went to school with, so it was kind of like I still got to see people I knew and went to school with but lived in east Pasco. But yeah there was quite a few members. The majority of the members were from east Pasco. We were the ones I think thatweren’t. From the west, on the west side.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did the church play in the community?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: A big part of our family. Our mom, she had us in church three, four times a week.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: At least three times a week.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I mean, Sunday was twice a day. We went morning service, to Sunday school, church, and then we came back in the evening. Even when we were young and she knew we had to get home with the younger ones, she had the older ones walk us home. So a big group of—here’s seven kids walking down the street. You know, back then, we—today, that’d be a gang.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: But, yeah, she sent us home so we can get home and get to bed while she stayed and attended church. Our dad was sick the majority, most of the time. I remember her dragging him to church on Sunday because of football, that was his thing. I don’t want to go, I want to watch the game. But every once in a while, he’d dress up and he’d go, she’d get him to go. But once he started getting sick, he couldn’t go. But she still got up and got us dressed and off we went.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your father’s illness?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Cancer. Lung cancer. Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And emphysema. Well, emphysema plus the—was part of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: You said he was a pretty heavy smoker?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. I don’t remember him smoking, but my mom—both my parents did smoke. But my mom, I don’t remember her smoking, either. So she did quit at some time, and my dad.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And they had some issues in 300 Area, too, that happened. Particles that got in there, too. So he had issues there. So he had gotten sick. It was a combination of both.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Okay. And when did your father pass away?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: 19—I remember I was in—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: ’78.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: About ten years after he retired from Hanford.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including food, that people brought from the places they came from? Like east Texas?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Oh, yeah. Well, of course.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It’s a lot. It’s so much.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: My mom’s a Southern cook and so am I. So one thing she traditionally kept us eating during, I don’t know, I guess in holidays, she taught me to make gumbo. And I still traditionally make it for Thanksgiving.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Every year, mm-hmm. Still do.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I don’t know. We—my momma used to take us picking beans. There was a farm here in Pasco that I guess after they harvested, they would let the families go in and pick again to see anything. So my mom did a lot of canning. She would take us all out there. We picked beans if we could off the vines and bring them home. She canned a lot of it. So we had a lot of fresh cooking. And when she cooked, she’d cook a lot. But yeah, the Southern cooking of snap beans and potatoes and ham and—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Preserves.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: She had a garden in the yard there, so she’d grow greens and cabbage and tomatoes. She would take tomatoes and cucumbers and pour vinegar and salt and pepper on, and we’d eat slices of that. Fresh corn if it was—either she’d take us and pick it or she—she couldn’t probably grow enough of it. But anytime she could get it, she’d cook it. There was a local guy that would catch fish and bring it to her. Crappies and bluegills, by the buckets, and we’d have fish fry, you know, as soon as we cleaned them all up.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Alan. Alan was the guy that used to do that.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, so traditionally, yeah, she loved to cook and she instilled that in me. I feel like some of my cooking skills came from a young child going in the kitchen and helping her a lot in the kitchen, learning how to do a lot of it. And I thank her for that because it makes me a good woman today, I think.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And me, I continue to garden, like she said, we just—I still do. I give her the—</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of got bit by the bug?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I give her the greens so she can cook them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Nice, nice. What about any—like community activities or events, like, celebrations that may have been more specific to the South? Was there anything like that that was brought?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Well, I know, Juneteenth is really big here and in the South. That’s one of the things that they still today do here each year. That was one of the big things I remember as far as traditional things that were done. Easter is a big—I think played a lot here, still today, is the women would come out with the big hair, big hats. My mom was one of them. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. She loved to dress up for anniversary, church anniversaries. That was something big that they—she dressed us up. But I remember, Easter mainly, going and wearing gloves, Easter gloves, hats, little patent shoes, matching your little patent purse. Yeah. So I remember that was a big—and the bonnet of course.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oh, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s cool. Were there any opportunities available here that were not available where your parents came from?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I think work. Just work altogether. I mean, if you didn’t get out from where they lived, you were going to be a farmer. So I think coming here had bigger opportunities, money. The South is hard, back then. You couldn’t do too much down there and not be scrutinized about what you’re doing. So for my grandfather to be able to sharecrop and have some land to work it and not lose it to the white man that was down there was a lot.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: True.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: So I can’t tell you the whole story, but there was a relative of ours that’s supposed to have shot a white man, and they smuggled him out, and he did live, he did survive. But his family—he had to leave his wife and children to start a whole new life away from there, because that person’s family after they left and they were questioned, where was this person, they were basically beaten, land taken from—part of their land was taken from them in order to try to get them to say what had happened. But they kept their mouths quiet. They did get him out, and he did have to start—and my mom actually saw that person. He had started a whole new life, new change of life, new lifestyle, new family. But it was kind of sad, he had to leave his wife and children just to start over, just to get out of the—leaving. But the family that was left there did get tortured because of it. So that’s one story that will always stick with me, because that’s kind of sad that you have to be smuggled out to survive. It’s almost like a slavery-type thing, where you have to run for your life and leave your family.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: You know?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Sharecropping is—and that Jim Crow system is—too many uncomfortable parallels to slavery. Slavery by a different name. Did your parents ever talk much about the segregation that was in the South and any differences here in Washington?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, in my experience, we knew that certain parts—we’d go to like—we would walk around a lot when we were growing up. And we knew in the earlier ‘60s, we were told we could go—if we go to Kennewick and walk across the old blue bridge—the old bridge, now it’s gone—we could cross over there. You could go there and shop and do your thing and get done, but you can only—make sure you’re back before nightfall. Don’t be there after nightfall, we were always told that. Us older boys. Because we were worried about, you know, accidents can happen. She just said, just get back because things happen there. I’m not saying there was cross-burning and stuff, I didn’t see that, but there was a fear that could happen to us in Kennewick. So we made sure we did everything we did, we stayed in Pasco or stay outside of town, and not have those kind of problems.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I think one thing I remember is going to school and everybody saying—you know like when we had basketball games against Richland or Kennewick, we always seemed to have the rep of we’re bad. You know, Pasco’s bad, they’re this bad element. And even with—I work in Richland, and even working with some of my coworkers and they say, where do you live? And I say, oh, Pasco. And they say, oh, I would never go to Pasco. And I’m like, good! Stay out. Because we ain’t missing nothing over there that you ain’t bringing us already. But it’s just that fear of hearing, Pasco’s bad. But you know, really, it’s not. I think it’s all in people’s—it may be, back in the day—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I remember when the prostitutes were legally—not legally—but they walked downtown Pasco. I remember that. I remember the pimps. I remember hearing about the police pulling these people over. I remember hearing they said they put them in the cars and put them back out on the street just to keep doing what they’re doing. I remember after-hours night clubs that they can go to after-hours, on east Pasco. Where they can gamble, drink late at night. I remember all that. But it didn’t affect me because my mom kept us—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: JD’s. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. My mom kept us—</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry, what? What’s JD’s?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: JD’s was the old—you shut up before I say it now.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Well, it was a grocery store, but I don’t think it was a night—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, there was some other stores around—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Around there, yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Some clubs were up there.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, there were some after-hour clubs that—they were bars but then they did after-hours stuff. But the prostitution, that went on for years.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I mean, all cities have these issues. It’s funny when they pretend they don’t exist or they shove them to an area and stigmatize that area. That’s often—yeah, I’m not from around here but when I did move here a couple years ago, it’s one of the first things I heard about Pasco. Don’t go to east Pasco.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, don’t go.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, and no real reason but that’s the “bad” area of town. Oh, well, then you come to find out the history of east Pasco and you can see why it’s been stigmatized that way, and it’s not due to the residents; it’s more due to careless—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Talk, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And prejudice. Yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, so that’s what I remember, is being labeled as the “bad” town to live in. I mean, Pasco has a lot of good elements to it I still see today. And obviously the growth is one of them. So I still think that it’s a great place to raise your family as far as having your children grow up here. I love it. I go to—I have family, I go—my family’s from the Bay Area, so I go out there and I visit. But I don’t want to live there. I have family in Seattle, I go to visit, but I don’t want to live there. I’m always—this is what I call home. And, see, I probably will die here. I imagine. [LAUGHTER] But I mean, everybody has their own different views. But, like you said, there’s bad element everywhere. You can’t really get away from it; you learn to adjust and hope for the best. I just think that there’s good and bad in everybody.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And also one of the issues I remember that—it was bussing. It wasn’t bussing, because we were never bussed; my mother would take us to school or we walked to school. But I also was at Longfellow at the time, and all of the sudden they moved us out of Longfellow and they switched us to what is now Emerson, the Emerson School. They just moved us around, switched us around, and we were told it was kind of because of a bussing issue—not a bus issue, but they wanted to move minorities around. So things were changing, I guess, so they moved us around. They moved us out of Longfellow to Emerson and then started changing out then.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: So that was quite interesting, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: The integration—you’re talking about the integration of schools.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, the integration, yeah. I remember that.</p>
<p>Franklin: And where—sorry, I’m not super-familiar with these schools, so where was Longfellow?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It is now on—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: 10<sup>th</sup>?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: 10<sup>th</sup>, it’s more in town. It’s on 10<sup>th</sup> also, 10<sup>th</sup> and—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Clark.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: No, actually, it’s 14<sup>th</sup>. That’s 14<sup>th</sup>, isn’t it? It’s 14<sup>th</sup>. It’s 14<sup>th</sup>.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: 14<sup>th</sup> and Clark.</p>
<p>Franklin: And where is Emerson?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Emerson is right on Sylvester.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, now it’s not. No, it’s not on Sylvester anymore. It’s moved up, now. It’s—but at the time, she’s right, it was on Sylvester.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: It’s now the Boys and Girls Club of America, that’s where it is now, and then they moved it over towards the high school now. Emerson, that’s the new Emerson.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any ways in which opportunities for your parents were limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I think, personally, I think the opportunities opened, like I say, when they got here, my sister was saying. It just, like I say, it was more work. My dad always had found work and he had, like I say, his own business.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: They both went to CBC for a little—my mom got an AA at CBC, and so she taught early childhood education.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, Head Start.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Head Start. I think there were other black women that my mom—the Tates—that one of them worked there with my mom.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes. Of course, Virgie Robinson. The school’s named after her now. We were real close to her, real close to her.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, one of our early interviews for the project was Richie, Richie Robinson, I talked with him.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, Richie’s great, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, he is. That was a really wonderful interview. And his mom, I wish I could have met her. She was a really—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oh, she was great.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: She was a really amazing lady.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes, she was.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about for yourselves? Did you feel in any ways, growing up in Pasco, that—or when you were first starting out in adulthood, felt that your opportunities were limited in any way because of de facto segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I don’t think so.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I feel that my parents at the time, they kind of were in the tougher fringes of the—you know, segregation and all. Because they came out of Jim Crow era. And then things were changing in the ‘60s and things were getting a little bit better. I think the opportunities for me opened up. For me, and my sister. We found work, there’s no problem.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Even in school, I felt had all the opportunities I wanted to go forward from middle school and high school. Went to Stevens, both went to Stevens, and it was good there.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: High school.</p>
<p>Franklin: And could you describe any interactions that you or your parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities that stand out to you, if any?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: My father, like we say, he was kind of tight-lipped a little bit about the friends. But he had a gentleman named Mr. Kimbrough. Now, he’s also a fellow patrolman. He’d hang out with him, and he would go out—his house was out further out at right now what would be the farm areas. Its no longer a farm area, now it’s West Pasco, further out. I think he was on 50<sup>th</sup> or 40—I think Road 53, I think, or 54. But anyway at that time, he’d go out there and he would hang out—I remember he used to drive out there with him. He would help him do his taxes, he would help him do his work in his house. They were really good friends, and they had good rec. He was really good. And they took care of each other. You know, he was a real good friend of my dad’s.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: We had good neighbors. We had good friends around our neighborhood.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were some of the people that influenced you as children?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Locally, or--?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. And nationally?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Influenced me? I want to say—I don’t know, I think just my upbringing. The way my mother taught us. After our dad passed, my mom really had to step up. I mean, she still had five?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yup.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Five kids in the house to raise. So she immediately—she worked nights, I remember getting up and making her coffee and packing her lunch. As she got older and got sicker herself, she started showing me how to pay bills. So I was paying bills probably at 15, 16 years old, writing checks for her. I felt I might’ve grew up a little faster, but at the same time, she was teaching me what I needed to know at the same time. But just watching her as a woman, growing up and being so strong and independent, it made me who I am today. I think I’m a strong person because of that. So I think she’s my biggest role model. Because of her faith in God, I think that helped shield us from a lot. Because she always taught us, when we came in from school, we prayed.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, we did a lot of praying.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: She taught us to pray, if we were in class and we were having issues with maybe our teacher or a fellow classmate, she would say, just—you don’t have to shut your eyes, she said, just say a little prayer. And today, I think she’s kept us out of a lot. She used to foresee things. I kid you not, she would tell us, I saw this in a dream: don’t go over here. One of our brothers didn’t listen. And we had a local pub across the street from our home where we grow up right there on Clark Street. It was First Edition. And she told my brother, I dreamed that you’re going to get injured in that pub; you need to stay out of there. And he went over there and they had a pinball machine. I guess there was someone in there playing on it longer than he wanted, and he went up to the guy and said, hey, I want my turn. This guy punched my brother one time, broke his jaw, and sent him straight to the hospital. My mom said, I told you!</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, I remember that!</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: And stay out of that bar because this was going to happen. There was a couple of dreams that she had about my older brother, and she told him, I had a bad dream. Stay out of here, don’t go over here. My brother didn’t listen. But you know, none of us have done time to where we’re in prison. But she instilled us the right and the wrong. And I think that is what is slacking in a lot of families today. She gave us rules and if we broke them rules, we got the punishment. And my mom didn’t joke.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: No, she did not.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: If my dad came home, and she told, you know your dad is going to whup you, she really meant that, and she meant she going to do it, too. And so we had that fear in us. And so I tried to instill that same thing in my children. Y’all know right and wrong. If you go out there and you did something wrong, don’t expect me to come and get you out of it, if you make that mistake. So I think that that is what people need in this world today, is a little bit of more, put down your foot, let’s just say, and just stick to your grounds.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your mom or dad ever give you any advice or anything on maybe how to handle a delicate situation that may be caused because of someone else’s bigotry or perception of you?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah. Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, she did. She said, they’re only words. Try to walk away from—she always taught us to walk away from a fight unless they put they hands on us. I mean, then you have to—if you have to defend yourself. But she’d always try to teach us it’s only words and they’re not going to kill you, and to try to walk away. You know, today, I’ve never really been—I don’t remember being called out of my name. But maybe one time.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: One time for me at least that I know.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Usually I will address it if it is a problem. I usually just go ahead and speak my mind, too. And then—but I’ve never had to physically fight or anything. Outside my brothers.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, that’s just—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, we protect our brothers and sisters. Yeah, we did that.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, but they tried to teach us to love, not to fight.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. So, Bryan, you worked out at Hanford, right?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how long did you work out at Hanford for?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: A long time?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: You want to put a—phew. Since ’86, so—</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you still work out there?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: No, I retired in—what was it? 2014. ’14, yeah. No, ’13. ’13, excuse me.</p>
<p>Franklin: So 27 years.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did you do out there?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Like my dad, like my father, like son, I joined—went on patrol.</p>
<p>Franklin: Went on patrol.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Hanford Patrol.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how had patrol changed from your father’s day to when you started?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, it was interesting because I—when I got out there, there was people that still—even though he was gone, let’s say, he’s been gone more than, at that time—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: 20 years.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: When I started, because that was ’86, so that’s been a span of—</p>
<p>Franklin: Almost 20 years.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: 15, 20 years.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Almost 20 years.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, some people that were still there remembered my father. And again, like my sister said, they had real respect for my dad, and they—I had to, of course, have previous experience in the service—Marine Corps, and they wanted me. But they knew my dad, and actually, the interviewer knew my dad and spoke very good words about him and everything. And it just went from there. But I tried to bring up a photo showing how my father was out there. He was one of the few that watched the first moon rocks that were brought in 1968 from the moonwalk.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, cool.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It was at the Federal Building, and he was—it shows him guarding it, standing up, guarding it. And then there’s a little girl looking at it, and he’s looking down kind of watching everything. It was in the Federal Building at the Science Center then. It was very cool. I was very proud of that. I think PNL still has records of those photos—they’ve got photos of it. But that’s the reason why, again, because they saw Rambo, a lot of those photos because in our academy they had those pictures. They had a picture of my dad still in there.</p>
<p>Franklin: In where?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: In our academy. We had an academy out there at the time, in the East Area. Not East Area, now it’s 300 Area, toward 300 Area. But at the time, they had some pictures in the East Area where I first started at, and they had pictures of patrolmen through the ages of the years, and they had my father’s picture there. It was great, you know, seeing that. So it was great. It was great there. Real professional. Professional work. A lot of years, a lot of good people. Had some issues in those days, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: Like what?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It wasn’t much—like not much racial issues. But you know a little here and there, little sticklers. Like we said, my sister was saying, my mother and father gave us—look over at the wind, just look over at—as long as it’s not interfering with my job, my work and my job, keep going.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And that’s why I did 20-some years doing that. And overall it’s been good.</p>
<p>Franklin: What on-the-job training did you receive, if any?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Ooh, I started off there as what would be called the SRT or like SWAT, kind of a fast tactical team there at the time. Different than what my father was, which was like just regular security police officer. We were like a [UNKNOWN], they called it. But anyway we would do pretty much everything what my father would do, except if there was an emergency, we would go there for emergencies. Anything, situations, we’ll be ready to go, out at the Hanford Area, whatever it may be. And in the town, also, so, the Federal Building. So it was pretty interesting.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you acquire any skills or experience on the job that helped you later in life?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oh, a lot.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Patience.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Patience, yes.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: A lot of patience. You’ve got to just—being an officer, whether you’re in the Area or you’re a police officer, you’ve got to have the patience, like you said. You got to have—of course have all the necessary training from law enforcement to do my job. Today, I would use those opportunities still in my head—it’s still a race around my head to do it—what to do and what not to do. They help me in life. Plus, like we said, we went to school. I also did—prior to going into patrol, I did four years of college out of University of Hawai’i, went to University of Hawai’i and got a degree there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, on—Manoa?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes, yes, Manoa Campus.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, I went to University of Hawai’i in Hilo.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: All right! Good job.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Hilo, right, that’s great. Excellent. The Big Island? Oh, my goodness.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, the Big Island.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It’s great.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I loved it. What made you—this is a little off-topic—but what made you want to go to Hawai’i?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Again, when I was in—I went into the Marine Corps right after high school in ’77—I went and I did my training and then after that, my first duty station was Pearl Harbor. So I got to see Pearl Harbor, did my duties there, and at the time I was taking a few classes at the University on my off time and everything. So when I finished my first initial four years with the Marine Corps, I decided, oh, well, I’ll just go back and finish up. So I went back to Manoa and started off there and finished up.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what was your degree in?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Broadcast communications.</p>
<p>Franklin: Broadcast communications. And, Rhonda, did you go to college as well?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I only did a little bit for early childhood education. Because I was kind of working at a daycare where they wanted me to have a little extra training on it. But, no, I didn’t go any more than I had to. [LAUGHTER] Per se.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s not always for everyone.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Hold on, I just want to write that down. So, Bryan, where did you—could you describe a typical workday as a Hanford Patrol officer when you were out there?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I can’t tell you everything. But I can tell you some outlooks. Like I say, we get there, get our lineup, we get the time—what happened the night before or what’s going on that happened that day, the activities. We’d get our reports, and we’d be sent out to our various locations, whether it be, let’s say, up close in East or West Area or we’d be sent way down south to 300 or way north to 200-East or 100-N Areas. So we’d roll, we’d do our various security checks, and just traffic control, those things.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so that really brought you all over the Site, then.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like your father, you would’ve gotten to know the whole Site pretty well.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes, I got to know the whole Site.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors and management?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Pretty good. I had a good—tons of good coworkers. I’m still having fun with them now. Some of them are still out in the Area today. I still have time with them. In fact, two years ago—well, now it was a year and a half I guess—we went to white water rafting on the Solomon River—Salmon River down in Oregon.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, cool.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It’s fun, you know, we do a lot of good things.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you have pretty close relationships, communication, with a lot of them.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oh, yes. Sure do.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I still—well, for my job, there’s one of the inspectors that come through, still, every time he sees me, your brother. Your brother this, your brother that. I’m like, okay, I get it, he’s a good guy. So he was like, I do still hear, people still that do know him say—</p>
<p>Franklin: And, Rhonda, where do you work?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I work for a company that’s not in Hanford, but for Hanford, that does radioactive waste from Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, which company?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: It’s Perma-Fix Northwest.</p>
<p>Franklin: There’s such a litany of contractors that’s it’s always, like, I need a map.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m scared to make one because I don’t know if I have that much space on a piece of paper.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Is it all Battelle now?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, we’re right off of Battelle here, on the other side.</p>
<p>Franklin: Our project is a subcontractor of MSA so we’re involved. WSU’s also involved in the web, as I like to call it. The web of Hanford contractors. And how long have you been with Perma-Fix Northwest?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: You’ve been there—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I’ve been at the site 19 years. It’s been owned three times. So it went from ATG which is Allied Technology—</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: To Pacific Eco Solutions which is abbreviated for PECOS to now what is now Perma-Fix.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what is your specific job within Perma-Fix?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: As of right now, I’m doing material control documentation. Before I was an operator, the other years there.</p>
<p>Franklin: An operator of?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: On the Site handling the waste.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. So kind of similar questions to Bryan’s—what on-the-job training did you receive?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Hazardous waste training, material—you know, as far as we had to get a 40-hour—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: You’re RTC cleared, too, aren’t you?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. We had to get hazardous waste training. Still today. We still keep that going. A physical every year. And on-the-job training pretty much every year we do it out on Site. It’s a nice job. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe a typical work day?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Typical work day, we do a job briefing in the morning, about what we’re getting into. We go over the paperwork that we might have to sign saying we understand what we’re getting into, what type of waste. And then usually we go in and suit up, put our respo on, and get to opening up containers and—</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: --start processing the waste. So now that I’m out in the office, I do the receiving of the waste now. And I enter it into—we have a database that I enter it into. And from there, lots of waste comes, I go to meet the drivers, get the paperwork, sign it. I create the barcodes that we use to mark the containers, and then I track the waste after it goes into the different facilities of the waste is being done at, I track that waste in that database. And then I build the shipment and give it off to our shipper who reviews it and sends it off to get notification and that’s the end of the process. And I do it on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And we interacted, because I had to work with her to get—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Waste coming.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Into her facilities to bring waste, you know, escort it, make sure nothing happens to it between coming out of the Area to her area. But she’s right, I would go in there with full gear, and—[LAUGHTER] I said, wanna see—the security folks would know me, but once I’d go in there, they’re just worried, what’s going on. Because they didn’t know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because I go on the Site and Hanford Patrol is pretty tactical. It’s not much different from what you would see on a base. Which really surprised me when I got here. Especially comparing photos of Patrol guys from the ‘50s and ‘60s that, you know, look like—you know, they kind of look like Mayberry--</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, exactly, and what’s the way it was with my father. And now you see like camouflage and whole wearing gear and everything.</p>
<p>Franklin: Automatic weapons.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, exactly, exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it’s a real different—it’s a real different world.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: He used to come on my lunch hour, and I’d be playing cards. And he suited up. And they’re like, your brother’s got a gun. We’re not supposed to have guns on Site. I said, he’s still on the job. He can have that gun. On the Site.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, so.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: But you tell them, and say, hey, don’t make any trouble with me, which wasn’t nice.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I would say, yeah, don’t mess with me, because there’s that gun right there. I might decide to take a few of you out. But we know, it’s a joke. Everybody knows it’s a joke. But it was fun.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: It was good seeing sis, though. It’s just—you know, see how she’s doing and vice versa, it was nice.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s good, that’s good. Let’s see here. And similar questions, good relationships with your coworkers?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And everything?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: No—treated on the job well?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. Well—yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, there’s been a few—maybe not so much—there’s been a few little—</p>
<p>Franklin: Maybe in the past?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: There’s been a few little incidents. But nothing that couldn’t—that hasn’t been dealt with. So, I could say there has been some people that would say something. And I don’t know if they just didn’t know better. So—</p>
<p>Franklin: You mean something like insulting, racially motivated?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Racially. They would kind of in a round-about way say stuff. And then they would think—they’d, ha ha ha. But I would go, ha ha ha and then let them know, yeah, you’re incorrect. So I kind of—I was there prior and I left when it was ATG. And I went and worked at the Interstate Nuclear Services which is a laundry facility off of the Bypass there, on 240. I left and went there for five years. My old supervisor sent a note saying, hey, come back, with the truck driver that was picking up the laundry from ATG. And I read that note, and I thought, you know, maybe I should go back now.</p>
<p>But I kind of knew going back that there was things that I wouldn’t tolerate if I go back. Because it was majority—I was sometimes the only woman on the whole crew, with all men. And you know, growing up with boys kind of made me thicker-skinned for some of the stuff. So when I went back, one of the guys, the leads, was saying, you know, you’re going to be on a respo all day. And I said, yeah, I know. And he—I guess he didn’t realize I had worked there before, and he thought he was trying to scare me, intimidate me. I just looked at him like, yeah, I know. He didn’t know I had worked there and I let him know—I know. So some things like that would happen. And I guess, like you say, you’re a woman and lunchroom chatter and belching and farting and the cursing and everything. And the first time, they go, oh, sorry. And I’m like, it’s okay, I’m used to it. I worked here before. But if it became racist or slightly, I usually nipped it in the bud. Because that’s something I’m not going to listen to or tolerate. So pretty much indirect now, people know with me. Oops, I’m sorry. But they usually—right now, we got a good bunch of people I work with and it’s a minority-type—so I’m still the only black person there but it doesn’t affect me like before. Because throughout the years there were other black males there and a few black females, and they kind of gradually left to go out further to the Hanford Site.</p>
<p>I remember one of the workers there was from Louisiana—one of the male workers. He came to my office one time and said, Rhonda, I’m leaving you. And we were the only black male and female on the site. And I said, it’s okay. And he said, I really feel bad. And I’m going, it’s okay. I go, I’ve been here before. This is nothing new to me. So I let him know, hey, it’s okay. But he really did feel bad that he was leaving me. He felt like he was really leaving me. And I told him, no, you got to do what’s right for you. This is okay for me to be here, and I accepted it. I don’t feel—I don’t know. I was gone for two weeks here just a month ago and I had emails from coworkers, females, males, saying, when are you coming back? We miss you. How’s your arm—I had arm surgery. They were happy to see me back. I do bring a little life to the party, so, I mean—</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I can see that.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: I can see that, awesome. In what ways did security or secrecy at Hanford impact your daily lives?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: When we worked out there? When I was working out there?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Or—well, maybe starting with your father, if any, and then kind of progressing to when each of you have worked out there.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Like I said, for my father, he was, like I said—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Pretty quiet.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, he didn’t talk much about work.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: He just, not that out there. Not Hanford.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I just remember one time we went on a trip, he’d point to those mountains. And say, you know, there’s missiles out there. And that’s what I remember.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah. He didn’t tell me that one, but I’ve been the one ‘til I got out there—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, he said if we were ever to be under attack, he said, there’s silos out here that are going to shoot missiles that are going to come up. And I still believe that today, that’s probably true what he was saying, but you know, you ain’t going to hear it on the news. But I can’t imagine them not having something out there to protect the Site if need be. But that’s all I remember Hanford work that he’d be saying—we were driving down the road going to Yakima or something, and he’s like, you know there’s silos out there with missiles that would shoot them.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, he never told me that when we were driving through on a drive-around. He didn’t tell me that, so you got something I didn’t know about.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I don’t know, I just think both our parents were strong Afro-Americans and I think that they wanted us to grow up and be strong Afro-Americans in society. And I remember my mom saying, whatever you do in life, whether it’s garbage pickup, working in a fast food restaurant, whatever, do the best you can. And that’s what I believe in today. You give it your all, good or bad, you try your hardest. If you don’t like it, try something else. And I believe in sticking through the thick and thin of things. And when you have a family, I think you have to learn to take a lot of stuff to put food on the table and learn that life’s not that easy sometimes and you have to take whatever’s dealt out to you in life and make it the best that you can. I try to, again, instill that in my family, that, yeah there’s good times and there’s bad times and you just have to learn to strive as a family knit and grow old and learn from your mistakes if you have some. And have faith. I think that’s a lot of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. How did you feel—how do you feel about your experiences working on the Hanford Site, given the mission of Hanford was to produce material for nuclear weapons, and that larger connection to not only national security but also this element of mutually-assured destruction and the destructive power of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Ah.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Let’s just start with her again. You.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I guess I understand that we have to have something. But how much do we have to have? And what’s the point? Why threaten other countries with annihilation when it’s going to not affect just where you shoot it but everything else around it that may not ever come back? I don’t think that life should be taken so lightly. When you say, oh, I’m going to shoot this and take care of this, when you know once that thing drops, it’s going to take care of a lot of other stuff, too. And I don’t think that we should use that as a means of controlling or getting your way, like a bully type of situation. That, to me, is like—that should be the last streams of something to be used, I would think. But I know we have to say we can protect ourselves. But I don’t know. I just think that that’s—I know my dad was in the era of when they were building the plutonium for the bomb. But he probably didn’t care about that. He cared about putting food on the table, I’m sure. I mean, that was probably the last thing on his mind. He’s probably thinking, I’ve got seven kids I’ve got to feed. And that’s probably all he was thinking about. And the job, it was a good job to have at the time. I don’t know if he was worried about it like that. If he did, I never saw it.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: He did keep the food on the table, that was important. We never went hungry. Never.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Never.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mom and Dad, they kept it going. For me, it’s different. My sister’s saying a lot that I agree with. It’s just, again, as a patrolman, I can see national security’s very important to me. But the same token, we’re on a—especially here at the Hanford Area now with the cleanup, I want everything to be safe for everybody. And even my sister, she does her part; her part is cleanup. And the plutonium in the Area, that happened, it was the time for it, and I guess they’d consider me a Cold War warrior like my dad was. And making plutonium and stuff was—we needed to have it. But again, do we need it that much? Who’s to say? The way things are going now with North Korea and the other countries—Russia’s even changing their philosophy on how many nukes they’re going to need. But I believe for us right now, for me, it was like my dad’s philosophy probably was. Just, hey, it’s there, it’s a good job. Even more paying job at the time than my father did and it helped me and my family. It kept, again, food on the table and got them to school. Did things I needed. But I do care a lot about the security. But I do also care about cleaning the stuff up, keeping it clean and minimizing it. Less nukes would be better. But on the same token, I’d like to clean up what we have and maintain that and try to not make new ones if we don’t have to. But right now it’s the way it is.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: The most important?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oh, this is—well, it was needed during the war—the big war, World War II. It ended it. Questions whether it was needed to make the bombs for the bombing of Japan for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those are questions that wasn’t part of my era, but I know it was important then. It was always going to be part of the history of America that Hanford did this. One of the bombs, at least, was built here and produced.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I think that—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Its legacy, though, is—right now is that—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: The energy.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: The energy it still produces. And we had good things that we produced too. Our nuclear reactor that was both producing electricity and made nukes, which was very interesting. The N Reactor.</p>
<p>Franklin: The N Reactor, yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And the B Reactor, of course, was one of the big first ones built out there. I’m just thinking, it’s a part of our history. You can’t get away from it.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: No.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: If I go to Hawai’i and I visit there—when I went there just to go visit, and when I went to school there, too, you bring up the name—you brought up the names and you live in the Tri-Cities, they wouldn’t say Tri-Cities to me. Oh, you live near Hanford. They wouldn’t even think about saying Pasco, Kennewick or Richland. Oh, you live in Hanford. This is in Hawai’i. This is in Honolulu, with tourists and I’d say that name. Say, I live in Pasco or I live in the Tri-Cities, they’d bring that up. I mean, the ideal of Hanford is, it’s abundance of opportunity for this area to grow, and it did. But then you got—like you said, you got your negative connotation of whoa, it’s the place we built the nukes and also this place has got to be cleaned up because it’s one of the biggest areas of cleanup in the country. So it’s got its goods and bads.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, I think it’s developed—I think due to the energy that it does produce, still, is good. If you think about all the people that has been employed through there—this place would be a ghost town if that was to go away. So I think that Hanford is—it’s a plus, but it’s a negative, too, because we have to have it. We need to clean it up. We got the energy from it, but we also got the nuke side that was bad, too. So it’s kind of a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: So, I think we’re thankful for what it has given and even what it’s still taking. Because a lot of lives are being lost due to the exposures that are being done out there. And that’s what’s scary, too. When we, like you said, you go traveling and you say, oh, I’m from Washington. Some people say, oh, Seattle? And then you say, no, Tri-Cities. They’re saying, Tri-Cities? And then you say, Hanford, and then they get it. So that’s the stigma of knowing what does happen here and what goes on here. People say, oh you’re going to glow at night. And I go say, yeah, sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’ve heard it, too.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: So. That’s the good and the negative.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you guys know or learn about the prior history of African Americans at Hanford during the Manhattan Project?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: There was segregation going on. A lot of segregation. They would work there, particularly in B area, I heard they had—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Separate.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: You know, your white area and your black area and the folks would stay there and work. They was some interaction but not a lot of interaction. But they all did the same mission, but they had their own—they were still segregated because of the situation during that time. And at the time, Richland, as far as I know, there was no any blacks there. And in Kennewick, I know there wasn’t, or if there was, very few. And of course Pasco was the place for all the black were living at the time. But other than hearing a lot about B area at the time when B reactor was running, I didn’t hear—I was hearing at the time, there was even prison areas out there, believe it or not. We had areas there, just different spots and things were going on that I didn’t know were out or realized were out there that the Army was using and had out there. It’s just interesting. But they—it’s hard to explain other than—just from some of the older folks, though, he was saying, that have been out there. But then they wouldn’t say too much about it.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. I don’t even remember the bridge being—I remember them saying that there was a sign that said no blacks after a certain time. But like I said, my mom shielded us from a lot of it. So I think we were going to church so much—[LAUGHTER] I don’t think we had time to worry about what was going over on that side of town. I just remember sports stuff, there would be sports after some of the games from the different local—from Richland and Kennewick. I remember there was a riot in Memorial Park.</p>
<p>Franklin: When was that?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: That was in—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Oh, god, that had to be back in—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: ’60--?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: The ‘70s, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I think it was ’70 or ’69 or ’70, but—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: Did either of you participate?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Not me, but my—</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Older brother.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Older brother, yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Artis.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: And Dwayne, they were in it, you know.</p>
<p>Franklin: What—do you know what--?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: It was—well, rumor had it that something—one of the guys from Navy Homes had an issue with somebody over here on the west side. All of Navy Homes kids showed up here at the park, in Memorial Park. And all the west side kids, which was one of our brothers or two of our brothers, had all our neighbor kids go there, and it was a big brawl.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh. So it was more like a neighborhood type of beef than like a civil rights demonstration?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, it was more like a beef between one—the Navy Homes and the west side.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah, okay.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. But—</p>
<p>Franklin: That kind of leads me into my next question. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here when you were growing up in that era?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Civil rights? I can’t think of any. Maybe the high school one with Whittier.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, the high school, it was an issue, too. Artie was more or less—our older brother—was more or less involved in that. But for myself at the time, I was in middle school at the time at Stevens, it was some issues going on. Because it was during the civil rights of the Watts thing, riots were going on. ’68 was the assassination unfortunately happened there, and Kennedy and Martin Luther King further in there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, Malcolm X, too.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Things were really static but I was still just going into middle school. Nothing was per se, I was just hearing a lot, hearing a lot of what was going on, but didn’t see a lot of major instances I can remember.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: But my older brother could, he could probably tell you more insight on that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were either of you involved in any civil rights efforts? Marches, protests?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Nope.</p>
<p>Franklin: Anything?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: No.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: No, we were—I was part of the black African American scholarship group. They got that, but—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: AA.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: AA. You weren’t—you were a part of that, too, weren’t you?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, but I didn’t participate in too many—I mean, I’ve never been in any kind of walks or protests. No. I was a good girl. I was.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: But again, like—the situation with us, because we were living in the fringe of the west side, I was stigmated myself—I don’t know if my sister wouldn’t say so much or my older brothers—but when I would go there they would say, you talk like you’re a white guy, you talk like you’re black, you’re on this side of town. And there was some—because you moved and you’re over there, now you’re part of them kind of—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, I do remember that kind of atmosphere.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Oreo stigma, I would call it.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: You think you’re better because you’re living on the west side. That kind of stuff, you know.</p>
<p>Franklin: They maybe see you as being kind of whitewashed.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That’s what I would say.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah. You don’t have to ride a bus because you’re in walking distance of the schools, that kind of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you were seen as being maybe in a position of privilege</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, and that kind of put a stigma on me, or tried to. But like I said, it’s something that you just get over, but.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: But that was our situation.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yeah, I remember that. I remember that feeling, too, of—you know. But again, my mom taught us, again, it’s only words, so you can’t help but where you were raised. I mean, your parents chose you to live on the east side of town, there was an opportunity for my dad to buy a house, he bought a house. He wasn’t worried about what side of town. I guess maybe he might have been worried about what side of town, but maybe it was closer to work. I don’t know. I mean. I just thought that they just wanted us to have a home. It wasn’t a mansion. It was just a home. A four-bedroom home. Imagine that, trying to put six boys in a four bedroom home. Somebody didn’t get their own room, so.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Bunkbeds, it was bunkbeds!</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Bunkbeds, you know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yup. Yeah. I forgot to ask, were your parents both from the same town?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that how they knew each other?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So I just have a couple kind of large-scale questions and then, I guess this is for both of you. What would you like—this is usually a Cold War question, but I’ll kind of open it up to now and cleanup—but what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford? During the Cold War and then during this cleanup phase.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: During it?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Like I said, being out there. You mean, opportunities for the folks coming in now?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Or just the opportunity of—</p>
<p>Franklin: I guess if you had the chance to reflect on your experience and you could talk to someone in the future and someone was like, wow, what was that like to work at Hanford? What was your contribution, or what do you think Hanford’s contribution is? How would you answer that question if you had to tell a future generation what it was like, or what would you want them to know? What’s the most important thing for them to know about?</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Well, like you said earlier, it’s a long—of course you got to go from the beginning, and you’re part of that, you’re part of that generation, that long generation from the war, World War II times to now, and the cleanup. You’ve got several various spots you got to look at. Because you got the war, then you got the Cold War era, then you got the cleanup. Each phase has its own—people will probably say different on each phase. Me, being out—again, I’m from the Cold War era because we stopped making a lot of the material, and then to cleanup, I would say, it was a job opportunity and it was a job that had to get done. And it still is. I mean, it’s still—you can’t let it sit out there and not have nothing done with it. You’ve got to be safe, and I trust all the time on my time, those years I’ve been out there, safety was one of the most things—safety and security. You don’t want to take that stuff home. You don’t want to get contaminated. You didn’t want to bring it home to your family or your cars or stuff, like I’ve been hearing about today, last few weeks. Very disturbing to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: God, yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I think that the newer generation coming in, I think the folks from the older generation that were operators and that stayed out there, been out there, and leaving, like I said, security and safety was the utmost, personally for me. And my feelings now is that the folks out there now is kind of going away from a lot of security. They want to clean, clean, clean and not be safe, safe, safe. I hear a lot of safety, but I think that we need more of doing real protection of the worker to get the job done and not use—if it’s got to be slowed down, so be it, or stop it. But it’s got to be slowed down. Because during my years out there, we’ve had—there have been incidents out there, unfortunately. There have been cleanups that have taken place there that have helped. And then also there’s times there that they could’ve been better, more diligent in the cleanup as far as how to do it and how to protect themselves and all of that. And it hasn’t been done. It hasn’t been done properly. Particularly, areas that as patrolmen, some areas that I would go and check out, areas that I was really worried about, things—a farm that my vent, like they’re talking about now, a lot of venting and things going on—things could happen. And you’re just doing a security check and you don’t know what you’re going to get, you know? I just think, it’s more safety needed out there. And give the folks the tools that the people that are out there, that know, have been out there, give them more of the tools they need. If they say they need masks or they need more equipment to do protection, so be it. Don’t—do it now, don’t wait. Just do it. And do all the proper procedures and do all the procedures. Your full stop, your operational, and then after it’s all done, you do an evaluation and make sure everything’s done right. And what didn’t, what could’ve been done better? Do it even better. As my sister would agree with her job, the same thing, you just have to—</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: The safety.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: I just think, the less we hear about it on the news, it’s better for me, always better for me, hearing about it. Especially PUREX that just—that brings some history back there about that issue, about that tunnel. And I’m not too happy about that. Because that could’ve—that situation should’ve been done properly through the years, taken care of. And PFP and things like that. They need to slow down and just do it properly and safely so everybody’s happy, so everybody comes home. That’s the important thing. You want to come home. You want to come home to your family.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And it is a good job, and it is an opportunity, and it is good, because you’re taken care of, not only yourself, but you are taking care of your environment, your future environment in your surrounding in the future as well as the present. It just has to be done right.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Mm-hmm. That’s what I think, too. That it’s important for the generations—I’m sure that if my dad was to talk about it, he probably would’ve said, you know, if you ever work out there, be safe. My mom’s biggest fear was where I’m at now because of our dad working at Hanford. She just kept saying, you know your dad worked in there. You know what he went through. I don’t want to see someone suffer like our dad did. He didn’t die fast. So when I talk to the young people at my job, I specifically tell them, you don’t want to be on an oxygen machine with your lungs collapsing in bed and your family watching you. For me, that’s all I remember of my dad, is really laying in a bed, on oxygen. I remember him being at the veteran’s hospital in Walla Walla and me and my younger brother were so young, we weren’t allowed to go in there to visit. So the older ones would prop the door and we’d sneak in and say hi anyway. You don’t—that’s a legacy you don’t want to leave your family when you’re working out at Hanford. You don’t want to have to think about the ifs and the ands from what could happen to you from coming home—from being exposed. So safety, to me, is a main important thing.</p>
<p>And the cleanup is also necessary. We don’t want it in our drinking water. We want this environment—the river runs through all these counties. Everybody enjoys it. Everybody wants to be out there fishing and boating. I tell my kids, I don’t—if you go out to the water, waterskiing with your dad, try not to drink that water. Because we don’t know for sure it doesn’t have the potential of that. Every time the wind blows around Tri-Cities, I worry, because that’s not—everything’s not fastened out there. So a dust storm comes through, that stuff is lifting. So, where is it going? In our air.</p>
<p>So we have to think, it’s always here. It’s always around us. The mindset of what people have to think about out there is that same way. Just because you can’t physically see it doesn’t mean it’s not there, and you just have to take all the precautions of if it was there. Safety is the first thing. Training is important. And health is everything. So I want the people to think that it’s a good thing. It’s provided a lot of things in Tri-Cities. The growth is because of Hanford, mainly. Like I said, I don’t think it would be anything here if that was to shut down completely. So the generations of families that come through here, generations of families—children are working in the Area and making better money than probably their parents did and enjoying better things than their parents did. So Hanford is a blessing but it’s also something we really have to be cautious about, too, and treat it safely in the right way.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Great. Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life at Hanford and the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: I just believe that my parents moving here, they moved here because they heard the good news. This project here. To come here and work and the families that moved here were close-knit in some ways. Yeah, they had—most of them—multiple people were in different churches, but those churches still fellowshipped in some way. So those families still hooked up and saw each other and talked about how they grew up and when this happened and when that happened. I just think that they saw it as a big opportunity for black families to come and raise their families in a safe environment and make some kind of living. I think that’s what brought us here today, is that I believe that same token. I tell people all the time, it’s a great place to live. You can make good money here if you apply yourself and look for it, it’s here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Agreed.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: And the same—same thing my sister was saying, like I said, it was the great migration. They could’ve easily went north to Chicago or New York, too, at the time, because folks were moving—California, even. I’m glad that our parents moved here. I’m glad that they did. Because we had the opportunities galore here. Even recently, hearing on the news that folks are just moving into Pasco itself is just growing extremely fast because of the housing opportunities, it’s cheaper, and the living conditions is a lot better, everything. And Hanford is a big part of it. Would I like to have Hanford as the big part in the future? Less, I think. I think hopefully we diversify more into less Hanford but more maybe scientific, I would say R&D, more or less. And less of—and things that we learn how to clean up will help other areas across the country and around the world. But I would like it to be less emphasis on Hanford and more emphasis on other products and other things. I know we got a big agricultural base, too, here, that helps also. But looking back, I just—I wouldn’t have any other way, either. I love it here. I mean, I’ve got our children here—we had our children here, we have grown here. From my father, like I said, he got me a good work ethic, my mother had a great work ethic. It helped me get through a lot of racial barriers. If there were, I—I worked harder. My mother said, work harder and Dad said, work harder, and I did. And I succeeded. I feel like I succeeded a lot in life. We’re very blessed and thankful for that. So looking back, I have—I think it’s a great opportunity and I’m glad they did move here and advanced our life and our kids’.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much, Bryan and Rhonda. I really appreciate you coming to interview with us and talk about your life and your parents’ life.</p>
<p>Rhonda Rambo: Thank you.</p>
<p>Bryan Rambo: Yeah, thank you.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
Hanford Patrol
400 Area
100 Area
300 Area
200 East Area
N Reactor
Perma-Fix Northwest
Battelle
PUREX
Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP)
B Reactor
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Bryan and Rhonda Rambo
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Migration
School integration
Segregation
Discrimination
Racism
Radioactive waste disposal
Nuclear energy
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Description
An account of the resource
Bryan and Rhonda Rambo were both born in Pasco, Washington. Their parents moved to Pasco, Washington in the early 1950s.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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03/23/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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e6c57e88700e3daf112882bfe107728a
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe858263aff645c79e7a9c2b67dd4702b.mp4
eceb2621daa76c475cbce2aad1d28218
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
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Andy and Shirley Miller
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: Okay. All right. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Andy and Shirley Miller on June 26, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Andy and Shirley about their experiences living in the Tri-Cities and/or working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Start with—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Andy Miller, A-N-D-Y. M-I-L-L-E-R.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: And Shirley Miller, S-H-I-R-L-E-Y, M-I-L-L-E-R.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thank you. Shirley, let’s start about talking about your life before Hanford and the Tri-Cities. Where and when were you born?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Where and when was I born?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, I was born in Kansas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: In Pratt, Kansas.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: In 1929.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you hear about the Tri-Cities? How did you come here?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: My husband got a job.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. For--?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Who did he work for?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: General Electric.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: General Electric.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what year did you move out here?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, God.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: It was right after your wedding date.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, I can’t remember.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: In 1951.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: 1951.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And you want to tell him where you met Dad?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Where’d I meet him?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Where’d I meet him?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: In college.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, in college.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: At KU.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: At KU, okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were your first impressions when you came to Richland?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: That it was a bare town.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s pretty fair. And where was the first place you stayed after you arrived?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: The first place?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, probably in the hotel, and then I went to a place they gave us to stay in.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where—what kind of place was that?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Wasn’t that a little house?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: The prefab.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: A prefab?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: You know what street it was on?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, unh-uh.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Snow Street.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, Snow Street, okay, it was on Snow Street. It was right across the street from the school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Andy, was that where you were born, or is that where your parents were living—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I was born at Kadlec, and I went from Kadlec to the prefab.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what—do you remember the address of the prefab?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: It was right across from Marcus Whitman. I think it was 512.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: 512. 512 Snow.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. I used to live on Stanton. That’s where I stayed when I first moved here, yeah. That’s a cute little neighborhood. So what was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, you asking me?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: What was the hardest part--?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: What did you miss the most about Kansas? What was the hardest thing about living here?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, I—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: It was hard on your asthma.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I mean, just the difference of a town like this, that was just built from different houses. I mean, it was a different type of living.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm. Okay.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I mean, not having different homes. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did your husband do for General Electric?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: He was an engineer.</p>
<p>Franklin: Engineer, okay. And, Andy, you said you were born—what year—you said you were born at Kadlec. What year were you born?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: 1953.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1953, okay. And how long did you stay at the house on Snow?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: We moved to a ranch house on Cottonwood in 1958.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, that’s also in Richland?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yup, and it was also one of the government houses that was built right after Hanford was constructed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So when did you—Shirley, when did you first become involved in the groups like the NAACP or CORE, Congress of Racial Equality? How did you become involved with trying to help the African American community?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: How did I come--? I don’t know, how did I?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, Nyla Brouns. That’s where you met Nyla.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And Randy Jones.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Randy Jones, uh-huh, Randy Jones, okay. It was Randy Jones, I lived next-door to her, yeah. Yeah, I lived next-door to Randy Jones. And I went to meetings and became involved.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Randy was an African American, married to her husband Herb, and they had two children. So our families became social friends and Rindy was one of the African American leaders in the city of Richland.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And she worked in Pasco. She helped get CORE started and was very active in the NAACP.</p>
<p>Franklin: And CORE stands for Congress On Racial Equality.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Congress Of Racial Equality, I think, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Congress Of Racial Equality. Okay. Do you remember what year—either of you remember what year that would’ve been, around?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I think it’d be about ’62 or ’63.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What were the primary activities of CORE and the NAACP in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Hmm. Trying to find houses for people. Is that one?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Uh-huh, yeah, that’s what you’ve mentioned.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, I think Mom just mentioned the housing issue. And she actually has a good story about helping the first African American family move into Kennewick, because up until that time, Kennewick did not allow African Americans to live there.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, and we worked on that.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: You want to tell him what you did with the Slaughters?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, what did we do? I mean, tell me. You—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: You were just telling me, you remember when the Slaughters would call for a house to rent? And they were told, no, what would you and Dad do?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, yeah. Then we would call up and ask, and they would say, yes, and then we would call back.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And who else did that? Nyla?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Nyla, oh, because Nyla did it more than I did because she’s better on the telephone than I. Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: So they would—because there was no written ordinance, but it was a practice. So what would happen is the Slaughters would respond to an ad and they would be refused. Then Mom and Dad and Dick and Nyla Brouns, they would then call the same people and they would be offered the ability to rent the house. So that put a lot of pressure. They actually did file complaints. The law wasn’t as good as it is now, but there was some legal leverage and finally the Slaughters were able to find a house in Kennewick to rent.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Yeah, we interviewed John Slaughter early on.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Good, good.</p>
<p>Franklin: And he told me—he mentioned this part of his civil rights history. That’s excellent. Who were other important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Do you remember some of the other people you worked with? There was Robert and Evelyn Jackson.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And Robert was a lawyer who worked for what was then the AEC.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, they were very important.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes. And do you want to tell the story that Robert hit home for us some of the background of how Robert was able to go to law school?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: By sitting in the back of the room.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Not in the back of the room. In the hallway.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: In the hallway, okay.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yeah, Robert was admitted to University of Virginia Law School by court order. But he had to sit in the hallway because the law school would not sit him in the room. They had said they couldn’t be in the same room with white students. So he had to—they would leave the door open while he would listen to the lectures. And then after graduating, he came out here where he got his first job. So he was—and him being a lawyer made him a leader. He lived in Richland, but we had—you worked with a lot of people. Iola James, do you remember her?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And do you remember some other people that lived in Pasco that you worked with?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, I can’t remember.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Okay. But it was a combination of professionals who lived in Richland and then with other African Americans who lived in east Pasco. And then you got to know people like Wally Webster.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm. Very definitely. He was the leader. Did you talk to Wally Webster?</p>
<p>Franklin: We are talking to Wally Webster in about less than a month. He’s coming over from the west side for a family reunion.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Good.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’ve talked to him on the phone, though. I’ve talked to him, and we’ve talked to Webster Jackson.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And we’ve talked to Pastor Albert Wilkins.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, he was very active.</p>
<p>Franklin: And talked to Dallas Barnes.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Mom was good—they still have dinner together with Dallas and Lozie.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. We wanted to kind of—we’re closing in on the end of the interview project, but I don’t know if we can kind of round out—we wanted to get some of the experiences of allies of the civil rights effort to round everything out. You know, why people would get involved to help others at a time when there was a lot of violence directed at African Americans and certainly a lot of resistance towards—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, it was only the fair thing to do. Goodness.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yes, that’s true. Were there ever any tensions between the professionals in Richland and the residents of east Pasco, as to, like class tensions within the movement?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Do you understand what he was saying, Mom? Did sometimes people in east Pasco resent or be suspicious of the African Americans from Richland?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Right, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did that play out? Were there any manifestations of those tensions? Any disagreements or violence?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I think there was, not violence but disagreements. Kind of anger at each other. Not anger, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of a dislike or—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I think.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: My memory from what Mom and Dad told me was that there were frank discussions.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: That’s a better word.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But they never got angry at each other, and there was always a working-together coalition. But there would be suspicion and sometimes some resentments that would be expressed.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: That’s right.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But there was never—at least from what Mom and Dad have told me over the years, there was never a fracturing of the movement in Tri-Cities. They stayed united.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, yes, there was never a fracture.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did each city—you mentioned housing in Kennewick, and I know that for east Pasco, a lot of the civil rights effort was focused around things like street improvements, right, and water and sewer, and employment. Did Richland have any unique civil rights challenges? Because—was housing an issue? Was it similar to the other cities, or was there something different about Richland?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes. Mom, did you want to tell him about when you were on the Richland Human Rights Commission and your work on the fair housing ordinance?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, go ahead.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: No, do you remember?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, unh-uh. I remember working on it, but I don’t remember any action.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, certainly, Mom talked, and I do remember, is that there was housing discrimination in Richland also, but more on the individual home owners basis.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, that is definitely true.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And when you first were on the Human Rights Commission, when you first went to city council, were they for it at first, or were they against it at first?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, I don’t think they were for it at first. But they were later.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: So, Mom and I think—was Mr. Mitchell on the Human Rights Commission? There were some other people on the Human Rights Commission.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: He could’ve been. Probably, because he was so active, yeah. I can’t remember.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But you remember working to get—in Richland was I think one of the first cities to adopt a fair housing ordinance in the Northwest.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. That’s great.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And thanks to Mom—and it was a coalition of whites in Richland and African Americans that were on the Human Rights Commission and they worked together to pressure the city.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, great. What were some of the notable successes of the civil rights activities in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: What?</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the successes of the civil rights efforts in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I don’t know what that—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, I mean, what are some good things that came out? I think part of it is, you had a lot of the marches.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: We had good marches.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And do you remember what the marches were for?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, what were they for? I remember the marches.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, I think it was during the time that Dr. King was working.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, you’re really going back far.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: That’s what they wanted to know about. Do you want to tell them where the marches would start when we would go to Pasco and have the marches?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: At the park in Pasco.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: In east Pasco. Kurtzman Park. And where’d we go after we left Kurtzman Park?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: We’d march across the bridge and through the town—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Through the underpass.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Underpass. And then we went up usually to where that other park was and what building is that?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: The courthouse?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Uh-huh, the courthouse.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And then we’d go back to Kurtzman Park. Do you remember what kind of reaction we got sometimes on those marches?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, negative, sometimes, yes.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: From people that would drive by?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, uh-huh.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: What would they do?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I mean, not—down.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And would they ever wave anything?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: A flag, yes.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: They would—my memory was that you would have people driving by and yelling obscenities and waving a confederate flag.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, oh, yeah! That was the main—yeah. The confederate flag held up.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And that is why I never understood people who talk about confederate flags being a heritage. Because my first experience with a confederate flag was that it was used as a hate symbol to try to intimidate African Americans and whites with them during these marches that were there to support.</p>
<p>Another memory I have is the marches back then, and I was only probably about ten, but the marches back then had a different atmosphere than marches that people go on today. We would get pep talks about the types of things that may happen, that people are going to try to goad us into violence. And I remember one African American woman, she was older, coming to me and specifically saying, there’s going to be people to try to get you to yell back, or try to do something and back. And I think she really focused on some of the younger white boys, to making sure that we would not undermine the march. So I just really remember being impressed with the strength.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, that’s good, you have the better memory. That’s good.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And another thing that—when he’s asking about things that made a difference is, do you remember the Elks?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, I remember the Elks.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And what did we do with the Elks Lodge?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: We picketed.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Because?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, they wouldn’t let white people in. I mean, not—they wouldn’t let black people in.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Mm-hmm. And back then the Pasco Elks was—I mean, some people said it was a private club and shouldn’t—they should be able to decide who should be members or not. But what Mom and Dad were upset about and everybody was upset about is, at that time in Pasco, so much of the power structure of the community groups—the Hanford groups would all meet at the Pasco Elks Club.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: And then blacks weren’t welcome to go in.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. So thereby excluded from—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: From the power structure of the community.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Right. And so, Mom, what did—what happened, were you and Dad invited to other functions, like political functions and community functions at the Elks Club? And people invite you to dinner at the Elks Club?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, but we didn’t go.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Right. And you lost some friends over that.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And you always say that—that one march that we talked about one time picketing, who was there when you were picketing?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I can’t remember.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Dad’s boss.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, yes, uh-huh.</p>
<p>Franklin: Jeez, wow. He was—you were picketing at the Elks Club?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Dad and Mom were picketing an event that was being held at the Elks Club. It was a community event. And I know that Dad and Mom came back—they never backed down, I want to emphasize that—but I remember Mom and Dad came back and Dad was told by a lot of people he worked with that he had hurt his career by picketing at the Elks Club. I think that his—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, he was. Yeah, he was told that.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yeah, but his boss later talked to him about it, and I think that it ended up being a positive experience. Of course, the Elks Club, I think though it may have been legal action, they ended up discontinuing their policy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Well, I also heard about an incident in Kennewick where some Richland High students—I think, was it Norris Brown that told me this? I’ve heard so many stories now that—where there were a group of Richland High students who weren’t allowed to go to a teenage club, because there were a couple black students with them; the black students were excluded. Do you have any memory of that? No? Okay.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I don’t, because Norris is probably about ten years older than I am.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Okay. What were some of the biggest challenges, or the—I don’t want to use the word failure, but some of the biggest—some of the harder things to get accomplished with civil rights, or maybe even failures, things that were tried but weren’t—never fully addressed?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: What was that?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, he was wondering, what were some of the biggest challenges? Like, what were some of the hardest things you worked on in the civil rights movement?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, my memory isn’t just—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, I think that—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Housing was one.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes. Because even at the end of the civil rights movement, did blacks—did they really, were they able to live in Pasco except east Pasco?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: That was something that I think that you—at the meetings that you guys let me go to, was a big issue for people, that that was not an easy thing to get done. As opposed to now, where I think the certain demographics are there in Pasco, located, but not anything like there was.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, your memory’s so good.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, I’m mainly remembering things that you told me.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, you guys are both working well off each other. So I think that’s good. You probably wouldn’t have as much to remember if you weren’t there with him.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Right. That’s right. And I think the school is—Whittier School. Remember Whittier School, Mom?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, and it was definitely segregated.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And was Whittier School, were the facilities as good as the other schools in Pasco?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: What?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Was Whittier School as nice as the other schools in Pasco?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, unh-unh.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And that was something that you and Nyla and Iola James, the Jacksons, something that you worked on. That was not, I don’t think that was easy, from my memory of you talking about that. And finally, Whittier School was closed, is that right?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did the students—did the students then get bussed out to other—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I think they were dispersed, and I think that there was issues about the lack of fairness, the way that was handled. My memory, just being told of the time, was Whittier School was closed, but then that wasn’t an instant solution, because the way they were dispersed and everything was not fairly handled, is my memory.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. What about—were you involved with the redevelopment, the Urban Renewal, in Pasco?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I think he’s talking about Art Fletcher. I think he was involved in some of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Were you involved in that as well?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Went to meetings, but not as a leadership.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: He did that.</p>
<p>Franklin: He was a big—he was the—who was Art Fletcher?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: He was an African American in Pasco.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And I think he was on the city council, and he actually authorized, I think, or helped create some self-help projects and Urban Renewal.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Uh-huh, he was very active.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But I do remember, speaking of tensions, I think that—I don’t think the approach he was taking was not universally advocated by a lot of the African Americans in Pasco. And I think there were some disagreements. But the people you’re talking to would have a better handle on that. I think Wally Webster was the first director of the Community Action Committee.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: He was very active. Talk to him.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: He’s going to talk to him pretty soon. But I think he replaced another CAC director. And there was some controversy over that.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I can’t remember anyway.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I think Pat Cochrane was the prior director.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, oh, yeah. And he—yes, we wanted him rather than Pat Cochrane.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes. And then Art Fletcher later on became involved in the Republican party and ran for lieutenant governor and he actually got a high job with the, I think, HEW in Washington, DC.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, under the Nixon Administration.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Under the Nixon Administration, that’s correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard lots of people have mentioned that, oh, he went on to be in the Nixon Administration. How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I think it influenced but not—what do you think?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I think you’re right, influenced. A lot of the marches that we went to in Pasco were to support what was happening in the South.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Uh-huh, definitely.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Like after the bombings on—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, yes, they were, too.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And to build support. They also—and I do remember Mom and Dad talking, and they certainly understood, but CORE changed its emphasis during that time on a national level.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: And CORE became much more active locally after that.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes, CORE did. And then later when CORE changed is that CORE then became more of a thing, that CORE was more of a group for African Americans, as opposed to African Americans and whites. And that—you and Dad talked about that here.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Whereas NAACP remained more of an integrated organization. Is that—my memory right?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: So CORE became kind of more exclusive then, or they—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I want to emphasize that Mom and Dad never felt upset with the local CORE leadership.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, unh-uh.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But I think there was an acknowledgement that while NAACP continued its traditional approach, that CORE really wanted to foster leadership among African Americans and so they could be frank with each other and work on that, which reflects what CORE was doing on a national level at that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right, right. Thank you. What was different about civil rights efforts here, compared to the national civil rights effort?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I don’t know. What did you think?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, I mean, we were not down in the South. We certainly didn’t have police dogs break up demonstrations, and there wasn’t probably some of the blatant things that happened in the South.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, not at all.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: No one was—there were no bombings or no killings here. So that was certainly different, though there was pushback. Mom, do you want to talk about some of the phone calls you got back then?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: What do you mean, the phone calls?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: When you would go to a meeting in Pasco or go to a protest in Pasco, what kind of phone calls you would get later?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: For me to stay home, because I wasn’t a member of Pasco. Yeah, I had that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wait, who were the phone calls from?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: People in Pasco.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But did they tell you their name, or were they just telling you kind of anonymously to stay out?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Anonymously and some would say where they worked.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Like I work over in east Pasco, or I work here.</p>
<p>Franklin: These were presumably white people calling to harass you to tell you to stay home and don’t get involved?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, wow. Did that happen a lot?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, but it happened some. Enough to bother me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Was there any kind of way you could report that, or was it just something that you had to face, endure?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, I didn’t report it to anyone, other than other people in the group.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But I think the consensus was there would be no point in reporting it, is that right?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Just kind of look the other way?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your husband or your father ever face any reprisals or anything from his work in civil rights? Any like job or, with his employment or anything?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I do remember a story that when one of his bosses retired that he was told that he may have been named president, if it wasn’t for his wife causing all these problems in Pasco.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, yeah, I remember that.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But Dad—I want to emphasize, Dad ended up being promoted to executive vice president of United Nuclear and so he had professional success. But I think there was—he received some pushback at work.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, there was pushback at work.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But Dad always discounted it and said it didn’t bother him. Is that a fair--?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, that’s wonderful. When you came here, and when you grew up here, Andy, what did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: You know, I—well, we knew that most African Americans, when they were brought up here, had to live in east Pasco. So we had that understanding.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, that was very, uh-huh. And it was very true.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But I will say that CBC’s had a recent exhibit and there’s been some writings on books, and I will say I learned a lot of that, the real history of African Americans in the Tri-City area for the first time just a few years ago. And coming from my family, it shows, if I wasn’t as aware as I should’ve been, people in the Tri-Cities just don’t want to talk about it. And I think you still see some of that now. People—there’s still a reaction of, why are we talking about what happened 60 years ago?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, that’s definitely true.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But it just—it wasn’t discussed as much 50 years ago as clearly it should’ve been.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard that same kind of thing. Luckily not when I brought up this project, specifically, but—actually, I did hear that in a meeting of an organization I belong to, the B Reactor Museum Association. An out-of-town member who was wondering why we were focusing on all this.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: All these black people, when whites made up the majority of workers anyway, so we should be focusing on them, was something like the comment. I’m wondering—well, I have a follow-up question to that question about African Americans at Hanford during World War II and after. From your perspective, what were their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: What was that question again?</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective, what were African Americans’ most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, I don’t know. What do you--?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, I think he’s just saying, what makes you the most proud? I think, Mom, weren’t you always impressed—I think you were equally impressed by the people you met in east Pasco and the professionals in Richland, as far as showing a lot of leadership and courage—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah!</p>
<p>Andy Miller: --in trying to integrate the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Gosh, these are so questions of olden time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that’s the conflict in doing oral history, is that we often don’t think to start asking these questions until a long time has passed and we want to really know what happened.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Gosh, I got stuff in my hair.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because we don’t think it’s history when it’s happening, and then when we realize we need to get it, it’s often—that’s why I really appreciate you sitting down with us.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I do have a memory, too, of—especially African Americans in Richland, I think were held to a different standard sometimes. They all had to be successful and perfect behavior. And you talk to some of them and their parents, it was acknowledged that I could do something, and an African American student could do the same thing, and the reaction was not going to be the same. And I do remember comments and things like that. So I think there was a lot of pressure, especially on African Americans in Richland going into school. There weren’t that many, and it seemed like, and often many of them talked about, being on display at all times.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that—people have alluded to that, but I don’t think have stated it quite as succinctly as you did. Although maybe they wouldn’t have wanted to—that certainly seems—one of the things that’s come across, especially a lot of the Mitchells and the Browns were told, you know, you got to just be the best student you can be, and turn the other cheek and things like that.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I can imagine that, and they acted that way, too.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes, and Duke Mitchell was two years ahead of me in high school, and he was. He was one of those people everybody in the high school looked up to. He was, I guess, kind of perfect. And he got a scholarship. He went to Air Force Academy, I think.</p>
<p>Franklin: : Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But I think, it’s nice that he’s come back and he’s leading a lot of the efforts now. But he was kind of an example of somebody who—if there was a double standard, he always met it. But I always looked at him and thought about some of the pressure he was under all the time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so. Shirley, did you ever work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, I worked at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, and what did you do?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, I was not a professional. I was kind of a—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: File clerk? Secretary?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What time period was this?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I can’t—what time period?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, what—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Was it before I was born or after I was born, or both?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Both. I mean, I had to quit because I was pregnant with you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And she came out here with a master’s in counseling and biology from—she got her master’s in KU and a master’s from Northwestern, and the only job she could get here in the early ‘50s was as a file clerk.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s saddening but not surprising. My grandmother had a PhD from Cornell in molecular—in biology, and never worked professionally because no one would hire her to do a man’s job in the ‘50s and ‘40s.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Right, yeah.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. Did you ever use your degree in any way? Did you ever have professional work?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Did I ever get professional work?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I don’t know. I think that I did, didn’t I?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, you ended up owning a bookstore. An independent book store along with a couple other women. A very successful business.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, yes.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: So she used her skills in that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where was that?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: In Richland.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Uptown Richland, called the Book Place.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Interesting.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And you worked at a college instructor for a while, too.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: At Central Washington.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, great. Okay. Let’s see here. I’m just trying to figure out what the rest of my questions fit. Did you participate in many social events in east Pasco or in the African American community, like cookouts or Juneteenth or things like that? Or was your involvement mostly with civil rights? I mean, were you close with African American families?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes. Mom, he’s just talking about sometimes we’d just go into Pasco just to have like a barbecue.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, uh-huh.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And sometimes it’d just be completely social.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And then in Richland, the same thing?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, right.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And then what would happen when you were living on the river, what would happen when you would extend the invitation to African American families?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I would have sometimes objections that people didn’t like me to have African Americans swim in the river next to us.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yeah, at the time we lived on—well, Mom still lives on Ferry Road which is about half a mile south of WSU Tri-Cities. So, live on the river, and back then, it was different. There was a little swimming beach down there. And Mom does remember—not many of the neighbors would confront her directly, but they would talk about her a lot. And didn’t understand why she was bringing African Americans to north Richland. Is that a fair--?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Right, fair.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you actually got complaints about them swimming on the beach in the river?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah. But they quit, too. But I kind of quit, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the objection? How would they harm the river? Did they ever explain it to you, or was it just a--?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Just a—it was never like a harm that they basically—no, unh-uh. But it was probably the color of their skin.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, they didn’t want them in their space. In their white space.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: It made them feel uncomfortable, I think. And people didn’t feel like they could go down there and swim in the river when there were African Americans there. And I want to emphasize, not all the neighbors—Mom and Dad had neighbors that were strong with them and all that. It was some of them who usually would forward the complaints. I don’t think it was direct complaints. But then Mom and Dad had neighbors who stood up for them, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s good. Did you attend church?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yeah, we went to Central United Protestant Church.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Did you ever go to any of the traditionally black churches in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes. And that was an experience. And I remember—Mom, remember the first time I went? Because our church was you were silent for the entire hour. And I just remember being stunned within three minutes. It was exciting, I mean, the back and forth, and the enthusiasm. And sometimes we would go to church for a specific reason: they would have a specific service. I know they had one when Dr. King was killed. But then sometimes there’d be a reason that we’d be invited by a family just to attend church. Certainly different experience.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did the church play—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Morning Star Baptist was—</p>
<p>Franklin: Morning Star. And New Hope, as well.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: New Hope, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did the church play a special or different role in the African American community as compared to the white community?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I don’t know.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, people talked about the churches.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, uh-huh. Yeah, they talked about it, yes. The churches are more of an important part to them.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yes, and sometimes, some people, some of the African Americans in the civil rights movement did not see eye to eye with ministers on certain issues. Is that right, or--?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, uh-huh. I can’t remember all of this.</p>
<p>Franklin: : A lot of the civil rights movement came out of the churches, right?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: A lot of the ministers—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, the ministers played an important role.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that the same in the Tri-Cities as well? Were some of the folks prominent here, were they also prominent church people?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, yeah, I mean, you mentioned Reverend Wilkins. He was certainly prominent here.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And a lot of the events happened at the churches. And the churches, a lot of times, formed the base of the—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, I think the church were kind of the leaders, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: So many of the African Americans that came to the area migrated from the South that we know.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Especially Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Especially Texas, right. Do you recall any traditions or community activities that people brought from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Do you remember any Southern traditions or anything, Mom?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, I don’t.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: I don’t, either.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: But there could easily have been. But I can’t remember.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s okay. Let’s see here. We talked about—I think we talked pretty much about the rest of that. I just have a couple, like a couple large questions. How did you feel at the time about working near or on—your family working on the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: How did I feel?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I accepted. Was I proud? I don’t think so. But I think I just accepted it as a part of the workforce. Huh? What do you say?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yeah, I think—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I think my husband was proud.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: He was definitely proud.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And he was active in the B Reactor Museum, later on. They certainly talked about the effects of the nuclear bomb and the effect of the atomic bombs in Japan. But on the other hand, the other side of that is how many people would’ve been killed if not for the bombs.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, that was definitely—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Probably was not talked about in Richland as much, but it certainly was talked about in family. But my dad always also maintained that no one made him work there. So he understood the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War and as just part of the foreign policy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. How do you feel now about that experience? Kind of looking back on the Cold War and looking at the environmental restoration that has to be done?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, Dad always talked about the safety and the waste issues and I know that he reflected there’s a—there’s some things that he wished they had done differently, but he also was proud of some of the things that they did do. That was an important issue to him. But I think that Dad would be—Dad was very progressive in his political views.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, he was a very strong democrat and active in the party.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But I think he would be irritated at times when people would try to impose late 1990s/early 2000s values on people who were living in the Cold War at the time. And I think he did not know that maybe certain revisionist history does not really take into account the actual climate with what the Soviet Union was doing at the time and some of the political decisions that were made.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure. What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: The what?</p>
<p>Franklin: The most important legacy of Hanford.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Oh, I don’t know. Well, do you have an idea?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Oh, I think—people can certainly argue with this—but I think Hanford can be proud of helping end World War II. I think that’s an important legacy. And the Cold War, the work that Hanford did in the Cold War may have prevented more wars during that time period.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Okay, that’s—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Given how the Soviet Union was then. And I think that certainly people would say that perhaps the environmental impact of some of the—when the reactors were being rushed into production, is that better care could’ve been taken of that. And then also I think the benefits of turning the emphasis from weapons to peaceful energy use—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: --N Reactor—Dad was very involved with N Reactor, and he was very proud of the peacetime use of nuclear energy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there many Manhattan Project employees that were still around when you moved here, Shirley, or when you grew up here, Andy?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Any what?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: He was wanting to know if people who were here in the 1945, when the Manhattan Project was done, if they were still here when you and Dad moved in the ‘50s and were still here when I was growing up.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I think so.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yeah. Dad talked very—Dad moved here in ’51 and he really admired a lot of the people, admired the brilliance of a lot of people for getting that accomplished.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And he always talked about how smart and how hardworking they were.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you know any African American Manhattan Project workers?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: You know, my—I don’t think my dad made a distinction on that in his telling. I do know that Dad was friends with a lot of people working, because I know that—as I became an adult and came back to the Tri-Cities after law school, many, many times when I was out doorbelling or meeting people, I ran into an African American who would say, are you Norm Miller’s son? And they’d say, well, you know, Norm Miller was one management guy who made me feel comfortable. So Dad had a relationships like that. I don’t know if they were here during the Manhattan Project or not, but I know that Dad had made a lot of friends at Hanford.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I can’t remember.</p>
<p>Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Hmm?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: What would you like people to know, like, your grandchildren? What would you like them to know, what it was like to live in Richland in the ‘50s and during the Cold War and Dad working at Hanford?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, I hope not much different than someone living in Seattle. But I would like them to know that, but I mean—wouldn’t you say so?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Yeah, I want to say, I certainly think we need to debate what happened at Hanford and nothing should be immune to that, but I’m actually, I’m proud of the work that my father’s generation did--</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I am, too.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: --at Hanford. Especially given the realities and that the main decisions were made by the leaders. And that Hanford is a viable institution going. There were certainly many unique aspects. None of us who were going to school in Richland at the time, none of us had grandparents living around. Mom and Dad—Mom has talked about the social life being different. Everybody in Richland at that time tended to be young, professional couples. And that’s why they had so many bridge clubs and stock market clubs and—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, that’s right.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: A lot of social activities.</p>
<p>Franklin: What is a stock market club?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: A stock market club?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Well, you basically get the group together and decide to watch stocks to buy. And if they make money or not. And someone makes better choices than others, and they say, oh, good, Mister.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: There were no extended families, so like Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were always not with family, but they were with couple friends that Mom and Dad had. That was our traditions. And that was one thing, I think, that was different than most people’s experience growing up. Because everybody was thrown into this new city together and they had to make everybody together.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, and we had many friends.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: You did. And that’s one reason you got involved in the civil rights movement, is you said you also saw some of the African Americans that were neighbors and that Dad worked with that you thought were treated unfairly.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so? What would he say about their treatment at work? What sparked that?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Oh, I think the obvious one was the housing that we already talked about, that was a big issue. And that a lot of businesses in the Tri-Cities would not hire—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Not hiring people is one of the things.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And then there were still social issues. I think that there were certain unfortunate incidents that happened at schools with African American children.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, definitely. Definitely.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: You would hear about that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of incidents at school? Mostly in Pasco or anything in Richland?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Oh, I think in Richland.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: In Richland, too.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: The use of the N-word, the taunting, things like that.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And Mom and Dad, I mean, they didn’t put pressure on the kids, but they certainly wanted us to be on the lookout for anything that happened. My younger brother got in a fight after one of his friends was called the N-word, and he got in trouble for getting into the fight. The kid who used the N-word did not get in trouble. So there were issues like that, but I think those were common to our entire country, not just to the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. I guess, though, it’s important for people to know that that is a country-wide issue; it wasn’t a Southern issue.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: It was very much an issue in the North and in the West. My last question is kind of a round-up question. Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, work, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Is there anything else, Mom, you can think of with having African Americans move here and largely being forced to live in east Pasco? Anything else we haven’t talked about in the interview so far?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Other than I think we were made more aware of it than the people who lived back in Pratt, Kansas.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Huh?</p>
<p>Franklin: How so? How was it compared to here to Kansas? What was different?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: I don’t know, I mean, I’m—</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, in the North, you certainly had a segregated town of east Pasco, or at least part of it.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yes, uh-huh.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: And that wasn’t the experience of a lot of other people who came here from the North. Is that right?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller. Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s—</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any African Americans that lived in Pratt? I don’t know much about the size—</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Segregated.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, it was—Pratt was segregated?</p>
<p>Andy Miller: But not many very families lived there.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: And not many families.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: It was a small farm town.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: But they had a little different school—I mean--</p>
<p>Andy Miller: A swimming pool.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: A swimming pool? They didn’t use the same swimming pool as we did.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did it surprise you to find segregation in Washington State?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Yeah, uh-huh. Richland didn’t have segregated swimming pools. We all used the same swimming pool.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. But Pasco was kind of de facto segregated, just by where people could live and what jobs they could have and when they could go to Kennewick. Oh, we didn’t ask you about that. The sign that was on the bridge, do you recall the sign that was on the bridge, the old green bridge leading into Kennewick?</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: No, unh-uh.</p>
<p>Franklin: To Pasco.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: We’ve never seen a sign, and over the years we’ve heard the debate whether or not there was a real sign or whether that was something said—certainly, just based on the experience helping the Slaughters, there was no one living in Kennewick and there was certainly attitudes, but I’ve just heard different debates whether or not there was an actual ordinance in place, a real sign, or just something—that’s a research project.</p>
<p>Franklin: Me, too. No, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to track it down, whether it’s—certainly, yes, certainly there was that attitude. The attitude was very plain, but whether there was a physical manifestation of it remains to be seen. Yeah, we’ve still—we were hoping to uncover that in this, and I don’t know if we’re any closer. But we’ve documented the attitude, so that gives us something. Well, if there’s nothing else, I just want to thank both of you, Andy and Shirley. I want to thank you for coming out and sharing your history with us. You know, your history as an ally and everything, so thank you very much.</p>
<p>Andy Miller: Well, thank you!</p>
<p>Franklin: I appreciate it.</p>
<p>Shirley Miller: Thank you!</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, awesome.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
General Electric
N Reactor
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Andy and Shirley Miller
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Discrimination
Segregation
Human rights
Description
An account of the resource
Shirley Miller moved to Richland, Washington in 1951 and was involved in local civil rights movements. Andy Miller was born in Richland, Washington in 1953. A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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06/26/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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39382a0f67b8a6e3791777d8beeecd5d
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1ce003197be6b98ea0b26e05a97de05d.mp4
793915522b780c8818451da5c7e285d0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
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English
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
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Liz Curfman
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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<p>Robert Franklin: Okay, great. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Liz Curfman on July 16, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Liz about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Elizabeth Curfman: Elizabeth, E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H, Curfman, C-U-R-F-M-A-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thank you so much. And you prefer to go by Liz?</p>
<p>Curfman: Liz, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, great. So, tell me how and why you came to the area to work at Hanford.</p>
<p>Curfman: I actually came to the area in 1968 because my grandmother was living here. And the job prospects here were much greater than they were in Memphis, Tennessee, where I was born and raised.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. So you were from the South.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, uh-huh.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your grandmother come here?</p>
<p>Curfman: My grandmother was sort of a black migrant worker; she went wherever the work was. She’d go to Florida, she’d go to do oranges, she’d go to different places. She’d come to Washington and do mint and potatoes. And it seemed that Washington had more seasonal work, so she decided to settle here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where was she living when she first got here?</p>
<p>Curfman: Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Pasco.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: In east Pasco?</p>
<p>Curfman: East Pasco, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did any of your other family members come here?</p>
<p>Curfman: I have two sisters that came here, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: I want to ask about your grandmother’s experiences as a black woman in Pasco in the ‘50s. Did she tell you about any—about her life and any hardships or struggles?</p>
<p>Curfman: Not really. She did a lot of domestic work and she did a lot of factory-type work, like at the potato sheds and things like that. But she was the kind of person where, when I came here, I was still saying yes, ma’am and yes, sir. She was adamantly against that. You don’t say, yes, ma’am and yes, sir. That’s a slave thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, but that was part of the Jim Crow system, right? Was you would say, yes, ma’am, yes, sir, to white people, children and adults, right?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you—what year were you born?</p>
<p>Curfman: 1950.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So, you were born, then, during the Jim Crow era.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you go to segregated schools?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you live in a segregated neighborhood?</p>
<p>Curfman: I did, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did segregation of the South compare to the situation in Pasco when you arrived here?</p>
<p>Curfman: Oh, it was definitely a culture shock, you know? I came to east Pasco to live with my grandmother until I found my own housing. My own housing was in Richland, and I had white neighbors, which I had never had in the South. So there was definitely a culture shock. Even my parents, you know—I have white neighbors, they’re like, oh my goodness. And they were from the—Ma said that that meant you had moved up in the world, kind of. So it was something to be proud of, I guess. Of course, my grandmother was totally the opposite. She was of a different generation than my mom and dad, because she was like, that’s nothing to be proud of. You deserve—you know, you’re just as equal as they are. So she had a different mindset for her generation.</p>
<p>Franklin: It sounds like it. Because your—I imagine your grandmother would’ve been born sometime in the 19<sup>th</sup> century.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yeah, she was born in 1897, I think.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So she would’ve grown up with segregation as well. Right after Plessy v. Ferguson. What do you remember about some of the landmark civil rights legislation or events when you were in Tennessee? School desegregation and civil rights protests?</p>
<p>Curfman: You know, being in the city, we weren’t involved in very many protests. I do know that I went to a segregated school, as most—well, all black kids did. But we didn’t have the yellow school buses; we had the city buses. And the process was that it would pick the white school districts before it got to the black school district. So I can remember at times getting on the bus and having empty seats next to a white person, but they would have their books sitting on the seats, so you couldn’t ask them to move. You know, so that you couldn’t sit there. It never even crossed our minds to even ask them to, you know. It was just one of those things that you go to the back of the bus.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, just the way it was.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, the way it was, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then do you have any memories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, how that affected your life or your family’s life?</p>
<p>Curfman: In 1964, I happened to be up here in the summer, visiting. I was like 14. There was a civil rights march in downtown Pasco. So that was the first involvement I had with anything like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, did you participate in the march?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why was that important to you?</p>
<p>Curfman: Because it was something, you know, having been from the South and not having those rights, it was important that those were the kinds of things we were fighting for. At that time, when I came in ’64, there was a lot of things about, we can’t go to Kennewick, or we can’t be in Kennewick after dark. So those were the things that the people doing the march said that we were marching for.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Greater inclusion.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: In the Tri-Cities. How would you describe the community in east Pasco when you first encountered it?</p>
<p>Curfman: Mm-hmm. It was—I don’t know how to explain that. It was definitely different from the South, because the people were—some were working out at Hanford in construction, so their economics was totally different than in the South, where the people that I knew worked in restaurants or did domestic work, those kinds of things. So economics were totally different.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were your first impressions of the Tri-Cities when you first arrived here? Yeah, first impressions.</p>
<p>Curfman: You know, of course there was a little bit of fear. But then there was, I don’t want to say shock, but I was in awe of the fact that I could go into the stores and that the store wasn’t all-black. You know, there were white clerks, white people buying groceries. You know, it wasn’t an all-black store or things like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about the environment? How did it compare to Tennessee? The physical environment and things.</p>
<p>Curfman: Well, being in Memphis, being more of a city, we had a lot more trees and sidewalks and things like that, compared to east Pasco. But I felt like the people of east Pasco were more involved. I never really had any involvement with civil rights and stuff in the South. My parents didn’t. But when I came up here, it was marches. The NAACP was really active in east Pasco. So I joined that and did some things with them. They just seemed to be more—doing more for black people. They weren’t accepting the status quo; compared to in the South, it was like this is the way it is.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why do you think that was?</p>
<p>Curfman: That’s a good question, based on the fact that a lot of those people came from the South themselves. Again, I think it’s, maybe, making more money, being financially able to do and say things, not totally dependent. You take, for example, working out at Hanford doing construction, versus being a domestic person that’s, you can’t say what you want to say, because you could be fired tomorrow kind of thing. So I think they had more freedom to talk and do things.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you had come out to visit when you were 14.</p>
<p>Curfman: Mm-hmm, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then after ’68—I’m just kind of going by date—you must’ve graduated high school and then you took the big jump and came out here.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, I was actually married at that time and had one son, one child. And my grandmother said the job opportunities were better out here for black people than in the South. So she paid for me and my family to come out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s a very common thing we’ve heard, doing this project, was the—yeah. That jobs were the main pull force out of the South for people was the employment.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you said that you, when you first came, you stayed with your grandmother until you got your own place and then you lived in Richland. Where did you live in Richland?</p>
<p>Curfman: My first house was on—actually, my first house was in West Richland which was even worse. I felt like I was treated worse in West Richland than I was in Richland or Kennewick, as far as the white neighbors kind of a thing. It was like I was totally out of place in West Richland. They treated you like you should not be here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any specific incidences that stand out?</p>
<p>Curfman: Just, the neighbors weren’t friendly. They had kind of one little grocery store and you’d go in, it seemed like everyone would be staring at you. The clerks weren’t friendly. You know, they’d just take your money and not say hi, not even give you eye contact. You just felt very unwanted. So, it was a welcome release when we found a rental in Richland and moved to Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: And where did you land in Richland?</p>
<p>Curfman: I was on Wright Street—Wright Avenue, right by Duportail, right in that area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, okay. Yup. I know that area very well.</p>
<p>Curfman: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you must’ve been living in an Alphabet House or a prefab?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, a prefab, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Prefab. A two-bedroom?</p>
<p>Curfman: Two-bedroom, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Just try—I lived the past two years in that neighborhood, so I know that neighborhood very well. So what sort of work did you do at Hanford? What was your first position?</p>
<p>Curfman: My first position was as a lab—at that time they called them chemical analysts in the laboratory, at 222-S Laboratory.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. All the way out in the 200 Area.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you—how did you get out there?</p>
<p>Curfman: Of course, my grandmother had brought me up here to go to work out there, because she heard that they were hiring. At that time they had a program that was called the TOP program. It was specifically designed to bring minorities—hire minorities into the library. So they were actively pursuing minorities to go to work out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: That must’ve been somehow connected to civil rights legislation, right?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Forcing, kind of—</p>
<p>Curfman: Affirmative Action.</p>
<p>Franklin: Affirmative Action, thank you. So I assume you weren’t the only minority to come out there.</p>
<p>Curfman: Right, no. Yeah, the entire program was all minorities, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were you and your cohort received?</p>
<p>Curfman: I think there was a little bit of fear. I actually worked with one lady that was from Prosser. At that time, there was one black guy working in the laboratory. She was saying that, except for him—he was the first black person she had ever seen, when he went to work out in the laboratory. So we talked about things like that. It was like we were always being watched, and it was kind of like being on the TOP program was kind of a put-down. Like there might have been some kind of resentment that we were being brought in.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. So you’re saying that there was kind of like the modern-day criticisms of Affirmative Action that some people say, you’re here for quota reasons and maybe—</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: --you took the job of a local or a white person.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: But you—so, was that just an initial thing, or did that kind of hang over the program for its—</p>
<p>Curfman: No, it was an initial thing. I can’t even remember how long the program lasted. I don’t even know if there was a class after the one class that I was in. I can’t remember. So, it was basically an initial thing. There was some that made it and some that didn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you know or hear about—did you learn about the prior history of African Americans at Hanford from the Manhattan Project on? Did you know that African Americans had helped to build Hanford and the buildings that you were working in?</p>
<p>Curfman: In the construction area, yes. Yeah, I knew that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that something that was kind of common knowledge or talked about?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, and being in east—there were people in east Pasco who were still working out there in the construction area. So, you hear about them coming here from Texas and different places in the early ‘50s and late ‘40s.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you—your work at Hanford was kind of beyond—it seems like you were the class that really went beyond—you expanded the boundaries of blacks at Hanford from construction into labs.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How was that received in the African American community? What did the earlier workers, did they ever talk to you about that, or anything like that?</p>
<p>Curfman: The earlier workers, no, I can’t remember talking to any of them about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. How did you get out to the labs? Did you take a bus?</p>
<p>Curfman: The bus, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was that like?</p>
<p>Curfman: It was interesting. You know, we would drive to the bus lot and catch the bus. When I started working out there, of course everyone had to do the shift work, so I worked the A,B,C,D shift, which was seven days on, two days off kind of thing, and then once a month, you had the four days off. But again, it was one of those things, getting on the bus, you felt like everyone was staring at you. Especially going out to the labs, because at that time, there wasn’t very many black people in the labs, so. Or on the buses period. Because the construction workers normally worked daytime; they weren’t out there at night and things like that. So there would be people that—you know. And almost like old habits never die, still kind of went to the back of the bus kind of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense, sadly. What did your husband do when he came out here? Did he find work out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, he was a chemical operator in 200 East area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was he part of the same program?</p>
<p>Curfman: No, he was not part of the TOP program.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. What do you know about his experiences out on Site?</p>
<p>Curfman: I don’t think he had any negative experiences. I can remember having his boss for dinner, things like that. Of course was a white guy. I don’t remember anything negative that he would ever come home and say.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your children eventually must’ve enrolled in Richland School District, right?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How was their experience as a minority student in the school district? Were there any people that were really influenced them or mentored them or was there any negative experiences?</p>
<p>Curfman: No, I don’t think there were—because they were both into sports, so that always kind of carried them a long way. They started out in Richland schools. I got divorced and remarried and moved to Benton City, which, again, put them—they were the only two black kids in the all-white school.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Curfman: But, you know, they had lots of friends. We didn’t have any problems. I probably had more issues than they did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine there were not a lot of blacks in Benton City.</p>
<p>Curfman: There was not. We were it. We were it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I grew up in a very small farming town and I think it was a similar situation for my friend who was the only black kid in our school for quite a long time.</p>
<p>Curfman: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>Franklin: So how was Benton City different from Richland, living there, the community? I wonder if you’d talk about that.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yeah, again, it was about the same experience as being in West Richland. You didn’t feel like you belonged. If you went to the grocery stores, the post office, the bank, you were glared at. Somewhat treated rudely. Not rude to the point of where they could get in trouble; it’s just that they weren’t as friendly. You could stand in line and watch them talk to the white person ahead of you, but then when your turn came, it was, like I said, not even eye contact. Just business as usual. I personally noticed those types of things.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, yeah. I think, I guess today we might call them microaggresions or something like that, yeah. But they add up, though, don’t they?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How come you moved out to Benton City?</p>
<p>Curfman: The guy that I remarried was raised on a farm in Montana and he wanted farmland. So we moved out there and bought four acres. He was white, so.</p>
<p>Franklin: He felt that—was that—not to pry too much, but that was kind of a stir at that point, interracial marriage?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, yes, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever receive any negative attention because of that?</p>
<p>Curfman: I think so. Actually, I can remember this one time not too long after we moved out there, we were out kind of moving the irrigation pipe around, and this neighbor from around the corner drove up and introduced herself to him. It was almost like she thought me and my kids were his hired help. So she was talking directly to him, inviting him over, you know. We’d like to get to know you, blah, blah, blah. To this day, I really think that—I’m sure after we were there for a while, she found out I was his wife. But at the time she was talking to him, to this day, I think she thought we were just hired help. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Wow. This would’ve been—‘70s? ‘80s?</p>
<p>Curfman: This was ’76, ’78, yeah, in the late ‘70s.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your family—how was your family, how did they adjust to the marriage? Were they more welcoming? The black community, was it more welcoming?</p>
<p>Curfman: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yes. Yeah, my grandparents and I had an aunt in Pasco at the time, they had no problems. My parents were still in the South. Of course, we didn’t go there and visit. I felt—a couple times I went back and visited, I felt like I had a couple uncles that treated me kind of cold, and I think it was because I was married to a white guy. They kind of took that personally.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because that would’ve caused probably much more of a stir in the South.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Especially among that generation, right?</p>
<p>Curfman: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because that had been illegal for quite—not only just a social taboo but it’d been illegal until—some states didn’t even change that until the ‘90s.</p>
<p>Curfman: Right, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So, you mentioned that you—so you were 222 chemical analyst and you worked shift work. I’m wondering if you could describe a typical work day.</p>
<p>Curfman: Basically, we’d get to work in the morning, we’d have a little short safety meeting. Ahead of time, we’d be assigned stations. We had different stations, like if you were going to be analyzing plutonium. We had different procedures. So I might be assigned to run strontiums tonight; someone else might be assigned to do H-pluses tonight. So you just came in, you know. You expected the shift ahead of you to restock the supplies at the end of their shifts. Sometimes that was done; sometime it wasn’t. So that was always kind of a sore spot, because our analyses were timed, in a sense. Operations would need the results in a timely manner so they could empty a tank or adjust a tank. And if we came in and had to—if the other shift left samples undone and we came in and had to get our supplies together before we could even start, then that just—kind of a snowball effect. So there was always tension between the shifts, depending on if that shift did their housekeeping before they left, before the next shift came in.</p>
<p>But as a rule, we were almost like a family. We did a lot of—for instance, on graveyard, we would do like a communal breakfast on our breaks. Sometimes there was times where people didn’t want to do breakfast; they wanted to take a nap during their lunch hour. So it was one of those things where, I’m going to sleep for 30 minutes; you wake me up. Of course, we had those little clocks we could set. So we just took care of each other.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, how would you describe your relationships with your coworkers?</p>
<p>Curfman: Oh, awesome. Yeah, we did lots of things together. Went to Richland basketball games, we followed the Bombers. A lot of parties at our homes. So, yeah, we did. It was good.</p>
<p>Franklin: You became very close with your fellow coworkers.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did you feel a sense of belonging with your coworkers?</p>
<p>Curfman: Absolutely, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your supervisors or management?</p>
<p>Curfman: I’ve always had a good relationship. When I was on shiftwork, one of my first managers was female, Louise Gray. I think she was—I’m pretty sure she was the first female manager in the laboratory. And we would have—we would go to her house for things and we would do things away from work, like Halloween parties and things like that. So we had a good relationship. Once a month, on our long change there for a while, we would always get together as a group for dinner, like at Chinese Gardens and things like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Curfman: So it was always fun.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, that’s wonderful.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then you became an engineering tech in ’78.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where was that at?</p>
<p>Curfman: That was at Plutonium Finishing Plant.</p>
<p>Franklin: At PFP.</p>
<p>Curfman: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you—did you work there, then, for the rest of your career?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what is an engineering tech? What does that mean?</p>
<p>Curfman: We kind of assisted the engineers. We would go out—I mean, I would go out and take readings off the tanks in the morning and bring them back to them so that they could do their engineering data calculations and things like that. So that they could in turn tell operations what adjustments they needed to make. So, a lot of data analysis, data gathering. Versus in the lab, I was doing hands-on work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were your—I imagine, kind of growing up in Tennessee, you know, Hanford may have been the last place you thought you might have ended up, working out with plutonium.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your family react to your—did they ever express any concern? Were they proud? Were they just really kind of curious?</p>
<p>Curfman: Well, they were afraid when I had to apply for my Q clearance, and at that time the FBI went to your house. So of course, the FBI went to their house in Tennessee and it scared them to death, because what is she doing? [LAUGHTER] What did she do?</p>
<p>But I had somewhat of the same reaction from neighbors in the Tri-Cities when the FBI would go talk to them. I actually had a neighbor mention that here just a couple months ago, that when I moved in—well, it wasn’t when I moved where I am now, but just when they do the every five- or ten-year update, they had gone and talked to this one neighbor and he was saying, like, scared me to death! You know. And that was not too long ago, you know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. And then in 1982, you were promoted to shift supervisor, lab manager.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you were the first African American woman lab manager on Site.</p>
<p>Curfman: That’s true, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that—how’d you find out that you were the first?</p>
<p>Curfman: You know, right now it’s just from talking to people and looking back. I’d like to find that out for sure, because I think it would be a legacy to leave to my grandkids. We know that Louise Gray was the first female. I know that a guy by the name of Jim Burden was the first black male. So right now, just from talking, I can’t think of anybody before me.</p>
<p>Franklin: And, certainly, even if you weren’t the first, you were one of—a groundbreaking thing. So you moved into management.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how was that different? How’d you adapt, and what did you do to adapt to that role?</p>
<p>Curfman: Of course, a lot of classes and a lot of training. It was a struggle for a while, because a lot of the people that worked for me had degrees like they may not have necessarily been scientists or chemists but they might have been the next teacher or some other profession where they had a degree. So I think there was some resentment sometimes when not only was I a black female but I didn’t have a degree. So, you know, so that was, just depending on the people.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever have any difficulties managing—being a minority, managing largely a majority white workforce?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, uh-huh. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe that?</p>
<p>Curfman: Well, you know, certainly there were—of course we had the cultural differences, but I think more than me being black, it was more me not having a degree. Even though I had white counterparts. The male manager that hired me didn’t have a degree. There were a lot of them out there, didn’t have—they did have nuclear experience from the Navy, but they did not have degrees. But it seemed—there seemed to have been a lot of emphasis on me not having a degree. Which, I kind of resented that. I’m like, look at him, look at him, look at—you know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, I mean, as long as you can do the—I mean, seniority experience counts for quite a bit.</p>
<p>Curfman: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that makes sense though. I mean, you know. Certainly something to point to.</p>
<p>Curfman: And it did start—I’m sorry.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, no, go ahead.</p>
<p>Curfman: It did start being less of a problem, because at one point—and I never saw it in writing, but it was said that eight years’ experience was equal to a four-year degree. So, as I got more experience, then it was kind of like, well, in a sense she does.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and I feel like you kind of see that on job postings, where it’s like <em>x</em> number of experience or a degree in the field.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, yes, uh-huh.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so you were—what kinds of—I mean, as much as you can talk about it, I know PFP there was a lot of secret work going on out there, but what kinds of—what kind of work did you supervise? What kind of work was going on in the lab?</p>
<p>Curfman: Okay, basically, what we did is analyze samples from the operations. You know, they’d send us a sample and they’d want to know if it was, how many grams of plutonium was in it. So we would analyze it and then send the results back to them, and based on the results, they’d say, we’re good, or no, we need to add more acid, or no, we need to add more base. Things of that nature. Or we need to empty the tank or we can’t empty the tank. We can’t empty the tank—it’s full, but we can’t empty it because the results aren’t what they need to be. So it was—so we were quality control, mainly. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah, that makes sense. And you did that until 2010?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, but I went from shift manager—in 1983, I was shift manager, and I can’t remember but I was promoted throughout the years in different levels of management. And when I left in—well, I actually left in 2007 because of a health issue. But when I left, I was a Level 3 which was the top laboratory manager.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Curfman: Challenging was every ten years they would change contractors, so it was always challenging to learn new management, what the expectations were, new procedures. I had bargaining unit people working for me, so it was always a challenge to work with the unions and answer grievances and things like that. It seems like there was always people that if they could have you in a grievance meeting, they wouldn’t have to be in the lab working. So sometimes you felt like people created problems just to get out of work.</p>
<p>Rewarding was having come from where I came from, to be in the position that I was in. I was 1994 Westinghouse Women’s History Month nominee. So there were things to be proud of. There was a lot of—I did a lot of things, like I represented the laboratory in Washington, DC and won a black national caucus. Represented the caucus at universal Washington black engineers’ conference. Things like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. Yeah, those are—those really are rewarding aspects. Did you still have family in east Pasco for quite a while after you moved here?</p>
<p>Curfman: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you go to attend any church events or community events in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Curfman: Oh, yes, uh-huh. I was librarian for East Pasco Church of God for quite a few years. So, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that a predominantly black church?</p>
<p>Curfman: It was at the time, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: At the time. What role did church play in the black community?</p>
<p>Curfman: Very important role, and actually, the majority of the churches now are still pretty much black. Morning Star is one of the—used to be one of the biggest in east Pasco, and it’s probably predominantly still black. New Hope, predominantly still black. So, yeah, I don’t know.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about did you go to any cultural celebrations like Juneteenth, or—</p>
<p>Curfman: Oh, yes, uh-huh, yeah. I actually worked with the Juneteenth committee, with the contestants for Miss Black Afro-American—Miss Juneteenth. I was part of that committee with Eloise Williams. Did a lot of that. What else? A lot of church activities. A lot of involvement with—we used to have what was called confederated choir where once a month, the first Sunday of the month, all the churches would go to a different church at 3:00 in the afternoon and all the different choirs would sing. So that was always fun. A lot of church picnics and potlucks and things like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard of, I think Pastor Wilkins was telling me about that, the all-church meeting.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What’s special about Juneteenth? Why is that such a big event for African Americans?</p>
<p>Curfman: Because we feel like that was when we were really freed. It wasn’t July 4<sup>th</sup>. So it’s just something to be proud of. We don’t seem to be—the younger generation seems to be losing it; we don’t seem to be getting as large a crowd as we used to. It has diversified. We get a lot of white people that attend, which we like that. You know, we don’t have an issue with that. But we like to keep it going, something that the community can be proud of.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did people bring—or did you or others that migrated from the South bring any other traditions with them, like food, especially?</p>
<p>Curfman: Oh, yeah. Yeah, my family in particular, pecan pie is a big deal for my entire family. But just—I have a sister in Pasco now, I mean, every day she still cooks the soul food, the greens and the cabbage and the black-eyed peas type of thing, because that’s how she was raised. And my grandmother and my aunt and people like that, I think most of the old-timers cook like that. They brought that. Barbecue, of course. Chicken—fried chicken.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes. Very, very, very good. How was your civil rights experience here different from Memphis?</p>
<p>Curfman: I just feel like it was more freedom. You know, I can remember coming home from church—my mother worked in a restaurant where it was all white. She was a cook. So if we went to visit her, we had to go to the backdoor. She had to go in the backdoor; she couldn’t come in the front. She used to not like us to call at work because the phone was out front. If we called her, she’d have to go out front, and her bosses didn’t want the black people out front. So that was always an issue. If we had some issue at school and we had to call her, you know.</p>
<p>I can remember coming home from church once and it was really hot outside. We cut across the park that was a whites-only park, and we were drinking water from the water fountain, and we saw the police, they were all like, hey, hey, hey! There was like three or four of us and we ran home. Went home, changed clothes, messed up my hair. Because if the police came by looking for us, we didn’t want to look like we had just came from church. We didn’t want to look like the same people.</p>
<p>So coming from that environment and coming here, and going to any park. There were a lot of barbecues back during that—a lot of things in the parks and there were other people besides black people. When I moved on Wright Street I had a neighbor that was a white lady, and she was real strong German, still had a real strong German accent. And she was just lovely to us. She baked cookies for my babies and was just, wow, this is pretty neat. I mean, she was really nice. So that would be something that I could write home and tell my mom: I have this white neighbor and she’s really nice.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s quite different. Yeah, that’s a very striking difference.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Let’s see here. Right there. Could you describe the ways in which the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, because we couldn’t—for instance, when they do the background checks, and I’ve had family or neighbors talk about the FBI coming asking questions, I could tell them it had to do with work, but I couldn’t really tell them why. It didn’t impact the work that much, other than we knew what was secret and what wasn’t, because we had to stamp things secret and we knew what we could talk about and not talk about. I think it was a little better when I was out there, we were starting to lean a little more towards closing down and doing cleanup, versus the people back during construction, as to why were building this plant. The secret, when I was there, the secret stuff came down to analysis. We didn’t want to say what our analysis was, kind of thing, versus what we were doing.</p>
<p>Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Curfman: I think I would like them to know that opportunities are there. I feel like I’m an example of it. I came from Tennessee, segregated community, no degree and went to work at Hanford and retired at the top of, you know, the management chain. And I do still have family right now that that’s something that—because I still have family in Tennessee that’s doing domestic work and working in restaurants. So, to them, I’m a success story.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else that you wanted to say in regards to race and your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Curfman: Not really. I can’t think of anything in specific. Just that I think you have to work harder than anybody else, and I definitely felt like I had to work harder. I had to take more classes. I felt like I had to take more classes than anybody else. I actually had one manager one time tell me, well, no, we need to let someone else go; you go to too many classes. But the opportunity was there, was presented to me, and I took that opportunity. So, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like, you kind of had to compensate extra?</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: For being African—a black female.</p>
<p>Curfman: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, Liz, thank you very much for a very enlightening interview. I really appreciate you telling your experience and your accomplishments.</p>
<p>Curfman: Thank you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Awesome.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
222-S Laboratory
200 Area
200 East
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1968-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1968-2007
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Liz Curfman
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
West Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Affirmative action
Basketball
Description
An account of the resource
Liz Curfman moved to the Tri-Cities area in 1968. Liz Curfman worked on the Hanford Site from 1968-2007.
Description
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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07/16/2018
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F54b7d20ee0fcb15c4aebd8d1af46a357.JPG
40b102488e4fb85911aee5b9a13e2f64
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe08d7b8e6f2d6e24e1c536f63f7f699a.mp4
96bdc31eb1aa12d2238a3fd1220bdcaa
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Emma Peoples
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Emma Peoples: --American families. And I suppose with other cultures, also, sometimes. People were known by initials only. But that was his legal name.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Peoples: And that was my father’s legal name. C.J. Mitchell, Senior, C.J. Mitchell, Junior.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. Okay. Great. Like I said, I have a little bit of boilerplate before we start, but I’ll have lots of questions for you about C.J. We got a chance to interview him—I didn’t, but our project did back in 2013. Bob Bauman, who’s a colleague of mine, a friend of mine sat down here with C.J. I’ve not only watched C.J.’s interview; I’ve assigned it in my history class when talking about race in the Tri-Cities. So it’s definitely been a—he was quite a guy. And we’ve interviewed Duke, Greg, we’re going to interview Vanessa, and I think that’s it for your nieces and nephews. And then—</p>
<p>Peoples: You haven’t gotten to Cameron yet?</p>
<p>Franklin: Haven’t gotten to Cameron yet, no, no.</p>
<p>Peoples: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: We’ll get there. We will get there. Because I’ve heard lots about him. And then of course you, we’ve really wanted to talk to you, too. But anyway, there’s some boilerplate and then we’ll just get right into it. And I’ll ask you a bit about how you got here and your life in Texas, and then how things were here. We’ll go from there, does that sound good?</p>
<p>Peoples: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: And there’s some water next to you there if you need it at any point.</p>
<p>Peoples: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: And also I really like your jacket. I wanted to say that.</p>
<p>Peoples: Oh, thank you.</p>
<p>Franklin: It looks really cool. It kind of looks like really cool lizard skin, you know what I mean? Like scales.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: I like it a lot. It’s really neat. Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: One other thing I want to tell you, though.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah?</p>
<p>Peoples: The Bartons.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes.</p>
<p>Peoples: You know how they are related?</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of. Keith explained it to me, but—</p>
<p>Peoples: My mother and Keith Barton’s father were first cousins.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, okay. So your mother and—</p>
<p>Peoples: Their parents were brother and sister. Keith’s grandmother and my grandfather were brother and sister.</p>
<p>Franklin: So your mother and Keith Barton’s father.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yeah, were first cousins.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Because he said, oh yeah, I’m related to the Daniels and the Mitchells and—</p>
<p>Peoples: My mother was a Daniel.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. Okay. I need to draw this tree out. Because I have it kind of in my mind, but—</p>
<p>Peoples: Okay. Okay, my great-grandfather was named William Daniels. I don’t know how many kids he had, but the two oldest were Keith Barton’s grandmother and my grandfather.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: And—well then it gets to the—my mother was a sister to Vanis Daniels and William Daniels that lived in Pasco. And they have children who live in this area, too. And then Keith—well, they all came during the—when they were building Hanford and the jobs were good and all this, I believe how they got here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was your mother—you said William Daniels was your great-grandfather, so then he had a son and a daughter that you remember. Was your mother the child of the son or the daughter?</p>
<p>Peoples: The son.</p>
<p>Franklin: The son. So then that’s your mom. Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: And Keith’s dad was a child of the daughter.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Okay, that helps a lot. Thank you. Okay. All right, let us officially begin. Sound good?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes, I think. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, we can take—any time you need a break or have a question, just feel free. Well, do you have any questions before we start?</p>
<p>Peoples: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: Not that I can think of. But I don’t know—didn’t know what to expect, so—</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that’s kind of an odd request, isn’t it? It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Okay. Ready?</p>
<p>Lori Larson: You’ve been going. She’s already giving good stuff, so I started.</p>
<p>Franklin: I know. Okay, well, then we have all of that. Okay, good. [LAUGHTER] My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Emma Peoples on May 2<sup>nd</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We’ll be talking with Emma about her experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And Emma, did you ever work out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Peoples: Okay. Do you want my full legal name, or do you want all of my name?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh. Which one is more interesting?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, I consider my legal name my married name.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Can we do both because that way we can kind of talk about how you’re related to other folks that we’ve interviewed?</p>
<p>Peoples: Okay. My legal name, currently, is Emma Ruth Peoples. E-M-M-A, R-U-T-H, P-E-O-P-L-E-S.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: My maiden name was Mitchell, M-I-T-C-H-E-L-L.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And you’re C.J.’s little sister?</p>
<p>Peoples: I am C.J.’s younger sister. There were five—my mother had—I have four brothers, I’ll put it that way. All four of the boys were older than the three girls.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: My youngest brother was born in 1933. My older sister was born in 1938.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: I was born in 1940, and my younger sister in 1942. My younger sister, by the way, never saw her father.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because—</p>
<p>People: He died before she was born. He died the 7<sup>th</sup> of June; she was born the 26<sup>th</sup> of October the same year.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. So where—you already said when you were born. Where were you born and where did you live before coming to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Peoples: I was born in Kildare, Texas, K-I-L-D-A-R-E. That was a small community—farming community that was on between Texarkana—Texas-Arkansas—and Marshall, Texas on the Texas and Pacific Railway line. My father was a railroad man.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so between Texarkana—</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, Texarkana’s 36 miles this way; Marshall is 32 miles this way, by rail.</p>
<p>Franklin: So nice in-between point. Was the rail kind of the main—was that—</p>
<p>Peoples: There were a lot—a gentleman that I did not know but I grew up with a cousin of his, and he wrote a book recently that I have. The way he described it, there were three groups of people—and he was talking African Americans—they were the timber people, northeast Texas is rich in timber; there were the railroad people, the Texas and Pacific Railroad went right through Kildare; and there were the—I said, railroad, timber—and farming.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Sounds like a typical Western town setup then.</p>
<p>Peoples: You don’t really think of—when you think of Texas, most people think of west Texas, because that’s what you see. But east Texas is, as I said, rich in timber.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yes, it is. What education and work experience did you have before coming to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Peoples: Actually when I came to the Tri-Cities, I had just finished high school two months earlier. The only actual work that we did during the summer, there were crops that needed to be worked that we had a chance to do that, which we didn’t think of it so much as work as a way to see our friends during the summer. [LAUGHTER] But it did give us, I’ll just say, spending change. And people that did have things that needed to be done, community people, would have us do things like that.</p>
<p>But as far as work-work, there was none because there was a rule in our house that you did not miss school. And you did not—and I found out from my second-oldest brother that they were not allowed to bring home a C. That was my father’s rule—which he was gone by the time I started school. But my mother was a very strong single parent, and the rules held fast.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you said you graduated high school at 16?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you left Texas then, at that time?</p>
<p>Peoples: I was 16 when I left. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was the end of July, and I turned 17 the 10<sup>th</sup> of August.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so ’57?</p>
<p>Peoples: ’57.</p>
<p>Franklin: So school—the <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em> happened in 1954; did that affect you in high school?</p>
<p>Peoples: That, we heard about—was that in ’54?</p>
<p>Franklin: I believe so.</p>
<p>Peoples: Was it that soon? The only thing—what I remember is the Little Rock Nine. I was in high school at that point. And we heard about that, and there was—she went to Texas College, I believe, and she was another person that stood out in my mind. This was all before I finished high school. Her name was Autherine Lucy. She went to Texas College. Well, maybe it wasn’t Texas College, but it was in Tyler, Texas. That was another one that we saw in the paper that was a part of this. And then the college was James Meredith—what was her name? There were two. There was a young man and a young lady. I know his name was James Meredith.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yup.</p>
<p>Peoples: Was that the University of Mississippi?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, Ole Miss.</p>
<p>Peoples: Okay. But I was not so much involved in that, but my younger sister actually was a part of the sit-ins.</p>
<p>Franklin: Of the what?</p>
<p>Peoples: Of the sit-ins.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, the sit-ins.</p>
<p>Peoples: She was a student at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas at the time. That was after I left, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: So, your high school—going all through your schooling, your schools were segregated, right?</p>
<p>Peoples: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, I think there was a forced integration and I read this not too long ago. The State of Texas had a forced integration. It was not until several years later that they actually integrated the schools, though. Because when I—I went back to Kildare for several months in 1960. That was during the time my husband was military. He was stationed in Germany, and we went there before we went to join him. It was during that time that they were doing the sit-ins and all that stuff. So I was not a part of any of that. But like I said, my sister was a college student and she did get involved.</p>
<p>Franklin: And Kildare was a segregated town, right?</p>
<p>Peoples: Absolutely. But Kildare was unique. My sister and I—my older sister and I would talk about this periodically. Where we grew up, it was segregated. But there seemed to be a healthy respect for each other. I don’t know how to describe that. But you didn’t hear about the rioting and that sort of thing. That kind of thing was kind of foreign to us. And I think because it was a farming community, and people had a history of working together, might have made the difference. But we knew the schools were segregated, but I guess maybe we just didn’t know any better and we didn’t think about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Things, too, like restaurants and movie theaters?</p>
<p>Peoples: Kildare had no restaurants! [LAUGHTER] However, movie theaters, yes. If you went to the movie, Atlanta, Texas was the closest town to Kildare. It was like 14 miles going toward Arkansas. You would go through Atlanta going to Texarkana. If you went to the movie, African Americans had to sit upstairs. You could not go in the lower part.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did you go up—</p>
<p>Peoples: There was a stairway.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there a different entrance, like an outside entrance?</p>
<p>Peoples: You know, I don’t remember for sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: Doesn’t really matter. I was just curious.</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t really remember.</p>
<p>Franklin: But nevertheless, you had to use a separate—</p>
<p>Peoples: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. And I assume you heard about the area from your brother, C.J.</p>
<p>Peoples: My brother came here when he was 16 years old, I believe.</p>
<p>Franklin: And do you remember what year that was?</p>
<p>Peoples: 1947.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1947. And why did he come to the area?</p>
<p>Peoples: For work. We had uncles that were up this way. He took the train. And what I didn’t know was that he didn’t get all the way here the first time. He had some bad luck and ended up staying in Chicago, coming back. I learned this from my youngest brother. That was something I—as a little girl, I didn’t know anything about this. But I just knew that my big brother left, and I was unhappy. I was happy when he came home, and he left again, and I cried again. But like I said, C.J. was the father figure. C.J. was the one that was always there. He was the one that—he was actually, as a teenager, superintendent of the Sunday school. So when we went to Sunday school on Sunday, he was going to always be there. Although the churches didn’t have church services every Sunday, they did have Sunday school every Sunday. So naturally, on Sunday, that was time that was spent with C.J. also.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did your uncles come up to the Hanford area?</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t remember exactly when they came up, but they came in the early ’40s. Now, I never remember my uncle Willie living in Kildare.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was Willie’s last name, was that Daniels? Willie Daniels?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes. But I remember when Uncle Vanis came. They were brothers.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s Vanis’ father, right? Vanis Daniels.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because you said your mother was a Daniels.</p>
<p>Peoples: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So they came sometime in World War II?</p>
<p>Peoples: They came up, and then Uncle Vanis came back. And then I don’t—they actually—and then he and my aunt and the youngest son came to Washington and then the rest of the family followed, I think, like six months later. They came—I remember that they left in the summertime. They waited until school was out before they came. And they did have an older sister who was an adult that was with them. So they weren’t—it wasn’t just the kids left without any adult there. But that, I believe, was in 1951.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What was it about the Hanford area that was drawing folks?</p>
<p>Peoples: Money.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Peoples: There were no jobs.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Kildare?</p>
<p>Peoples: Anywhere, practically. But when the war effort started, then jobs were created. And so you basically went to where the jobs were. I do know that my grandfather had a brother who lived in Seattle. I remember they went to, I believe, Bremerton. And I remember an aunt, my mother’s sister, living in Bremerton. You traveled to where the jobs were. And the families were quite often left behind while the breadwinner was gone. I think there were a lot of very strong women during that time that made sure the family’s needs were met while the breadwinner had to be someplace else.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Or even some women that were breadwinners themselves that were also helping making sure the family’s needs were met.</p>
<p>Peoples: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you moved here with your brother, C.J. Was that just to be closer to family, but also for job reasons?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, no, I don’t know why he asked me to come. But he did ask me to come, and there was nothing else for me to do. So it was—when I look back, it was a blessing, actually, rather than say it was a good move. It was actually a blessing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. What were your first impressions when you arrived?</p>
<p>Peoples: The first thing that happened when I arrived. Well, I rode back with—well, there was six of us in the car. My Aunt Maxine was with us, my Uncle Willie, my brother, and then a first cousin who lived in Pasco, her husband and his brother were with us. And they drove to Texas together for the funeral. And I rode back with them. We first went to my uncle’s house in Pasco; that was Uncle Willie. C.J. had left his car with them there. And we got in the car and we drove home, we drove to Richland.</p>
<p>And it was late at night and the next morning, when we all got up, up in the day, my sister-in-law said—she told me that a friend of mine was staying with her aunt, well, it was actually the next street over. During that day, she said to her two-year-old, why don’t you take Emma up to your friend Bruce’s? And this little toddler took me up to his friend’s. [LAUGHTER] I said, smart kid. He knew exactly where to go. I just walked along with him, and when I got there, I actually saw my—he walked up in the yard, and of course what do kids do when they walk up in the yard? He saw his friend, he went over to play. But my friend that had—she had come up to Washington earlier with her family, and she was at her aunt’s. She and a friend of hers was sitting out in the yard, so I recognized them and she recognized me when I walked up. So that was my first experience.</p>
<p>But I don’t know. I just—when I look back now, the way they embraced me and the kids, and right now—that’s why I say this is my second family. They are so very special to me. And they make me feel special.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s really wonderful. So you stayed with C.J. after you arrived.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember what house that was? Was it an Alphabet House?</p>
<p>Peoples: It was a prefab. A two-bedroom prefab. Now, bear in mind they had four kids. [LAUGHTER] That’s why I say, you know, this had to be a blessing. It was on the corner of Adams and Cullum. No, no, I take that back. Adams and Craighill.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, two-bedroom.</p>
<p>Peoples: The first house we bought was on Adams and Cullum.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s like seven people in a two-bedroom prefab.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. That sounds tight.</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, they had three boys. The girl was a baby, so she had her crib, and the parents had their room, and Emma slept on the couch.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Peoples: We made it work. I say, they made it work.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how long did you stay with them?</p>
<p>Peoples: Until I was married. I came up in June—no, July of 1957, and I was married in November 29<sup>th</sup> of 1958.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you meet your husband here?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you know him or his family where you came from?</p>
<p>Peoples: No. He was stationed at Camp Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: Actually, the first time I remember—well, wait a minute. The first time I met him, there was—my friend Carolyn Barton and another friend, Catherine Perry, and Lula Mae Tate, we all went to the same church. There was a lady that had—it was a restaurant, and she had some—I think they were three apartments or something like that. But it was kind of like a ballroom. It wasn’t a ballroom, but it was a small room and she would let kids have sock hops there. But there was no liquor, none of that. Her place was strictly food. So you didn’t—but the guys from Camp Hanford would come down there because they loved her chicken.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was this Virgie’s Chicken Shack?</p>
<p>Peoples: Virginia’s Chicken Shack, yes. Anyway, this particular Friday night, I had gone over and we went down to the sock hop. I went with Carolyn and Catherine and Lula Mae. There were some guys there—that’s where I actually met him. There was another guy with him, his last name I think was Rogers. But anyway, I don’t know why they were there, but they were. That’s where I met him. But they also—I never saw the other guy, but he would also come to our church sometimes. That was New Hope.</p>
<p>Franklin: New Hope, okay. I was just about to ask you that. Where was your husband from?</p>
<p>Peoples: His hometown was Forrest City, Arkansas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Was that—</p>
<p>Peoples: Eastern Arkansas, it’s about 40 miles east of Memphis, Tennessee.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: Right on what is now Interstate 40.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what is your husband’s name?</p>
<p>Peoples: His first name was, I’m going to spell it for you. Everyone called him Al. Well, actually, they called him Peoples. Because with the military, everyone is last names. But his first name is Alpheus, A-L-P-H-E-U-S.</p>
<p>Franklin: I can say I’ve never heard that name before.</p>
<p>Peoples: It’s a Biblical name.</p>
<p>Franklin: It sounds Biblical. Alpheus Peoples.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: After you got here, what was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to?</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think being surrounded by family made things so much easier, because it was not just my brother, C.J., and his family. Like I said, I would go over on Saturday nights, I would spend the night either with the Bartons or at my uncle Vanis’. And I would go to church with them on Sunday morning, with Carolyn mainly, on Sunday morning because we went to the same church. But I also had a cousin that lived on the next corner, on Craighill.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who was that?</p>
<p>Peoples: On Abbott and Craighill. The Rockamores.</p>
<p>Franklin: Rockamores, okay. That’s a name I’ve heard several times.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes. Now that was my father’s niece.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: And they were—well, I always, when I thought about it, I thought about the fact that they—I felt they treated me more like a younger sister than a cousin. But our families in Texas were very close.</p>
<p>Franklin: It really seems like a lot of your family migrated—moved from Kildare. Seems like a pretty sizable chunk of Kildare moved up here.</p>
<p>Peoples: Absolutely, absolutely. Because when one person found out there were jobs, then they let the other people know. There were people that came and didn’t stay, but there were quite a few that did.</p>
<p>Franklin: It wasn’t just the job itself; the pay here was also greater than it would have been for an equivalent job in Texas, right?</p>
<p>Peoples: In the first place, there was no equivalent job in Texas. And in the second place, the wages were almost non-existent. I mean, you worked a lot of hours for not much money there. So they came here and the ones who did not move their families here came and they sent money back to take care of their families. Sometimes eventually the families moved here and sometimes they didn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You mentioned that you went to New Hope Church. What role did church play in the community in general?</p>
<p>Peoples: In my life, it was always the center, basically, of life. I’m going to tell you this, because this is what I told a group of people that—I was wanting their vote.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wanting their vote?</p>
<p>Peoples: I ran for national office in an organization, and I had to go to the caucuses. When I went, I introduced myself and I started out with where I grew up and I said, I was raised by a widowed mother who was a very strong single parent. I went on to say, every time the church door opened, my mother made sure all those little Mitchells walked through it. So we went to church more than anybody else in town. That was our lives. Everyone in Kildare—I don’t know of anyone in Kildare who did not have a very high respect for my mother. I mean, we even went to church on Thanksgiving Day.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. That’s impressive.</p>
<p>Peoples: That was the one thing I missed, and when I went to Texas one year after that, after I had been away, and I wanted to be there on Thanksgiving Day. But they no longer had church on Thanksgiving Day. So that was something that I remembered. You hold onto your beliefs and what you remember and it doesn’t always work out the way you would hope.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why do you think church was so important for your mother, why she passed that on to you?</p>
<p>Peoples: I think it’s just a strong belief in Christ. And no matter where I go, and whether I’m—I’m not in church every Sunday, but it still is very—that life is still very important to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. And the church also plays a very prominent role in the black community in general, right?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes. But it doesn’t have to be a black church. It can be—I was a military wife. And when you are away from home and you don’t know where the closest church is, you go to the chapel, which is what I did. I went to the chapel.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including sports and food that people brought from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Peoples: You mean traditionally?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, like different types of traditions or customs that people would have brought from Kildare up to Washington.</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t know.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about food? Did you or C.J., the Mitchells, did your family cook Southern food, soul food, or—</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, that depends on what you call soul food.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: I love to cook. There are some things I don’t do. I’m not a cookie-baker. And I don’t do a lot of pies. However, I do do sweet potato pie.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, because that’s a staple, right?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, my older sister didn’t really care for sweet potato pie, but I love sweet potato pie. I have a granddaughter—actually, she’s a great-granddaughter. When she was—oh, she was maybe two-and-a-half, close to three, maybe, and the family was living with me at the time, and I had baked pies the night before, and I left them on the counter, on a rack, right by the stove. They was just sitting there on the counter. She got up before anyone else that morning, and she went into the kitchen and she saw the pies. She didn’t touch one of them, but the other one, she took her little finger and she ate pie until she thought she had enough. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, she went back in the bedroom and by that time her dad’s up, and she walks in and he looks at her and she’s got all this orange stuff all over her face. He gets, evidently, a look that—she looks up at him, he said, and she gave him this great big grin and said, oh, Daddy, that’s good pie. [LAUGHTER] So that’s the sweet potato pie.</p>
<p>However, my thing is—well, Christmas Eve was always a special time for us. And when I say us, I’m saying C.J. and me. We always got together on Christmas Eve. We started that because when our kids were small, we thought they would be happier at home with their toys or whatever on Christmas morning, but we did want the family time. So we did Christmas Eve. And then he told me once that he wanted Christmas Eve at his house. Okay, that’s fine. So he said, when I was growing up, he said, I could not open a gift until Christmas morning. If we’re at my house, I can open my gifts any time I get ready. So.</p>
<p>But Christmas Eve was very special for us. I’ve gotten to the point—now, I don’t feel physically up to doing like the big dinners we used to do for Christmas Eve or whenever. So this past Christmas Eve, I just decided we’ll have dessert night. So I said, everybody, if you have someplace else to go, you can just stop by. You don’t have to stay; just stop by, have dessert and go on to wherever you want to go. And that worked out really quite well. I think that’s probably—we’ll try doing that more. But what I told them, I said, what I will do, I will try to have everybody’s favorite cake. When I said that to my nephew, Robin, he said, well, I’m sure that if you don’t have everybody’s favorite, they’ll make do with whatever you have. It’ll be fine. But it turned out quite well. I know my one nephew, they were going to church Christmas Eve, so they stopped by on the way to church. That was basically what I was hoping for. If you had something else that was traditional that you wanted to do on Christmas Eve, that’s fine. But if you have a chance, just stop by and have dessert. Go on your way if you choose.</p>
<p>But when my nephews were growing up, I made it a point to—these are the three oldest ones. I always made them a birthday cake on their birthday. They always got a birthday cake from me.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s Duke—</p>
<p>Peoples: Duke, Greg—</p>
<p>Franklin: Greg, and Cameron?</p>
<p>Peoples: No, Nestor. Cameron asked his mom once if she would ask me to bake him a birthday cake. Now this is her—the way, what she told me. She said, he told him, no, I will not. And she said, because if you want her to bake you a birthday cake, you ask her yourself. So he did. And I did. But like I said, I like to cook and I like to think I’m a good cook. So that is one of the things I enjoy doing.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about the Juneteenth celebration? I understand that originated in Texas, right? Was that a—</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t know that it originated in Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: Because—what year was it? I forget the exact time, but my two sisters and I went to Springfield, Missouri. And I had never heard of it—I had never heard it called Juneteenth until then. There was a lady there that said something to the effect that it was actually August 4<sup>th</sup>, was the celebration. So I don’t know, different states, evidently, celebrate that particular event at different times. But what I learned in history was that it was the June 19<sup>th</sup> when they actually got the message of the Emancipation. Although it had been declared, what, three years earlier or something to that effect. But actually I don’t know how or where the Juneteenth celebration started, but like I said, I’d never heard it called Juneteenth. It was just referred to as the 19<sup>th</sup> of June.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Peoples: But maybe that’s growing up in a small place like Kildare, that—I don’t know what the official—[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Peoples: Do you want something that happens right now?</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Peoples: It’s still out there. It is still out there. So, I don’t know what I should say about that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, that’s important to say that it’s still out there.</p>
<p>Peoples: Because you will find, and it is not limited to small organizations; it is not limited to small businesses; it’s out there, big-time. And you will find that—well, if I say this, I would ask you not to put it on—but just for information. I work at Wal-Mart. I see segregation every day.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Peoples: I’ll relate one thing that pertains to me, but I feel that at this point in my life, I am strong enough, I’ll just say, in my own skin, in my own right, that I will not let it hinder me from doing what I choose to do. Number one, they will find reasons that you don’t need certain options or you don’t need certain—they judge you. They feel you can’t do this; you’re not capable of doing this, when I know in my own self that I am just as capable as anyone in that store.</p>
<p>And I said that to one manager one day. He said, I understand that you wanted to learn more about merchandising. I said, oh really? I don’t know, where’d you get that? Well, someone told me you wanted to learn more about merchandising. I said, well, I don’t really think so. I say, because, to be truthful with you, I would go so far as to say that I know more about merchandizing than anyone in this store. Which, I felt was true, and I still feel that it’s true. Because it’s not because I’m doing a particular job now that I’m not capable of doing anything more. But I wanted to say to her, if I were in charge of merchandizing, the store would look a lot better than it does now. Because number one, that’s not my first retail job. I mean, I’m not a member of management at Wal-Mart because I choose not to be a member of management at Wal-Mart. I have other things that are important to me now. But I have worked in management in retail a number of times.</p>
<p>I actually managed the plus sizes and maternity at JC Penney before I even thought about Wal-Mart. This sort of thing. I was in management with Macy’s back in, oh, 1970s. You know? I chose to leave retail, because I had a family, and my family, when they were small, it was important to me to be home to get them off to school. When they got to be in junior high, I thought it was important for me to be home at night and not getting off at 9:00 at night, because my schedule was usually 12:30 to 9:00. I chose to go do something different. That’s when I went to work for Hanford. Because I was home—they were old enough that they could get to school, or I could drop them off at school. But I felt that I needed to be home in the evening with my teenagers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Peoples: So that’s why I made that choice. But had I stayed with retail, I could’ve been anywhere I want to be. I don’t think it is—so when they try to look at you and feel you are not capable of doing something, as I say, it’s not important to me now. But it doesn’t make me think it’s right. But I am that person who, if I am going to go to work at Wal-Mart, which I do, 40 hours a week usually, I don’t go in there to make friends, I don’t go in there to play up to anybody, I do not go in there to stand around and visit. I will stop and talk to a customer. That’s the customer. It’s—I’m supposed to talk to the customer, and I feel that is important. You need that rapport with your customer. But as far as just standing around, killing time—that’s not me. If I’m going to be there, I need to be busy. And if I’m going to be there, if I am responsible for making sure these items are in the right place on the shelf or whatever my job is, that is what I’m there to do. I’m not there to—</p>
<p>So, it’s still out there, but I don’t let it affect me as it might have at one time. Because, number one, I get to walk every day and I get paid for walking. [LAUGHTER] But I do my job. And that is what is important to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You grew up in a segregated world. The Tri-Cities wasn’t segregated by law or outright, but was there an informal type of segregation that existed here?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was it something you could see? Were there any incidences that stand out to you?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, it was actually shortly after I came here. There were several that were called a teenage club in Richland, for a place that teenagers could go, and some kids from Pasco and I know one from Richland that went over there, and they ended up in court over that. My friend Carolyn was one of them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did they sue the club, or was there a—</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t remember the particulars, but they did go to court. And I believe they lost.</p>
<p>Franklin: They were denied—</p>
<p>Peoples: They were denied, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think I saw that in some of the old newspapers that we have.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yeah. And then Kennewick was the place that no one of color was allowed. I actually worked with a lady once that—this would have been in the ‘70s, early ‘70s—and her husband worked out in the Area. But he built houses. She worked in the next department from me at Macy’s. And she said they would build a house and they would live in it until they sold it, and then he would build another. He just did this, I say, on the side. But she said that they sold a house to a couple, actually, the couple was Oriental. And she said some of the people that they thought were friends of theirs stopped speaking to them because they sold the house to someone they didn’t approve of. But segregation is still out there. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>A person that I worked with at one point at Wal-Mart said to the person that was store manager at the time that—they would take people to the corporate meetings every once in a while that choose someone, say, you get to go this time or whatever. Anyway, how they do it I don’t know, but he said to her, I would really like to have a chance to go to the corporate meeting sometime. And he happened to be Hispanic. And she said to him, I really don’t think that you are the—what did she say? Not the picture but—the image that Wal-Mart wants to show. So he looked at her and he said he smiled and said, oh, do you mean that’s because I’m bald? But he knew exactly what she was saying. But, see, things like that, I mean, you would think that people would be smart enough now not to go there. I mean. But you see it all the time. But as far as African Americans are concerned, it’s still there. It’s definitely still there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I want to talk a bit about your work at Hanford. What sort of work did you do?</p>
<p>Peoples: When I first went out there, I worked in the mailroom as a mail messenger.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that in the 300?</p>
<p>Peoples: That was in the 300 Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then what—</p>
<p>Peoples: And I went from there to what they called Engineering Files; you processed all the documents that came through. And this was in support of the FFTF.</p>
<p>Franklin: That was a long project. What on-the-job training did you receive, if any?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, first of all, I had to learn my mail route. [LAUGHTER] But there was quite a bit of training. Any job you took, there would be some form of training. But I worked mostly in—I went from the mailroom to engineering files and then I went to FFTF Engineering. I actually was the liaison between the drafting section and the finance people. Forget what they were called now. But anyway, at any time we had—I worked strictly for engineering, so anytime there were documents that had to be signed, drafting prints that had to be signed, we were more or less the gofers, the go-between. We took the documents from one group to the other and made sure the documents were signed and signed off properly. And then later I worked in what was called Fuels and Controls, and that was all of the fuel—I was in the group, all of the fuel rods that went into the FFTF were analyzed and assayed in our group.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh. And what did you do for that group?</p>
<p>Peoples: I was the clerical support. Made sure all, there again, the documents were signed off properly and the documents went to the right place, and to research whatever we needed in support of those documents.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you work out at Hanford total?</p>
<p>Peoples: 23 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. So quite a while. And probably for a litany of contractors?</p>
<p>Peoples: Actually, no, I worked for Westinghouse all while I was there.</p>
<p>Franklin: The entire time?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. That’s kind of a rarity.</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, actually, they were the ones that were in charge of building FFTF, and then later I worked in security for them.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you do in security?</p>
<p>Peoples: The last position I had was, we had documents, again, that needed to be signed. But a lot of it was safety, security—SQS, safety, quality assurance, and security. I actually was the person that, in support of, here again, clerical support, but my one position—one job I had was to take all of the—when they went to the computers and so on, I had to actually take the directories from all three groups. The secretaries would send them to me, and I had to roll all of that into one directory for the entire SQS group. So that was interesting. And that was the computer part. That was really the start of the computer part that I did out there. So you got training in support of any job that you did. There were actually CBC courses and WSU courses that were open to train you for whatever your job was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did you acquire any skills or experience on the job that helped you later in life?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, I think everything. Because, number one, dealing with people. Also, being able to get along with people. Well, people skills, I’ll put it that way. Sometimes, you know, you have to think about the better way to do things, rather than the fastest way. And I think I learned a sense of responsibility.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors?</p>
<p>Peoples: You mean now?</p>
<p>Franklin: When you were at Hanford?</p>
<p>Peoples: Or there? I thought they were very good. I had some of the best management, I think. I’m not saying everybody was tip-top, but for the most part, I felt my management was very good. I thought a very good relationship with my management.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were you treated on the job?</p>
<p>Peoples: At Hanford?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Peoples: I thought quite well.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Peoples: Not much. Not a lot. Because of, number one, I’m a very strong family person. And number two, it’s just not something I did a lot of, outside of work. I have always, more or less, separated work from personal things. I had a—there were two things that I remember when I was in high school, the one teacher used to say—a famous word of his was, or famous saying is, business is one thing and friendship’s another. I have always tried to remember that. Because it doesn’t matter whether you are the friend or not. If it has to do with a job, you get the job done. You don’t let friendship enter into it. And the other one was—this was a different teacher, and he would say, a wise man will not insult you. And you always try to be wise enough that a fool cannot do so. Those are the two things that, from my high school, that I remember, that I have thought about a lot in my life. As far as—now, like I said, I work at Wal-Mart, there are people there—there is one lady there that I have watched—I’ve known her for like 12 years, and I have so much admiration for her and her family that, she’s just a very special person in my eyes. And there are other people that, I mean, I will deal with you if I have to, but I’m not going to go out of my way. But when you see someone with so much respect and such family values that mirrors so much of what you believe in, I don’t know, it just makes you admire that person.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. How did your racial background figure into your work experiences?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well. There is always someone that thinks that they can say certain things or do certain things, and you’re just supposed to smile and go on. But it doesn’t work that way. I am, I think, very strong in my own right. And like I say, I don’t go to a job expecting any favors. I go there to get the job done. That is the bottom line. I just don’t work any other way.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways did the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, when you think of it now, if what happens on the job—are you meaning with people or with my family or--?</p>
<p>Franklin: Just in general. How did the nature of the job and the security and secrecy impact you?</p>
<p>Peoples: It was just, in my opinion, a part of the job. But the one thing that I saw other people do that I never did, and that was, my husband worked for Battelle. I worked for Westinghouse. We didn’t discuss our work at home. Because number one—and I was not always saying, well, you know, Al did this at work or this, that or the other. That wasn’t my thing. We didn’t do that. And we did not call each other at work unless it was a really good reason for me to call. And for me to go to his building—the only time I went to the building where he worked was when I was on my mail route. Or had to go to that building for a reason. In other words, we didn’t—we weren’t someone that couldn’t go five minutes without calling each other. Because you go out there to do a job, and that’s any job. You don’t—</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of work did your husband do?</p>
<p>Peoples: He worked in the lab in 325. It was chemistry. And it was, in fact, I think he was in that for most of the time he was there. That was—where he worked, it was—oh, how do you describe it? They had all kinds of research and stuff going on in the group that he worked in. And there are, not in his name, but a lot of patents that he actually worked on that are not in his name. But that was the type of work he did. And he said one day, the one thing he did say to me, one day he said, you know, the kind of work that I do—we do work for a lot of different people. He said, and the worst thing that we can do is to have one vendor know what you’re doing for someone else. So that was the type of way that we worked. He didn’t discuss what he was doing. Because it was research. And that’s just—if you have to discuss that, then you maybe are in the wrong area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm. Is your husband still alive?</p>
<p>Peoples: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And when did he pass away?</p>
<p>Peoples: 1994.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, so some time ago then.</p>
<p>Peoples: Actually, I buried him one day before my 54<sup>th</sup> birthday.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow, okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: And he worked at Hanford for a lot of years. Much longer than I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was he always out in 300?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, he was in—actually, they went to 2-West once for about a year, and he was actually in the same building and the same lab and basically with the same chemist most of that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: And he was brought out here by the Army at the Hanford Camp?</p>
<p>Peoples: He was military. He was stationed at Camp Hanford. And when they sent him to Camp Hanford, he had no idea where he was. He’d never heard of it. Lots of people never have yet. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: And then he decided to stay after—</p>
<p>Peoples: Actually, when he was discharged, we came back.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. That’s right, because you followed him—</p>
<p>Peoples: We were—our last duty station was in Fort Hood, Texas. Before that, he was actually in southeast Asia, during when the Vietnam thing escalated, when they had the August 4<sup>th</sup> bombing, the Bay of Tonkin, the boats, he was actually over in that area at the time. He was evacuated out. It was August 4<sup>th</sup>, he was evacuated out later that year.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was it that made you want to come back?</p>
<p>Peoples: I had family here.</p>
<p>Franklin: And he was just willing to come, and--?</p>
<p>Peoples: He had friends here, too, and, well, like I say, I have two families. When we came back from Germany—well, actually when we came back from Germany we were stationed at Fort Lewis. And then from Fort Lewis to San Francisco, the Presidio, and then to Fort Hood, Texas, where he was discharged at Fort Hood. We had in the meantime bought a house here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So you had planned on coming back.</p>
<p>Peoples: So, we came back. Well, we didn’t plan to come back that soon, but—when he went to Thailand, the kids and I needed a place to live. So the house was available, we bought the house, and that’s where we stayed. We were a block from C.J.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you must have bought a prefab then?</p>
<p>Peoples: No, it was a precut.</p>
<p>Franklin: A precut, right.</p>
<p>Peoples: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and how long did you live in that house for?</p>
<p>Peoples: Oh, that was ’64. I don’t remember for sure. When did we move? We moved to Blue Street. Oh, ’67.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: No it wasn’t; it had to have been ’68, because we came back here in ’67 from Fort Hood.</p>
<p>Franklin: For your work, or for your husband’s work, how did you feel at the time, during the Cold War, about working for the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t know that we gave it a lot of thought. Because research is research. Al was mostly in research. And when I went out to Hanford, it was in support of the FFTF, and it was a test reactor that would—and it was more or less fuel. Fuels and controls, I believe, was the title. So I didn’t think of it was nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Franklin: How do you feel now about your experiences, having worked out there?</p>
<p>Peoples: I think it was good experience. I would not—I can’t think of anything that I would trade. It also, you know, you do interact with a lot of different people. A lot of different people. That is one of the reasons that I feel at this point in my life I can feel comfortable, I’ll just say, in my own skin, and not be that concerned about what anybody else is doing out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you—when you came to the area in the ‘50s, what did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Peoples: I didn’t. Because at that time, everything was secretive. That was the time that if you left work and you forgot to lock your file, you could be fired.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. From your perspective, what were the most important contributions of African Americans at Hanford?</p>
<p>Peoples: At Hanford?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t really know. I don’t really know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. In the civil rights era—this is kind of what my next set of questions is about—what were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Peoples: I don’t really know, because I was more or less, up until I was married, it was more like family time, or church, and I worked at a dress shop in Uptown Richland here. It was called Hugh’s Women’s Apparel. As far as Hanford was concerned, it was not something I had a lot of knowledge about.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about for African Americans in general here? Were there any civil rights issues that were important to folks that you knew of? For example, kind of the lack of services in east Pasco or the treatment of African Americans in Kennewick, the sundown laws?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, sundown laws was before I came here. But I do know that—well, I just know rumors. I didn’t actually know—</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Peoples: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Then I think that is about—that’s all my civil rights activities questions.</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, you know, I was a military wife. When you went to—our first duty station away from here was Germany. When I was in Germany, I went to the post chapel. I didn’t go to the—I went to the Protestant service. There were no African American churches. But I wanted to go to church, so I went to the chapel. So when we came back, when we were at Presidio, San Francisco, I went to the post chapel. When we went to Fort Hood, I went to the post chapel. I took my kids to the post chapel. You know, this sort of thing. When we moved into our house up on Cullum, I don’t know how they got the information, probably from the city, new residents, or new whatever. The people who came to welcome us to Richland and to invite us to their church was from Richland Baptist. And having the experience at the post chapel, I did not have a problem with that. So that’s where we went.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you mean you didn’t have a problem with that?</p>
<p>Peoples: Because, well, I didn’t feel that I had to go to an African American church.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, I see.</p>
<p>Peoples: I had become accustomed to worshipping where there was to worship. Whether it was the post chapel or whether it was a small church.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you the only African Americans that went to Richland Baptist?</p>
<p>Peoples: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there others?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, the Mitchells went there before we did. And then there was Shirleys, the Shirleys went there. And the Abercrombies went there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So really more of a community church than a strict African American—you just felt, you went where the church was closest.</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, that makes sense.</p>
<p>Peoples: Now, if you’re in Heidelberg, Germany, there aren’t going to be too many African American churches. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s very true!</p>
<p>Peoples: But they had a church service there, not too far from our quarters that you could drive or you could walk, it was that close. So that’s what I chose to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did your work at Hanford come to an end?</p>
<p>Peoples: 1996.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did you do afterwards?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, I devoted my time to the American Legion Auxiliary.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that the national organization that you mentioned earlier?</p>
<p>Peoples: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Peoples: In fact, I had gone—the day that my—actually, it was my second national convention that I came back, and they had—there was a notice on my email that they were having involuntary—oh, let’s see. Involuntary reduction of force. But you could volunteer for it. If you chose.</p>
<p>Franklin: That sounds like Hanford.</p>
<p>Peoples: So that’s what I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of like an early retirement.</p>
<p>Peoples: That’s what it was. But in 1995, my husband and I had discussed this earlier, when he was still alive, I told him that I really wanted to go through the chairs up the ladder for the American Legion Auxiliary. So when do you—I said, when I really make the decision, it’ll take me three years to reach that point. And I said, when do you think would be a good time for me to start? So we’d talked about it, and I’d actually been endorsed by my unit for second vice president in 1991—for 1991. Then I found out that there was someone from Cheney that had also been endorsed, and I had decided in my own mind that I would never oppose anyone from the east side. So I didn’t send my endorsement in. However, it was like two months later that we had the meeting with my husband’s nephrologist and I asked him, after he explained everything, I asked him, would you be comfortable in giving us a prognosis? And he said, well, the way I see it, I would say he has three to six months. So, I said, well, I would have had to back away anyway. So I didn’t do anything. So he lived another three-and-a-half years.</p>
<p>So after he was gone, I decided the next year that I would go for second vice president again. So I wrote a letter to each one of the units in the state introducing myself and telling them what my plans were. I made it clear that the reason that I had not been active for three years previous was because of my husband. I felt that if anyone, knowing why I was not there, votes against me for that reason, so be it. So I went for that office. That was 1995, and I did have competition. There were two of us. When the vote was announced, I was the one that was the winner. So I took that position, but when I took that position, I made a commitment. And the person who opposed me actually ran again the following year and was successful, and she ended up being—we ended up being—I had to go second vice president, first vice president, and then you go in as president. She ended up being my first vice president. We had a wonderful relationship. That was—I mean, it’s just, I couldn’t have had anyone more supportive. I could not have had anyone that did a better job of keeping me informed of everything that she was doing and so on. We had, I’ll say, the two of us, we had two really, really good years.</p>
<p>But I made that commitment, and after that, well, we put Washington on the map. We did a really fantastic job, got all kinds of compliments from the national organization, and then I got an appointment for the following year as a member of, what I think, one of the most important committees on the national level, and that was the Americanism Committee. So I did get a national appointment every year for about five years. Then I decided that—well, I had actually promised one of our past state presidents that I would go for national office. So I really wanted to be national chaplain. So I went for that office. And I actually had competition from Kentucky, part of the Bible Belt. And I actually ended up with more than two—almost two-thirds of the total national vote.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, that’s quite a resounding victory.</p>
<p>Peoples: I thought so. And I had the national president, several times during her year, to tell me that she was so happy that I was her national chaplain.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s really great.</p>
<p>Peoples: That’s something that, I will cherish that for a long, long time. I don’t have to be national president or something like that. I was happy being national chaplain. And it was more or less, with my background and my beliefs. The one thing that was unique—or maybe not unique, but—it is a non-denominational organization. You must be very, very careful with your articles and everything. When our Washington State Public Relations chairman called me one day to interview me and she wanted to know how I think about it. I didn’t know she was going to put it in the paper, but she did—but I made the statement to her, was that, I know it is a non-denominational organization, and I will never intentionally offend anyone or their religion. But I say, I will never deny my Christianity. So I had a good year as chaplain, too. So it’s one I’ll remember for a long time.</p>
<p>Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Peoples: Actually, I don’t know that there’s much I could tell them. Because, number one, I didn’t see it as the Cold War. I saw it as a research project. It wasn’t focused on the bomb anymore when I was there. It was focused more on research and the things that are important to our survival, like the power that FFTF could have generated.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration, segregation, and civil rights and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities and at Hanford?</p>
<p>Peoples: Well, in the Tri-Cities, the one thing I remember and the one thing I mentioned a little bit about this earlier, and that was with the families that—well, I’ll just say Kildare. When I came here, it was like I wasn’t just one person. I was part of—it made me feel like I was part of a huge family. Because I remember the—sometimes—well, on Sunday mornings, the Browns, Mr. Brown, they would come by and pick me up to go to church. You know, this sort of thing. Things like that. So in other words, I guess I would call it outreach and just the way they embraced me as a person, just because I was from Kildare. And they would go out of their way to, I guess, make me feel comfortable.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. Well, Emma, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to talk to us today.</p>
<p>Peoples: I hope I didn’t bore you too much. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: No, no, it was wonderful. It was great. Okay.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
FFTF
Fuels and Controls
Westinghouse
Battelle
325 Building
200 West Area
Camp Hanford
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1957-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1973-1996
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Emma Peoples
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
School integration
Migration
Segregation
Description
An account of the resource
Emma Peoples moved to Richland, Washington in 1957 as a teenage and worked on the Hanford Site from 1973-1996.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
05/02/2018
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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e6ce36cb30b9f1e09252def218218e87
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F778869c15a7f92f5091d0594692c20a2.mp4
f38c1e4976ea1b7344a9ce14b66e8ae5
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Vanessa Moore
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Vanessa Moore on May 11<sup>th</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Vanessa about her experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Vanessa Moore: Sure. My full name is Vanessa Bernetta Mitchell Moore, I guess. That’s with the married name. So, V-A-N-E-S-S-A, B-E-R-N-E-T-T-A, maiden name M-I-T-C-H-E-L-L, married name, M-O-O-R-E.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. And Vanessa, when and where were you born?</p>
<p>Moore: I was born in Richland. And December—well, December 2<sup>nd</sup> of 1956 is my birthdate.</p>
<p>Franklin: December 2<sup>nd</sup> 1956. And how did you or your family first come to Richland?</p>
<p>Moore: They came to Richland in the ‘50s, I believe, as a family. We came as a family. My parents and a couple of older brothers. But originally, my father and mother both were born in Kildare, Texas. They actually lived, basically, next-door to one another. So they grew up there. My father first came out here, I believe he told me 1947 as a single teenager. He was following a couple of uncles of his. It was William Daniels and Vanis Daniels, Senior. So he came up and was here, I think, briefly at first. Now, I may not be 100% accurate because it’s second-hand, but he was here for a while with them, went back to Texas and got married. And then he went briefly to I think it was Chicago, because his older brother, William Mitchell, was in Chicago. So he was there for a bit. And I don’t know if my oldest brother was born there or before they went. But anyway, it was in the early ‘50s that Mom and Dad came to, I think, Hermiston, maybe, first, and then they lived in Pasco when the three oldest children were born. I’m number four, and I was born in Richland. I can’t remember if Nestor was born in Richland or Pasco. But we lived down on the south end of Richland—what I call the south end. I don’t think they call it that anymore, down near Aaron Drive and Winco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, the south of old—you know.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, old Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Before the river.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, that used to be called south Richland. So we lived on, I think it was Craighill. 100 Craighill Street, that’s where I was born—or where I lived when I was born.</p>
<p>Franklin: What first brought your father and his uncles, your great-uncles, to Hanford?</p>
<p>Moore: Opportunity for work and to make more money. The way I understood it, wages were low and they were in southeast Texas, and people either farmed—my mother’s family farmed. My father’s was a single mom household because Grandpa had gotten killed when Dad was young. So I think she did domestic work, and he as a teenager did some work at the sawmill or something here and there. But the opportunity to come and make more money in construction, I think it was, because I know Dad worked on McNary Dam and what we call the Blue Bridge in Pasco, and some other construction-type work. As I said, part of the time, they lived in Hermiston and then also in Pasco. Dad was a, I think a chem tech for General Electric in the early days.</p>
<p>Franklin: A chem tech?</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: What—do you know anything about that?</p>
<p>Moore: Because I know he took chemistry. He would always go to school. So we were little kids, and he was working, but I remember him taking a lot of night classes at CBC. He was a—I guess they worked in the chemistry labs or something, the chem techs. We have them still now at PNNL now. So that was one of the things he did before he got into what they called personnel back then instead of human resources.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your father’s educational level?</p>
<p>Moore: He had graduated, I think, top in the class or high in the class in high school, Perfection High in Kildare, Texas, I remember that. At the age of 17, because he would tell me—or 16 or 17. Then, as I said, when we were young, he took a lot of night classes at CBC and I think he got his associate’s degree at some point. My older brother may have more accurate information, but I believe he did. And he would be studying, like, he’d work shift work. So sometimes he was off during the day, and some of the little ones who were still home, we’d go fishing with him or something, but when it was time to study, he’d just say, hit the road. [LAUGHTER] We knew what that meant. And he said—one time he told me, he said, I want to stay ahead of you, of all you kids, so that I can help you with your school work. And he insisted we all had to take chemistry. I didn’t do that well in it; I think I got a B. But it wasn’t my favorite class. And you know, like, math and all those different things. Or he was taking some sort of course to learn to do something, like small appliance repair courses and things like that. So he could make a little extra money, or save a little extra money. Either one.</p>
<p>Franklin: The way I understand it, there was a large extended family migration from Kildare up to Pasco and Richland. What other—what were some of your other relatives that came up from Kildare?</p>
<p>Moore: As I said, the Daniels. So, my great-uncles, Uncle Willy and Uncle Vanis, and then Edmond Richmond, I didn’t know we were related until some of these projects started but he also—they called him Shorty--I knew of him all my life. And Sparks is another family name, Groves. Trying to think of some others. Brown. I know that his name is Primmer Brown, and his wife, Suzanne, is somehow related to my mother. So there were the Browns and the Miles, because she had two or three sisters whose families were also here, so. The older I got, the more family I met. So it’s quite a few.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your mother’s name?</p>
<p>Moore: Her maiden name was Castleberry.</p>
<p>Franklin: Castleberry. And what was her first name?</p>
<p>Moore: Bernice.</p>
<p>Franklin: Bernice Castleberry.</p>
<p>Moore: She worked out in the so-called Area at one point, also.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did she do out there?</p>
<p>Moore: She was—they had a differentiation between secretaries and clerks, and I think that she was considered a clerk. She started in a time—let’s see, my youngest brother was just going to school. So she was a stay-at-home mom until the sixth child was like in kindergarten. And there was a program, I don’t know whether it was Battelle or GE at that time, but where they were trying to increase the number of women and I think minorities in particular—I could be wrong, but I think so—into the workforce. So you might think of it as like a steno pool, or the secretarial pool. Quite a few ladies came to work at that time. Before that, maybe they were doing domestic work or stay-at-home moms or doing other things. But it was an opportunity to learn while you worked, you were paid while you learn, and then you would be sent out on assignments. So I remember her taking speed writing and typing and different things. So you may have an assignment to fill-in for someone who’s on vacation, and eventually have an opportunity to have a full-time position yourself. So I know she and several other ladies that I’m familiar with did that and worked until retirement. Unfortunately, Mom had to retire early for medical reasons. But Opal Andrews, I think, is another individual that you were going to interview. She did that. She’s in the Miles family, so she would be CW Brown’s first cousin, I guess.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. And I think she last worked for Westinghouse or DoE. So I’m hoping she will eventually come sit with you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, me, too. You mentioned, you have five siblings, right? So six of you total.</p>
<p>Moore: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Duke, Greg—</p>
<p>Moore: Nestor.</p>
<p>Franklin: Nestor.</p>
<p>Moore: Cameron.</p>
<p>Franklin: Cameron.</p>
<p>Moore: Robin.</p>
<p>Franklin: Robin. And you’re fourth?</p>
<p>Moore: I’m in between Cameron and Robin. So Duke’s name is actually David.</p>
<p>Franklin: David.</p>
<p>Moore: So David Mitchell, Gregory Mitchell, Nestor, Vanessa, Cameron, and Robin.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, thanks. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Moore: But some people say there’s no girls in that family, so. All my life it was, what? There are no girls in that family!</p>
<p>Franklin: And how did that make you feel?</p>
<p>Moore: It was all right. [LAUGHTER] I said, well, there must be, because I’m here.</p>
<p>Franklin: What else do you know about your parents’ lives before they came to Washington?</p>
<p>Moore: On my mother’s side, I know that Grandpa had about 150 acres that they farmed, because he was able to participate in the, I think, forty acre and a mule program. So he had an opportunity to get that going. My mom had, I don’t know, five or six siblings. So they raised what they ate and they had some animals, and mom would say, people thought we were rich. And she’s like, huh? They’re just making a living. But they would help others around them maybe who didn’t have as much. Maybe it’s time to kill a hog or something, you know, how families would get together and share whatever, share the work and share the benefit. So I think they worked hard and school was always very important. Mom and Dad went to the same little one-room schoolhouse in Kildare. I’ve been there a few times. It’s very small. It’s still very small. It’s kind of like a cross in the road, it seemed like an intersection for the city, when we were little, although there were homes around there. And it’s in southeast Texas where it’s very humid, so we’d go in the summer and that wasn’t that much fun.</p>
<p>But, like I said, my father’s father was killed, I believe in a railroad accident. We were always told that he was hit by a train. But I don’t know if they were certain of that, or if it was just because of the circumstances of where his body was near the train tracks, they assumed. So there’s still some stories around what happened there. So my father as a young person had to kind of assume the father role. I know his younger sister, Emma, who lives here also, she followed him up and is still here, that he was more like a father to her because Grandpa had been killed so early and Grandma just had to work really hard to try to make ends meet. So I think his life was a lot harder there than here. He and Mom, from what I’ve been told, were like high school sweethearts because my aunts, my mom’s sisters were always saying, oh, he just loved Bernice. CJ and Bernice. So. They were like 18, 19 when they got married.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, wow. Did either your father or mother ever talk about their first impressions when they came here? Because it’s such a different environment from east Texas.</p>
<p>Moore: When we asked them about it in our latter years, you know, as we were older, they would talk about it. I don’t recall them talking a lot about it when we were growing up, except the way they did things. Because my mom, having grown up on a farm, she still had ways she did things, from carrying on from the farm to the house to the yard, the way you work and when you work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you have any examples?</p>
<p>Moore: Their work ethic, I think, was good. Let me try. Some of the remedies and things that my mother would come up with. She would make us drink cod liver oil. Like once a year, she would get about a quarter of a cup of orange juice and stir a tablespoon of cod liver oil in it really fast and say, drink this.</p>
<p>Franklin: My grandmom, when I was young, made me do the same thing.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, and those were things—</p>
<p>Franklin: She grew up on a farm in the Depression, and yeah, I don’t--</p>
<p>Moore: I don’t—it was supposed to keep you healthy, I guess.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, you’re still here!</p>
<p>Moore: And she would talk about people eating a little bit of sulfur to keep bugs from biting them. We never did it, but that was something they did there, where they would put—and I remember seeing this once when we visited and I was a child—they would take powdered lime and put it in a ring around the house to keep critters from crawling in. Have you ever heard of that?</p>
<p>Franklin: I have, actually.</p>
<p>Moore: I think that’s what it was for.</p>
<p>Franklin: That can still be done today. You can get that bituminous earth that you can line your house and it’s sharp and pointy and any bugs that try to crawl over it get all shredded up.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: So they don’t—but it’s harmless to people and animals.</p>
<p>Moore: Sure. So that was one thing she would do. She talked about Grandma, when it was time to like kill chickens, bring in the chickens and axe and how you did all of that. And using the lye to clean all of the stuff off like a pig or something, if you’re getting ready to butcher animals. I remember visiting in--it was in the ‘60s, so I don’t remember how old I was--but I was amazed that my grandmother was so strong. They didn’t have indoor plumbing, so you’d have to go to the outhouse in the cow pasture. [LAUGHTER] That’s where the outhouse was. But all the boys, all my brothers, had these Levi jeans. You know, in the old days jeans were really thick and heavy. She would just wash them and wring them out like this, these arms. I thought, wow, Grandma! Grandma knows what she’s doing. And she had this habit of—I shouldn’t put this on tape—snuff. You know what snuff is?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, the powdered tobacco.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, she always had some right here. And she’d have a little can that she carried around with her. And I know Grandma couldn’t read and write. My mom would—she made an X and then other people would sign for her. My mother used to tell me how she spent a lot of time with her dad, helping him get ready for his preaching. He was sort of like a—even though he was a farmer, he was also like a circuit preacher. So she said, I’d run Bible verses with him. So she would help him, or she would read things to my grandmother if she needed that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he know how to read?</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. Oh, Grandpa did, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, great, your grandfather did.</p>
<p>Moore: My grandfather did, yeah. But Grandma, she did not. It seemed like a time where she had to take care of everything at the home, in the house. Making sure there were meals there when people came in from the field, because you had to eat and get back to work. By the time—Mom would say she would get everything ready for everybody else, but she never had time for herself. So I always thought that was kind of sad. I felt bad, because Grandma didn’t get a chance to do some things other people got to do. She would make their clothes. My mom would tell me stories of—I think she had four sisters, Robbie, Dessie, Marjorie—about four. She’d get bolts of material like every year, say, okay, we’ll go to the store, I’ll buy five bolts of material. You guys tell me what you want. They’d look at the Sears catalogue or whatever and say, I want the sleeves from this dress and I want the bodice from this dress, and Grandma would make them. I thought that was amazing, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Moore: How do you do all these things? They’re like wonder women back in those days! So, anyway, that’s kind of a side story.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, that’s really wonderful. It’s nice to kind of set the—you know, inform people what life was like in the South and the kind of conditions that people left. Did your grandmother, did she stay in Kildare her whole life?</p>
<p>Moore: She and Grandpa would come up here during the off-season from farming, because my grandfather would work at Hanford to make extra money so that he could pay his farm off faster.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that was your mother’s father, or your--?</p>
<p>Moore: Yes, my mother’s father.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what was his name?</p>
<p>Moore: David Castleberry, my oldest brother is named after him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Moore: So it was David and Rilland. Grandma’s name was Rilland, R-I-L-L-A-N-D.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s an interesting—</p>
<p>Moore: Interesting.</p>
<p>Franklin: I can’t say I’ve ever heard that name.</p>
<p>Moore: I know! But it’s kind of an interesting story that later on in my life, I found out that my husband’s grandmother and my grandmother actually were neighbors. When Grandma was living here when she’d come up to visit, they lived in houses that were back-to-back. Here, what, I don’t know how many years later, their grandchildren end up marrying each other. To me, that’s just amazing!</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that is amazing. Wow. So you’re talking about your grandparents and then your husband’s.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, my mother’s parents and my father-in-law’s mom. My husband’s grandmother.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your husband’s grandmother. And what was her name again?</p>
<p>Moore: Her name was Campbell.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, the last name was Campbell. Okay.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, I don’t remember her first name. I think they called her Mama or something like that. But Grandma Campbell.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did David Castleberry do at Hanford? Was he just a general laborer?</p>
<p>Moore: That I don’t know. I imagine. I don’t know. Vanis might know.</p>
<p>Franklin: He knows a lot of things, that Vanis.</p>
<p>Moore: He’s enough older than me that he would know, kind of the in-between generation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. He just also seems to soak up all of that lore. So for yourself, growing up in Richland, how many other black families were there in Richland when you were coming of age?</p>
<p>Moore: I can think of a couple. The Rockamores, the Wallaces, the Browns. I guess more than a couple. And a family named Shirley, Calvin Shirley, I think is the son’s name. Oh, and I think Fred Baker. My dad had a friend named Fred Baker, and they were here. So there were a few. When I was in grade school, sometimes there wouldn’t be anybody else in the school except for me and a cousin, or me and a brother, that type of thing. So it’s not—it certainly wasn’t like it is now; it was very rare. You’re probably going to be the only black face in the school class picture back then. And everyone pretty much knew the other families, I guess, because the parents knew each other. Maybe they would socialize or maybe they were related or worked in the same area.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe life in the community?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, to me it was normal. You play with the kids on the block, and we went to school together. I’d get some odd questions sometime.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like what?</p>
<p>Moore: Like, is that your real hair? Or, if someone touched you, would it rub off?</p>
<p>Franklin: Are these questions from kids or from adults?</p>
<p>Moore: From kids. From kids. And then as I got older, there’d be name-calling here and there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like racial name-calling?</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. Not real harsh, maybe like Oreo or Tootsie Roll, or something like that, the type of thing a kid would say. I remember one time I was at Jefferson School, and I think I was in fifth or sixth grade, and my brother, Bill Mitchell—excuse me, not brother—my first cousin, Bill Mitchell, he and I were actually in the same class, and I want to say my younger brother Cameron was there, Nestor was already out and Robbie was too young. So there was like probably three of us in the whole school. I was always a good student, always thought of as the leader. You know, you put kids in groups and the teacher would always say, you’re going to be the leader in this. Or if you have to pick the leader, they’d say, well, why don’t you do it?—the other kids. So, I think one thing I noticed is that the teacher would remember my name by the first day. Because you’re the only person who looks like you, and my name is a little unusual so maybe that had something to do with it. But you know what I’m saying? It’s easier to associate and remember that person because they look different than everybody else. I had positive experiences for the most part, but I remember one time a boy saying something, calling me a name and another boy who heard it said, you better not say that; her brother’s going to beat you up. And I thought, Cameron? He’s not going to beat anybody up.</p>
<p>But I think my brothers’ experiences—I know their experiences were different than mine. And I know my parents protected me a little bit. Like when we got older, I couldn’t go to, say, a basketball game in Pasco just with my friends. My brother had to be there. Part of it was the Pasco/Richland rivalry, but part of it, too, was, we don’t want you to be there by yourself. Or wherever it was. Just to be careful. So I know it was there.</p>
<p>I learned some things sort of after the fact or by figuring things out. For instance, we were looking for a house. We first started on the south end and then, I think I was going into third grade, and we moved to what’s called Richland Village, which you would not know what that is. But these houses like Newcomer Street, just south of here, like the other side of Spangler, the older ones that kind of all look alike, that was called Richland Village. Those were the government homes that you couldn’t buy them at some point. The ability to buy them came about when I was a child. I don’t know exactly when, but my parents bought a house in there. But we had looked somewhere else and everybody liked the house and we didn’t get it. Found out later that, well, no, they weren’t going to sell that house to us. That was in Richland also. And my father became a realtor later on after—well, maybe right before he retired and continued on. So seeing some of the documents that realtors work with opened his eyes about some other things, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, the covenants.</p>
<p>Moore: Redlining and the covenants and things like that. But anyway, he knew those things. I remember Dad saying he moved to Richland to be closer to work and also to move us to where we would have maybe a different experience.</p>
<p>Franklin: Different from what?</p>
<p>Moore: Because originally most everyone was in east Pasco because that’s where you could be. And so was he. But the community, maybe, was a little smaller and more—not close-knit, that’s not the word I mean, but isolated, maybe? Separated? So we would go over, a lot of times, Sunday after church, Mom and—I don’t know if my dad went so much, but you’d visit. That’s what people did after church, is they’d go visit friends and family. So we’d go to Pasco and visit with a lot of people that she knew or was related to. And Mom and Dad would, sometimes both, and the kids would play and that kind of thing. But I don’t know, he just wanted to reach out and branch out and do some other things. I thought it was interesting.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Can’t tell you all the reasons why. But it was deliberate.</p>
<p>Franklin: I mean, I guess in hindsight it’s easy to—or you can kind of understand. It seems like more opportunity maybe, a better chance for—because east Pasco was physically separated from the rest of Pasco by the railroad tracks, by the underpass, but always had that reputation that followed it and its citizens, undeservedly, but it certainly was—might be fair to say that less was expected from people in east Pasco than would have been from people from elsewhere.</p>
<p>Moore: I don’t know, that could be. And then you may spend a lot of time reminiscing in the way we used to do things and where we came from, instead of moving forward to new experiences.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: And I think he liked to see what was new and try it out, and wanted the kids to get involved in different things, so.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Moore: What do I do in my spare time?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Like right now?</p>
<p>Franklin: No.</p>
<p>Moore: Back then? When I was a kid?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, gosh. It was always, go outside and play. [LAUGHTER] There were no video games, and there weren’t places to go and hang out and that sort of thing. So you spent time either with your siblings or with your friends or by yourself, just coming up with things to do, exploring the outdoors. I didn’t get involved, really, in sports, like the boys did. I liked to run and chase with my friends and ride bikes and things like that, but not really organized sports too much. Seems like there wasn’t a lot of spare time. Really when you think about it, school and church and chores and—[LAUGHTER] We lived in a two-bedroom prefab with eight people when I was small. [LAUGHTER] You just didn’t—you’re trying to picture that, right?</p>
<p>Franklin: I lived in a two-bedroom prefab for about a year—a little more than a year, actually.</p>
<p>Moore: Did you?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. So I’m really trying to—</p>
<p>Moore: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: It felt small for two people, honestly.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, yeah. I don’t know how we did it. I slept in the living room. Mom and Dad had a room; the youngest child was in a bassinet in their room. And then four other boys had two bunk beds in the other room. I do remember my dad busting a hole in the back and putting a backdoor in so you could get out the back. Yeah. So, just—I don’t know. You’d go to the park, you’d go fishing with family. That kind of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any particular community events, either here or in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Moore: I remember picnics. Like after church picnics. One was—I don’t know if it was a regular event, but everybody went to Sacajawea Park and we’d take all kinds of food and just spend the day. I do remember that. And then in my early married days, the Juneteenth celebrations that go on in Pasco every June, those seemed to become more and more regular. Other than that, I don’t recall.</p>
<p>Franklin: What can you tell me about Juneteenth? What’s its importance to the black community?</p>
<p>Moore: It has to do with the Emancipation and when the news of Emancipation made it to the community in Texas, and people realized we’re free. So it’s a celebration of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What does that mean to you?</p>
<p>Moore: Juneteenth?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Well, a tradition. Right now, it means a tradition to me. It’s an opportunity to inform people of history, remind others of history, and to appreciate what your ancestors went through and did for you in order for you to be who you are and where you are. That’s what it is for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned attending church. Which church did you attend?</p>
<p>Moore: As a child, I grew up going to Richland Baptist Church here on George Washington Way. That’s where I was baptized when I was nine. But Mom and Dad would also take us to Morning Star Baptist Church in Pasco. I think before they moved to Richland, they attended either there or New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, which—before my mother passed away, I know she had started going back to that church. I came to find out that it’s like a sister church to a church in Kildare. So that’s one thing that I’ve realized as a child that people did the things they did because they brought it with them. The style of church, the fact that you’re there all afternoon. Because they were farmers. So when you would go to town to go to church, it’s too long a trip to just go and come back. Like, you and I, we can go and go home and get home in five minutes. But it came an event in itself, a social event as well as your worship. When you finished, you would stay and socialize.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because it would also—back in the day, it would have been hard to socialize given that people were so—farming communities were so spread out.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, so now we’re all here, bring a pound cake. Some of the food traditions are because of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What other food traditions did people bring?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, pound cake, greens—I never liked chitlins, never had them, but—just some of those traditions. I asked my mom about it once. I said, why didn’t you ever make those? She goes, because I don’t like them. [LAUGHTER] And they don’t smell good. But anyway, I think the barbecues you see, some of the things that happen at Juneteenth, people will come in and they’re making their special form of barbecue, or their cakes and jams and pies, whatever it is. Those were traditional to them. Sweet potato pie, that’s one of my favorite ones. And I’m perfecting my recipe.</p>
<p>Franklin: Awesome, I’d like to try it sometime.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, I’ll let you try it. It’s pretty popular.</p>
<p>Franklin: I don’t think I’ve ever had sweet potato pie.</p>
<p>Moore: No?</p>
<p>Franklin: No.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, you’d like it.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s never been a tradition in my—</p>
<p>Moore: I had never had pumpkin pie until—I didn’t know—when I did have it, I thought, ehh, I don’t know. Do you like candied yams?</p>
<p>Franklin: Love them.</p>
<p>Moore: Then you’d like sweet potato pie better.</p>
<p>Franklin: My family’s a big rhubarb family because in Alaska that’s what grows.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, really?</p>
<p>Franklin: Rhubarb and strawberries. So strawberry rhubarb pie is just like—</p>
<p>Moore: I’ve heard it’s good.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, man, nothing beats my mom’s strawberry rhubarb pie.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, okay. I’ll have to try that. So some of the things you start to see, the traditions, the way, like I said, the style of a church service or the picnics. Even the reunions now that have grown up. My family has a reunion that’s been going on for I don’t know how many years, the Daniels-Cole reunion. It’s every-other-year, the first week of August. People come together.</p>
<p>Franklin: Does it happen here, or--?</p>
<p>Moore: It happens here or Seattle or California. This year it’s here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, the Daniels-Cole?</p>
<p>Moore: Daniels-Cole, and that’s because Vanis Daniels, Senior, his wife was a Cole. So they’re starting at those two, and that’s where the---</p>
<p>Franklin: And it radiates out.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, so I’m considered third generation from that. For years and years and years, my father was very involved. Vanis is still very involved. I’m not as involved as I used to be.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, I’d love to come to that and map the family tree. Because I’ve interviewed so many people in this extended family network. I didn’t realize when we started this project—I got all these different names—</p>
<p>Moore: How many people were related. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, and then it’s really like, it seems like a lot of the town just picked up and—I’ve interviewed a few folks from—</p>
<p>Moore: That’s what I wonder about.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’ve interviewed a few people not from Kildare, and even not from Texas. But 80, 90% have all been from Kildare.</p>
<p>Moore: In recent years, we’ve talked about, people should just have a Kildare reunion.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Because there’s so many people. Don’t even call it a family reunion. Just anybody who can trace themselves back, this is your reunion. That would be quite an undertaking. The last Daniels reunion where I hosted something, I want to say we had over 100 people, and most of them were within Tri-Cities/Seattle/Portland. Before you even leave town, there’s a lot of people. Sometimes it’s like, I’m going to have Thanksgiving at my house, but mum’s the word because I don’t want to have 50 people. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, no kidding. You mentioned your mom didn’t cook chitlins, but did you ever grow up with any other—were those food traditions—any other Southern food traditions an important part of your diet growing up?</p>
<p>Moore: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What else--?</p>
<p>Moore: Dressing. And I called them dumplings—she called them dumplings. I don’t know what other people call them. For Thanksgiving, she would make cornbread. Cornbread and buttermilk was one from my dad. Whenever Mom made cornbread, it was like in a 13x9, and he would take a swath off the end of it and crumble it up in this special rectangular bowl that he had and pour buttermilk over it and eat it. He loved that. I just thought it didn’t sound very good. I’ve never had it, but that was a tradition for him. She would use cornbread and all these other ingredients to make a dressing to go with turkey. Well, she would make pie crust to make the sweet potato pies and the scraps from the crust, she would boil like a broth, like the stock from the turkey innards, you know? Where you’re making broth, and she would just let those down in there and let them boil and they were like big, thick, fat noodles. We called them dumplings. I think they’re called slicks or something, somewhere else. I was watching the cooking show one day and they were making “slicks.” I thought, looks like dumplings to me. So that’s something I love to pour over the gravy and turkey at Thanksgiving. My father made really, really good candied yams. It wasn’t the cans with the marshmallows and all of that. He would take yams, not sweet potatoes, and slice them in spears and bake them with lots of sugar and butter and nutmeg. So when I would host Thanksgiving, I’d have him bring the candied yams. Those are the things that I really liked that she made. And she had some—oh, it’s like beans, pinto beans, but I think it was something she developed on her own; I don’t think it was a tradition. It became a tradition. She was known far and wide in the Tri-Cities for her chocolate chip cookies, because all of my brothers’ friends from the sports teams would want—why don’t you get your mom to bake cookies? That was our thing. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: This question seems kind of self-evident, but I’d like to hear your take on it. Were there opportunities available here that were not available where your parents came from?</p>
<p>Moore: Most definitely.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of opportunities?</p>
<p>Moore: More work, just the availability of work. Education, schooling. I don’t think there was higher education there. Like I said, the one room—not necessarily one room, but the schoolhouse was where everybody in every grade grew up there, went to school all together. Mom talked about the difference in the quality of the books from the school she was in versus where the white kids went to school down there, that there was a time where the superintendent came to their school and they were all supposed to put their books on the desk, and he walked around because he wanted to pick the best one to take back to the student at the white school who needed a book. I just thought, are you kidding me? That’s how people were? But that’s just how it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, it’s kind of hard to believe.</p>
<p>Moore: So those kinds of things are evidence to me that what people have told us is true. When we would go to visit--this would have been in the ‘60s I guess, we were going to Texas to visit and my dad told the boys, I remember him saying to them, it’s not like Richland. Now, when you’re here, just—giving them instructions about what to do, what not to do, who you speak to.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember what some of those instructions were?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, I think, like if you were walking down the sidewalk and there was a woman coming, you would need to move over to the other side, or don’t look people in the eye, that kind of thing. So you’re listening to this, thinking—because his thought was, you can’t act the way you act in Richland, because it will not be accepted, is basically what he was telling them, telling us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because your father had grown up in a segregated society.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, right. Yeah. So certain things you do and don’t do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that shocking for you and your brothers to hear, or was it just kind of accepted? Did you have knowledge that Texas was different from Richland?</p>
<p>Moore: It was a little bit shocking to me. I must’ve been, I don’t know, eight or nine. I didn’t say anything. In those days, too, when your parents told you something, you didn’t really question them. You might think to yourself, wow, I wonder why that is. Well, Greg might question it, but—[LAUGHTER] It depends. I guess everybody has their own personality. Some of those kinds of things bothered me a little bit. Some things, maybe we should do here, like yes, ma’am and no, ma’am. It was interesting. I thought to myself, I see why people wanted to leave, why you wouldn’t want to live there. I could see that.</p>
<p>Franklin: You got kind of the push and pull factors in play.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, you might miss your family, but I wouldn’t think you would miss that way of life. And when they came here, things were still—there was still the “colored” areas, I guess, as far as certain stores or lunch counters. I understand, like in Pasco, there was a lunch counter in the drug store that wouldn’t serve. So it wasn’t like it wasn’t here. But by the time we were of age, that type of thing wasn’t happening.</p>
<p>Franklin: It wasn’t happening at all?</p>
<p>Moore: Not to my knowledge, but I’m sure it happens more covertly. Because I do remember a time when—and this was after I was married—my husband and I—I don’t know if the kids were with us, but we were with my parents, and we went into a local restaurant. It was pretty evident after a little while that they didn’t intend to serve us. You know how you’re just ignored, or we don’t have that, or whatever the case may be. So either you make a decision that you’re either going to make a ruckus, or you’re just going to go somewhere else.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that a restaurant that’s still around?</p>
<p>Moore: The building is still a restaurant, but there’s not the same restaurant. There’s a restaurant in that location, I should say. And I wouldn’t want to say because I don’t want to infer anything about them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, sure. Do you remember the name of the restaurant—is the business since closed?</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm. I’m trying to think. I know the name had—I don’t know the actual name. I think I know the previous name, but I don’t want to say it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Moore: But my husband was the one who picked up on it first. He said, let’s go, they don’t want us here. And he tells me stories of going—he and I are the same age, okay, and he grew up in Pasco and I grew up here. He and his family were going to Spokane. You know how a lot of us stop in Ritzville, you have the bathroom break or whatever. They didn’t want them to use the bathrooms. So if he was five or six—he was born in 1956, so this was maybe early ‘60s? The attendants were telling them everything’s broken, you can’t use, they’re out of order. Leonard’s this little kid, he’d already jumped out of the car and run to the restroom and back. He goes, no, they’re not! I was just in there! [LAUGHTER] But you know, just that sort of treatment, I have experienced that as an adult here. But not often. And I think it’s—in my opinion and the way we were raised is you just kind of consider the source and move on. Because it’s not worth your energy. So.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sports was very important for your father.</p>
<p>Moore: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right? Was it something that was brought—baseball, specifically—was that something that was brought from the South?</p>
<p>Moore: I think so. I think so, because he talks about them playing with a stick and a rock. The more people you talk to, that’s what they did. They played baseball. My father-in-law talks about it, Vanis talks about it. Because it was something you could do with whatever you had. You didn’t have to have special equipment, right, you didn’t have to have special facilities. So you could just mark out a diamond in the dirt somewhere or lay some pads down on the grass. I remember us even doing that in the backyard, or out in a field. So everybody played baseball, from what I understood. So it was very, very popular and he played it here. He played, I think they call them the merchant leagues or whatever, like the stores would sponsor them maybe. Dad also played a little basketball here, too. I saw a picture of him on the Battelle team.</p>
<p>Even my mother did, too. There’s a picture of her in uniform. She played basketball in high school, and she played a little bit out here in one of those leagues, which, I can’t figure out how she had time. She had six kids and lots to do. But she played basketball. And she did teach us—she was the one who was out there teaching you how to shoot and playing the game of horse or whatever. So that was kind of fun. But baseball was my dad’s greatest love. If he could’ve been a professional baseball player, he would’ve liked to do that. Then he switched, of course, to umpiring later on. So he stayed connected to baseball. He could tell you so many details of so many games, no matter when it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were opportunities limited here because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Moore: In what ways. I would just be giving my opinion, I guess. Job opportunities were limited in some respects, because people—I think it’s human nature to gravitate to people who are like you. So if you’re going to fill a position or if you’re going to do a job search, you have something in mind. Or you have a preconceived notion about a particular group of people, so maybe you don’t make an effort to reach out. Or these people, you would make an effort to reach out, but you’ve got to have trained, skilled people, so who has those skills?</p>
<p>So there was some effort made to help improve the skill set of people, too, so there would be more opportunity. So that was a good thing, a very good thing and that opened doors for people. So there are things maybe externally that you can benefit from if you take advantage of them, or you can kind of make your own way, or you are, I guess, hurt or disadvantaged by the practices that exist. I do believe that happened.</p>
<p>But I don’t know, I guess I just don’t want to dwell on it a lot. Because people are making progress, but we can’t forget there are those who don’t want to make any progress. And would like it to be, no, you’re not allowed in this area because I don’t want you here. That still goes on. It’s just done differently.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hmm. Where did you go to school?</p>
<p>Moore: I first started in Lewis and Clark, kindergarten, first and second grade. And then when we moved up to Richland Village, to Jefferson, then to Chief Joseph when it was still a junior high instead of a middle school. It had a different mascot, different colors, because it closed there for a while and then reopened. I went to Hanford High School the year it opened, 1973, I was a sophomore. I was going into my sophomore year. At that time, we didn't have four-year high schools. So your freshman year was in junior high school. And we lived on Newcomer Street, which was the line. We lived on the Hanford side of the line. So I was one of the first classes to go there. But I ended up transferring back to Richland High. When Hanford opened, we had no seniors, because they allowed everybody who was going to be a senior to finish at Richland. And then we also did not have all the classes. So you may be going to Hanford, but your accounting class, you had to get on a bus and go to Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p>Moore: So for me, I was kind of doing this back-and-forth and got involved in the Cooperative Office Education program when I was a junior. So I was only going to class for half a day anyway.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the cooperative office—</p>
<p>Moore: They call it COE. It’s where you take business classes at school, and then you have a job where you work at least four hours a day, so you get credit for the work and then also for the class. They still do it. They still do it. They call it something else. I work at PNNL, and we hire students who do that. You’ve heard of DECA, which is the retail type? Have you heard of the DECA clubs?</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>Moore: No? Tsk. You didn’t grow up here.</p>
<p>Franklin: I did not.</p>
<p>Moore: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, very much no.</p>
<p>Moore: So anyway, that’s what I did, and that’s how I got into banking. Actually, I wanted to work at Battelle, because many of the students were picked by Battelle and they paid better. At that time, minimum wage was $1.65 an hour, in 1973 when I was 15-going-on-16. I wanted to go to Battelle, but they wouldn’t allow me, because my father worked there in the personnel department. Some of my friends did, and I ended up going to Seattle First National Bank. Which is what it was called then; now it’s Bank of America. Yeah. So graduated from Richland High, ’75.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your brothers had been pretty involved in sports.</p>
<p>Moore: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, kind of sports. And it seemed like a lot of—the Browns were also really big—it seemed like sports was a big avenue of acceptance for young black men in Richland. I wonder, from your perception, were things—being a girl and really not being able at that time—there weren’t a lot of sports options available to you, right?</p>
<p>Moore: Not a lot.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because Title IX hadn’t really come into effect yet.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. There weren’t a lot. I mean, there was softball and tennis. There were opportunities I didn’t particularly choose to get involved with. I think I went out for tennis in seventh grade and didn’t think that was my thing. But sports, that’s an avenue where a lot of young men kind of excelled and were interested. The Browns were—they were kind of a half a generation older. Because they were teen stars, I guess you would say, at Richland High back in the ‘50s, like in the mid-‘50s. Whereas then my oldest brother graduated high school ’69, so it’s kind of a—I don’t know if you were—Theartis Wallace, he’s first cousin to CW and Norris. He played for the Sonics when they first—didn’t they start out with an expansion team or something? He played. His family’s here still.</p>
<p>There was a lot of sports activities which was good because everybody liked—sports were huge, period in the Tri-Cities. I think part of that was Hanford, too, providing outlets for people to have activities. Remember when we went on the tour and you see the size of the schools and the gyms and the pools. They had teams. So these young people would have had parents who were maybe on these—like my dad, he played. And Vanis’ relatives, they’re already playing on what they called the merchant leagues or the Hanford leagues. So it was going on, and people would get you involved.</p>
<p>Like my dad coached, for one, and I remember him helping get Little League started in Pasco. We were out the house one day and Vanis and Edmon—I think Edmon was there, too—but they had this big bag full of, you know the wool baseball—baseball uniforms were wool. They were going through bags of uniforms trying to sort out some things that they might be able to use, and I think that was sort of the beginnings of Little League in Pasco. But I know my dad coached my brothers. One of the reasons he got into coaching was because he wanted to be there. He was concerned about their experience.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the root of the concern?</p>
<p>Moore: Just how are the kids going to be treated when they’re out there on the ball team. I don’t think he did it initially. If you were to talk to my brother, Nestor, he might be able to elaborate. But I think at one point, he was having some—some experience that he had led my father to want to be a little closer to the game. I don’t think it was necessarily—it wasn’t a racial thing; it was just the coaching interaction with the kids type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were things different for you, just compared to your brothers. Or was it different for you, not having that sports outlet?</p>
<p>Moore: Probably less social for me. Less social. I had my few close friends, we walked to school together, we played tetherball at recess or whatever. I had a lot of friends in school. I got along with people, I was involved in things, like ASB and that sort of thing. So I wasn’t like in my shell, but it was different, because you look at boyfriend/girlfriend interactions, right? I’m a black teen-aged girl, and there’s mostly just white guys in the whole school. So there wasn’t as much interaction as far as dating and that kind of thing. I didn’t really date.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that discouraged, do you think?</p>
<p>Moore: I don’t think it was necessarily openly discouraged; it just was not done. You know what I mean? It just was understood that it really wasn’t done. Especially not black female and a white male. Maybe the other way was more likely that you would see. But then you had to be careful, because how’s that going to be received by your peers, by parents, by the public? I know they could probably tell you some stories. Or even church, because there are certain sort of things that—we just don’t do that.</p>
<p>I remember my mother, seeing the cover of a, they call them quarterlies, what you’d get every quarter for your church for your next upcoming Bible studies. And I think maybe there were a black teen-aged boy and a white girl or something on the cover, and that was like—[GASP] for some people. We can’t use this! Or if you wanted to date someone’s daughter, I know the boys would have to think about that, because it would be different. I didn’t experience it because it wouldn’t be that dynamic, do you know what I mean?</p>
<p>Franklin: Right that was even—your situation would have even been rarer.</p>
<p>Moore: Rarer. Yeah, you get it. That would be rare and this would be rarer. I do remember there was a guy that, we were friends and he’d asked me out to prom or something. We went and kind of started dating a little bit. At some point, I think I said to him, I felt uncomfortable. Like if you’re walking down the mall and people are looking, and I felt a little bit uncomfortable. So I thought, hmm, I just don’t want to do this anymore. He got really upset—and I don’t know if you should show this on your tape, but I’m just going to tell you. He says, do you know how many friends I lost because of you? So, you know, like I went out on a limb, and now you’re saying this? And I just remember thinking, well, then I guess they weren’t your friends, were they?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: That’s the first thing that came to my mind.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: I mean, it’s out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: I like how that’s somehow your fault.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, it’s my fault.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, I mean there were—it’s funny, because I try to teach—when I teach American history, I teach this in class that there were miscegenation laws up until the ‘60s and ‘70s in a lot of states. Interracial couplings were illegal for—and today, I think we look back on that and just be like, well, why? What was the rationale? The decay of society, and the loosening of morals, and it seems silly now. But 40, 50 years ago, it wasn’t—it was very alive. That thinking was very alive. It’s interesting to me how quickly that has changed and how normal that is to a lot of us now.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, but then there are those that it’s not okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: For still, yeah. For some.</p>
<p>Moore: Depending on where you are, you’re taking your life in your hands.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s true.</p>
<p>Moore: Literally.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. It’s become a lot more unpopular to express an opinion about that, a negative opinion towards that.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, it has, but.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, interesting.</p>
<p>Moore: The reactions to it are—some are out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: So many of your brothers and other men I’ve interviewed have mentioned that sports was a vehicle to acceptance. One person, I can’t—I think it may have been Emmitt Jackson that mentioned that he thought it must have been—he heard it was—imagined it was harder for girls. Because without that outlet there for acceptance, there just wasn’t—because everyone liked sports. So if you were a good sports player, people overlooked a lot of maybe other prejudices they might have had and were able to accept you better.</p>
<p>Moore: Because of the—I don’t know, it’s almost like you’re being unique. Because there was a lot of acceptance. People looked at me as an individual. Not as a black person. Because they would say things, and I’m thinking, I’m right here. [LAUGHTER] Or make a generalization. And I’d say, well, you can’t say that about everybody. And they’d say, well, that’s not you. You’re Vanessa. You know what I mean? So they’re saying that because they know you, that’s not you.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re the good one.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, you know what I’m trying to say?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, I know exactly, yeah. I have heard things like that before.</p>
<p>Moore: I’m not sure I expressed it very well, but—they don’t see it. But I could go all day and never see another black person until I went home. But I’m not thinking about that. Just like they’re not thinking about it. That’s Leslie, this is whoever, this is Pam, this is me. We’re just who we are. It’s not that they’re white and I’m black. Which is, I think, the way it should be. But it seemed hard for people to be like that if it was someone they didn’t know personally.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did racism or segregation affect your education?</p>
<p>Moore: I think, for me, it probably affected it in a positive way, because my parents emphasized it, emphasized education being important. Because people who were denied it, they saw it as the way to have a better life. So it was just sort of assumed, you’re going to work hard in school and that’s your job and you’re going to get good grades, and college is what comes after high school. So it affected me probably in a good way in that sense.</p>
<p>But the overall opportunities, I don’t know. Because where I lived, it probably wasn’t a big factor. But in a way, too, though—this is kind of an odd way to say this—but when I was applying to colleges, I kind of had this, I don’t want to go too far away from home feeling. Maybe that’s normal, but in retrospect, I think it would have been neat to seek out some of the historically black colleges and universities, just to have the experience. I had been accepted, but I was afraid to go, or thought my parents couldn’t afford it or whatever. We have odd ideas when we’re teenagers, right? So the experience could have been different.</p>
<p>My father actually wanted me to apply to the Air Force Academy, because that was the year they took girls, and my brother, Duke, had graduated from the Air Force Academy. And I thought, oh, no. [LAUGHTER] Nope. I ended up, I went to WSU for my first year. I got married spring break, and kind of went to school off and on after that, ‘til I finished at CBC, and now I’ll finish here at WSU this December. After all these years—</p>
<p>Franklin: Congrats.</p>
<p>Moore: --I’m back to finish what I started back in 1976. So I’ll graduate and retire. How does that sound?</p>
<p>Franklin: That sounds good. It’s never too late. It’s never too late to finish something.</p>
<p>Moore: Some people think I’m crazy. Like, why are you doing that?</p>
<p>Franklin: You know what? If it matters to you, then that’s what’s important. You want to be able to say you did it.</p>
<p>Moore: Yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Who are some of the people who influenced you as a child?</p>
<p>Moore: Mostly my mom.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Moore: Because she was a person who trained us and explained how the proper way to be, what was important, value systems. My dad also as far as—but he was gone a lot more. So I think Mom—and that happens to a lot of families. That’s the person you’re closest to. Teachers, also. Teachers would encourage me, like, say, nominate you for this position or that position. Or choose you as the—I think I was the—you know you have the patrol that go out in grade school and have the sign for you to cross the street?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, the crossing guard.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. The fifth grade teacher, of course, appointed me as captain. So I remember that experience. There was this one big kid who didn’t want to listen to me, and so we had a run-in. [LAUGHTER] So teachers. And the encouragement about your skills or your abilities or your potential and your future. So I got that from teachers from grade school all the way up to high school, and then people that I worked with who were very encouraging.</p>
<p>Franklin: Members of your family had worked out at Hanford, some of them during the Manhattan Project like your great-uncles and things and your father later, and the Cold War. What was your reaction, or what do you know about your parents’ reaction in learning that the work they had done out there had contributed to the development of atomic weapons?</p>
<p>Moore: My father, I think he looked at it as having done something good, and I think most people did when they realized, because it was to help stop something from getting worse. And for many of them, I don’t—I can’t speak for what they thought, but what amazes me is the fact that everybody was so consistent with keeping the secret, and saying, you just don’t talk about that. And dedicated to the work that they were doing. The people that I’ve talked to and interviewed myself, they were thankful to have been able to raise families and make a wage that they could have a good life. And I think people were patriotic that they were supporting the war effort, I suppose. But then there are also times where you think, that’s just so horrific. When I learned about it in school--and I didn’t connect it back to Hanford when I first learned of it, when we talked about Nagasaki and Hiroshima and all of that, I thought, oh my goodness, how could we do that to people? You know? Just the devastation and the killing power of it all, it was just kind of upsetting to me that any country would do that to any other country. And then the way that people were treated. I had an art teacher who—he still lives here, Mr. Yamamoto—who told us the stories of the internment camps when he was a little boy. It just was very upsetting to think that anybody could treat—that people could treat other people the way that they were treated.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think that kind of—you kind of get right to the heart of why this is such an interesting issue for people not from here, and kind of the divide. Because I think the horror is often what people who are not from here immediately think of; whereas when you first mentioned that people were grateful for the opportunities it gave, that it helped to win the war, that it provided stable income is something that people from here think of. There seems to—I guess what’s—the truth is really in both. I mean, those are both true experiences, those are both true reactions. You can’t say that one side is objectively true. And I think that’s--</p>
<p>Moore: And some things we just blindly went along with. You know, like, when it came—I don’t know how long ago it was—but, okay, growing up in Richland, you have the mushroom cloud at the school. It’s on everything. Everything’s “atomic.” And the plane and all of that. We thought nothing of it. And then when some—I think it was students or some people from Japan, years ago, coming in, seeing those things and being so upset and insulted, and you realize, oh my goodness. Why do we do that? You just feel bad.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm. That’s what—in March, we had the visitor from Nagasaki who survived the bombing. He toured the B Reactor. But I think what upset him the most was the mushroom cloud symbol, and that it was a source of pride for the community.</p>
<p>Moore: Talk about insensitive, right?</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and it wasn’t a source of pride to him. He had been a child during the bombing. Yeah. It’s reconciling that. So you had mentioned, though, when you first heard about the bombings you had felt this kind of shock. What about when you connected—do you remember anything about drawing that direct connection from that event to where we are right now? Because there is a very—there’s a very distinct line—</p>
<p>Moore: No, not at that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Moore: Not at that time, because it was just something we were reading in the history books, and I’d never heard about the Manhattan Project.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about when you did find out?</p>
<p>Moore: I wondered what people, like the question you asked, the people who had been working here and didn’t know what it was, what in the world did they think when they found out? Some of them must have felt like, I wish I hadn’t been a part of that. We don’t know. We can just speculate. I never really talked to anybody about that. But it comes to your mind, what must they have thought?</p>
<p>Franklin: Or maybe what—yeah, because I always feel like there’s a difference between what feelings people might harbor inside and what they say outwardly. Because they don’t want to criticize or be unpatriotic. Certainly the physicists had deep misgivings about it. But it’s always interesting to hear. Yeah, I’ve always wanted to know what people really think.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, I would like to know. I guess there’s some of them we’d better ask before it’s too late!</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, I’ve asked a lot of folks, you know, over 100, and it’s always kind of—</p>
<p>Moore: That were actually there and doing it at that time?</p>
<p>Franklin: Only a few that were actually there, but it’s interesting. So the last question, the second-to-last question I ask in all these interviews is, “What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?” And I’ll ask you that question later, but just to bring that up, because usually when I ask that question, for people who, their parents may have worked here or even some that came here in the Cold War, nine times out of ten, they always say, well, the bomb won the war, and we should always remember that. Even though they weren’t directly involved in that event at all, that has seemed to be this unifying point of this community’s history, this kind of objective truth. Not that it’s not true, but it seems to just be—it dominates the whole thing.</p>
<p>Moore: Is that to make it feel okay? [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: I don’t know. Sometimes I—I don’t know if I should say this on camera, but sometimes I think so. It’s just interesting, because as an outsider, I have a different perspective.</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm. We’ll have to talk about that. [LAUGHTER] But you know, when you’re talking about that just now and the actual war itself, I think some of the things I remember were the whole-body counters and the drills. Get under your desk.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you have to do the whole-body counter?</p>
<p>Moore: Yes, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And tell me about that. Because I’ve—I haven’t talked to people about that direct experience.</p>
<p>Moore: They would bring a big like semi-sized truck to the school every once in a while, and we would have to go in and lie down and go through what they called the whole-body counter. Just because we lived here. We lived near Hanford, so they were checking us. I want to say, I think the building is—it hasn’t been that long ago, don’t they still have a building downtown where they have a whole-body counter?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yup.</p>
<p>Moore: Okay. Yeah. But they would bring it to us.</p>
<p>Franklin: It was like a mobile one.</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hmm. And I was in grade school, so I know I did it at least twice. And then we would do some of the other drills where if you heard certain sirens, you were going to have to get under your desk. At the time, we just did it. But you think back at it now and you’re like, what would that do for you? You would be dead anyway. It’s not going to help you. Because we’re talking about, in case of a nuclear attack, get under your desk? No. But the body counts to check and seeing the symbols on certain buildings so that you know that that’s where there’s a shelter.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah, the civil defense.</p>
<p>Moore: Uh-huh, and the radiation in the bomb shelter symbols.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did the whole-body counter ever—did you ever connect that with the possibility of receiving something that could have been picked up by that machine?</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did that—what kind of feelings did that elicit in you?</p>
<p>Moore: Just that we just did it and nobody ever seemed to have any problems so it must be okay. But I remember also—and not knowing the significance of it, but I remember my father having to leave specimens. They’d put these little kits on your porch.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that would be like a metal—</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: With a glass—</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, and so you had to leave a urine specimen, and then someone would come and pick it up.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, we have some of those in our collection. Unused.</p>
<p>Moore: We didn’t think about it. It’s just like, oh, that’s, my dad works there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, he just has to do this.</p>
<p>Moore: he just has to do this, or seeing the guys come with their lunch pails. Everybody had those black metal lunch boxes like you see in the cartoons. They’d get off the buses on the corners and be walking home. Because the big—like, the bus they had down there at CREHST, I think it’s brown and yellow, those buses were driving the streets everyday. Only in Richland. It didn’t dawn on me until quite a bit later that, well, some of the people that worked out there lived in Pasco or Kennewick. How come they don’t get a bus? But there was a reason. I mean, you had to be in Richland. It was just part of life. As a little kid, you just see it go by, and that’s what happens. But I do remember as a young adult, the scene, that incident that Vanis described to you when we were on the tour and the man fell through.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: I know his family. And I asked Vanis the other day if that was who I thought that was, and he said yeah. And I remember when it happened, because his sister—well, his parents and my parents kind of knew each other because everybody’s kids played baseball. So they knew one another and I just remember thinking how tragic that was for their family. How could something like that happen? But people go on and life goes on and it just does. And then when—was it McCluskey? Was that the contamination?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, the americium.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, that one really got me.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Moore: Because you realize how easy it would be for something to happen and people to be contaminated. When I worked out there, I know they checked us all the time. It took me a while to get used to the term of being “crapped up” because we didn’t even say words like that. [LAUGHTER] I thought, what are you talking about?</p>
<p>Franklin: Just very quickly, because I know it was much later, but when did you go out to work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Moore: It was 1991.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you started on with Westinghouse, right?</p>
<p>Moore: Westinghouse. I was going to be a field clerk at PUREX, at the PUREX facility. I was going to be supporting the radiation technicians. We called them—they have had different names, HBTs, RCTs, the rad tech people. So I was their clerk to keep track of all their records and reporting and doing some different things and it was quite an experience, because it was another world to me. I was used to being somewhere where you had nice surroundings, you had an hour lunch, things were comfortable. And I interviewed for this position in town, but then the assignment was out there. And later on, the manager told me, well, if I had let you see it, you wouldn’t have come. And I think he was right. It was like Hogan’s Heroes. You’ve seen the building, the camp where they’re in? That’s what it reminded me of. The razor wire and the guard shack, and you had to put your purse—everything down and it went through the little turnstile to check it and the guards had their guns, and you went through radiation monitors to go through different sections of the building. So it was a real eye-opener for me the first day. They were getting ready to go to shutdown; nothing was being produced anymore. So I was after that. It was all about remediation and then restoration.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you stay out there?</p>
<p>Moore: I think I came into another position that was into the 300 Area, maybe a couple of years later, and then back out to the 200 Area in the 2750 Building I think it was, so it was in more of an office building. There it was more like being in town. Like, once you get there, it’s no different if you were at the Federal Building; it’s just that you’re far away. And you can’t run to Zip’s or something on lunch. [LAUGHTER] But it was nothing unusual. My brother, Greg, worked out there at that time, too, and I had other relatives. And I realized once I went from my banking world to the Hanford world, a lot of classmates, former classmates, that I thought didn’t live here anymore, they worked out there. So everyday I saw somebody that I knew. So it was interesting to kind of get reacquainted and I didn’t feel so much a fish out of water, because I knew people and there was help to learn what was going on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of like one big extended family.</p>
<p>Moore: I know! If you’re not related to me, I went to school with you, right? At one point I became an activities administrator, so I monitored the budget for the Tank Farm’s HBTs to make sure they had the equipment that they needed and they weren’t overspending, or if there was going to be training, that kind of thing. Bob Heineman, I think I saw him on one of the films for these productions—</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: He was my boss at one time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Yeah, I had a really interesting interview with Bob Heineman.</p>
<p>Moore: I thought it was good. I just heard part of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: He was quite an interesting guy.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. He and my brother, Duke, went to school together, I think.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: So Bob was—he was one of those encouraging people that kept after me. When are you going to finish school? When are you going to do—what are you going to do next? Just that kind of thing. So the community was—people were pretty close-knit and my family was, in a way, kind of known. So if I just said the name, they knew you were a Mitchell, then it was like, okay, I know you, practically. So that’s the value of a small community. My kids say it’s not, because, Mom, I can’t go anywhere with you. Everybody knows you. To me, it’s comfortable.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. Because you would’ve been used to it, right? I mean, your father had such a large role in the community, and it seems he was a very beloved figure. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Moore: During my time here? I think equal pay would be probably one. And in some realms, acceptance. I know my dad tells a story about moving into a particular neighborhood, and—</p>
<p>Franklin: Just kind of down the street here?</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, and you have neighbors who are your peers and behave as if, ooh, you’re getting a little too close to me. You-shouldn’t-be-able-to-afford-to-live-where-I-live kind of reactions. So he’s told me a couple stories about that. Not too long ago, actually. Several years back, but, I’m like, really? Because I knew the people. And he says, oh yeah. So you just—and Mom and Dad were not the type to fill our heads full of a lot of things that were going to get us agitated. You just kind of deal with it, I don’t need to talk—and maybe it was just kind of a generational thing, too, though. There’s grown-up conversation and you don’t need to know everything. So they lived life without burdening us with their troubles. And my mother would say sometimes, you just don’t need to worry about that. Whatever “that” was. And I think that’s, in a way, a good thing, but then it also shelters you from some things maybe you should be aware of.</p>
<p>Franklin: What actions were being taken to address the issues that you just mentioned?</p>
<p>Moore: I know some of the major employers, just from having been in the workforce here, have deliberate plans. Like they pay attention to affirmative action, and they maybe have set goals that they try to adhere to. And sometimes, depending on who is in charge at the time, how much effort goes into some of those things. You understand what I mean?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. Like they exist, but are you actively working your plan, or is it just one of those things that, you know, I’ll do it if I have to? So I think that’s one thing, from my point of view from being in the workforce.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were the most important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Moore: My goodness. I’m not sure I’m the person to ask. Are there—yeah, not like the ‘60s, like people organizing marches and things like that. I can’t—</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Moore: I kind of fell in the in-between, where there was not a lot of activity. I do remember having cousins whose parents were kind of involved, and so would be marching in downtown Pasco, I think it was maybe ’65 or something, when there were some civil rights marches. They would make posters and get involved and get the whole family involved in. We didn’t participate so much in those kinds of things, not that—I as a child wasn’t aware a lot of it was going on. I’d see it on the news or something. But not direct participation. So I don’t know if that’s because I was too young or wasn’t active enough.</p>
<p>Franklin: So now to the big question that I mentioned earlier. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Moore: I think, about working at Hanford, that you should study it and understand it to—study the history of it to understand why things are the way they are now. Because there’s legacy in regards to behaviors, I think, in this community. Maybe people’s expectations and worldview of—maybe it’s not the worldview—but what they should be entitled to, or how life should be. Because it’s residual from that timeframe, where things, for some people, were just provided to them and handed to them, or you just get this job and you’re going to do that forever, you don’t have to worry about it, you’re going to get a good pension, you’re going to get to retire. So they got to remember that one thing they should learn is, things change. Right? Don’t get too comfortable. Because life can change, even though in past generations they just thought it would go on and on and on. At some point, it’s got to be changed. Because the government can’t support everybody. And people should have a work ethic and some people would tend not to feel they had to. Right? Don’t let yourself be complacent, I guess, is what I’d think they should learn. And to always be looking for opportunity and doing what they can do to grow.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I understand. I’ve been out there a little bit. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Moore: I had a hard time coming from outside Hanford and going to Hanford, and people’d say, oh, don’t worry about it. Or, you’re working too hard. And I thought, what? This is my job.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was surprised—you know, I started in the summer of 2015 being out there a bit. I was surprised at how much of the good ole boy attitude is still there. You do think that’s a thing of the past, but—wow.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, it hasn’t died out yet. It hasn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, it’s a strange incubator. It’s just its own world out there. And some things are great about that world. What about living in Richland during the Cold War? And growing up during that time and in this kind of unique community?</p>
<p>Moore: It was kind of a unique community, because of so many people in the town had the same employer, basically. So it became one of those things, if you didn’t work there, or your parents didn’t work there, you just felt like you were somehow out of the loop. You know, you couldn’t be in a conversation around dinner or going out with somebody, because they’d get onto the Hanford, and you'd have nothing else. You’re just the outsider. So I learned that it’s definitely a culture of its own. But it’s a big supporter of the community, and the companies made sure that the schools were good. So I think educational opportunities were much improved because of it. Look at all the things that go into CBC just so that the contractors can have what they need. Community college—I don’t think it would be what it is today without Hanford and making sure that the high number of highly educated and trained people in science and technology is what drives part of what goes on with all the STEM everywhere. This school is going to have a computer lab, because my kids are going to go there and they need to know this. You almost get the feeling that you’re getting the extra support that some other community is not going to get because they don’t have a Hanford in their backyard. So there’s a lot of horsepower there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but there is.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, no, no, believe me, I very much have. People have high expectations for their children here.</p>
<p>Moore: They did, which translated into high expectations for their educators and all of that. I remember being struck that non-Richland people—like I said, my husband grew up in Pasco—there seemed to be more entrepreneurs outside of Richland. Like you have very successful farmers, or, his father had his own business. There’s dentists and lawyers and just people that were in different walks of life, because they had a different experience. I thought it was pretty cool. Because, like, not everybody works for Hanford; some people do other things! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Did you spend a lot of time—you mentioned that sometimes you would go to Morning Star Baptist Church. How connected with the community in east Pasco was your family? Did you have a lot of friends—did you have friends over there?</p>
<p>Moore: My parents were very connected. We as kids weren’t so connected, because we were almost, I think, by other children, looked at as outsiders.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mean, like other children in east Pasco would have looked at you as—</p>
<p>Moore: Yes, yes, yes. Because, you live in Richland, you think you’re better than everybody. That’s quote-unquote, you think you’re white. Or why do you live there? Because my parents do. I live where my parents live. That was very hurtful for me. When I got married, I moved to Pasco because my husband’s business and family were in Pasco. And I saw a change in some people who had been that way toward me. It was like, okay, now she’s okay. And I never understood that. I’m the same person I’ve always been.</p>
<p>Franklin: You left your airs behind.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. Because Richland people think they’re better than everybody else. Did you know that? That was the talk.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, no, I’ve heard that. A lot. I mean, I’ve heard—</p>
<p>Moore: We Richland people don’t understand why. But I was subject to that, too. From relatives and non-relatives.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think that happened, from a lot of the folks I’ve talked to for this project and the general oral history project, that seemed to be existing for just people from Richland in general, from Kennewick and Pasco were just like, oh, you Richland people. It wasn’t a secret closed city, but it did—everybody there had this Hanford connection, and it was different enough—</p>
<p>Moore: And there was a time where you apparently couldn’t live in Richland unless you worked—you couldn’t own property. I mean you might live on a trailer camp, right, or rent, but you couldn’t own.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, you couldn’t own property, period. And you couldn’t rent unless you either worked at Hanford or you were a contractor in the way—like, for the folks that ran the retail in the Uptown, they were contracted through the Atomic Energy Commission to do that, and so they were allowed to do that in Richland. But, you know they were still—</p>
<p>Moore: And for a time, if you were a black, you couldn’t either, so—</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Well, you had to work at Hanford and most of the jobs for blacks were menial. They weren’t recruiting people into the science and engineering for a time. Certainly it was mostly construction.</p>
<p>Moore; Right, construction and laborers. Because you hear that over and over. I was a laborer; oh, I worked construction. And some people it became very, very skilled and built all kinds of homes. Well, the people who built Morning Star. Joe Williams was one of the people who helped build that and he was a skilled worker out here that helped with the lining of the tanks. We have him on one video, and he talked about his work.</p>
<p>Or my uncle, Willy Daniels, who—he was a school teacher when he was back in Texas. So when he came back here, he was one of—some people, I guess, couldn’t read and write or needed some assistance, so that was one of the things that he helped with, which put him in positions that other people weren’t. Even when he was an old man, I’d say Uncle Willy was in his 80s, and I remember—I was a stay-at-home mom then and I lived in Pasco and I would see Uncle Willy every once in a while. I’d go visit him. He’d say, oh, I have to go to take so-and-so to the bank, because I have to help them. He was still doing it. Up until he died, I think, he was still helping people with things.</p>
<p>But yeah, you just—you don’t know what your life is going to be like. It’s been interesting. Everybody has their own story to tell, right? But I did have that experience where it hurt my feelings that people would talk to me that way or feel like I thought I was better than they were. Yeah, it upsets me still.</p>
<p>Franklin: Understandably. Is there anything you would like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life here at Hanford and Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Moore: Here at Hanford. I don’t think there’s anything in particular. I am thankful for my ancestors. I am thankful for the upbringing and training that I had, and the exposure that I’ve had. And the opportunities that I’ve had. I think I would want to try to carry that on. I’ve been involved in the community as far as volunteering and working with non-profit groups and trying to help keep history alive. So I think maybe I could’ve been more outspoken or involved. It wasn’t my nature; it wasn’t my experience. But I think, speaking up when something needs to be said is something that we should do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Well, Vanessa, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to interview with me today.</p>
<p>Moore: I appreciate being here. Thanks for having me.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re very welcome.</p>
<p>Moore: All right.</p>
<p>Franklin: All right.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
General Electric
Battelle
Westinghouse
PUREX
300 Area
200 Area
2750 Building
Tank Farms
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1956-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1991-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Vanessa Moore
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Discrimination
Segregation
Baseball
Basketball
Civil rights movements
Nuclear industry
Description
An account of the resource
Vanessa Moore was born in Richland, Washington in 1956 and started working on the Hanford Site in 1991.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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05/11/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa5a8dcdd12fbca9989b5d633fc57f0e3.JPG
fae2178edeeec17f60766a4a4d89ea45
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F57f37ea890397fdef25ac5a08b33b79f.mp4
b876e5a6903fef8c367009890b5ce932
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Ellenor Moore
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Ellenor Moore on March 21<sup>st</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted at Ellenor Moore’s home in Pasco. I will be talking with Ellenor about her experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Ellenor Moore: Yes. My name is Ellenor Louise Moore. It’s spelled E-L-L-E-N-O-R, middle initial, L, Moore, M-O-O-R-E.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thank you so much. Where and when were you born?</p>
<p>Moore; I was born in Louisiana.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Moore: In 1932. I’m 85 years old. So.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’d like to talk about your life before coming to the Tri-Cities, so I’m wondering if you could kind of—what type of environment was it to grow up in Louisiana in the ‘30s and ‘40s?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, you know, I was in the late teens when I came, when my father got work here and came from Louisiana here to work. Growing up in Louisiana, it was really—well, we went through part of the Depression, the big depression and everything. But you know, everyone was kind of in the same conditions. So, as a child, I didn’t realize how bad it was. But it really was. It was bad. At that time, we lived in the country. My father worked—he wasn’t a farmer. He just didn’t like it; he never—he wasn’t one. And he had grown up partly in St. Louis, where his mother had lived. He came back to Louisiana.</p>
<p>The story is that he met my mother and then he was there and he stayed there, but he didn’t like it at all. He always had the idea he was going to get away and he was going to go wherever he could go. During World War II, he was thinking he wanted to go back to St. Louis. But housing and everything was so hard to get, he never did really do that. He wound up—he went out and worked in the defense, when they were building the army camps and stuff like that, back in 19—what would that have been? ’41, ’42? So that was the kind of work, he did that.</p>
<p>And then when he came back, of course he couldn’t find anything to do except worked at a sawmill. We lived in the housing that was there, which was very poor. There was no indoor plumbing or anything like that. You grew up—I remember at like eight, nine years old, ten years old, it was really, really bad. So that was the only thing that kind—that kept us there. After the sawmill, we moved into the little town, which was Jonesville and that’s where I went to school there. Then my dad got a job at a car—automobile franchise, I guess you’d call it. He worked there until he was able to leave and come here to work.</p>
<p>Franklin: What year did your father come here?</p>
<p>Moore: In 19—the early part of 1950.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did he come here to do?</p>
<p>Moore: He came here to do whatever kind of work he could get. I mean, he wanted to get away. From my understanding, most of the people that came here, a lot of them, they just—they were looking for work. We heard about it from—well, my uncle had been in the service, and when he came back he was stationed in Bremerton. That’s how we knew about, you know, the Northwest. I had never even heard about it. Here I was, I don’t know how old I was; I was probably eight years old, and he came, he was stationed there, and then he was discharged and he came back home to Louisiana, but he stayed for a very short time, because he did not want to be there. He’d gotten—he had been overseas and stuff like that. And he came back and settled in Seattle.</p>
<p>Then my aunt came. I remember when he came back up here and he was saying that he was going to live up here. I remember my aunt saying to him, well, as soon as you can, send for me, because I don’t want to be here either. And she came. Then my grandmother, they sent for my grandmother, my mother’s mother. And they were in Seattle.</p>
<p>But it took a while before my father was able to get away from there. The way he got away is that my grandmother had met this man, Mr. Jones, that had worked at Hanford. He was talking about how they were hiring people and they wanted people to work and that’s how my dad found out about it. As soon as he could leave there, he did. He came here to live. It took him two years to save enough money to send for the family.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Moore: What I remember about it is the living conditions and housing was just horrible.</p>
<p>Franklin: Here or in Louisiana?</p>
<p>Moore: Here! Here. Because there was no housing for black people. You had to live in east Pasco. The housing wasn’t adequate at all. We moved into—I remember when we came—I didn’t come with—at that time, my grandmother had moved back to Louisiana, so when the rest of the family came, when my mother and the other two children came, I stayed with my grandmother, and they sent for me later on. But in the same year. My mother actually cried because of where they had to live when they first came here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really? Could you describe it? What kind of—</p>
<p>Moore: Well, I can remember, it was like a little encampment over on, what, Idaho Street, I believe it was. It was owned by a family called the Haneys, and you probably—because they were here for many, many years and they still are here. They have grandchildren, all of them still here. And they owned some property and they’d put up some little shacks that people could rent. That’s what I’d call them, they were little shacks. They were—no inside plumbing; they had like a public bathhouse on the property. All of that was just so foreign to us.</p>
<p>So my mother spent most of her time trying to find a place for us to move. I think we lived in that place about three months. And then she found a house over on—what was that? On Douglas Street. And so it was—that was just—we were all so glad to get out of that place where we were. So that’s what I remember about it.</p>
<p>There was not very much—now, I never worked out at Hanford. My dad did. But that was the conditions. And by that time, I finished high school and my first real job, I got it at Our Lady of Lourdes. Sister Anthony Marie was my supervisor. I never will forget her, because when I applied for the job, I was just going to take any job. It wasn’t any special job; I just wanted to work. I had finished high school, and I’d started to go to business college in Kennewick. It was very difficult, because I didn’t have very much money or anything like that. But I needed to work, and I thought, well, I have to get a job.</p>
<p>I applied at Our Lady of Lourdes and I was hired. I was prepared to work wherever if it was cleaning up in the kitchen or whatever. Sister Anthony Marie hired me and trained me as a hospital aide. That was—at that time, the aides had to wear the white uniform, the white stockings and everything except the cap, as a nursing aide. So that was my first real job here. The pay was $120 a month. And I was glad to get it.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would that have compared to the job back in the—to the similar type of job back in the South?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, before we’d moved, my mother—it was two doctors in the little town where we lived. My mother got a job where she worked at that doctor’s office. I think she was getting paid, maybe, $15 a week.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, so, $120 a month was quite a bit more.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. And my first real job. Oh, I was very happy to get it. I worked a year-and-a-half. Things had started to improve a little bit. That’s when they started building some other housing in east Pasco. But I worked 15 months at Our Lady of Lourdes and then I moved on to Seattle, because my aunt and uncle and all lived in Seattle. I got a job as a hospital aide at the veterans’ hospital, the new one that they opened that year. And so that’s where I worked until I’d gotten married. You know, so it was a real journey.</p>
<p>But I also kind of wanted to go to school and it just seemed like I never did get a chance to do it. I had to work. And then I got married, and of course, three children, just one right after the other. And I worked a lot, but it was at home, taking care of kids. I married Thomas Moore.</p>
<p>Now he had been here since, I guess, 1949. He was a divorcé; he had two girls. So I had a family right away. And then, as I said, three children. It was five children. The girls were—when Tom and I got married, the girls were ten and five. So that was a nice experience for me. But I had helped raise—actually, at home, I was the oldest one. So my three brothers and—my three siblings, I’d always helped with them. So I knew how to take care of kids. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you meet Thomas in Seattle, or—Thomas was from here? Or he had moved here?</p>
<p>Moore: He had moved here. When he came here from what I’ve heard, from some of the things he said, he always wanted to be a businessman. He had a restaurant downtown near the overpass, you know that street that—what is that? The main street that comes through Pasco there. Lewis Street.</p>
<p>Franklin: Lewis Street.</p>
<p>Moore: Lewis Street. So he had—and, you know, at that time, it was kind of segregated in the sense that—but he went out of business with that. I don’t know how long he had it. At the time I married him, he had a pool hall over in east Pasco. That was when he had the other restaurant, I think, that was when he was married to his first wife. And then when they were divorced, he still had that pool hall. But that—at that time, things had opened up. There was some housing where people of color could get housing—rent places near the railroad track on the east side. But that’s about as far as they got. Took a while for people to be able to get decent housing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because Pasco was divided into—</p>
<p>Moore: It was divided into east Pasco and north Pasco. The railroad track actually divided the community and—I have to get—I have hay fever here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, no problem.</p>
<p>Moore: So I got to get my tissue.</p>
<p>I remember when working at Our Lady of Lourdes, I had to walk to work because I didn’t have any transportation. And at that time, there was not—it was a lot of empty spaces over there in east Pasco. It wasn’t that much housing, a lot of tumbleweeds, which I’d never seen in my life. I didn’t even know what a tumbleweed was. [LAUGHTER] I can remember, one of the things that I remember, walking to work—and the wind blew a lot then—those tumbleweeds would just come rolling down the street, well the roads, mostly. You didn’t want to get caught in that bunch, because they’d gather up as they’d come, and you don’t want to get caught in that. [LAUGHTER] So I can remember, walking, trying to dodge tumbleweeds on my way walking.</p>
<p>And coming under that underpass, that always frightened me. I never wanted to do it, but I had to. You either did that or you walked across the railroad track. I was afraid to walk across the railroad track, because of trains. So, you know, going under that underpass was not easy for me. So anyway, that’s some of the things that I remember about that.</p>
<p>It’s just the hardships. Dad would come home from work sometime and he would say things like, oh, well, they had to hose us down today. What is that? Well, you know, they wash you off, because they could read that we had been in a hot place. Now, here’s the thing. I don’t think anyone, pretty much, that was working out there understood what that really meant. They didn’t really understand. I mean, they didn’t know how dangerous it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: And so—we didn’t. I was the oldest one in my family, but I didn’t really understand anything about that. I didn’t know that it was really dangerous and it was something that he could’ve still had on him, on his clothing or whatever, when he came home, and I’m sure he did. But that happened a lot, where he was working, he said, we got into a hot area. They didn’t really explain that to workers. They told them, but, you know? Who knew? I mean, most of the people, a lot of the people were just like my dad. They’d come from an area that nothing like that had ever happened. They didn’t really know what it was all about.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of education level did your dad have?</p>
<p>Moore: My dad, I think he went to—let me see—he finished the eighth grade.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And when he got a job out at Hanford, did he ever talk about what he did? Was he like construction, or--?</p>
<p>Moore: It was construction. He belonged to the labor union. And it was construction, and a lot of it, I guess, was clean-up stuff that they did. Cleaning up what, I have no idea. You know, we didn’t know, and they didn’t either. They just did whatever they were told to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was he happy with the compensation of the job, like the pay, was it a good job for him, or was he still kind of looking unsatisfied, kind of looking for—</p>
<p>Moore: Well, it was a good job for him. I mean, he had never been able to get a job that paid as much as it did. Yeah. I don’t remember him complaining about the work; he was just glad to be working.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did he work out at Hanford for?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, let’s see. Oh, he worked there until—in the ‘70s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. So quite a while then.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, so from 1950 until—I don’t remember exactly in the ‘70s. Mother finally convinced him that she didn’t want to live here, and they moved to Seattle. Mother—my mother never was satisfied here. She also got a job at Our Lady of Lourdes, the same year that I did. Because my oldest—my youngest brother was like two years old or something, three years old. So I worked the swing shift, and she worked days. So we kind of worked out the remaining—and in between us going, she coming from work and me going to work, there was a lady that we knew that my father had actually helped that family to come to Pasco, too. They were from Louisiana. The Wilkins. I don’t know if you—</p>
<p>Franklin: Was it a family that he knew personally?</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that how a lot of—</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Seems to me that’s how a lot of migration into this area happened, was people tell family and friends and is that—</p>
<p>Moore: Right, that’s what happened, because from where we came from in Louisiana, I don’t think there was anyone there that even had heard of Hanford. Didn’t even know that much about Washington state. The thing of it is, you know, I remember the first time I noticed Washington state on something, during the ‘40s, we would get boxes of apples that they gave—I think they called it commodity or something, that the government—it was surplus fruit and stuff that was sent to help the people. Dad helped to distribute that stuff to families. We got a box of apples, and on the apple box it said Washington State. So that was pretty much what I knew about Washington state until I got into school and got to learn more about geography and everything. But yeah, that was my first knowledge of Washington state. We got a box of apples with what the government gave. And they gave things like—I don’t remember getting any other fruit, but I remember the apples, we did get apples.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Louisiana where you lived before you came here, where you lived was—was where you lived segregated?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, it was definitely segregated.</p>
<p>Franklin: How deep did segregation go there? Did it go all the way to—</p>
<p>Moore: [LAUGHTER] About as deep as it could get. We had separate schools. My first school that I went to, the very first I can remember, we lived about probably three miles from—well, it seemed like to me it was a very long way, being a young child. But I would imagine it was about three miles.</p>
<p>That’s when we lived in the country. Daddy was working, at that time, he worked at the gin—gin cotton where they baled the cotton. We lived in the country in this little area. We had a house that they built on the plantation. It was a plantation. There was a plot of land just adjacent to the house that my mother would work in that. I remember her out there hoeing and stuff when I was very little.</p>
<p>I went to school. It was a church, a one-room church house. And one of our cousins was the teacher. And all the kids were in this one room. The big—she trained the kids that were in the fourth, fifth grade to help the young ones. So that was my first of going to school. I went to school. And believe it or not, we had a horse. His name was Shorty. Mother would put me on the horse and my brother was a baby at that time. She would hold the baby, and I’m sitting behind her on the horse and drive me to school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Moore: And then come pick me up. That was—the part I remember about that was, I was so afraid the first day that I went to school because—the only thing that made me not so afraid, one of our cousins was the teacher. So I did know her, but I didn’t know any of the other children. And we didn’t live close, as I said, children—they were at least three miles away from me. So I didn’t know any of them. And I was so afraid. I just did not want to be there. [LAUGHTER] I was so glad when Mother came and picked me up. But that was the beginning.</p>
<p>Then we moved—going back now, I’m kind of going back and forth, because we moved to another area that was close to the sawmill where Daddy worked. Because he’d work at the sawmill and then during the season when they were doing the cotton, he worked at the gin, baled the cotton. And it was other people did live closer to us then, because they had a house that there were several houses in the area where the sawmill was. The people that worked there lived in those houses. And then the school I went to was still another church house thing. So from the first through third grade, I went to a one-room church house school.</p>
<p>Franklin: And these were segregated schools?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, of course it was segregated. The teachers were all black. When we moved to town, that’s when I actually got to go to a real school building. Because there was a settlement of black people in that area. There were white people that lived across the highway. The highway ran through. They lived, they had different schools and everything. But in that—that’s when I went to school in a real school and we had several teachers. It was, the high school was there, too.</p>
<p>So those were—that part was really good experience, and I remember feeling good about it. I was a very good student and the teachers liked me. I had friends and there were other kids there and everything. When I got in high school, I played basketball. That was nice; we’d go to the little towns to play the other teams and that type of thing.</p>
<p>So that, I enjoyed, even though it was segregated, but that’s all we knew of, being segregated. I mean, when you went to the movies, we had to sit upstairs in the balcony. You had to buy your ticket from another window on the side of the building, and then you couldn’t go into the front of the building in the lobby and buy the ticket. You had to—they had a window on the side and you went upstairs to the movie. But we would go, we’d go to the movies every week. [LAUGHTER] You know, every weekend, we went to see—I remember the only thing they played was Western movies. It was like Gene Autry—you probably don’t even know who I’m talking about. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: No, believe it or not—believe it or not, I do. Yeah. I grew up with my grandmother and she was really into old Westerns.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. So that was a real treat for us. The tickets cost $0.12 for children. So you should see me trying to save up my pennies during the week so I could go to the movies.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about other elements of life in—like the store and restaurants and things? Were those also segregated establishments as well?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, yes. They were segregated here, too, when people first—when my husband first came here, as I said, the restaurant he had down there on Lewis Street, it was sort of segregated. I mean, it was segregated to the point to where black people couldn’t go to other restaurant—they had their own little restaurants and stuff, even over there in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there—</p>
<p>Moore: There were a couple restaurants, and they were—</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there signs here? Was it as formal as it had been in Louisiana? Or--?</p>
<p>Moore: No. No, it was just subtle in the sense that you weren’t going to get served or you just knew that you—you know. There’s certain places you didn’t go. There was no one—no black people living in Kennewick. You couldn’t—even when it got to the point here in Pasco when more and more black people came in, and it sort of opened up, you could rent a house in some parts, as I said, the parts near the railroad track, on this side of the railroad track. But there was no black people living in Kennewick. They wouldn’t rent you a place.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Moore: So that was completely—</p>
<p>Franklin: I wanted to ask, we talked a little bit about your coming here, but I wanted to ask, what were your—how did you—did you take a train here?</p>
<p>Moore: I took a train. It took five days to come from Louisiana to Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were your first impressions of Pasco when you got here?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, I was upset! Just kind of like my mother. My mother, as I said, she was still in tears. She just hated the place. [LAUGHTER] I didn’t like it. I knew that—well, my dad was working, so we did have a roof over our head, and he was feeding the family and stuff.</p>
<p>So it was not that we didn’t have that; we had—in Louisiana, after we moved out of the country, things weren’t too bad. It was segregated, of course, but every—the black part of town had their own restaurants and a couple stores, and they did have a big grocery store there in that part of the town where people go. Only one that I remember, one big sort of big grocery store. But you know, I kind of lost my thought now. Because I’m going back and forth. Is that okay to do that?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Because I’m remembering—</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s just the way our memories work and how life is.</p>
<p>Moore: And when you compare some things.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: But you were asking about—you said if there was signs here?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. If the segregation was as formal, or—if formal’s the right word. Because Louisiana’s segregation, the South, there were signs, it was in the law. Here it seems to have existed but kind of outside the law or informally, and I kind of wanted to just get your memories of that.</p>
<p>Moore: Yes. It was here. It was here, you felt it if you were a person of color, you definitely felt it, and you knew that—there were no black people working at any of the restaurants or anything. There may have been some in the kitchen, but I don’t remember because I didn’t go to them anyway. But in my young adulthood, you just didn’t, you didn’t go. When you went to a restaurant—as I said, I don’t remember ever seeing any signs, but there were only certain ones that you could go to. There were no black people working in any of the restaurants where you could see them. As I said, there may have been some in the kitchen, working. But I don’t know. When I got the job at Our Lady of Lourdes, as I recall, there were only three people of color working there, including myself.</p>
<p>Franklin: And your mother?</p>
<p>Moore: And my mother. But there was two—one lady worked in the kitchen at Our Lady of Lourdes, and then there was one that was—I don’t know if she was an aide or not. She worked there for years and years and years.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were you treated by your coworkers there?</p>
<p>Moore: Very nice. I never had any problem with anyone. And it was a Catholic hospital, and I was Catholic, and the sisters, as I said, I remember sister Anthony Marie. She was just such a lovely, nice person. Because when she hired me, I didn’t know what she was going to hire me for. I said I was ready for any kind of work. When she hired me, I really knew nothing about working in a hospital. So she taught me pretty much everything.</p>
<p>I didn’t even know how to read a thermometer. I remember the first week that she gave me a thermometer and she taught me how to read it, and you know, the first few days, I could not even see the line in it. I would turn it and turn it, and I couldn’t see the line. But once you learned how to do it, it’s so easy. The minute you hold it up, you see the line. But she had a lot of patience and she taught me the terminology and everything that we did. I was soon on the floor, following the other aides at first for about a month, and the nurses. And I learned quickly, so within two months, I knew how to do the different things that they needed me to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Moore: So it was nice.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you finish high school in Louisiana, or did you finish high school here?</p>
<p>Moore: I finished in Louisiana. That was the year we moved, that Mother moved.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Moore: So when Mother and the other kids moved, then I came. But I had finished high school there.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to, moving from Louisiana?</p>
<p>Moore: [LAUGHTER] As I said, the housing, the places where we had to live when we first came here. Because we had a nice little house in Louisiana, once we had moved to town. Yeah. And so, it was just—and the conditions. It was dirty, the wind blew all the time, sand was everywhere. During those days—and sand would get in; I don’t care how you—everyday, you had to dust, you had to clean in the places where we were living, because sand would get through any little crack. And there were some cracks! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that’s a common story, all around. Yeah, wow.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, that was the worst part of it. And when I—after I’d started work, actually, within six—well, within six months, I had bought myself a little car, and I didn’t have to walk in the wind blowing the sand. So that was—I was actually pretty satisfied until—I knew I didn’t want to live here, though, and that’s why I moved to Seattle.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did you come back to the area from Seattle?</p>
<p>Moore: I came back in ’54—moved back in ’54.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Moore: So I worked 15 months here and then I went to Seattle and I worked almost two years.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was it that brought you back, was it your husband?</p>
<p>Moore: Mm-hm. I got married, and as I said, then I was stuck here, because—you know. He lived—he always wanted to have his own business. So the restaurant business and the other—a pool hall, I think he had, it didn’t work out too well. So actually when we got married, he was a laborer, which he had never really done. And he had joined the labor union. He got a job working on Ice Harbor Dam when they were building it. We had one of the houses over there on California Street, which is facing the park over there, now. That park, they actually—that was all—that park was just all open field when we got married. But there was a row of houses. They dismantled and moved all those houses and then set that up as an industrial area, you know, from the area on over to the railroad tracks, I think, is all industrial.</p>
<p>Franklin: That was part of the redevelopment? How did you feel about coming back to Pasco? Were you—</p>
<p>Moore: Well, when you’re young and you get married, and you’re in love—it was okay. Because my husband was here and so it was okay. Evidently, it had to be okay because I lived here then thirty-something years, raised my kids here, anyway. But when they had divided that area and was redeveloping that area, see, my husband built a fourplex over there on Douglas and—I don’t know if that’s Wehe; I can’t remember if that’s Wehe or not. I don’t even go over there anymore. I mean, I hated east Pasco so bad. [LAUGHTER] Since I’ve been back here, I’ve only been over that way about three times.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. Why is that? Just—</p>
<p>Moore: it was because it was just such a horrible beginning over there, you know? I just didn’t—I didn’t like it. Now, there’s nothing there, really. Now, my husband, see, he developed a business there. He finally went into build a wrecking yard, which is one of the biggest wrecking yards, I guess—it was at that time—right there on Wehe and A Street, on the other side of the railroad track. So that was the business that stuck with him, and the one that he was able to develop, and made it successful, and that’s what we were able to raise our kids with, with that business.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe life in east Pasco and the community and what did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Moore: I didn’t do anything. There was no social life. As I said, I was lucky enough to get a job pretty soon after—within three months, I had a job. So I worked and I came back home. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Any community events that stick out to you?</p>
<p>Moore: There was a church that—I’m Catholic, so I’d come to church, but you know it was over here, Saint Patrick’s. Once in a while, I’d visit some of those other churches over there. There was only a couple at that time. But there was really no social life.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of role did church play in the community?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, it played a big role. It still plays a pretty big role for the people that belong to those churches. They play a pretty big role. The churches, always in the black community, play a large role. Because the churches were there when there was nothing else. It’s not only for their spiritual satisfaction; it’s the social thing, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities or traditions or events that people brought with them from the places that they migrated from?</p>
<p>Moore: I wasn’t really involved too much—the church, as I say, was the—oh, well, now, you mean back then, or now? Over the years, yes, they brought some things with them. Like they celebrate Juneteenth which came from a Southern celebration.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm, the end of slavery, right?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, when they found out about it was the end. It was June, it took until June, yes. So, yes, that’s one of the celebrations that they have here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because that’s now a pretty big pageant and community event all around the United States.</p>
<p>Moore: Right. And it’s because of black people coming from the South and they brought that with them. That would be something, a celebration that they would have every year. And it has caught on. So, yeah, they do have it. And they celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday and stuff like that. And that’s something, of course—it was people from the South really pushed that to happen. In the small communities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right.</p>
<p>Moore: You see, when I came here, I had—there was nothing for me to do, except work and I would go to mass on Sundays, and then I worked and I’d go home. And I wasn’t here that long, then. When I came back, and once my children got up, I didn’t work until—I didn’t go back to work until my youngest child was old enough to go to school. So, from the time my first child was born until then, I just took care of home and the children. I got a job at Safeway, which was the second black person to ever work at Safeway. They had a little store downtown Pasco on 4th—or was it on 5<sup>th</sup>? And I worked there—I got that job in 1963, and I worked there—and I worked part-time; I didn’t work full-time because my children were still young and I didn’t want to be away from them that long. So they were very, very accommodating to me—</p>
<p>Franklin: Safeway was?</p>
<p>Moore: Safeway. Because I made arrangements with them that during the summer, they would hire a student to work in my place so I could stay home with my children. I didn’t want them all summer without having me there. So, Safeway did that, and I worked with Safeway for 12 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah. You said you were the second—</p>
<p>Moore: I was the second black person to work there. The first black woman, she’s still here, Doris—I can’t remember Doris’ last name now. But they moved her to one of the stores, I think it was either Kennewick or Richland, that she went to work over there and they hired me in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where was the Safeway located in Pasco, was it in east Pasco, or was it—</p>
<p>Moore: It was on 5<sup>th</sup>—no, it was on 5<sup>th</sup> and Clark, I think. Yeah. It’s where that—it’s a bank there now, used to be a bank. I haven’t been over there since I’ve been back now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hmm, I don’t know if I’ve been over there either.</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah. But it was on 5<sup>th</sup> and Clark.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you treated fairly by the management and the patrons? Or—</p>
<p>Moore: Well, the management was fine. The patrons, when I first, I would say the first week or the first two weeks I was in there, they would line up in the other checkstand. We had three—did we have three checkstands or two? We only had two checkstands, I think. It was a small store. And they would line up in the other stand and I’m just standing there at my checkstand, because—and pretty soon, they realized that, oh, yeah, if I can go through that checkstand, I can check out real quick and I’m gone. [LAUGHTER] So it took people about three weeks or two weeks to realize that, okay, it doesn’t make sense for me to stand over here in this line when I can go on through the checkstand. And they did.</p>
<p>And I was a good checker. I learned to be a very good checker. At that time, it wasn’t like scanning now, you scan through; we had to memorize the prices, and you keyed everything in, you subtotaled, you put the tax in and totaled, and you had to count out their change to them, because there was no automatic telling you how much change that was coming back and everything. Well, I’ve always been a real fast learner, so, as I said, within a month, I was a real good checker. I worked twelve years there.</p>
<p>A couple times, I went out—they sent me out to Richland, but after that—my kids were teenagers then, and I worked in the Richland store, out there. But I had no problems with people, because I treated everyone the same, I was courteous. At that time, we had to be nice and courteous when you worked in a store or something. Now people will check you out and won’t even speak to you. You know, they scan the groceries across the thing and never even say a word to you sometimes. I was just very nice and courteous to people; I treated everyone the same. So, it worked out fine.</p>
<p>I actually enjoyed working at that store. I did, I had no problems. And I never did—at that time, the employment office was next-door to Safeway downtown. There was an employment office down there. That’s when they had really started to hire people of color, minorities and blacks, out at Hanford. I mean, other than just doing the labor work and stuff like that. So I was asked to take a test and go out to Hanford to work, and I refused, because I didn’t want to be away from my children that much.</p>
<p>See, that was my thing. I worked. My family was more important to me than my job, really. And so I just—I didn’t want to put in full-time work and having to travel out there and everything to work. So I never—that was one of the reasons I never did go. Several of my friends did, and they were trained to do clerical work and different things like that. So they’d opened up to where they were actually training people to—</p>
<p>Franklin: Around what time was that?</p>
<p>Moore: That must have been, let me see, I have to think back here. Oh, gosh. That had to be like in the late ‘70s?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Moore: I think it was like in the middle to late ‘70s and early ‘80s when quite a few people that I knew went out to work. During the time my kids were growing up, I did volunteer work. My kids all went to St. Patrick’s through to the ninth grade. I did volunteer work there and of course a cub scout leader and PTA and all that stuff. So I was involved in that type thing. Then my children, when they got into high school, I was appointed my Governor Evans to serve on the Washington State Women’s Council. I did that for about almost three years. That was during the time when we worked for the equal rights amendment and different things like that.</p>
<p>I had always wanted to go back to school. I went to college, CBC, and at that time, I quit work for two years and I went to CBC. And then I got my two-year degree and I decided I wanted to go ahead and get my bachelor’s. I did that through programs that were brought down from Eastern Washington. And I went back—oh, after that time—I’m trying to keep this in the right way, now. I was still working for—oh, when we had the big problem in the school district where they reassigned the high school principal which had been there for years and years and the town just went crazy and recalled the school board that was the school board at that time. And they recalled the whole school board.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was that over?</p>
<p>Moore: It was over not treating minority kids right at the high school. And all the schools, really. But the high school is where they had the biggest problem. That was during the time when the civil rights movement was everywhere and going on. So that year, they had recruited a black music teacher that taught at the junior high school, and his wife was appointed—there was an opening on the school board, and she was appointed to serve on the school board. So, she actually saw what was happening, how the black students were treated at the high school, and how if there was a disagreement between a white student and a black student, the black student wound up getting suspended; the white student didn’t. Regardless of who started it and what it was about. And different things like that; it was just stuff going on. She and the other school board members started trying to do something about that, and bring about some equal treatments, wanting—</p>
<p>And the community—and so they thought the best thing to do was to reassign the principal that had been there for years and that was his little kingdom and he could do whatever he wanted to do. When they reassigned him to another job, he refused it, and said he was treated unfairly and that type of thing. He had his group of people that sided with him, and then the group of people that wanted to change things in the community. So the school board was recalled. I mean, they just recalled that whole school board.</p>
<p>They had also hired—while that school board was in together, and after they had started trying to make some changes—at that time, I really wasn’t following it too much until they appointed—a new superintendent came in, a young man from—I don’t remember where he was from—and he had brought in a group of people that was progressive, that wanted to make changes and stuff like that. So anyway the school board was recalled and the principal decided he wasn’t going to take the job that they had offered him. He thought he could make them change and get his way.</p>
<p>I was one of the people that was appointed to be on the temporary—on the school board until—it was three of us, three people appointed to serve on the school board. One was a farmer from out in the blocks, and another one was a guy that worked at Hanford. So the three of us had to come in and serve on the school board and it was a learning experience for all three of us. I mean, we had not had that kind of experience. It was really some trying times going on.</p>
<p>They wanted to force us to hire the principal back at high school. And we said, no, we weren’t going to do that. Our job was to appoint two other people; it was a five-member board, and our job was to appoint two other people to make up the board, and we did. We appointed a minister that was a minister in this part of Pasco, and then a businessman, too. So I was the only minority person on the board. I had to really be on my mark. I mean, I had to really learn as fast as I could about what was going—all three of us did—I mean, all of us did, really. To appoint the two other people, we had to be really careful who we appointed, because we had to be people that were open-minded and wanted to carry the school district forward instead of falling back into that same type of mentality that was before. So, it was very, very difficult.</p>
<p>We would have—when we’d have the first six months or the first year, the levy failed, because people were all upset and everything. So the levy would fail and they cut out a lot of the good programs, I mean enhancement-type programs, because they levy failed. My son was in high school. At that time, he was in the tenth grade, coming out of St. Pat’s. He was on the debate team. That was canceled. And he was so upset, he lost interest in school. So that was a personal problem for me. [LAUGHTER] Trying to get him, you know, so he wasn’t so upset about something that he really enjoyed doing. He was a very good debater, and that didn’t work.</p>
<p>But getting back to the big problem, the school board problem, we had to really make up our mind what way we were really going to go with this. Three of us, we had to appoint two other people, which we did, the people that we picked, we thought they were people that would be open-minded. And at that time, also, they had very few, I think maybe there were three black teachers in the whole district. So it was a real big problem.</p>
<p>I remember, our school board meetings would be so full, we had to move them to the auditorium at the grade school, McGee. No, was McGee over there? I think it was. In order to have room for everybody. And they were rowdy, and they brought cameras, and they brought recorders and everything, so they could record every word that we said in the meeting. How long—excuse me, I’m going to ask you a question. How long have you been around? Were you around during that time? You were there, so you know what happened.</p>
<p>Tom Hungate: I was over in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Moore: You were in Kennewick. I know you were, but I mean, the <em>Tri-City Herald</em>, every day there was a big article in the paper about everything, and people were making threats. I mean, I had phone calls where they’d threaten me that I’d better vote to hire back the principal that had been there, or either—whatever. So we had to make up our mind what we were going to do.</p>
<p>I had to really be on top of them when it came to choosing the other two people that was going to be on that board. Because the two guys that were on the board, as I said, they were both very good—they were good people, I liked them. The three of us kind of clicked. But we had to be careful who we appointed. Several times, I had to really just speak up and say, no, that person is not going to work, because of research I had done. I had to do research! The other two guys, they weren’t thinking so—they had never been exposed to segregation or anything. I mean, these are two people who didn’t know where I was coming from. I had to speak up and let them know what was really happening.</p>
<p>It worked out, and we had the other two people appointed, and we decided that we would offer this principal that had refused to—he started driving a potato truck to make people feel sorry for him, you know, the ones who were on his side. So they’d march around, we’d have people marching in front of the school district office and everything when we were in there having meetings. That was really something.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sounds like a real circus.</p>
<p>Moore: But within a year, we also had to hire—we had to hire a new superintendent, because he—that was all going on, so he decided it was best for him to leave and go somewhere else. So that was another big problem of hiring the right person. We had to interview all these people for superintendent, and we had to interview for people to fill in the place as the principal. We went through two people we hired, and one of them stayed for a year, and he was gone. He just couldn’t take it. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Because the high school was just—many of the teachers had been there for years, too. And they were used to what had been going on before. So that was difficult. We finally, within a year-and-a-half, the levy—we got the next levy passed. That was the beginning of people trying, really getting together and doing what they needed to do. And it worked out. That was a real learning experience for me. I learned more in—I served on the board for three years. That was worth a college degree.</p>
<p>Franklin: The experience?</p>
<p>Moore: The experience was, it really was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember the name of the first—the principal that had been reassigned, and what happened to him?</p>
<p>Moore: You know, I don’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Moore: I’m 85, okay? [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: I understand.</p>
<p>Moore: I really don’t remember his name.</p>
<p>Franklin: Does the name, last name Ferrari, does that ring a bell?</p>
<p>Moore: No, that wasn’t it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Moore: No, it wasn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: In preparation for this project, I went and did some research and looked through some of the records from the Congress of Racial Equality branch that was here in the Tri-Cities, the CORE movement, and they had mentioned this—the records were from the ‘60s to the early ‘70s. They mentioned this—what was going on in Pasco, at Pasco High School, and that there had been issues with the principal, that there had been issues with some students, that there was a fight between some white girls and black girls.</p>
<p>Moore: Well, that—yeah, that had started happening quite often, when everyone was all upset and everything like that. You know how teenagers act out? So there was quite a bit of that that would go on. You know, to bring order to all of that, it was really—it was something.</p>
<p>Franklin: I bet, I bet.</p>
<p>Moore: It really was. Thank goodness we did—we got things in pretty good shape.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Thank you. I had taken a lot of notes about that, but I want to go back through that material when I get back. That should be a—it seems a good part of my research.</p>
<p>Moore: Well, I’m going to tell you, I have to say this about the <em>Tri-City Herald</em>. They were really biased in some of the stuff they printed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, I’ll look for that. Biased against who, or for who?</p>
<p>Moore: They were biased against—well, I felt they like they were biased against the new school board in a sense, for what we were trying to do. Because it was overwhelmingly on that other side for a while. I mean, we had to work really hard to turn things around. We really did. And we had to do it in a way where we were trying to make everyone feel good about what was happening, you know?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: So it was a very difficult job.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, you needed that community buy-in.</p>
<p>Moore: Yes, you definitely did.</p>
<p>Franklin: And community support.</p>
<p>Moore: But it didn’t take—as I said, within two years, we had it so that the community was behind us—the majority of the community. There’s still those holdouts that were there. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, there will always be a few. How long did you serve on the school board?</p>
<p>Moore: I served on it three years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so you passed the reins when things had—</p>
<p>Moore: Well, I was appointed, at first, for one year. Because they’re staggered, so when we were appointed, I was appointed for one year. And then I was elected and served the next two years. And I would have gone on, but my husband started complaining I was away from home a lot. He was used to me being at home taking care of things. [LAUGHTER] But my kids were in high school and everything, and they were old enough to where I felt like I could go ahead. And it was such an important thing, I felt so obligated. I had to follow through with it. I had to try to help things to be better than what they were.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you feel like things did end up being better? Do you feel like you made progress there?</p>
<p>Moore: I think we made progress, yes. I think we made a lot of progress. We also recruited a lot of black teachers, smart people, some of them wound up being—at least three or four of them wound up being principals of schools here and then went on to other places.</p>
<p>Carl Peterson was one that we recruited. He was one of the assistant superintendents that had been here, the group that had resigned and went on at the beginning of—after that first year of going through all that turmoil. He was recruited to the Tacoma area, and he—I mean, he’s retired now, but he went on to build two schools there. So when he was recruited to first go over there, he was principal of the school for one year, and then they assigned him to build a school. And then after he was there two years, they wanted him to build another school, be in charge of building and setting it up.</p>
<p>So when we recruited—but that was only because we were on that—I was on that schoolboard. I was on that schoolboard—I was the cause of them celebrating Black History Month. Okay, I have to say this. After I was on the schoolboard, I was also then hired to work in the school district. So I worked as a community liaison person in the school district until I left here and moved to Seattle. But I helped to organize, and all the time trying to recruit very good black people to fill in some of the teaching positions, to have some black aides in the school district, which they didn’t have any before. So I did a lot of that type of thing. Which helped, because then you had people that could come in with some other ideas.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing I find about—a lot of people do things out of ignorance, just because they don’t know, and they haven’t been exposed to minorities. And once they’re exposed to minority people that’s educated and interesting, they change their mind about a lot of their feelings. It opens them up. So, anyway, I thought recruiting and having black teachers in the district and stuff like that really helped a lot of people. And it helped to make things different.</p>
<p>Franklin: And it helped to reflect the population, too.</p>
<p>Moore: Right, yes, it did. Of course the black population anymore is very, very small. Because I think most—many of the people just moved away. Their children did. Their children didn’t stay here. At one time, I think we had about, what, 5% of the population in the school district was black. Now, I think it’s about three. I’m not sure, but I think it’s about three.</p>
<p>But at that time, see, when I first came here, there were no minorities hardly at all. Now we have a lot of Mexicans, too, in the school district. At that time, there wasn’t. So all of that has helped to just—helped the area grow and the school districts to change their mind about the way they were doing certain things. So, I think it’s better.</p>
<p>I’m not—I’ve been away from here, though, like I said, I moved. So I just came back, and I haven’t been involved. I’m too old now to be involved with stuff. And then, plus, I’m sick. But I think we did a lot of good.</p>
<p>And I worked a lot on the different charitable organizations that were here. I served on the boards of probably seven of them and brought in some awareness. That helped, too, because all the charitable—many of the charitable organizations had no minority representation. And so, that was one of the things that I did. I helped them to realize how important it was to have that type of input. When I was gone, they would still have the input. So that was my idea of trying to do that. And I think that helped a lot. I served on the United Way board for years. Anyway, I tried to do my share of working in the community.</p>
<p>Franklin: It sounds like you really did. I mean, that’s wonderful.</p>
<p>Moore: I actually enjoyed it. You know, I enjoyed meeting people, I enjoyed bringing about some awareness. And you know what I would say is, I can’t speak for everybody. I can’t—well, it finally got so I had to turn down different things that I was asked to do because it was too much. People were acting as if I was a spokesman for the whole black community, and I had to just let that—that couldn’t be. I’m not a spokesman for them.</p>
<p>So it was—I enjoyed that part of my life, because I was involved with community, and we got some really good things done. I didn’t have anything to do, much, with employment-type things that happened. I served on the planning board for the skills center that opened in Kennewick. I don’t know what it’s called now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is it Tri-Tech?</p>
<p>Moore: Probably that is, the skills center?</p>
<p>Franklin: Tri-Tech Skills Center?</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: They have like a radio station, and—</p>
<p>Moore: Well, they opened up with a lot of different beginning skill things that went on there. Training for carpentry, auto mechanics, what, I think they had a beauty school, radio-type thing, a lot of different things that the high school kids could be exposed to.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Moore: So, you know, those were things that I thought, I was glad to serve on those commissions and things, to try to help them plan that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. I wanted to ask you, were there opportunities available here in the Tri-Cities that were not available where you or your parents came from?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it came to be, as more people came in. I think maybe, back in the late ‘40s and stuff like that, that’s when minorities started coming here to work. But Hanford was the thing that opened it up to get more people in. As that happened, then things grew to where people—there were opportunities.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were opportunities limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, I think so. You said where was it? Here, in this area, yes, they were.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were they?</p>
<p>Moore: It was just very subtle. I think a lot of it was very subtle. I mean, I went to—oh, I tried out a lot of things. I went to put my application in at a lot of different places. And I knew it was just thrown in the wastebasket when I left. [LAUGHTER] You know, I mean, but that’s the way it was. They didn’t turn you down.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, you can laugh at it now, but—</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, they didn’t turn you down and say, we’re not going to take your application. That’s what they would have done where I came from. They’d say, well, you’re not—you can’t be hired here, you’re not going to work, we’re not taking your application. They would take the applications, but nothing ever happened with it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, they’d smile and take it and then probably—</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, right. I don’t ever remember anyone being rude or anything like that. The only rudeness, and that wasn’t really in this area, that must have been in 19—let me see, what year was that, maybe ’78? We never got a chance to do any vacation or anything, but we did decide that year we were going to go camping, when the kids were big enough to where they could enjoy going camping. My husband and I, we had a trailer that we hooked up onto our car and we were going camping, we were going to go up into Montana.</p>
<p>And so the only trouble, the only rudeness we ran into, we stopped in Ritzville. I think it’s Ritzville, between here and—yeah. We stopped there and we went in the restaurant, and we had food, and when we came out, my daughter, which was four, about four years old, she said, Mom, I need to go to the restroom. I said, okay, so there was a service station right there, and I said, we can go here, then. Because my husband and the boys were still in the restaurant. And I went, and it was locked. I asked if I could have the key, and he said, no. It’s broken. It’s out of order.</p>
<p>So as we were standing there waiting for my husband to come out, because there was another service one across the street, and I thought, well, we’ll just go across the street over there and go. And we were standing there waiting, and I saw other people come and go in the restroom. So when my husband came out, I said, you know, we asked to use that restroom, and he said it was out of order. But other people are going there.</p>
<p>And my husband went over and said to him, oh, I see your restroom, you got it fixed, huh? And the—oh, that man just went all to pieces, started yelling at Tom and stuff like that. And then the ones across the street said, hey, man, are you having any trouble over there, you need help? And I caught my husband’s arm, I said, don’t argue with him, let’s just go. Just go. But, you know, if he had continued, in my mind, I thought, they’d probably beat him up, throw him in jail. And so that was the only thing I’d ever had that kind of trouble with.</p>
<p>So when I came back, I just couldn’t let it go. I had to write a letter about it. I wrote a letter to the <em>Tri-City Herald</em> saying how we’d been treated there. I didn’t think any more about it. It was printed. And then in a few weeks—I was working at Safeway then. That’s right, it was in the ‘60s, must have been in the late ‘60s. I had just started working at Safeway, and there was—people contacted me that worked for, what, the civil rights or something. But it was a white woman that came and interviewed me, and she asked me about it, and I told her what happened.</p>
<p>She said, well—at that time, we lived over there near the highway on Lewis Street. We had bought a house over there. It was right on Lewis Street. She said to me, be careful. You know, someone may decide that they may do something—hurt you or something about this. I hadn’t really thought of it in that manner. But that was disconcerting, to have someone come and say that to me. But she came to find out, to see what they could do, if they could bring charges or something against them.</p>
<p>Then, about a week later, it was—was it Texaco? I think it was a Texaco station, representatives from the Texaco station came to my work at the Safeway to interview me. And I just told them what had happened, and I said they were so rude, and all I wanted to do was take my daughter to the bathroom, and I told them what happened. I did get a letter of apology from the company after that.</p>
<p>See, but that’s the kind of things that happened, the kind of things that people go through that went through and may still go through in some places, I don’t know. But I mean, it wasn’t anything that we were doing wrong, it’s just that, I guess Ritzville was one of those places they didn’t see very many black people. And they thought the restroom at the service station, you couldn’t use it. That was the idea.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: So when you ask about that type of thing, it was sometime very real.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: You know?</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s an important story to tell, because I think it’s—for folks that don’t experience that, it’s hard to imagine and I think people need to hear about things like that, because it happens.</p>
<p>Moore: It happens. And as I said, something bad could have happened back there. And I just knew it, and I just—I just said, come on, let’s go. Let’s just go! Because the man that was talking to him had one of those big wrenches—I don’t know what you call it—in his hand. I imagine, if my husband had kept arguing with him, he may have decided to hit him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Moore: You know? And if that had’ve happened, no telling what would have happened.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that would’ve been bad.</p>
<p>Moore: That would’ve been bad.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wanted to—your father participated in Hanford’s early Cold War history. I wanted to ask, what did you learn or know about the prior history of African Americans at Hanford during the Manhattan Project, and from your perspective, what were their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life, and civil rights?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, I think at the beginning, they did most of the dirty work. They were put into areas—and as I said, no one understood; it wasn’t explained to people what they were really getting into. I think the people that were in charge didn’t really understand themselves. They didn’t know the ramifications of what it could turn out to be. So, yeah. But I think most of the black people—it was later on that I think blacks were hired in more—that they recruited people with more education, people that had other skills and stuff. But I think, my feeling is that most of the black people were hired at first, they did the labor work, the cleanups, the things like that.</p>
<p>You know, it’s a lot of cancer in this area. I’ve been diagnosed with myeloma since I’ve been back here. I probably had it for—I remember about 30 years ago, actually a doctor when I went in for my regular checkup, and I was a very healthy person; I never was ill—but just doing my annual checkup, and he said to me, your white cells are kind of out of whack. And so, of course, I didn’t know what that meant, and he did several tests. I went to him three times. Right here in Pasco. And I went to him three different times, and he finally told me, well, I’ve done everything. I’ve done run all these tests and I don’t see anything wrong with you. White cells is to help combat any kind of infection or anything, but you don’t have any. He said, you’re healthy. I don’t see anything wrong with you and the test doesn’t prove that there is. So, I don’t know anything to do about it, except just occasionally have a checkup. So it went on for years, and I never had any problems, so when I’d have my annual, no one else ever said anything about it, and it kind of just slipped my mind.</p>
<p>Okay, I got sick in California and I was having all this pain, all this pain, and I didn’t know what it was. My primary doctor was a very good doctor. She sent me to all these specialists, and they did tests, and they did all these things, and they kept saying, well, we don’t see anything wrong with you! You’re in good health. I was just, I mean, before then, I was such an active person. I’ve always been active. I was going to exercise classes three times a week, I took up ballroom dancing, I was dancing twice a week. No sickness except the blood pressure. I had high blood pressure and taking medication for that. But I wasn’t having any pain or anything. And I went to all these doctors; they all did every test you could think of, and they would say to me, well, I don’t see anything wrong with you. There’s not anything we can do for you.</p>
<p>So, then, when I started to getting so weak—and that’s when I said—my son just kind of insisted that he didn’t like me being there by myself. It took 12 different doctors before I got a diagnosis. I just got a diagnosis last year, here. My primary doctor here really paid attention to when I had my blood work done, paid attention to what was going on with my white cells and sent me to an oncologist. He went through my medical records and everything and there he said, I think I know what’s wrong, but I’m going to have to do two more tests to be able to diagnose it. So, he did a bone marrow exam and did complete skeletal scan. And so it’s multiple myeloma. So, see, it’s something that could be in your body for years and years and years and then finally show up.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: But then that made me think about my dad coming home saying, well, they had to hose us down today. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. We talked quite a bit about civil rights activities in Hanford and Tri-Cities and you mentioned your work on the school board. Were there any other major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, let’s see. I don’t know about Hanford, because I never worked there, you see. I never did work out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Moore: I just knew it from my friends that worked out there and my dad that worked out there. But—</p>
<p>Franklin: What about here in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, in the Tri-Cities, major—well, as I said, it was just kind of subtle. You knew it was there and there were things that happened that you didn’t feel you could get hired by certain things because—Hanford actually opened it up for people to be hired, for minorities to be hired, because otherwise there wasn’t—my stepdaughter was the first person of color to be hired at a bank here. It just hadn’t—it wasn’t happening. They weren’t hiring people there. But she was hired. So I think the work, it just evolved after everything else surrounding we were doing—things had opened up in other places and stuff, and bringing in new people, people from all over the world have come here. I think that has helped a lot.</p>
<p>Franklin: What action was being taken to address these issues in unemployment and in living, and African Americans being able to live outside east Pasco? How did that situation—</p>
<p>Moore: Well, you know, different laws and stuff were passed, too. I’ve always thought that Washington State was—actually, when you think about it, I think it’s a very good state that tried to be fair. As more and more minorities came in here, I think—there was other people coming, too, so it was people with—more progressive-type people.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights effort here at Hanford and the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, I don’t know, I’m sure it had a big influence. It had a big influence. It was kind of slow catching on, but it had a big influence.</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective and experience, what was different about civil rights efforts here?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, oh, let’s see. They started hiring more people and recruiting minority people to come in and work—</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Franklin: I think, and then we’ll wrap up, because, yeah, it’s been a long interview. It’s been a great interview. A long interview is always a good interview.</p>
<p>Moore: Well, when you edit it and everything, it’ll be okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Okay. So, I wanted to ask, and these—Tom gave me a couple great questions here. I wanted to ask, why were you appointed to be on the school board? Who reached out to you and why? Because you would’ve been a stay-at-home mom at the time, right?</p>
<p>Moore: Well, no. Well, I think it was because there weren’t very many black people in the community that was—well, I wasn’t—see, even when I was a mom, I still did things with the schools.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: So I was active in that. And I was outspoken. [LAUGHTER] That’s kind of one of the things. I was always—I wasn’t afraid to give my opinion about anything, so I think that’s probably what happened. But I’m trying to think of who—it was this other black lady that had—oh, it was Virgie Robinson, that’s who it was. She worked for the school district--</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes.</p>
<p>Moore: --at that time. She said to me, they’re looking for someone to have minority representation on the Washington State Women’s Council, from this area. And she said, I was telling them about you. So she told somebody that was connected; I don’t know. They called me and asked me if I would be interested in serving on it, and I said, yes, I would. So that was a good experience. That was for the—you know. That was before we had equal rights here in Washington State. So I served on that for, what, two years, I believe it was. Governor Evans was the one that appointed me, and then after then, I guess I might have served on it more than two years, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great.</p>
<p>Moore: You know, I was being—I’d have to go to like Seattle and Olympia sometimes when they’d have meetings over there and that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Another question, earlier on you mentioned that your grandma, who had come out here, went back to Louisiana. And why? Why’d she do that?</p>
<p>Moore: Well—oh. Oh, I told you about—I think I said that she had met this man, Mr. Jones, she married him. And they split up. And she just decided she didn’t want to be here, out here. So she moved back to Louisiana. Now, that was before my father moved out here. See, that was a couple years before he moved out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gotcha, okay.</p>
<p>Moore: Then after I was here, and married and everything, I sent for her. So I had her here with me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, so she came back out.</p>
<p>Moore: She came back with me for—and she stayed with me for—I fixed her a little place, and she stayed with us for about three years. And then her daughter, my aunt, in Tacoma, she went over to live with them, and she passed over there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gotcha, okay. That makes sense.</p>
<p>Moore: My grandmother was a very—I think she was kind of my hero. Because she was not afraid to just get out and do new things. She’s a very independent woman. Yeah. I learned a lot from her. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s really wonderful. How were opportunities different for your children here in Tri-Cities than had been for you in Louisiana?</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, my goodness. It was a lot of difference. Oh, yes. I mean, it’s so different. By the time my children graduated, things had changed a lot. They had the opportunities were there. You just had to take advantage of it. Yeah, oh, yes. Just like daylight and dark. When I went—when I graduated from high school in Louisiana, I wanted to go to college, but of course we had no money to go to college. The only way I could’ve gone, I would’ve had to—they had 4-H. I belonged to the 4-H club. I don’t know if you know what that is.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was also in 4-H.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, you were in 4-H?</p>
<p>Franklin: I grew up in a farm, yeah.</p>
<p>Moore: Oh, okay, 4-H Club. So, they had those clubs and they had scholarships. You could get a scholarship, but you had to go into farming stuff. Agricultural-type thing. And that was not for me. I had no—I was in the club in high school, but it was just a social for me. I just wanted to be with the other kids. I had no idea about staying on a farm and doing—so I passed that up. I didn’t want to do it.</p>
<p>The only other opportunity was to go into the service, which some kids did. I just thought, no, that’s not for me, either. You know, they’d go into service and then you’d have to go off to college. Most of the only opportunities was what they trained for. I know a lot of the boys, they actually went and they took agricultural as their—that was their major, that’s what they majored in. And then there was teaching, you could either get to be a teacher, you know, and I didn’t really want to be a teacher.</p>
<p>So, I actually had no opportunity—I was so glad when my dad left and came and I had a chance to leave there. What I wanted to do was go into business. I did actually start business school here, but I had to work, so that kind of went out the window. But I always wanted to go to college. And I did it. My kids, my youngest child was a senior the year I went back to school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. And did all your kids go to college as well?</p>
<p>Moore: No, they didn’t. My son that lives here, he worked with his dad and he still runs the business, Tommy’s Steel and Salvage in east Pasco. He started working with his dad when he was like 12 years old down there. So he went to CBC for one year, and then he was still—he worked with his dad everyday.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s Leonard, right?</p>
<p>Moore: Leonard, yeah!</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re talking about Leonard?</p>
<p>Moore: Yeah, Leonard. So that’s what he went into. My other son went to Western for one year, and it was just—he couldn’t get a job, and we just didn’t have—it hadn’t been long—my husband had just started the business; we just didn’t have the money, and he didn’t. So then he came back home and he got into the Electricians’ apprentice program. So he went through that. He worked out at Hanford for a little bit, but he said, Mom, I don’t like it out there. I just don’t want to work out at Hanford. Because he realized the dangers of them crawling around in these places. So he went to—where did he go next? He went to Colorado and he worked there for a while, and then he wound up in California. He got a job at the University of California there, as an electrician. He worked his way up to management and he took classes the whole time he was there so he could get his certificates and everything for management. So that’s what he does now, and he does, as I said, now he’s working at San Jose State, and he’s the building—I can’t remember exactly what it’s called, but what he does is he’s in charge of the building and remodeling at the school, whatever they do there. So that’s what he went into. And my daughter was a model and she actually was the first black Miss Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Moore: She wound up in Chicago and she married an attorney and she had modeled for several years, she traveled to Europe and places like that. And then she came back, as I said, and she lived in Chicago. And she got married and they have twin boys that will be 16 years old this year. And she’s been a stay-at-home mom. [LAUGHTER] She decided she didn’t want to—she stayed at home and raised her kids.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. So my last question is, is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and civil rights, and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Moore: No. Well, I’ve always wanted to take advantage of opportunities, and I tried to get my kids to do that, too, look for opportunities that’s out there. After they opened up, well, you had some opportunities. We didn’t have that much at first. But I felt like my kids had opportunities, and they didn’t always take advantage of what I wanted them to do, but they did okay. They all doing fine. I actually enjoyed working with the school district, because I was able to be in contact with young people, to try to encourage them, and that’s not an easy job sometimes.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, it’s not.</p>
<p>Moore: I mean, they’ll look at you, and it just goes in one ear and out the other. But that always has been my goal, to try to encourage people of color that I was around—or anybody, actually—because I’ve worked where there are no minorities at all. Many of my jobs have been that way. It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter to me about that, because I just love to see young people try to do the best they can do, and take advantage of the things that are there for them. It really hurts when you see many of them don’t do that, or don’t even try. I just—it’s upsetting.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, great, Ellenor, thank you so much for taking the time to interview with us today. It was a wonderful interview.</p>
<p>Moore: Well, I thank you for coming.</p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1950-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Ellenor Moore
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
Migration
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Discrimination
Racism
Description
An account of the resource
Ellenor Moore moved to Pasco, Washington in 1950 as a teenager.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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03/21/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F352c93051f62d9c5ef4ce99e165b9188.mp4
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Greg Mitchell
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history interview with Greg Mitchell on April 23<sup>rd</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Greg about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Greg Mitchell: My full name is Gregory, G-R-E-G-O-R-Y, last name Mitchell, M-I-T-C-H-E-L-L. No middle name.</p>
<p>Franklin: No middle name.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Or initial.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, okay. Where did your parents move here from?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, if we go way back, my parents started in a little town called Kildare, Texas, which is in the northeastern corner of Texas. Some people will know the town of Texarkana. The closest airport there is Shreveport, Louisiana. And then they moved to Chicago, where my older brother was born. And then from Chicago they moved out to Washington State. There’s some history prior to that with my dad and mom and going back and forth. But as far as I remember, my folks were living in Hermiston, my brother was—he’s two years older than me, so he was probably a year or maybe a little bit, not quite two years old. Dad was here working on McNary Dam, so they were residing in Hermiston. Shortly after that, when that project was completed, they moved to Pasco. We had relatives here—he did, on his mother’s side, two uncles. He moved here to work construction on the Blue Bridge. From there, he migrated work-wise out to the Hanford Site. As a youngster, I remember, my best recollection is remembering my dad coming home, getting off the Hanford buses when we lived in the south end of Richland down in the Craighill area there. Our address was 100 Craighill, I’ll never forget it. Never forget my phone number and the experience of growing up in the south end with lots of friends and going to Lewis and Clark Elementary School in Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. What year did they come to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, like I say, I was born in Pasco, so I assumed that they arrived shortly before that, and I was born July 31<sup>st</sup>, 1953. So I would assume that they had to move prior to that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about their lives before they came to work out here?</p>
<p>Mitchell: What I know is just been in conversation with my mom and my dad and then the visits that I made to the Kildare, Texas area as a youngster, and then later on as an adult, that they were—they brother grew up in a rural area, very small community—very, very small. And they were neighbors, field-to-field neighbors, approximately probably quarter-mile apart, up the road and around the corner from each other. So my dad married the girl next-door. Yeah, and they ended up out here, and rest is history.</p>
<p>Franklin: Heh heh. What do you know about their initial experience of coming to work here and finding a place to live?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Their initial experiences is just related to being black in a predominantly white community. What I know about it—I don’t know a lot about it, what I’ve heard about it after the fact, was strictly conversational. As you may have gathered in your interviews with my father and maybe interviews with my brother, that the Hanford—the Manhattan Project, Colonel Leslie Groves, when they embarked on this whole project, it was made known to the point of being put in writing that blacks were going to be used for construction. They were not going to be used for operation, maintenance and follow-on. And then addition to that, that blacks were being steered to the east side of Pasco.</p>
<p>With that type of environment and atmosphere, again, being a youngster, I didn’t experience it, but I did hear stories about it. From my parents, from folks that—relatives that were here, locally, friends of my parents, older folks that had been around that had migrated up here when all the livable wage jobs became known and people tended to come this way from the South and other parts of the United States.</p>
<p>My personal experiences came a little bit later. But I did hear about it. We didn’t question it too much. It wasn’t real overt. But when the topic came up, they were pretty open about the fact that there were some restrictions driven by the times and the thought processes of the times. They were centered on the color of your skin.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your family wasn’t steered towards east Pasco.</p>
<p>Mitchell: My family originally was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Originally was?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I was born in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I remember as a youngster going over to visit relatives. Shortly after I was born, my parents chose to move to Richland. I remember asking Dad about it. He said that he felt he was closer to work; it just made more sense, very practical, and that he was very excited about the school systems. Being so close to the Hanford Site, Richland had a tendency, at least in the minds of lots of folks, to be pretty heavy math-science-oriented. And Dad was very interested in getting us the best education that we could get. So those were the two factors that kind of drove the move: work and education.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ education, educational experiences when they were children, and how was that different from yours?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, the one thing that I remember—I remember as a young man seeing an old photograph of my father’s graduating class, and he would chuckle. There were five people total in their graduating class, all black, and he said, yeah, of the five people you see in here, if you take me out of it, three of the four are my cousins.</p>
<p>So they grew up in a segregated area in eastern Texas, small school, it was all—they had black educators, black administrators. That was under the guise, I guess, of separate-but-equal. We know that that’s not necessarily true, but that was the selling point of segregation at that point, as explained to me by my parents and other people that I’ve talked to and me doing my studies on history, and then actually visiting and seeing some of these situations. But, yeah, they grew up in a small school, segregated school.</p>
<p>I remember one of the things that really caught my attention was the fact that my mother was playing sports. I thought that was so ironic, because my sister—I have four brothers and a sister; there’s six of us altogether. And as we went through the Richland School District at the time that we went through, there were no sports for my sister. So with six of us, my sister kind of had to make it three-on-three and she was, I thought, very gifted, as a youngster. But she had no opportunity to do it. I thought it was so ironic, because we grew up watching my mom play basketball here in Richland, listening to her stories about being involved in athletics and being able to play athletics as a youngster.</p>
<p>But then we moved here, it wasn’t color-driven, it was just the date and times that were going on that girls did not have the opportunity to participate in athletics as I went through high school and down through probably, I think, almost everybody in our family, there was no girls’ athletics. So to me, that caught my attention. You know, Mom, you played sports? Well, Vanessa doesn’t get to play. That always has been a little bone of contention for me, particularly now that I have granddaughters. I like the fact that they have the opportunities, not only educationally but athletically.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. How would you describe life in the community? In Richland.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I guess that for me, personally, I felt that I grew up like Huckleberry Finn. We had lots of warm weather, good summers, playing baseball, going down to the river, being adventuresome out on Columbia Point, which is now pretty well built-up, but at the time that we grew up on that end of time, it was a pretty rural area. There were people that had pastures down there and horses, one of our neighbors had horses down there and my mom would give us permission occasionally to go down. Sometimes we would sneak down, and go down and do our thing along the riverbank. In those days, the wild horses would actually come into town, into the shelterbelt area down in the south end. So for us, as young kids, you know, we thought this was great. It was outstanding.</p>
<p>As we went to school, we did notice that there weren’t many people that looked like us in the school district. We had a couple of neighbors, and we had one cousin, female cousin, that was a year older than me, and then their families that had gone through. But we didn’t see a lot of other blacks in the school districts.</p>
<p>But initially, it didn’t seem to be a problem. We interacted with the people that we were around, we seemed to enjoy it, they seemed to enjoy our company. I think we kind of naturally fell into positions of leadership, some of it driven by athletic prowess, some of it driven by just, I think, our personalities to extend towards others and they would react. There were times that you would be taken back by an instance that would be racially motivated, or have racial overtones or undertones associated with it. But overall, great place to grow up.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you—hold on a second, you already answered that. Do you remember any particular community events?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Community events?</p>
<p>Franklin: Could be here or in Pasco.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, community events, I remember not so much if they were necessarily community—well, I think we used to have what was called Pioneer Days. I don’t know if it was associated with our elementary school or just the community in general. I think that I hang on to the elementary piece of it because I went to Lewis and Clark Elementary, so when you talk about pioneers, that’s about as pioneering as it gets. And there were pretty fun events around the community. I noticed that one of our neighbors, his father was—if he wasn’t the fire chief, he was pretty high up in the fire department in Richland. They would have the Fire Prevention Days and the parade and setting up your bikes and doing your thing. All that kind of stuff, that was fun. But as far as major events? City-wide, no, this was pre-Water Follies and Boat Race Weekend days.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was housing like where you lived?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, where I lived, we lived in prefabricated housing. As some people may or may not know, Richland was, because of the Manhattan Project influence and being driven by the Corps of Engineers, it had a lot of army flavor to it. Armies would set up their living quarters as it was associated with rank. We have what’s now called the Alphabet Houses. The size of your home and the amenities associated with it were driven by your rank, and that carried over in the Manhattan Project. So if you were a laborer, you would usually be directed or offered smaller overall footage housing than somebody that might happen to be a manager, than somebody who might happen to be an upper-level manager. So for us, with my father being a laborer, we were in some of the smallest housing there was. There was eight of us, at one point, in a two-bedroom house with one bathroom. But for us, again, we were happy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you attend church?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What church did you attend?</p>
<p>Mitchell: We went to Richland Baptist Church on George Washington Way. My parents, I think, believed it was very important that if we were going to live in the community that we immerse ourselves in the community in all aspects, whether it be social, whether it be in giving back to that community, whether it be in leadership positions in the school district, as a student, them in PTA or whatever it was. And part of that was going to a church that was all-white. We did go back and forth to Pasco, and we got exposed to black churches in Pasco. But our church was Richland Baptist Church, and we were the only black family in that church that I recall for a long, long time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there—what was different about the white churches in Richland and then the black churches in Pasco?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I think the difference had to do with the fact that—one of the things that a black church, even to do this day, has, and it has a legacy of, being a sanctuary for slaves. People that work six days a week in the field, that were owned by other people, one of the few places that they were able to express themselves was at the church without some type of restitution being paid. So that became a location of celebration, outward celebration. Dancing, music. Whereas, I think, when you look at church elsewhere, in this case, a white church, you tend to have a reverent overtone that is quiet, respectful, et cetera. Those differences were very, very obvious. But no less respectful or religious.</p>
<p>Franklin: What—oh, sorry, you already answered that, too. Do you recall any family or community events or traditions that people brought from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, family traditions, let me just think a little bit. I think one of the things—I don’t know if we participated in it so much, but we heard about it. One of the things that people from the South, regardless of color, would do, on New Year’s, the New Year’s Day dinner would always involve black-eyed peas. The idea of eating black-eyed peas—and again, this wasn’t a racial thing; if you go to the South now, they will do this on New Year’s Day, white or black—that is, that it’s supposed to set up good luck for the remainder of the year. So that tradition came with people from the South, again, black and white, that had migrated up to this area for work. But in our house, we would talk about a little bit, my mom would share some of those stories and talk about that being a tradition. It wasn’t so much that we did it all the time. Black-eyed peas were a pretty standard food source. But I don’t recall that we did it specifically for New Year’s, but I remember her telling us about the story and the tradition that that was one of the things that came up with all people from the South. So I thought that was kind of unique and interesting and fun.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about Juneteenth?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Juneteenth, for me, I wasn’t aware of Juneteenth early as a youngster. I didn’t become aware of Juneteenth until post-adulthood. It started being celebrated with parades and food and different things. But once I was introduced to it and asked about what was it, I was informed that during the Civil War—a lot of these folks are from Texas, and Texas was slow to get the information that the Civil War was over. I believe that Juneteenth is associated with—I don’t know if it was the 16<sup>th</sup> or the 19<sup>th</sup> of June—in 1865, was when Texas finally found out that the war was over. In this particular case, war being over, the North winning, slaves had been emancipated, but not necessarily considered free in their own mind and the mind of others. So, this tends to be the celebration date and series of days that commemorates Texas being informed the war is over, slavery is officially ended, et cetera, et cetera, and thus the celebration and follow-on that is done annually to include not just Texas, but is done here because of so many people, particularly blacks, that migrated here from Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there opportunities available here that were not available where your parents came from?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I would have to say yes, simply because my parents went to segregated school. So that, the first thing that pops into my mind was, we did not. So that’s a very glaring difference. Opportunities to do other things? I don’t know; I didn’t share any conversations with my parents as to what types of things they may have felt they were limited in being able to do down there that we were not limited to do as their children up here. I can make some assumptions. I don’t think that my parents were able to avail themselves of the opportunities because the information wasn’t there. For example, my brother and myself gaining appointments to military academies with the assistance of congress people and senators. I don’t believe they were able to do that.</p>
<p>One thing that I know they weren’t able to do in Texas, which my grandfather on my mother’s side did, and that was black people weren’t allowed to own property unless they were ministers. So my grandfather on my mother’s side and my great-grandfather, his father, and I believe his brother all became ordained ministers for the purpose, not only for religious purposes, but also for the purpose of gaining the right within the State of Texas to own land. So my parents weren’t forbidden from owning land here. So to me, that’s another difference.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. What about work or housing?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Worker housing? In what respect, how that differs from what my parents were able to do?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I don’t know what kind of worker housing my parents were restricted in down there. [COUGH] Excuse me. But I do know that worker housing here was segregated, in the form of domicile, food, and that type of thing. You may recall in the interview with my father talking about the Hanford facilities and the shower facilities and how they were segregated and how he and some of the people that came up here with him that were black were given tents initially to live in. That is not something that me or my siblings had to experience in our working at the Hanford Site, or working anywhere else in this area or in the United States, as we grew and moved about.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were opportunities limited because segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Mitchell: What ways here?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I don’t really feel that they were totally limited. I think that they were probably a little bit scrutinized. And by scrutinized, I think that there were people that were either taken aback or would complain. But in the long run, I would be remiss if I didn’t credit lots of non-black people that assisted in me and my siblings’ development, encouragement, support, whether it be in the school district, whether it be in the neighborhood, whether it be in the church, just as friends, whatever. There were a lot of people that weren’t black that assisted us.</p>
<p>For example, my brother getting his appointment to the Air Force Academy, me getting my appointment to the Naval Academy Prep School. I think all the way through my brother, Cameron, and some of the things and accolades that he’s achieved, my sister being involved in some of her work opportunities, working in a bank, my brother, Rob, doing different things, my brother, Nestor, being involved in certain things, were because there were a lot of people that either looked past, felt it was ridiculous, or simply just said, hey, the right thing to do is to judge somebody on character and merit. So in that regard, I don’t believe that we were ultimately limited.</p>
<p>I think there were hiccups along the way. There were a couple of things that occurred that were surprising and/or hurtful. I remember one time, I was playing basketball at Richland, I was on the junior varsity team, we had gone to Pasco. I'm the only black player in the program at any level. The game is over, JV team, we had played earlier; the varsity team played later. The varsity game had gotten over. Richland had won the game; Pasco was very upset--obviously, at that time a very predominantly black-populated high school. There were some hard feelings because the rivalry is very intense. And I remember that there were some folks banging on the door accusing one of the Richland players of using a racial slur towards one of the Pasco players. There were folks—black individuals of Pasco, parents, other students or whatever—that wanted at this young Richland player.</p>
<p>Well, the coach’s reaction to the banging on the door was to call my name, open the door, push me out the door, close the door and yell, talk to them! Assuming that, because I’m black and they’re black, I could quell the situation. Nothing ever really came of it. In other words, there was no fighting that resulted or anything like that. But it caught my attention that for whatever reason, folks were—and I didn’t feel it was so racial as it was an uneducated fear of black people on the uprise. Please, you’re black, go talk to them. And I thought that that was interesting.</p>
<p>But as I got older, I kind of chuckled about the fact that, you know, it was just simple ignorance. Lack of understanding, knowledge, sitting down with someone and finding out about those people to the point of understanding that, if you have 100 black people in the room, you have 100 different personalities. But we had lumped together. I was part of that lump, so, Greg, please go talk to them. I thought that was interesting.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe any interactions that you or your parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities area?</p>
<p>Mitchell: When you say other parts of the Tri-Cities area, you mean like, outside of Richland?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, one thing that, along that line, it was common knowledge that in addition to signage—and I’m not sure, but the last time we looked, in the “blue laws” on the books in Kennewick, that blacks were not allowed in Kennewick after dark or after 6:00, sundown, or whatever came first. That was pretty common knowledge growing up, not only for me, but for my white counterparts and colleagues and friends, people pretty much knew that Kennewick, blacks didn’t reside in Kennewick. And to the point where—I didn’t realize until I got older and looked it up, and at that time it was still on the books, not enforced, but it was still on the books. And then I realized that that wasn’t untypical of other places around the Northwest, as we moved around and got a little bit more exposure outside the Tri-Cities. But that was an interesting situation.</p>
<p>I didn’t feel that when we would leave for school purposes, whether it be athletically or academically to go and visit in Kennewick school district, I never saw anything that made me fearful, apprehensive or scared. But we would—we being me and my teammates, white and/or black—would laugh about Kennewick. Blacks not living in Kennewick. And then that barrier was broken by a good friend and their family of ours, that when they moved to Kennewick, and they weren’t prohibited from moving—</p>
<p>Franklin: Who was that?</p>
<p>Mitchell: That was a family, their last name was Slaughters. Greg Slaughter and my brother, Nestor, became very close friends. And then we met the rest of the Slaughter family. Quality people. They seemed to be well-accepted. He attended Kamiakin. So there was—I won’t say that it went away, but I think that they were warmly accepted in their community. I don’t know if it took a little while.</p>
<p>I know for us, it took a little while, as we moved within Richland. I remember in my—the summer between my sixth grade and seventh grade year, we moved from the south end of Richland up to the north end of Richland in what was called the Richland Village. The first part of the summer, we lived in a house on Cove Street, and then we moved to the house that I pretty much grew up in on Newcomer Street.</p>
<p>At that time, we got there, my mom always encouraged us to get out and do things. As kids, we would cut lawns to earn money and do different things. There was a young man down the street from us, his father was one of the local Merrill-Lynch investment executives. This young man had a paper route, <em>Tri-City Herald</em> paper route and he wanted to give it up. I told my mom about it, she said, oh, get that. We can pass that paper route down through the family so we got a little opportunity to generate money. So I ended up accepting this paper route. At that time, the <em>Tri-City Herald</em> did not have a Saturday paper. Sunday paper was the only morning paper, and Monday through Friday was delivered in the evening. So after school, go and deliver papers, et cetera.</p>
<p>I remember when we moved to the Newcomer Street address that my dad had mentioned to me and the three of the oldest of us, of the six, that the day after we moved, that a lot of the houses on either side of us up and down the street and across the street from us, the very next day had for sale signs on them. We just kind of looked at that. Oh, okay. And then it came time for me to collect for the newspaper for that first month that I had been delivering. Across the street and one house over, there was an older couple, and I went to collect for the newspaper.</p>
<p>At that time--to set the scene for this--at that time, Little League baseball was put in the sports section just like the Mariners, the by-lines, per inning, and who got hits and who did different things, and it was done regularly. Small paper looking for news. Well, the Little League games were publicized and people could read about it. I go over to collect, and I knock on the door, and this gentleman opens the door. And I said, hi, my name’s Greg. I’m your paperboy. I am collecting for the <em>Tri-City Herald</em>. And he says, just a minute. And I said, okay, fine. So I stood on the porch behind the screen door. He came out to pay me for the paper. And he said, what’s your name again? And I said, my name’s Greg Mitchell. He says, are you one of those Mitchell boys we read about in the paper? Hitting all those home runs and doing all that stuff? And I said, you’re probably talking about my older brother, Duke. He says, yeah, that Duke guy! He says, yeah. I said, yeah. Yeah, we live right over here. He goes, oh, really? He goes, you guys are those Mitchell boys? And I said, yes, sir. And he said, well, come on in.</p>
<p>Well, I’m not going to enter anybody’s house, regardless of their color or my color, you know? I said, no, I’ll stay right here. And so he leaves and he walks down the hallway and he yells for his wife. I can’t remember if her name was Elaine or Ethel or Irma or whatever. And he yells for her, Irma/Ethel, come up here! And she’s going, what do you need? And he says, we got a future Bomber standing on our porch! He goes, you got to come out and meet this young man.</p>
<p>And it hit me right then, even as a eighth grader. It hit me right then that I guess it’s okay if I can run fast and jump high. You’re going to accept me because there’s something in it for you. But if I wasn’t that Mitchell boy that could run fast and jump high and I just was good at playing clarinet, or if I was really good at doing math equations, or if I was really good at chemistry, would you show me this same respect? I don’t think so.</p>
<p>So, at that point, I realized that people may look at you differently for your physical abilities versus your mental abilities. Even to the point where they might overlook the color of your skin. So that stuck with me. I didn’t feel so insulted or hurt, but it was a good lesson. I would experience that a little bit later on as I got older and continued on to high school and became one of those Bomber players and then went on to college to play collegiate football and watched people and fans react. Because of your ability to jump and run and do different things.</p>
<p>I always remember my father telling us that, these big sports guys—well, you know, you interviewed him. I’m still involved in sports quite a bit, whole family has been. My kids and grandkids are. And I think it’s great. But my dad would always say, sports is something you do; it’s not who you are. And he always drove that home with us. As much as we were immersed in athletics, education was always first, your character. And that it’s something you do; it’s not how you define yourself. And that was a moment that drove that home.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. Do you think--for you and your brothers, sports was a clear path, and as you mentioned, and as I’ve heard in other interviews, sports was a path for acceptance, but it wasn’t so for black women in Richland of your generation.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I think that most of our acceptance wasn’t necessarily driven by sports. I think our acceptance was driven by the fact that—as I look back on it, I think our parents instilled in us—either developed and/or instilled in us leadership qualities. Whether it be communication skills, the ability to stand up for what we know is right and different things. I think it was enhanced by athletics, but for us to be able to—like I say, again, I reach back to Duke going to the Air Force Academy, me getting an appointment to Naval Academy Prep School—it’s not because of athletics. I don’t care how good an athlete you are, you don’t get in the Academy because you can run fast and jump high. If you don’t have the academics and the character, you don’t go.</p>
<p>But for women, I think they were definitely suppressed. And I don’t think only by white people. I think that there was a general belief at that time—we’re talking ‘50s, ‘60s, early ‘70s—where you were still back into grow up, get married, raise a family type of a thought process. We were fortunate that we got to see my mom initially start that way and then move into a working mom.</p>
<p>But when I look at it, I think you’re correct in the fact that black women and/or other minority women were looked at as, outside the homeworkers, only in the service industry: housekeepers, cooks, maids, et cetera. So, yeah, I’d have to agree that there was limitations there.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you mentioned your elementary school. Where did you go for middle and high school?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, at the time, we had junior highs, which were seventh, eighth and ninth. We only had three-year high schools here in Richland. They have since moved to the middle school, four-year high school program.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry, I went through middle school.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah, yeah, and I understand. As have my kids and now my grandchildren. But I went to Chief Jo. And at that time, it was really interesting, because, as I mentioned, as I was getting ready to leave elementary school at Lewis and Clark and go into junior high, my brother, my older brother, David, was already at Carmichael. So, my friends were all headed to Carmichael. Lewis and Clark is the geographic feeder to Carmichael, just because of proximity to the school. Logistics. Well, we moved up to this end of town, which put me into the Chief Jo Junior High district. My brother was allowed to continue at Carmichael because, as a ninth grader, which—that’s when your high school grades start counting. And they said if you can find a way to get there, he can stay there. So my parents said, yeah, we’re not going to change schools; this is his last year there. But for me entering, they said, ah, start fresh, et cetera. So I was a little bit disappointed; I was excited about wanting to go to the next level of education with my classmates.</p>
<p>So we moved up here, and I ended up getting introduced to new friends. Some of which I had known from summer athletic endeavors and different things or just social interactions at the community pool or whatever. You get to meet other people. So I knew a few names here and there. But overall, I didn’t have this network of friends going to the same school. So that was a little bit interesting.</p>
<p>When I got there, I was able to build new friendships, meet new people, and one of the things that was very distinct in Richland is that, because of the housing, the south end is where the laborers tended to be; whereas the farther you got—the closer you got to the Hanford Site, which means moving north, the more you would run into kids of managers, administrators, and decision-makers. So at Chief Jo, we had quite a few kids of folks that kind of made—the decision-makers of the Hanford Site. So I was exposed, now, to the people that were laborers, artisans, good folks with their hands, craftsmen—and very good craftsmen—to folks that were more in administration, science, decision-making, management, et cetera, and their children. So I got exposed to a little bit more of that type of an environment. As I look back on it now, it was very helpful. It gave me a broader picture, and expanded my knowledge and exposure to what goes on in a whole corporate business, et cetera. And then it also started to expose me to more opportunities and avenues and options as you get older and what you want might want to do and what you might want to become. Not that I felt limited when I was living in the other end; it’s just that this was so professionally expansive. I enjoyed it. So I felt that I kind of got lucky. I had a whole new group of friends.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did racism or segregation affect your education?</p>
<p>Mitchell: My education? I don’t think so. I think that—my classroom education, I don’t think so. My social education, I think so, sometimes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I just remember—and I remember being a senior at Richland High School, playing football, and I was playing both offense and defense. And in the first two weeks, I was performing very well. After the fact, I found out—the coach came to me and said, well, we’re just going to use you on defense. I said, oh, okay, all right. And it was right after an article had come out in the paper that says to stop Richland, all you gotta do is stop Mitchell. He’s the one that’s scoring all the points.</p>
<p>So, anyway. The very next week, the coach says, we’re just going to use you on defense, and I said, okay. And the season went on, and we got through it, and at the end of the year, the person that they had started to highlight when I was moved just to defense ended up becoming an all-conference player. That leads to scholarship opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought it was very interesting that this player received all-conference honors and had twelve catches—pass/catches in the season, and I had 14 in the first three games.</p>
<p>It was interesting as we got older, that young man, a good friend of mine, came up to me and said that it was his mother who had gone to the school and complained that, you’re throwing all the passes to that black kid. You’re not throwing any to my son. He came up to me and apologized. We were friends at the time, and we’ve been friends since. But he came to me after the fact as we were adults and said, do you remember that? I said, yeah. He said, well that was my mom. And he says, I have to apologize for that.</p>
<p>And then I remember my younger brother, Nestor, playing baseball at Richland. He had the highest batting average in the entire conference. So summer baseball came around. He didn’t make the summer team after being the batting champion and being the trophy as being the batting champion for the entire conference. But he couldn’t make the summer team in the city.</p>
<p>And then years later, one of the dads that was making the decision on who would be on the summer team, his son, he said, his dad came home that evening, and he was very upset. There were three coaches, and he was very upset, and his wife asked him, she said, why? What’s going on? He goes, all I can tell you is we made a horrible decision today. And I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud of myself. We made a horrible decision today.</p>
<p>And come to find out later on, that their son came to me and said that when Dad came home and said that, it was about the fact that the other two coaches didn’t want your brother, Nestor, on the team. He said, he’s the best player in the conference! How—you know. He’s been evaluating these guys out of town, and he can’t make the team in town? And he said, they—two-to-one, he didn’t make the team. And this young man came up to me and said, Dad was just almost in tears about the injustice of that decision. And then that young man came up and said that my dad just felt horrible, felt absolutely horrible.</p>
<p>And then the one that really—I don’t know—that really got me was, my mom occasionally, when we lived on the south end as youngsters, my mom occasionally—we would sometimes go up and meet my dad get off the Hanford buses and then walk with him home. Well, one day, my mom went to meet him. I don’t know if this is while we were too small to go, or whatever. But anyway, my mom was standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus to come and for Dad to get off the bus so they could walk home. There was this youngster that was probably nine or ten. Came running up to her and started screaming at her, “nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger!” And then took off. And my mom said, come here. And he came back, you know, he’s ten. And my mom looked at him, she said, young man, I’m not a nigger, and you go home and tell your mom and dad that. Because she knew that’s where it was coming from, and sent him home.</p>
<p>Well, years later, I’m done, I’m working here locally, and I’m on the board of Columbia Industries and we’re doing some things, and we’re getting ready to dole some money out. There’s this one young man, a couple of years older than me that we were considering as a board to be the director of this one particular non-profit entity. It’s time to vote. And so they ask him to step out of the room and do whatever. Are we going to put him in charge of this particular non-profit? And we installed him and we funded him and the board, we approved it. As a board, we approved it. We were done with the meeting, we walked outside, and he comes running over to me. And he recounted that story. And he said, I was that young man. Come to find out, he and his family went to our church. I didn’t know him; he was three years ahead of me. I didn’t know him.</p>
<p>But that was interesting, to see, not only hear about and experience the episodes, but to see the full-circle transition. Where people come in and recognize—and I don’t know if that’s something we did, to help educate, my parents did, or we did as a group or a family. Or if people did a little bit on their own, if the community was responsible for some of that. Whatever, but I thought that those were interesting starts and very interesting circular finishes.</p>
<p>Franklin: So I want to move to talk about your work history and experiences at Hanford.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: What sort of work did you do?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, when I started, I mentioned to you earlier that I started—I got a job as a field clerk in the summer of 1972, working at J.A. Jones Construction Company. I was supporting a group of people that were involved in quality control of fabricated piping materials. Basically, what I did, I was a gofer, and I ran paperwork here and there, here and there, here and there. And then—that lasted for a little while, and then they moved me actually on the Hanford Site. I was supporting the quality control and inspection unit that was installing the evaporator building and they were supporting the building—at that time, the double-shelled waste tanks were under construction. These are million-gallon tanks and they had moved from the single-shell design to the double-shell design because they thought that they were more structurally durable and would result in, obviously, a safer holding tank. So I supported that group and learned a little bit more about what was going on out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Went to school, came back, and then post-school, I went looking for work, and I got hired on as what they call an NPO, nuclear process operator. Basically what it is, is you are—in a normal construction field, you’d be considered a field laborer. You do basic labor work: haul this, pick up that, sweep up this, clean up that. I was assigned to the Tank Farms in the 200 East Area. I don’t know if you have any knowledge or have a chance to go out there, but it’s where the farms—it’s right in the heart of the farms, it’s right in the center, geographic center, of the Site. We were in support of the construction of those tanks as well as the day-to-day operations of the tanks that were already had, mixed waste, some that was just environmentally hazardous, some that was radioactive, and we would go out and take monitor readings on some of this. I worked as a shift worker in the summertime, which was interesting, being out there at night and having to go out in the desert, drive out in a truck and check gauges on these tanks to make sure that the pressure—checking pressure gauges or other things, and then having to make—switching. Because all the tanks are connected by piping, and they would move the material in the tanks by pumping them from one tank to the other.</p>
<p>That’s why, to this day, a lot of times—because the records don’t exist—all that pumping that would go on, almost on a daily basis, they don’t know exactly what’s in what, because they didn’t keep the records. The records that were kept no longer exist. So now they have to go out and sample these tanks and chemically identify what’s in them. But initially, we were part of the people that were associated with, in support of, that movement of these wastes from tank to tank.</p>
<p>Franklin: What on-the-job training did you receive?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, at that time, you had certifications that you had to go through before you were allowed to be involved. What they would do, there was initial safety trainings that everybody went through that was on the Site. Then there were job-specific trainings. Most of them were safety-related and some of them were job-specific-related.</p>
<p>The job-specific training, as you would pass you would get what they call certified at different levels. What it would do for you, it would allow you to be of more usage of them, you were more capable to do things and do it in a safe way. And over time, it would also allow you to make more money. So there was a way to progress, not only just due to time and tenure, seniority, but also due to certification and, you know, your value to the company and your ability to assist in more work. That was my initial introduction to Hanford. Yeah. And it took a different turn shortly thereafter. I wasn’t out in the facilities.</p>
<p>Franklin: What happened?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, what happened was, is that, shortly after I got out there and was working, we went on strike. This was in 1976. We went on strike, and there wasn’t any work, because the union was on strike. Shortly thereafter, I got an interview, based on my education, I got an interview from one the engineering firms to work in the project accounting office, because of my business background, educationally. When I walked back down, after the initial interview, I walked down to the personnel department, now known as human resources, and the personnel manager asked me, he said, well, we’re going to offer you a job. And I said, well, that’s great. He says, but I’m going to give you an option. I said, oh, really? He says, yeah. We’re not going to bid against ourselves as a company. It’s going to be the same pay for the accounting job, or you can come and be my assistant. I said, what? He said, I need an assistant here in the personnel department. It’s just me and my secretary. And he goes, we’re starting to grow and I need more help. He says, again, I’m not—it’s going to be the same pay. It was a whopping $235 a week. Same everything. You can either do the accounting side or you can come and work with me. And I said, I don’t know anything about personnel. He goes, your dad’s a personnel guy. I’m sure you’ve had enough exposure with table talk at the dinner table to know what’s going on.</p>
<p>Again, this is pre-human resources degrees where you study all this stuff. It was simply people that knew the most about the company and how they got paid and all this stuff over time that they would stick in the personnel department; whereas now, it’s something that you actually go to school for. I said, well, yeah, maybe. I said, well, can I give you an answer in a day or so? He goes, oh sure. So I scurry home and I talk to my dad about it, and my dad summed it all up. He simply said, well, he said, educationally, you have a business background. If you go into the business side and down the road decide you want to go into the personnel side, I’d think it would be harder than if you start in the personnel side and then decide that you want to go on the business side, because your education’s on that side. He says, you know, it’s not that you couldn’t return to the business side. I think it would harder to do in reverse, if you go into the business side.</p>
<p>Okay, okay, so I took my dad’s advice. So this gentleman, I called him, and I said, okay, I’ll take the personnel assistant job. [LAUGHTER] And he said, okay. Meet me at the Tri-Cities airport on Sunday—I think this was like a Thursday. He said, meet me in the Tri-Cities airport on Sunday, and bring enough professional attire for eight days. Okay. He says, yeah, we’re going on a recruiting trip. We need some designers—it was an engineering firm—we need some designers and some engineers. I said, okay. He said, we’re going on a four-day trip. We’re going to be two days in each city. Travel on front end, travel on the back. Okay. So we took off, and the first place we went was Adina, Minnesota, which is a suburb of St. Paul-Minneapolis. We stayed at this Ramada Inn. He looked at me and he said, okay, we’ve got a full slate tomorrow. We’ve landed, and tomorrow I’ll meet you and—the standard scenario was you would take a technical recruiter or interviewer and you would take a personnel person and tell them about money and relocation and benefits and all the people-side of the stuff, and he would talk about the job side of the stuff. Well, anyway, we had the chief of our engineering department and he says, we’ve got a full schedule tomorrow. We’ve got an interview every hour on the hour, all day. He says, we’re going to meet downstairs at 6:00; our first interview’s at 8:00. What you’re going to do is you’re going to be in the room with me, working on the people-side and telling them about relocation, listening to me talk about it. At noon, I’m going to watch you the second half of the day, and then on Tuesday we’re going to split the schedule. That was my training. I said, okay.</p>
<p>So we go, I do the trip, and we come back. And the secretary says, don’t you think we ought to sign him up as an employee? Seeing as how he’s already been on the trip, and thank goodness he didn’t get hurt on a business trip before he signed up as an employee. So we kind of chuckled about that and whatever. That kind of launched my HR side of my exposure to Hanford. And then from there, I started doing new graduate recruiting on the technical side, science and engineering. So I spent nine years on the road a lot, going to different locations, interviewing people, new grads, to come out as first year, first time engineers or scientists that come to our company. And I spent a lot of that time with the Westinghouse Corporation at that time, and then moved on to different types of work within human resources to include benefits. I was the EEO officer for a while, which meant that I interacted with a lot of the federal compliance agencies that any company with over 50,000 employees have to deal with.</p>
<p>Franklin: EEO is Equal Employment?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Equal Employment Opportunity. We had the EEOC, which is Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is the federal side of it. We have OFCCP, which is the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which oversees any company that has a government contract. So there was a lot of what they call oversight, whether it be state, federal, and different branches within the federal that the companies and the contractors have to, are responsible to report to, to send annual reports and different information, to interact with. And so I moved in that direction for a while.</p>
<p>Later, towards the end of my career, I ended up being over in the employee and labor relations, labor being union, and employee relations being non-union, dealing with day-to-day issues in the workplace, which was very interesting. As it relates to the civil rights and all this other thing, it was interesting to go into that arena and that side of a corporate situation and watch the evolution of women, minorities, as it related to pay, promotion and including age discrimination type of things.</p>
<p>There was no ADA at that time, Americans with Disabilities Act, to where now you see the ramps and all these other things. And having to be a part of getting companies to comply with that, and to watch the corporate culture push back against it—because it cost money. It may have been the right thing to do and some people would go ahead and do it. Whereas now you see upstart companies, newer companies, even companies that have been around a while but are still considered newer like Microsoft—that was just part of their business profile. Because they came after all these things were “normal,” standard.</p>
<p>But to be on the end where this became—you know, the term glass ceiling, where women weren’t being promoted. I remember for the first time hearing glass ceiling. I remember for the first time meeting a Westinghouse corporate vice president, female. Black female, which was interesting. I remember meeting the Secretary of Energy, black female. That was different. So we were on the edge of this change, and seeing how it manifested itself in the workplace, and the grousing that would come about. Because you would find people that were upset about affirmative action. They only got the job because of the color of their skin. They only got the job because they’re female, et cetera, et cetera. You didn’t hear much grousing about, well, they only got the job because they were a veteran. You know, you didn’t hear that.</p>
<p>But it was interesting to be on the frontline of that change and evolution and work through all of that, and personally be a part of it, being promoted to management as a black male, and then watch the opportunities for other people that traditionally were not white male under 40. That was interesting. That was a historical time, in that regard.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors, management?</p>
<p>Mitchell: My relationship with them?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Mitchell: My relationship was great. Are you asking me my relationship because of the color of my skin?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay. The relationship because of the color of my skin, I don’t think played a really big part. I think that one of the things that I am frankly proud of is the fact that I believe that my approach to people—and I believe I’ve seen evidence of this in multiple different types of workplaces, most recently even in the school district and across the street here at Hanford High School, where I spent some time working in the special needs program—is that I think that my training and my personality are such that people aren’t afraid to ask me questions that they’re really curious about, that I think generate communication and understanding. I don’t think people are afraid to come to me and ask me a question about being black, or what’s that like? Is it truly different for you? That kind of thing.</p>
<p>I think it started when I was in elementary school. I remember a young man came up to me and asked me if my blood was black. I think I was in fourth grade. And I said, no, I said, do you want me to show you? So I cut my hand and I said, see? To me, I thought that was always important. I remember being at Chief Jo and the kids wanting to know. It wasn’t because they were prejudiced.</p>
<p>That frustrates me to this day, is that we tend to walk on eggshells rather than to talk to each other. Is it different being black? Is it different being a girl? Is it different, you know, being Hispanic? Is it different now that you’re coming to the United States? What’s it like for you when you come in and you’re dressed in Islamic attire? What’s that like? We don’t talk to each other! I think that a lot of times, people are so afraid that they’re going to offend, that they’re going to move off of the political correct line and communicate with each other, that they tend to assume and proceed with ignorance, and come up with the wrong result.</p>
<p>And I believe that, as it related to my work relationships, I think I’ve always created an atmosphere, at least around my own space and within my groups as a manager, that I wanted to foster that and nurture that. And I think I was successful in doing that, more often than not, whether it be social or professional.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Not a lot. I think one of the things that I learned in my brief military stint was that there was a reason the officers didn’t fraternize with enlisted men. I thought it was because they were just smug. But in its barest sense, that philosophy and that term and that cliché comes from the fact that if you learn to know them, respect them and love them, you’re not going to be able to send them over the hill and never come back. So from a military standpoint, it’s simply practical. If I know you and I know her, and I’ve got to pick between you two which one I’m going to send around the corner to Afghanistan, knowing that you’re going to have to stand there and fight and we may not get over there to get you. And I have this deep, in-depth relationship with you, it’s going to complicate my decision-making.</p>
<p>I think that I tended to have a little bit of that in my non-work related deal. Not so much that I was a big wig making lots of decisions. It was just simply, one, I felt that my family’s privacy was important; I felt that my own personal privacy was important, and I respected the privacy of others. But not to the point where I wouldn’t interact with people or do any of those things. But I was mindful of that, and it’s purely out of respect.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your racial background figure into your work experiences?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I think that it played a role in me getting the equal employment opportunity, EEO officer/manager job. There was a real trend as this became—you need an in-house person. You would see almost 90% of my peers were black males.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why do you think that was?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I think that it was a tangible evidence that a company had embraced the idea of in-house equal opportunity oversight. If you go in, and you see equal opportunity office, and you walk in and you see the manager is black—because it started out primarily as a “black” situation. It was an offshoot of affirmative action, which is primarily black male.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure.</p>
<p>Mitchell: So I think that’s as tangible evidence as you can get as a company that, we’re involved in this. Now, involved in it versus taking it seriously might be two different things. But I think that that gave me the opportunity and a platform to actually add some substance to it. Because once they put me in the position, don’t give me the job and the authority and that oversight within the company and not expect any results. Because once I got the authority to go in and oversee some of the decisions for promotion, for succession planning, for initial hiring and whatever, that’s where I could make some inroads. I don’t care if it was because I look good, because I was black sitting in the office. Shame’s on you. Now you’re giving me the hammer, I’m going to go use it. So, to me, I’d say, yeah, fine. They’d say, they just put you in there because you’re black. They’re just window-dressing. I said, they may be window dressing; I’m not. I’m going to find some qualified individuals, females, other minorities and whatever, that can come in and do this job. I saw it as an opportunity to expand my beliefs and improve our company. Because I thought that they gave me direct input to building the character of our labor force.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. A common way that some companies addressed equal opportunity was to hire African Americans, sometimes as maybe just window-dressing, for appearances sometimes substantially. I wonder, is there a connection between that kind of action and your story about the basketball tournament in Pasco, where you were represent—the coach thought you would be representative, or would have the unique ability to speak to another group? I’m just wondering, is there any kind of—is that a similar train of thought, or do you see a connection in those?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Not necessarily, because I think what it was, was simply—you know, it was just our regular season game over at Pasco. And I think that the coach, really, was—it was a knee-jerk reaction to something that genuinely scared them. And I think the first reaction was, oh man, how do we get this hostile group of people, in this case black—how do we put a firehose on the fire? And, Greg’s black! I think the first thought was, they’re not going to want to hear from us; they’re already mad at us; we’re white. You know, they’re here banging on the door because they’re angry at white. Maybe they’re not going to be angry at him. Okay, boom, go help us.</p>
<p>Like I said, nothing really resulted from it, but I don’t necessarily see a direct correlation. I think the only correlation would be that the coach’s reaction—because they were human—in that day and time, is not much different from what you would find in the corporate management group in that day and time. And so when they were charged with having to address that, I think that you would run into some of the same lack of information, ignorance, prejudice, some people that simply were just prejudiced, some people that were just mean, and some people that wanted to do the right thing and didn’t know how. You know? I think it was a compilation of all of that. But I think that that’s the only correlation I would make. I would think that were people on the school side as well as on the corporate side that were victims of the reality of the situation, times, thought processes, and societal norms.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure, okay. Thank you. In what ways did security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your daily life?</p>
<p>Mitchell: The secrecy part of it was interesting, because I remember, even prior to getting to Hanford, when my brother went to the Air Force Academy, at that time, he had worked at the Safeway down on Cullum Avenue and then right after that I followed him there, because, hey, we got a job, you know, and he’s getting ready to go and take off. So I got this job. Well, I was back in the back, working in produce. I think I was—I believe I was unloading a pallet of Cabana bananas. All of the sudden I see this guy come in and he’s got a tie on and he’s got a hat on. The tie didn’t bother me, but the hat made him a little suspicious in my opinion. And he comes up and he’s got this little flip notebook. Well, what it was is they were doing a background check on my brother. Because if you graduate from the Academy, he’s going to go—maybe he goes to NORAD, which he did do, which is where our nukes are at. So they’re doing security background checks on him. So that was my first exposure to anything secretive and whatever. I knew that my dad had a badge, but I didn’t know what it meant.</p>
<p>So when I went to work out there, they said, okay, we’re going to get you what they call a temp badge. So I went to work out there as a college student in the summer, I got a temporary badge. And then you would hear people talking about, well, you need an L clearance. You need a Q clearance. I didn’t really know what those were.</p>
<p>Well, as I moved into human resources and we start bringing people on, we have to determine what level of classified material they are going to be allowed to see. If it was low level, that was L. If it was Q, okay, that was a little bit higher. And the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, for the federal government, does all the background checks for every agency. We happened to be contractors of the Department of Energy, but they do the same thing for the military, they do the same thing for everybody. And that was significant because once you—you’d have to do this horrendous amount of paperwork. Every place you’ve ever lived, every college apartment you’d ever had, the whole works. So it’d take a while to compile this information, and then you had to send it back and get in line. Well, you might be in line behind everybody else that OPM’s got to do a background check on. So, it could be months. Sometimes a Q clearance would take a year or even more, depending on what was going on. Boy, you were really disappointed if they found anything they had to go back and reinvestigate because it would just push you back in line.</p>
<p>So from that standpoint, I didn’t have any problems. But I did get exposed to it, because I started out with this temp, I went to an L, the higher I got in management, I would go to a Q. And then I had a little bit of that on the Academy side where they were investigating you. But as far as the impact on my job, per se—what I thought was comical was, for example, if I had an L clearance [LAUGHTER] I could go in, and—let’s say both you and her have Q clearances and you’re looking at something and you need my help. And I walk in as an underling, and I’m reviewing something with you. You guys are okay, because you have the Q clearances. I’m not supposed to see it. But an element of it, you need my help on, because it’s my area of expertise. The government says, it’s okay as long as you guys are there. I couldn’t look at it by myself. But if you guys are there, as if you were going to keep me from reading it, remembering it, and selling it down the road, you know, type of thing. So I thought that was comical. But that was the only impact. It wasn’t really—it was more a nuisance than it was anything else.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your parents ever talk about their reaction or did they have a reaction to learning that Hanford had contributed to the development of atomic weapons in the nuclear weapon stockpile?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Did they ever make any comments about it?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Mitchell: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about—</p>
<p>Mitchell: Not directly. Not that I ever really heard. I think that they were—my parents tended to be—both my mom and my dad tended to be, when they communicated with us as their children, tended to push the pride in what we were doing and wanting to do a good individual job. Now as it related to the big picture, they didn’t comment much on the political/societal impacts of it being, oh, this is where elements of the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Japan took place.</p>
<p>Franklin: How do you feel, or how did you feel at the time about working for a company on a larger scale for the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I felt fine. Because my initial exposure, like I said when I left here and went to Naval Academy Prep School, I had looked at those things, I was looking at the potential career of being in the military. So for me, the idea of the possibility—because my big goal was flight. I might be carrying the bomb. Now, did I have a problem with that? No. Did I have a problem with the idea of the bomb being used on people? No. I had the idea of the bomb being used on the wrong people. To me, again, I felt that I may have some level of control. Not much; I guess you take orders and do what you’re supposed to do at the time, if that really were to have come about.</p>
<p>But did I think, like people say, well, god, how would you feel about a bomb and being somebody to actually deliver that, or being somebody to actually help make that bomb? To me, I have two things that I think about. One, I want to hold the people accountable for making decisions to use it and how to use it, and I’m going to do the best job I can to make sure that the technology that I’m responsible for is being used responsibly. From there, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the rest of it and the social impacts and oh my goodness and all that stuff, no.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Mitchell: The most important legacy? I think the most important legacy is the fact that it did contribute to--most people think about the war. I think about all the science things that have come out of the Hanford Site. I a lot of people don’t understand or recall that the first artificial heart was developed down the street. Dr. Christian Bernard put it in. It was developed at Battelle. The scanner bars, developed at Battelle. Just like NASA has come out with all the things that we have: freeze drying, irradiated foods. I think Tang was the first thing that we use everyday that came out of NASA. There was a lot of things that came out of Hanford that don’t get—they don’t get any airtime compared to, oh my goodness, the bomb. I think their legacy is the day-in and day-out things that they’ve used or that they’ve developed that we use everyday. Whether it be x-rays and how we use it, how we do carbon dating, not necessarily developed here but enhanced here. And I think there’s so many things that go on that people who lived right here don’t know about that folks out there don’t communicate exist that have, they’re way above and beyond the bomb. And I think that’s the most important legacy, is the day-in-and-day-out contributions to our quality of life, and the life or quality of people worldwide that have come out of Hanford, I think is its greatest legacy.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Mitchell: What do I know or learn?</p>
<p>FranklIn: Yeah, what did you learn about it?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I learned over time that it was a segregated, it was initiated as a segregated situation, just like the rest of 1940s America, that I think it has evolved into a much better-educated and socially responsible legacy than how it started. I think that’s good. I think it has tremendous amount of continued potential. I hope it’s used in that way. We’ll see.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities when you were coming of age?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I think the major issues were similar to the national issues. I don’t think Hanford was unique. But I think that Hanford was probably more specifically honed-in on employment opportunities. Because that’s what it was about, work opportunities. But as it related to the overall issue, no, we didn’t go downtown and get kicked out of a place.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about housing opportunities?</p>
<p>Mitchell: And housing opportunities?</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that a struggle as well?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I think that was a struggle. But the thing was is that I think housing opportunities were limited or directed similar to like they were in the 1940s anywhere else. And especially up on a military base, which this was based on a military base concept. In fact, we used to have a Camp Hanford. I have an aunt—I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to speak with her, my dad’s sister—but she met her husband here. She was living with us and met her husband at Camp Hanford. Camp Hanford is all of these streets that you see up here behind you between George Washington Way and the river, all these streets that were up here that now people build up on, where these condos are, where the E.L. Food Factory is and all that was part of Camp Hanford. This was part of Camp Hanford, where we are right now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes. What actions were taken to address those issues of employment and housing?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I don’t know, then. I just know what I was involved in, and I know there were federal laws that were involved, obviously the civil rights movement in 1964 had some impacts on that. In 1964, I was 11. So it took a while before, one, I was aware of it, two, I was knowledgeable enough to make a, develop a thought process about it and be involved in it and/or impact it. But I think because of that timing, I was able to be involved in the beginning of some of those things actually coming to fruition to where you did see some movement. Is it still necessary? Yes. Yes, it’s still necessary. I think that—</p>
<p>Franklin: Is what still necessary?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Assisting and overseeing that people are getting equal opportunities. Some people say that, you know, affirmative action type of things and that type of mentality was, okay, load the numbers for a federal report. That’s not what people wanted. That’s not what people have ever wanted. That I did know, whether I was young or not. It wasn’t that somebody, well, I didn’t want you to give me a job. I don’t want you to give me a job. I want to be able to earn a job. I want to be able to be evaluated for my performance. I don’t want you to give me anything. I just don’t want you to stop me from earning anything.</p>
<p>And I think that that mentality still needs to be constantly educated, nurtured and supported. Whether it’s because of the color of your skin, your gender, your religion, whatever. I think that’s still important. I think it’s real simple. It’s very, very simple. Martin Luther King said, character not color. Don’t make it hard. Don’t overthink it, people. If the person’s character merits the opportunity, we’re done. The rest of it creates problems and extra energy that’s unnecessary. It’s not hard.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Directly involved?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Mitchell: You mean like marching in the street? No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, or—</p>
<p>Mitchell: Do you think—I would say yes as being the manager of the EEO office for a Fortune 500 company and one of their subsidiaries and evaluating their hiring practices and who they selected, who they promoted, and how they paid people. Yeah, I was directly involved.</p>
<p>Franklin: And which company was that again?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Westinghouse.</p>
<p>Franklin: Westinghouse, so here at the Hanford Site.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I think that once you bring national attention, the one thing that happens that influences nationally, including what happened here at Hanford, is that you have the responsibility and the authority to implement. Doesn’t mean it’s done well, it’s done accurately, timely, or efficiently, but you do have the responsibility and the authority to implement. And I think that’s the influence that a national movement has.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. From your perspective and experience, what, if anything, was different about the civil rights efforts in this community?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I think the civil rights efforts in this community, for me personally, I think that there were folks that were surprised that there was any need for it, particularly in my community as it related to me being in school. Being a predominantly white school, there’s a lot of folks, in this case kids, that didn’t see any racial episodes that imprinted them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because they were kept away from it.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I don’t know if they were kept away from it, or if they—it didn’t happen everyday. You didn’t see that many other minorities, so you didn’t see it on a daily basis. They may have heard something at school, but the race riots, those things, they didn’t happen down your street, they didn’t happen at your lunch counter, they didn’t happen at your movie theater, they didn’t happen at your drive-in. Not very much. Some of those things would happen, but usually you wouldn’t see it. We had a few things that occurred here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Such as?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I remember that there was a shotgun discharged on Lee Boulevard at Zip’s that unnerved us a little bit. We don’t know if it was directed at my brother or not. There were a couple of episodes where you would have people get in fights and that type of thing. There would be situations in the school districts, at athletic competitions where you would see a predominantly black school, such as Davis out in Yakima or Pasco High out of Pasco, come into Kennewick or Richland or even Eisenhower-Davis, Yakima-to-Yakima, that you could say were based on the energy and concerns people had related to the civil rights movement and what they would see on television and the frustration that they felt that they needed to support, whether it was happening to them everyday or not. I think there were some influences there, where people said, oh, yeah, that’s right, we ought to do something here. What are you going to do? Have you done your homework? Are you educated? Do you know what you—a lot of people will stand up and jump around, and if you stop and say, what do you want the outcome of all this to be? I don’t know; we’re just mad. Well, that’s not good enough. What is it that you really want? What do you see? What do you want changed? When are you going to say that something is actually happening positively towards the goal that you understand and articulate? A lot of times, the back end is not part of it. It’s just a front-end reaction.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the issues here that existed for people to focus on, that weren’t just misdirected energy? But was there any civil rights issues here in the community that needed people’s attention?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, here in Richland, not so much. I think in Pasco there were. I think if you recall at all the discussion that you had with Dad, even as a youngster growing up, I remember in Pasco, them fighting for simple things. Water and sewer on the east side. I remember walking over to visit my relatives, and we would go over and I had one great-uncle and we had a set of really, really good friends of ours. To get from one place to the other, there were these boards laid over this, basically an open cesspool. And we would have to walk across the boards to go over the cesspool and then get back on the sidewalk—on the street; there was no sidewalk—get on the street and then walk over to this guy’s house, and then walk on the boards to get back to my great-uncle’s house. They didn’t have sewer. So yeah, there were some civil rights issues that were just basic. Running water and sewer on the east side. But I would come back to Richland, and I could jump in the shower and turn it on and flush the toilet. So, did I live that on a daily basis? Not where I lived. Did I know that it was part of my overall community? Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did your work at Hanford come to an end and what did you do afterwards?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Oh, Hanford, I took an early release in 2005. After that, I was focused on wanting to have a professional career as an umpire. I did that for a little while and found out that it’s harder than it looks. You don’t get paid a lot of money on the low end and you have no insurance. So from there, I decided I would continue to do high school and college basketball and baseball. Then I started working in the school districts as a paraeducator, which is basically a teacher’s assistant. I started out in the Kennewick School District and I worked in the special needs department, which is special education. And I had a couple of assignments in the classroom setting, I had a couple of follow-on assignments one-on-one, and I concluded that, in 2015, here at Hanford, across the street with a classroom assignment, special needs classroom assignment, and then I decided to formally retire, which means basically, apply for my social security, August 2015. Since then, I’ve continued to officiate high school and college basketball and baseball, and I’ve always enjoyed the river and been a fisherman and outdoors in that regard, and I’m going to be doing that as soon as I get paroled from you guys.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sounds good. [LAUGHTER] Well, I just have two more questions.</p>
<p>Mitchell: That’s fine.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then I’ll let you get to the river, because it is a nice day out.</p>
<p>Mitchell: It’s beautiful.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s going to be nice day outside today. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Mitchell: That it was a very unique place in regards to the amount of really exceptional minds that were here, and I hope continue to be here. At the time that the Cold War was going on—now, one of the things the Cold War did, and I hope someone describes the Cold War to them, what’s the difference between a hot war and a cold war—one of the things that our race with the Soviet Union did is that it constantly pushed innovation. I think there’s where some of the things that I mentioned before that really don’t get their horns tooted as much as, oh, this is the place that had to do with the bomb—that’s when a lot of that was just really going—great guns was the push for innovation and using your mind. I think we had some of the greatest minds ever and still do. We have a collection of some very brilliant people here at the Hanford Site.</p>
<p>The other thing I want them to know that during that time, was we weren’t immune to any of the issues that the rest of the country was going through. I think if you look further, it wasn’t just the United States. But I think that we made some progress, that we continue to make more progress. And hopefully they’re grateful for the fact that where they are now is because of other people before, you know, recognizing, standing up, doing for and holding accountable themselves and others. And I hope they remember that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else that you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, the one thing that I always—I will say that kind of frustrated me—[COUGH] excuse me—in my professional career of being a recruiter, I was unsuccessful in getting some of these corporations—even though at one time Hanford was the biggest summer employer of college students in the United States at one time—I always felt that we had kind of missed a little bit by not tracking our own out-going high school students. By that I mean that we have the ability, especially nowadays, through our technology, to identify kids that are interested in math, science, engineering, and other aspects of the workforce that’s needed here and beyond. I don’t think that we do it very well. I think if we were to mine our own high schools for students that are either going to CBC for technical degrees and workability in two years, to folks that are going elsewhere and maintaining some kind of communication and tracking system that says that these 30 kids coming out of this school and these 27 out of this school, where are they?</p>
<p>Because what I’ve found was, in my recruiting experience, we didn’t find that a lot of young people at the University of Washington in engineering and science would want to come to Hanford. They tended to be folks that wanted to work in lab coats and on computers and didn’t want to get dirty and didn’t want to leave—when I say dirty, be out and about with boots and a hardhat on, walking down a fence looking at something, standing under a tank, coming in here, brushing the dirt off of something. They wanted to be design engineering, design scientists. Well, it would take kind of a different personality that really wanted to come and live here, because of our geographics, our weather, et cetera. So we would end up replacing a high number of those young people. Once they were here, they got relocated here after school, got a job, they got happy, mom and dad were happy, yeah, they’re working. And they’d say, I’m a young person, don’t have a family established yet, they’d be here a year and next thing you know they’ve got to Phoenix to Motorola. Or they’re going to Amazon or they’re going to Microsoft or whatever. Which is fine.</p>
<p>But you still have a need for some folks here, and the kids that grew up here, a lot of them want to go and do those things, too. But in the long run, they tend to come back, and we’d track that part of it, they tend to come back and raise their families here. So we were never successful, in my opinion, in kind of keeping a little bit in touch with those folks and mining our own built-in workforce. So that’s one thing that I wish that we had done better, that I had had more impact on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hmm. Well, Greg, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to interview with us.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Not a problem.</p>
<p>Franklin: Now, I’ll let you get back to the fishing.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah, I’m going to get on the river and have some fun.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
J.A. Jones Construction
Tank Farms
200 East Area
Westinghouse
U.S. Department of Energy
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1953-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1972-2005
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Greg Mitchell
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
School integration
Sports
Migration
Naval education
Basketball
Racism
Football
Nuclear industry
Engineering
Affirmative action
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Description
An account of the resource
Greg Mitchell was born in Pasco, Washington in 1953 and grew up in Richland, Washington. Greg worked on the Hanford Site from 1972-2005.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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04/23/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6e30d3e337609651104e8500b79d2c9a.JPG
556342979eeca9c416457931981a3047
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff603783bd090cbf7b0264ceb196fc541.mp4
98cc7ff788f4b561bb9230343d7a27d4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
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David (Duke) Mitchell
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Duke Mitchell on March 2<sup>nd</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Duke about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Duke Mitchell: My full name is David Lynn Mitchell. D-I-V-A—D-A-V-I-D, I’m sorry. L-Y-N-N for Lynn, and Mitchell, M-I-T-C-H-E-L-L. However, I’ve been called Duke my entire life. I am now 66 years old and very proud of it. But my dad wanted to name me Duke after Duke Snider, baseball player. But my mother said, no. So they named me David after my grandfather, her father, and Lynn after one of my dad’s brothers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Your father was very into baseball, right?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes! C.J. Mitchell was very into baseball. That was his favorite sport. He grew up doing that, playing that, and he was an umpire for 40 years at least. Umpired in the College World Series four times, did a number of NAIA World Series as well; I think there were about ten of those. And he’s in four or five different halls of fame, not only in the state of Washington, but nationally, in baseball. And then he also umpired and refereed basketball and football at the high school level.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. That’s great, and we’ll want to talk a bit more about that later. I’d like to kind of start at the beginning. When and where were you born?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1951. June 30<sup>th</sup>.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. But your father had been to the area before you were born, correct?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if you can talk a bit about that.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I’ll tell you what I think I know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, perfect.</p>
<p>Mitchell: He and my mother both told me along the way, but then also I did watch the interview of him just the other day. But I do know that he came out to the Hanford area in 1947 when he was 16 years old, after graduating from high school, Perfection High, in Kildare, Texas. He followed some of his relatives out here looking for work. So he was here for a couple different occasions, it turned out.</p>
<p>I didn’t realize until I watched the video on him that he had come here, became homesick, went back to Texas, and then he came back a second time and stayed longer. But then he went back and married my mother, his high school sweetheart, in June of 1950, June 3<sup>rd</sup>, in fact. Then they moved to Chicago, Illinois, following other relatives, looking for work. While they were there, I was born. We stayed there just a brief time, and then we moved to Hermiston, Oregon in late 1951 or early 1952, as my dad worked as a laborer on the McNary Dam, helping to construct the McNary Dam. Then shortly after that, we moved to Pasco, Washington, and my dad worked on the Blue Bridge as a laborer once again. And he did other kinds of odds-and-ends jobs as well, until he was finally able to get a job out at Hanford, working in construction in all these cases, helping to build the K Basins, he has told us, and other kinds of contracting labor, I guess it would be.</p>
<p>Until he was finally able to realize, and was encouraged by some of his supervisors to go to school, go to college. He went to Columbia Basin College and studied chemistry and math, primarily, because those were the things that would apply to what he was doing there at Hanford. And he was able to then work himself into some better jobs as a result, to the point where he became a metallurgical technician in the 300 Area here at Hanford, just north of Richland. That was a good thing for him, got him out of the construction area, into a little more technical fields. And then from there he was able to, again, continue on with his education. Took him 14 years to get his two-year degree at Columbia Basin College it turns out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Mitchell: That’s a long time. A lot of starting and stopping. And in fact, I’m a trustee at Columbia Basin College right now myself, in my eighth year as a trustee. But education has always been an important thing to my parents. All the years as we were growing up, they always talked about education. We were pretty good athletes and played a lot of sports as we were growing up. But my dad and mom always said, that’s not how you’re going to make it, as far as making a living, and you need to get as much education as you can. That’s going to be your ticket to success. They always told us that, and it is definitely true.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did your mother ever attain higher education as well?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Not schooling-wise, but she was a really smart person and hard-working person. And I think the biggest thing is she had a lot of courage and got involved with things. In fact, I’ve thought about them over the last ten years at least, realized how much courage they had to do some of the things that they did as African American people in the time that they did it. So, again, to answer your question, no, my mother did not have higher education, but she did have a lot of experience, life learning, life lessons, I guess you would say. Got involved with a lot of things and allowed us children to also get involved with a lot of things.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you offer any specifics on some of the courageous things that you felt they did as African Americans?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Just kind of sticking their neck out, to use one of my dad’s phrases, in that they got involved in areas where they were the only African Americans there. At a time when oftentimes, folks didn’t want to see us around.</p>
<p>Franklin: Such as?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Such as getting involved with Boy Scouts and the City of Richland. Moving to the city of Richland, for that matter, because—and we moved here in 1955—it was difficult for African Americans to move into Richland because it was a controlled situation. It was a government-owned community; you had to have a full-time job in order to move to Richland. We lived in east Pasco, as all—not all—most African Americans back then, that’s where we lived. That’s where we were allowed to live. So I lived with my parents in east Pasco, probably from the time I was two until I was four or five years old, when we moved to Richland.</p>
<p>So the fact that they went to Chicago, following their relatives, places they knew nothing about, then they moved to Hermiston, Oregon. My mother had never been there; my father had. Then they moved to Pasco, and then they moved to Richland, all by the time I was five years old. Like I say, once we got to Richland--and that’s when I can really start remembering what was going on--just getting involved with activities—my mother was involved when I was in Cub Scouts; she was a Cub Scout leader. She used to go to school board meetings, for years, I understand. I wasn’t here after I left in 1969, going to college. But my mother became very active in the community.</p>
<p>My dad, also, just the fact that he got involved with a lot of things, took a lot of risks in terms of the jobs that he pursued and he was saying in the video that I watched, the oral interview with him, about taking a pay cut in one instance, hoping to get a job. He did get a job and it turned out real well for him. The fact that he went on 17 interviews, I think was the number that he cited, before he actually got one. Or maybe it was 16 and he got an interview on the 17<sup>th</sup>.</p>
<p>Those kinds of things, in the 1950s, that was courageous for African Americans. I know that now, from my experiences, when I went looking for an apartment to live in in Southern California in the 1970s once I graduated from the Air Force Academy, my first duty assignment. There were certain areas that wouldn’t rent to me, wouldn’t rent to them when they were going through that process. That’s why I call them somewhat courageous.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, definitely. Did your parents ever talk about their time living in east Pasco, kind of what the conditions were and why they moved to Richland?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I do remember some of the living in east Pasco. I have a lot of relatives that lived there then and still quite a few that live there now. But, to refresh what I had recalled and what I was told along the way, looking again at the oral interview with my father: in east Pasco, back in the late ‘40s, certainly in the ‘50s when I was there, and even into the ‘60s and ‘70s, the infrastructure there was not good. They had outhouses at times while I was there. I remember there were chickens and things walking around, kind of loose in some of the neighborhood when I was a kid myself. Running water, things of that nature, were not what they should have been. It was definitely a second-class environment in east Pasco there. But at the same time, the African American community made themselves a home there. There were a lot of things going on there, there was a lot of cultural things going on there, a lot of activity. But going over to Pasco from Richland, once we moved over here—because we used to go to church in east Pasco, the African American churches, if you will.</p>
<p>Franklin: And which church did you attend?</p>
<p>Mitchell: We went to Morning Star for one, and there’s a New Hope Church there and there’s some others that we attended. But I had several great-uncles that were in Pasco: Vanis Daniels, Senior, and then Willy Daniels, they were two brothers. They were brothers of my dad’s mother. We used to go over there on Sundays a lot. There were some other relatives that I had there that we would visit as well. But I bring up Willy Daniels because he just lived down the street on Douglas Street there in east Pasco, from Morning Star Baptist Church. I do remember going to church with him.</p>
<p>But the reason I get into that, going over there, going through downtown Pasco, Lewis Street was the main drag back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. There was a Sears Roebuck there. I think that might be the Booth Building now; I’m not sure if that’s the same one, where the Pasco School District is located and their facilities. But going again east on Lewis Street, through downtown Pasco, then you go underneath a bridge, I guess it’s a railroad bridge or whatever. That was the dividing line between Pasco and east Pasco. It was like going to almost a different world in some respects, because of just the change in the conditions. Not only the folks, from a Caucasian world, if you will, into an African American world, but just the quality of what was there just wasn’t the same. At the same time, folks made the best life that they could there. I certainly respect and love my relatives who live there, came there, and are still there, some of them.</p>
<p>Franklin: You still have some relatives in Pasco?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Absolutely, yes. I have a number of relatives still in Pasco. Some in east Pasco, some who have moved. Because when Urban Renewal happened in, what, I think it was the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—</p>
<p>Franklin: That sounds about right.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah, but then they dispersed some of the ethnic neighborhoods, if you will. Certainly in Pasco it was some of the dispersal of African Americans throughout the community and things of that nature. But Vanis Daniels, Senior lived there, but his son, Vanis Daniels, Junior, is still over there, he and his family. And then Edmon Daniels, his brother. There are a number of others, but I don’t want to name too many names because I’ll leave somebody out and then I will—folks won’t be happy with me.</p>
<p>Franklin: I understand completely. It’s so interesting. I like the way you described that, going under the bridge. I think so many of us have heard that phrase, right, “on the other side of the tracks.”</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah, it’s definitely the other side of the tracks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Or sometimes “on the wrong side of the tracks.” But that’s literally how it was.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: I mean, the tracks were kind of this dividing line, this de facto segregated line.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes, they were. And when I say under the bridge, it was a railroad bridge. The tracks went across the top of the bridge. So going on West Lewis to East Lewis, you’d go down underneath the railroad tracks through this tunnel, this bridge, and then come back up on the other side. Back then, there was Whittier Elementary School, which is where most of the African American students went because that was in our part of town, if you will. There was a definite distinction.</p>
<p>Franklin: Awesome, thank you. Okay. So Richland, obviously, was kind of a different world.</p>
<p>Mitchell: It was.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you described how you had to work at Hanford to live in Richland. I’m wondering if you could talk about your early memories in Richland, and maybe even going back as far as your moving from Pasco to Richland and how that change was for you and your family.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I’d love to. As I say, I was probably four to five years old when we moved to Richland from Pasco. At that time, there was myself and then my brother, Greg, would have been—well, he is two years younger than me, so he would have been two to three years old. And then our brother Nestor was born in 1955. He was born in Kennewick General Hospital. I don’t know if he was born before we actually moved to Richland or right after we moved to Richland. But the big thing was, we lived in a prefab at 100 Craighill in Richland and when we first moved there, there was four of us, I would say: my mother and father and myself and Greg. It’s a two-bedroom prefab and it has one bathroom. By the time we moved out of that house in 1965, there were eight of us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p>Mitchell: That was big, because the bathroom was the crunch point. I mean, that was where—we had to get through the bathroom in order to get to church on time, and we were almost always late for church, which really stuck in my mind. As far as moving there, the community there in what was the old south end of Richland, we were treated pretty well. At the same time, we were—there was another African-American family on the next street, Casey Street, which was the Wallace family. There were a number of children there. Theartis Wallace was a very good basketball player for Richland High School. He had a brother, Maurice, who also played basketball. Another brother, Bruce, several years younger who played basketball for Richland, et cetera. And then down another corner there was the Rockamore family, African American family. They are cousins of mine, ours, as well. All from Texas. Most of us—</p>
<p>Franklin: All three families?</p>
<p>Mitchell: All three families. Yeah, many of the families that I knew, anyway, came from a place called Kildare, Texas. That’s where my parents went to high school and where they’re from.</p>
<p>Franklin: How do you spell that?</p>
<p>Mitchell: K-I-L-D-A-R-E. I think my dad did talk about that in his segment, as well.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, yeah.</p>
<p>Mitchell: A lot of folks from Kildare came to the Tri-Cities because once they found they could have a job, find a job, folks came looking for work. Because as my dad always said, you could always find a job here and it paid much better than the jobs did in east Texas. So that was one of the reasons that they were drawn here. At the same time realizing that they weren’t always welcome. But they could find a job, and generally speaking, it was a better condition than what they had left. So they were willing to come here.</p>
<p>As far as growing up, once again, I started to say, we were treated fairly well by the folks in our community, the Caucasian folks. Realizing that there were some differences. I’ve thought about those things before I came here today. One of the things that we were always taught was to treat folks well and respectfully. There were some rules, some unwritten rules, certainly, as far as how the races interacted or didn’t interact together. We were aware of those. One of the ones that I think about is, we didn’t go to other folks’ houses, normally, and certainly didn’t go in their house. In my family, we were expected to be home before dark, so we were always home before dark. And my parents were pretty strict with that.</p>
<p>We played sports—I was the oldest of the six, of course. When I was eight years old, I started playing Little League baseball, and I was pretty good. My brothers coming along were pretty good as well. Sports was a good thing for us, because it did allow us to interact with others and others to interact with us. And also get to know us, because many of the folks, Caucasian folks, in the community hadn’t really dealt with black folks in the past. So that was a way for us to interact and that kind of thing. That was good. They got to know us, and we got to know them somewhat. Like I say, I was always treated well and the teachers were really helpful. And I was a star on the playground, which was a good thing. But at the same time, again, the school was the big thing for us, according to my parents, and I believed it.</p>
<p>However, I finally got to seventh grade, and I played football, baseball and basketball in the seventh grade and eighth grade, throughout. But I didn’t do well in school that seventh grade year. In fact, I got three Ds.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh my.</p>
<p>Mitchell: That year, my first report card in junior high school. Not middle school, junior high school back then. My parents said, no more sports for you until you get your grades straightened out. So that caught my attention.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that must’ve hurt, as a—</p>
<p>Mitchell: It did, because that’s what I did! I was pretty good. Well, you know, he’d always told me, my parents always told me about the importance of education. And then I was also starting to see that, too.</p>
<p>Watching some of the programs on television that I used to watch. Whether it be the sports programs—because I watched every ball game that was on television if I could. Back in the mid-‘50s, late ‘50s, we only had two TV stations, I think, in the Tri-Cities then. Whatever was on that was sports, I would watch it. Especially college football, I would watch that. That’s when I first fell in love with USC Trojan football team, because every November, we could watch Ohio State and Michigan in the morning and USC and UCLA in the afternoon. And I watched them all. I loved what I saw. That was one of the reasons that I started thinking, I think I want to go to college.</p>
<p>And then also, the environment in Richland, education is a big thing in Richland, as it is throughout the Tri-Cities, but Richland in particular. And I do—many would attribute that to the fact that Hanford is here and there are a lot of well-educated people here. That trickles down to their kids and it’s expected that you do well in school.</p>
<p>Being a competitive individual, some of my classmates were doing really well in education. I can do that, too. In eighth grade I decided that I was going to be on honor roll, because that’s what they do in Richland. I was accustomed—well, being kind of a—I won’t say top dog but certainly competitive. So I wanted to do that.</p>
<p>Also in eighth grade is when I had a crush on a young lady and I found out that she liked guys who did well in school. From them on, I did well in school. Turns out, she’s also the young lady that asked me to run for class president when I was a senior in high school. I did, to impress her, feeling I wouldn’t win anyway. However, I did win.</p>
<p>I’ve been paying for it for 50 years, in that every time I come home from the military for my class reunions, I had the privilege of giving a speech. And then also since I’ve been back for the last 25 years, my best friend and I have been some of the leaders in putting together the recent reunions. And in fact, I was just asked on Monday at Fred Meyer, what are we going to do for our 50<sup>th</sup> reunion next year? So, like I say, that’s continued on for a long time, that responsibility. But it’s been a privilege and it also helped me get into the Air Force Academy.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s the gift that keeps on giving, huh?</p>
<p>Mitchell: It’s a gift that keeps on giving.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what year did you graduate school?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Richland High School class of 1969.</p>
<p>Franklin: But that would be Columbia High School, right?</p>
<p>Mitchell: We were Columbia High School back then. Although we did have an R on our helmets; we were always called Richland, but officially we were Columbia High School.</p>
<p>Franklin: I just, I only say that because when I said Richland High School to Ann Roseberry, she—</p>
<p>Mitchell: She corrected you?</p>
<p>Franklin: She was very—yes. Very, very prompt to correct me that it was indeed Columbia High School.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay, yeah. Ann Roseberry has recently been the manager of the Richland Public Library. She invited me to be on the Richland Public Library board about nine years ago. So I’m in my ninth year of being on that board because of Ann Roseberry, formerly Ann Chamberlain when we were growing up. Her father is—or was—a retired lieutenant—excuse me, a retired full colonel in the Air Force. When I went to the Air Force Academy one of the people that I talked with when I came back was her father. So we’ve been connected somewhat for 50 years. I’m a lieutenant colonel, retired, and I got through the Air Force Academy as a football player. I was recruited to play football for the Air Force.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow, so sports was—</p>
<p>Mitchell: And I did play. Sports was a big thing for us. In fact, of the six of us children, three of us were put through college playing college football.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. And you played for which—</p>
<p>Mitchell: I played for the Air Force Academy. And my brother, Greg, played for University of Puget Sound. He was a wide receiver and defensive back. I was a defensive back and a quarterback and a tailback in college at Air Force. And then our brother, Cameron, who was a high school American football player, and I understand also a high school All-American basketball player at Richland High School, but he played for Washington State University. And he’s now a superior court judge. And I have a brother, Nestor, who was a pretty good baseball player as well. He had the opportunity to play at Washington State University. But apparently he and the coach didn’t see eye to eye, so he didn’t stay there for that purpose for that long. He’s a recently retired fireman from the City of Seattle, however.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. I imagine when you were growing up watching sports, that would have been the time where the leagues were starting to desegregate, or have more African American players in them, right? Because that would have been—</p>
<p>Mitchell: Absolutely. That was one of the reasons, I guess, that I—partially why I fell in love with USC. Because there were not a lot of the major schools that had African American players in the ‘50s, certainly, and into the ‘60s—because I graduated in ’69. But USC had a lot of really good teams; they also had a lot of good—well, not a lot—they had three or four good African American ball players on their team. That was not that big of a—not that prominent—not that prevalent, is the right word. Not that prevalent at that time. In fact, in the SEC, Southeastern Conference, that the Air Force played in Tennessee in the 1971 Sugar Bowl, the SEC was totally segregated. Well, not totally—99.9% segregated. Now you look at the SEC and as far as football and basketball, most of their players are in fact African American. But when we played them in the ‘70s, early ’69, ’70, ’71, is when I played for the Air Force, they did not have more than two or three African American players in the SEC and other leagues as well. Even the Big 10, which had a fair number of African American players, on a given team, you’d probably only have three or four or five and they were all pretty good or they wouldn’t be on the team, probably. So that was a transition period, for sure. In fact, we played, I think at least one game, or one team that was somewhat hesitant to play Air Force because of the African American teams on Air Force. Even in 1969, ’70 timeframe.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Still definitely well within the civil rights era.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Absolutely. That’s another thing that I was thinking about. Again, I went to the Air Force Academy in 1969. I was selected to go there, probably just a little less than a year after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I do know that the United States government was trying to find ways to integrate and to change some of the policies and procedures that were going on in this country at the time. I certainly believe that one of the reasons that I was able to go to the Air Force Academy—I was recruited, again, to play football—but I think there was more emphasis on finding qualified African American students who could be in service academies and other aspects of life in the United States. So.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. You had mentioned some of these unwritten rules and without getting too personal, I wanted to know, how did dating figure into that when you were in high school?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Ha, ha. Yeah, that was one of those unwritten areas. It was one of those things that it was pretty well understood that as an African American guy, black guy, you really probably shouldn’t date Caucasian girls, white girls. The first date I had, however, was something called Tolo at Richland High School. It’s like Sadie Hawkins.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, okay.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Where the girls invite the guys. I was invited by a Caucasian lady to go to that with her. And in fact, I was one of two sophomore princes for Tolo in 1967, it would have been. Yeah, ’67. Maybe ’66, ’67, when I was a sophomore at Richland High School.</p>
<p>But getting back to the specific question, yeah. We went to Richland Baptist Church on George Washington Way here in Richland. It was—I think we were the only black family there. There might have been others that came and went while we were there. And there were some young ladies that I certainly was attracted to, but at the same time, I knew, no, that’s not going to work. And then also being a Southern Baptist church, just—no.</p>
<p>And then another one that has been in the news recently is about Kennewick and how we knew that we weren’t supposed to be in Kennewick. Unless we maybe had a specific purpose, maybe going to a store to pick up something. I think we went to Basin Surplus, I think that’s in Kennewick, to buy something several times with my parents. We played sports over in Kennewick, but then we got on a bus and came home.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I wanted to ask a little bit more about that. I’ve heard from many that there was kind of a de facto rule that African Americans weren’t encouraged—were not encouraged to be in Kennewick after dark and would be stopped by the police if they were. Did that ever happen to you or anyone you know? Do you have any experience or recollection of that kind of treatment?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay. I have heard about it. I never personally experienced it, because I am one who tried to learn—I tried to learn from others and their experiences. And have always been taught to not put yourself in a situation where you can find yourself in trouble if you can help it. So from my specific situation, I would have to say it’s hearsay. Because I never really saw the sign. But yeah, I certainly heard it, and I strongly believe that I felt it. Even in Pasco and Richland, I mean, there were certain areas that you knew that you probably ought not to be in, and so you didn’t go there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Even in Richland?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Even in Richland. There were some areas—well, again, in 1965, my dad talked about how he tried to buy a house up in Beverly Heights, which is just to the southwest of Carmichael.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay. And I do remember that because I was 14 years old at the time and we thought we were going to get out of that two-bedroom prefab with eight of us and get a new house, or a different house. And it fell through. But having been in that area, even in the recent few years, yeah, that would be an area that I don’t think would be welcoming to us, even now.</p>
<p>And then my dad who was a realtor for a number of years—he did pass away January 24th, 2016. But he was selling real estate almost up until that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, 2014 is when I found he was ill. He was still a realtor at that time but he didn’t do a lot of selling because I took him to a lot of medical appointments then. But we’ll say 2010, just as a number—a year. But there were some areas in Pasco, West Pasco that he says that he was showing an African American family some potential houses to buy, and some folks came up to him, basically, and said, no, not in this area. You’re not really welcome here. So that was approximately 2010 timeframe in West Pasco.</p>
<p>As far as Richland, my dad did experience some difficulties there on 115 Spring Street, which he purchased that house in 2000—excuse me, 1976. 1976. I know that for a fact, because I loaned him $10,000 towards his down payment. The reason that I was able to do that, I was a lieutenant in the Air Force, my wife was working, we didn’t have any children. Also, I had just received a legal settlement and some dollars from my car accident where I had been run into by a drunk in Colorado—excuse me, in Wyoming, on my way back to Colorado. And so, I was able to loan my dad $10,000 for a down payment on that 115 Spring Street house.</p>
<p>But he did receive at least one anonymous phone call threatening him and us. And then one of his coworkers there at Hanford did inform my dad that when this coworker was about to move into a house on Spring Street, that this coworker was quizzed as to whether or not he knew about “those folks down the street,” talking about our family. Now, I wasn’t in that house. I was in California at that time. Because, again, I left Richland in June of 1969 on my way to the Air Force Academy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay. So I would come home during my breaks and such but I never lived in Richland directly again until 1993. So, you know, I observed things, I heard things, but I was gone for 24 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, great. Oh, I say that all the time. Richland, especially when you would have first moved here, was a very peculiar town in that it was owned by the government—</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes, it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: --which is a distinction very few towns in America have. I’m wondering if you could talk about whether—I guess it would be more upon reflection, but kind of the peculiarities of living in this government town where everyone had a job and everyone was assigned housing and things like that.</p>
<p>Mitchell: I’d love to. Primarily because I’m a retired Air Force officer. And I, along the way, came to realize that the government towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and there in New Mexico and also here at Richland were designed and built on a military model—a military base. And the assignment of houses was based on a military model, and that you received the kind of house that you were offered based on your rank, if you will. Whether or not you were a manager or how high a manager, or if you were further down on the totem pole, if you will. For the African Americans, I do remember that almost every one of us that I can think of lived in a prefab. I think there were three-bedroom prefabs and two-bedroom prefabs. I know we had a two-bedroom prefab. I don’t know what the Wallaces had because they had a fairly good sized family as well. I don’t know if they had a two-bedroom or a three-bedroom, 102 Casey Street. Down the street on Craighill, my cousins, again, the Rockamores, I think—they only had one daughter, so I think they had a two-bedroom. But one of the things living in Tri—Richland, I’m sorry, in Richland—I think they had inspections of the yards and things were maintained very well here. Also, Richland was fairly new, too. Because, now looking back on it, leaving here in 1969, and Richland I think was really built in 1943 or ’42, or something like that. It wasn’t that old.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. No, it certainly wasn’t.</p>
<p>Mitchell: But things were in pretty good shape. We had a lot of what are called Quonset hut-type buildings. The library was in one of those. It’s the buildings that have kind of the round roof, that kind of thing. There are not many left now.</p>
<p>Franklin: A lot of those were military surplus.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, that was military. Yeah, exactly. That’s what I’m saying. And then just up the street—well, up here was where Camp Hanford was. That was a Army camp, because they had the Army here, I believe, to help with security for Hanford. That’s my best knowledge of why we had that group of military stationed here. In fact, my dad’s—one of my dad’s three sisters, Emma Mitchell, now Emma Peeples, married an Army enlisted person while she was here. She moved up from Texas to here to live with our family in that two-bedroom prefab. So there was maybe nine of us at some point. I mean, I can’t remember how many there were.</p>
<p>Franklin: When I first got to town, I lived in a two-bedroom prefab with my wife. It was small just for two of us and a cat. I just—</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, we had bunk beds. I know we had two sets of bunk beds. I can’t remember where everybody slept. We had one sister. I don’t think she slept in the same room with us guys. I don’t know that for a fact. It was tight.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I—it would have to be.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah. But again, everybody that lived in Richland at that time was pretty much connected to Hanford in some fashion. So we all had that in common. Going to school, education was significant and important to almost everybody. If you weren’t trying to do well in school, you were an anomaly, I would say. That’s the way I felt, anyway. Because we were expected—at least the folks I hung out with, and I hung out with ball players, a lot, and students who did well in school, just because those were the kinds of folks I was attracted to as well.</p>
<p>But taking higher math or physics or biology or chemistry or whatever, those were things that I did do, because I realized, again, going back to eighth grade that I wanted to go to college. I didn’t know what I was going to study, but I just wanted to be prepared. And then when I did take the SAT, I did do well on that. I was a semifinalist on the SAT. I didn’t realize what it took to become a finalist until my son took the SAT when we got back here and he did very well with it and he was a finalist. In fact, he ended up being a Rhoads Scholar candidate. He’s pretty bright guy. He’s got a PhD now in history. And then my daughter’s also pretty bright as well.</p>
<p>Franklin: Does your son teach?</p>
<p>Mitchell: He teaches at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee right now. He’s been there three years; he’s on a tenure track position.</p>
<p>Franklin: Those are—I’m a historian myself, I know how coveted those positions are. So he must really be a bright guy.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah, he’s pretty bright. Like I say, he’s—well, yeah. And my wife is pretty bright, too. That’s where they got it from, I’m sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. That’s a good thing to say on camera.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, that’s how I truly believe.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, I know.</p>
<p>Mitchell: At the same time, I’m no slouch, to use my dad’s, another one of his phrases. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Social events, what kind of social/community events in Richland or in Pasco do you remember participating in growing up?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I didn’t participate in a lot. Primarily, it was in church, whether it would be at Richland Baptist Church. There were a few early on, perhaps in Pasco, when we’d go back to Pasco and spend time with our relatives and that kind of thing. But I didn’t go to many social activities, again, while going through—I went through Lewis and Clark Elementary School, Carmichael Junior High, and then Richland High School. And I didn’t go to dances. I didn’t do a lot of things at night, like I said, because we were expected to be home at night. So I generally was.</p>
<p>I was the first-born, and I do believe in birth order having an impact on how you do things. I do believe, oftentimes the first-born tries to be a little more obedient to their parents and do what the parents expect. So I didn’t break a lot of rules or whatever. Now, as my parents had more kids, they became a little less strict. My brothers and sisters, I strongly believe, were able to do a lot of things I wasn’t able to do. But at the same time, I really didn’t want to do a lot of those things just because, as I say, I did have that feeling at times that I wasn’t always welcome or that—you know. I was a little different.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Connected to that, you would have been in middle school and high school at the height of the civil rights movement, nationwide. I’m wondering if you could reflect on how that impacted you.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, it definitely did in that I have relatives who lived in Watts, California, outside of—well, LA. And when Watts was burning and they were having riots there, I was concerned for my relatives and that. I’d been there before, visiting, in, well, 1964. My family and I were there visiting some of my mother’s sisters and other relatives in Los Angeles, in Watts. And so in 1965 when I’m seeing Watts burn and that—and there’s also riots going on in Detroit, Michigan and in Chicago—which, I have relatives in Chicago; I was born in Chicago, as I said. I have relatives in Detroit, I have relatives in Oakland, I have relatives in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, and lots of other places. So I was fearful, I was concerned. I was concerned about what might happen here, locally. Because there was also some strife in Pasco as a result of just the fact that the conditions were not what they should have been. With other folks around the country expressing their frustration with being suppressed in many respects, some things did happen in Pasco as well. So that started getting kind of close to home. So I was fearful, I was concerned, and then, again, when folks started getting shot, I mean, some of our leaders started getting shot—of course, John Kennedy was out here visiting Hanford Site, N Reactor, I think in 1962 is when he visited?</p>
<p>Franklin: ’63.</p>
<p>Mitchell: ’63, okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: About two months before—</p>
<p>Mitchell: So then November 22<sup>nd</sup>, ’63, he’s assassinated. And then his brother gets killed shortly thereafter, and of course, Martin Luther King gets killed, and Malcolm X gets killed. There’s a lot going on in the ‘60s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Mitchell: And then we had Sharon Tate from Richland High School and Charles Manson.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you know—</p>
<p>Mitchell: No. No, no, I’m ’69; I think she was like ’61 or ’62. No, I mean, I would have been in elementary school or probably not even to junior high yet. But we knew about her. And then we had some other significant athletes and such out of the Richland School District that I think—well, I won’t try to name names again, but we had some folks who were prominent.</p>
<p>And then one of the guys my dad didn’t make mention of when he was doing his interview—what is his name? Mike McCormick, former state senator, I think he was, for the State of Washington, and he was one of my dad’s supervisors. He’s one of the ones that helped to encourage my dad—or did encourage my dad to go to Columbia Basin College so that he could move on and get perhaps a different job. That did work out for my dad. I did go to school with one of Mike McCormick’s children, I believe it was. If not children, maybe a nephew or niece.</p>
<p>So there were just a lot of folks that were important in my life. The football stadium was named after Fran Rish. I played on his last football team. I did start for him as a sophomore in football. I never played, actually, directly for Art Dawald, who the gym’s named after, but I did have him for a government instructor or teacher. I played on the junior varsity my sophomore year for Richland Bombers. And I actually played for Ray Juricich who was the head of the sophomore team, and of course Art Dawald was the overall basketball coach. And then I ran track and field and went to state and relays twice when I was a junior and senior. Did not have real good technique, but I was fairly fast and we had a really good relay team. We, in fact, still have a school record at Richland High School Track and Field after 40-some years. Because they don’t run that race anymore.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, well, that helps.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah. We ran the 4x220-yard dash relay. Now it’d be the 4x200 meters. The girls run that, but the guys don’t run that race anymore. So we still have that record.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if—what do you know about the events that happened in Pasco, the strife that happened in Pasco sometime in the late—like ’67?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I know—some of my relatives, again, were some of the leaders in Pasco that got involved with some of that. As I understand it, it was trying to get running water and perhaps electricity and paved roads in Pasco, were some of the things that came up during that time. Again, just some basic services that we didn’t have on the east side of Pasco that were in west Pasco, or central Pasco, but the black side of town didn’t have those. So some folks were concerned about that. And then some educational things. And just fair treatment all around to begin with. Because even here in the Tri-Cities, there were places that wouldn’t rent to us, that wouldn’t sell us a house, things of that nature, and those kinds of frustrations and feelings of being second-class citizens and such certainly boiled over. It was just a time of United States history when folks started saying enough is enough and we don’t want to accept this anymore. Some of that was here, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there any—did you or your family ever face any discrimination in, like, going out to eat for example?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I don’t remember that directly, but sometimes you would get to a place and you would—it was kind of like you weren’t there. Folks would walk by you, and didn’t really want to take you to a table or offer you a place to sit. Things of that nature, sometimes.</p>
<p>Franklin: They’d just kind of wait you out?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah. But we didn’t go out that much anyway, because there were so many of us. Again, family of eight, my dad was working—he worked two or three jobs, back then, two or three. And then he was umpiring along the way as well. But we didn’t go out to eat a whole lot. I never had a steak in my life until I went to the Air Force Academy. That was the first time I ever had a steak for a meal. We went fishing and we did things of that nature, and that was things they did in Texas, that’s things we did here. So we did fish frys and chicken and things of that nature. Peach cobbler was a big thing in our house. My mom did that really well. We had a lot of collard greens and cornbread and beans and things. We never went hungry in my house. We never, ever went hungry in my house. But at the same time, we just had some of those basic kinds of food, and we didn’t often go to a restaurant.</p>
<p>In fact, probably one of the first restaurants I really remember—I don’t remember the exact restaurant, but I remember when I went to the state track meet, it was held—when I was a junior, it was held at WSU Pullman. We were undefeated in our relay at that time, and we ended up going from first to last. I think there were eight teams. One of our guys took off too soon, so we had to stop. So we went from wherever we were to the last place. Then we ended up finishing, I think, sixth overall out of the eight. But I remember going to a restaurant there, and that was a big deal for me, because I’d never really done that kind of thing. I don’t remember what I had to eat, but that was nice.</p>
<p>And then another time—well, we used to go to the basketball tournaments over in Seattle, because Richland Bombers used to go to state a lot. Kind of like now, like they’re over there right now. I have a nephew who’s playing for Richland this year, Nathan Mitchell, Cameron’s son. But we had relatives there in central Seattle, went to Garfield High School, which was the predominantly black school, back then. We stayed with our relatives, the Lowe family, but we’d go to Hec Edmundson Pavilion there on U-Dub campus and we went a number of years when the Bombers were playing. One of those times we went to Ivar’s, and I don’t think it was with my family, but I don’t know if it was track or what it was related to, but I remember going to Ivar’s, the main one, the primary one, the first one. That was a big deal for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Just because you hadn’t really been to many restaurants growing up?</p>
<p>Mitchell: No, no, no, no. Well, when we traveled places, as with most African American families, you didn’t really stop. When we went to California or wherever, we pretty much drove all the way through, and you’d just change up drivers. Because, again, most motels didn’t really want us, and we didn’t stop along the way. You’d pack up the food that you needed and you hit the road and you get there.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s interesting. I’ve heard that related often when people were from the South would say that about the South, but you—even on the West Coast, your family would—just felt safer not stopping?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, that was it, and that was how you knew how to do it. Because you don’t know when you pull into a place—well, first of all, they’re probably not going to want you there anyway, and secondly, it might not be safe for you. But, again, when I was—after I graduated from the Air Force Academy, and I’d travel between here, the Tri-Cities and back to Colorado Springs, several trips I went with some of my classmates and friends that were Caucasian and such, so we didn’t run into a lot of problems that way. But when I traveled by myself, and I know when I was a lieutenant—I guess I had become a captain—in 1979, I went from California to Montgomery, Alabama for one of my military schools, and back. I was just careful, and even in ’79, you could tell when folks weren’t real thrilled that you were there, wanting to get a room. But I also made sure that I went to the big chains, like Ramada Inn, I would go to that, or I would go to Holiday Inn, or wherever, as opposed to other places.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why? Why would you pick a chain instead of a mom-and-pop?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Because they probably were a little more accepting and had rules and regulations about how you treat people and also they wouldn’t want to have a lawsuit if they didn’t treat you well. They wouldn’t want to experience any negative situation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Mitchell: So that’s something that I just learned along the way, that you try to put things, again, in your favor. So that if you’re going to have a difficult situation, you want to minimize it or avoid it altogether.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of leverage their want to keep a good reputation.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Absolutely. And their want to help keep you safe. Because it’s in their best interest to do that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Because your money is just as good anyone else’s money.</p>
<p>Mitchell: It is. And my money’s not as good if they get a negative rap, then other folks aren’t going to go there, either. And also they could get sued.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, definitely.</p>
<p>Mitchell: So there was a lot of reasons. But, you know, we all do that. Even today. I’m sure you do those kinds of things, too. You think about it. What’s going to be in your best interest. And certainly, as African Americans, you learn to do that. Because you know there are lot of folks actively not interested in your well-being, necessarily.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. You mentioned when Kennedy came to visit and your—did you go out—</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah, our whole family went out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that day and that experience.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, I can’t remember it in great detail, other than that there was a ton of people. It was a big deal. Again, I don’t know if I got it from watching my dad’s segment or not, but apparently they had cleared some of the sagebrush away and waste to ensure that more vehicles could get out there, because we parked in the sand and sagebrush out there, when we got out there. And in the last—well, since I’ve been back here and I’ve worked at the K Basins, and I’ve worked out in the outer area at Hanford over my 18 years at Hanford, it’s a long way out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, N Reactor’s pretty far out there.</p>
<p>Mitchell: It’s pretty far out there. It’s almost out to the, well, not the Vernita Bridge, but it’s almost that far, it’s just not that same road. It takes a while to get out there. But it was a big, big deal. Big in the community, and probably—I don’t know if it was a school day or not, but I think that they let us out of school. Yeah, there was all kinds of folks out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s not everyday the President of the United States comes to town.</p>
<p>Mitchell: No, especially John Kennedy, I mean—they were really—like they talk about Camelot and all that stuff and then Jackie Kennedy, et cetera. It was a big deal. We were pleased we had an opportunity to go out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: So your father, when you moved to Richland, your father started working at Hanford from where you were a young boy, and then he continued working there until you left and afterwards. What did you know about your father’s job at Hanford, and what did you know about Hanford growing up?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, we were here in Richland when they had the buses that would drive around in the morning and pick folks up and that. And, in fact, my dad was in a car—yeah, a car accident where one of the buses hit him in the fog one time. But it was a very controlled situation. Not everybody—well, you didn’t know what everyone else did, and everyone knew you didn’t know what everyone else did. That’s the way it had to be, because it’s Hanford and it’s all secret and that kind of thing. Government town, there was rules and regulations, standards on the houses and that type of thing. Like I say, there were inspections on the houses if I’m not mistaken, on the various houses and your yards and that kind of thing. They expected you to take care of your yard, just like on a military base. Again, everybody that you knew and you went to school with, had a relative that was working at Hanford. So you felt some camaraderie with that.</p>
<p>At that time, Richland Bomber basketball team was a big deal. And in fact, we had the current gym, the big gym that we have, was built, I think, 1965. It has three big floors on it. When they rolled the bleachers back, and I know we had our PE classes and that kind of thing in there.</p>
<p>Davis of Yakima was probably our biggest rival early on when I was coming along, and then Pasco, later, became our biggest basketball rival. But they had some good players. For Pasco, a guy named Ron Howard, graduated class of ’70. So I played football against him and basketball just one year for me, but I ran track and field against him, et cetera. But he played basketball, Seattle University, and then he played football for the Dallas Cowboys. And then he was in the Super Bowl at least twice. I probably haven’t seen him for about five or six, seven years now, but last time I did talk with him, he was coaching at Rainier Beach High School in Seattle.</p>
<p>And then another guy, Albert Wilkins, who’s pastor over here at Morning Star Baptist Church, and in fact, he presided over the funeral of both my mom and dad. But he was a Pasco High running back, class of ’69, good ball player, went to University of Washington, played for them for a brief time.</p>
<p>Then another guy that I never played against but know of is Michael Jackson who played for both the Washington Huskies and also the Seattle Seahawks, outstanding basketball player.</p>
<p>As far as Richland goes, coming along, Ray Stein was one of the ones that we all looked up to and that. He went to Washington State University and played basketball for them. I think he graduated in about ’63 or so.</p>
<p>And then, of course, the Wallace brothers and the Brown brothers, those were both African American families in basketball. When I was playing football for Richland, we weren’t very good. I was team captain my senior year and also I was the quarterback my senior year, although I got hurt a couple times. I had a super sophomore year as a football player in high school, then injuries in both my junior and senior year. But—</p>
<p>Franklin: Speaking of Richland sports, Richland High sports in general, there’s been some controversy in recent years over the mascot of—I just would like to get your thoughts on that subject.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay. I have thought about that. I’ve also thought—not for this discussion, but I have thought about in the past about it for future discussions. I can understand why a lot of folks don’t like it, because of what it symbolizes as far as destruction—death and destruction in a lot of respects. Same time, I, for one, strongly believe that if it had not been for the atomic bomb being dropped in Japan—on Japan, the war would have been quite different in terms of the loss of life; it would have been much greater on both sides, had the United States and its allies tried to go into Japan and the islands and fight the Japanese until they were willing to give up. I don’t think they would’ve given up, just given their culture and such, and the belief that their emperor was basically like god, they would fight to the death in many respects, I believe. And I think, with the bomb actually being used, it did bring the war to an end much more quickly than it would have been otherwise.</p>
<p>Now, as far as the symbol and our still using it, I can understand why folks don’t think it’s necessary or would like to see us get rid of it. And having worn that on my helmet, on my uniform in the past, I would be willing to give it up. At the same time, I’m not willing to be an activist to try to make it happen. But, yeah, I think over time, it’s probably going to go.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s a very well-reasoned response.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well-thought-out. Thank you. I just—since sports were so crucial to you, I really wanted to get—</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because that’s certainly—it’s definitely kind of a flashpoint in a very—as someone who’s not from the community, not from this area originally, it’s a very—mascots are generally of a certain ethnicity or an animal, and it’s very interesting just in terms of that it’s really a mascot for a focal point in time.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes, it is.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that, to me, is pretty—it makes it pretty unique among many mascots.</p>
<p>Mitchell: It does, but Richland, Oak Ridge, Tennessee—yeah, they’re unique communities because of World War II and what resulted in the outcomes of World War II as a result of these facilities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And their, of course, also work in the Cold War, and their 40-plus years of helping to construct the US nuclear weapons stockpile, which is a very formidable resource.</p>
<p>Mitchell: And we just tore down the Plutonium Finishing Plant, PFP, recently. And we’re tearing down many of the other facilities, and rightfully so. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, we’ve covered so much, I’m trying to—I just want to get a good gather on where we go now. Did segregation or racism affect your education in any way in Richland?</p>
<p>Mitchell: I think once we were here, no. I think that—there are other folks that maybe it impacted, because we were here. But me, directly, no. In that, again, I think sports helped in that I was a good ballplayer—we were pretty good ballplayers. There were other African Americans in the community that were pretty good ballplayers. And as a result, we were somewhat accepted. At the same time, I know there were folks that didn’t like it—who didn’t like us, necessarily. But I don’t care who you are or where you are, there’s always somebody that doesn’t like you, isn’t going to care for you or whatever. But don’t worry about that. I don’t worry about that. I do try to treat others the way I would like to be treated, and treat them respectfully. If I don’t necessarily care for them—and I don’t care for everybody; I don’t think any of us do—but I try to stay away from them if I don’t care for them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Mitchell: And certainly they have as much right to be people and do what they want to do as I do. And I would hope that folks would feel that way about me. And if they don’t care for me or my family, that’s fine. Just leave us alone, and we’ll do the same for you. But—</p>
<p>Lori Larson: Can I ask a question?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes, please.</p>
<p>Larson: [LAUGHTER] So how did your insertion and your family’s insertions across the Tri-Cities, how did you affect segregation?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry, before you respond, could you state your name?</p>
<p>Larson: Oh. Lori Larson.</p>
<p>Franklin: Thanks.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay, Lori Larson. Most of the African American folks in the community, including my family—and my family has been fairly prominent in the community because we’ve been blessed to be able to do some things—I think it’s helped a lot, because folks get to know us and find out that we’re people just like them. Many times, when we haven’t been around other ethnic groups, we don’t know about them, we’re a little bit fearful of them, regardless of what group it is, just because they’re different. And we are different. But at the same time, we’re very much the same. We’re all humans and we all have the same feelings and emotions and needs and that kind of thing.</p>
<p>So I think that, especially when we were ballplayers, getting to know people and folks getting to know us, and I know I had my name in the paper quite a bit for sports. But also, I really enjoyed having my name in the paper for being in the honor roll. It was a big thing for me. My kids as well when they were on the honor roll. The fact that, yeah, we can compete and we can do things that are positive. Everything we do is not just negative. And sometimes you feel that folks feel that way about you. That, you know, you guys are just negative.</p>
<p>So, have I answered your question? I think that we contributed by allowing folks to get to know us. And see us. And see that we’re not a whole lot different than they are.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thank you. Were there any civil rights actions or demonstrations in Richland that you know of? I know there was a local, I think a CORE office or a human rights commission. But I’m wondering if there were any organized marches or anything like that?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Not that I know of directly, but, again, John Dam Plaza was here then, just like it’s here now. And there might have been something at John Dam Plaza. I know that my mother got involved with some activities—I don’t know if she was part of NAACP or not. But I know there was a guy named Art Fletcher who came from Washington, DC, African American guy, he played football, I think, for the Baltimore Colts back when they were the Baltimore Colts. He was one of the presidential appointees for some of the activity out here in the Tri-Cities and Hanford area. He did get involved with some things related to some racial issues. But I don’t know the details.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. I’d like to kind of jump ahead. You mentioned that you worked at Hanford.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes, I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: And kind of—I assume that was after your career in the Air Force.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes, as I said before, I came back here in June of 1993. One of the reasons I came back here, is because, again, of my children, 13 and six. Not wanting to go to the DC area with my family, because I told my wife I was going to retire at the 20-year point, which we did, in ’93. But we came back here and—well, what was the exact question again?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, I just wanted you to talk about your decision to go to work at Hanford and your job there.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, one of the reasons that I came back here—and the other place we would have gone would have been Colorado because my wife’s from Colorado and we like Colorado a lot. But we came back to Richland because of the amount of family that I have here, because people know me here, because I could get a job at Hanford. Because my technical background—I have an engineering management degree from the Air Force Academy. And I have a safety and systems management degree from the University of Southern California, a master’s degree. Those kinds of jobs—excuse me, that education tied into jobs I could get here at Hanford. Specifically in the project controls area. Project controls has to do with budgets, cost schedule, performance measures, and that’s what I did, first for Westinghouse and then when they reorganized Hanford, I ended up working for Fluor Daniel Hanford, and Waste Services Hanford, and Waste Federal Services Hanford, and other companies as well. But the continuity of service was the same; it stayed the same, it was just a different name on the paycheck, basically.</p>
<p>Franklin: You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Mitchell: Oh, okay. And that started in 1996. I got here in ’93. ’96. And I ended up retiring from the Hanford contractors community in 2009. Then I went and found another job working for a company, and that company had a job at Hanford in Richland, Washington, so I took it. Well, I applied for it and I got it. So I worked for a company as a consultant to DOE Hanford, overseeing—or assisting with overseeing the contracts for the 200 Central Plateau area, which is where I’d worked—some of where I’d worked when I’d been working for Fluor Daniel Hanford and other companies.</p>
<p>So I came back here, again, because of the job and also because of the school system. Again, specifically the Richland school system, because I am a Bomber and I am familiar with the school system. And also when I was in Alaska as the comptroller sitting up there, and I was up there at Elmendorf Air Force base in Alaska, and I don’t know if I was on the internet or I got some materials from somewhere about the rank order of the high schools and their performance in the state of Washington. And Richland high schools, Hanford in particular, Richland, too, were right near the top of all the high schools in the state of Washington. Having been through the system myself, it’s good for me, good for my kids.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you live in Alaska?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Three-and-a-half years.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m from Alaska, originally.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Whereabout?</p>
<p>Franklin: Palmer, and Anchorage.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Okay, I’ve been through Palmer several times. Of course, as you know, there aren’t many highways in Alaska.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, and Palmer’s a town you just pretty much drive through usually.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Drive through, yeah, driving through Palmer on your way to Fairbanks and then back around. So. Yeah. I—yes. It’s good.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s fine. I miss it sometimes. I don’t miss the winter.</p>
<p>Mitchell: No. Well, I was there three-and-a-half years and I tell folks, when they say, how’d you like it? I say, well, after doing everything three times, I was ready to leave, in that, as you know, everything’s based on the calendar in the year, and when it snows is pretty much predicted, and when it’s going to do this is pretty much predicted, and when the fish are going to run, it’s the same kind of deal. So everything’s very cyclical and very predictable.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, yes, it is. We have three seasons there, right? There’s winter, break-up, and construction season.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes. That’s true.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, fall’s like two weeks.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Not long, not long.</p>
<p>Franklin: Anyway. Well, I digress. So you kind of carried on this family legacy of working at Hanford. How did you—did you find—how do I word this question? When did your father retire from Hanford?</p>
<p>Mitchell: He retired officially in ’93.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Mitchell: When I came back here. So, just almost the exact same time he retired. However, then he continued—they’d bring him back, because he was in human resources person, HR person, and he used to give tours of the Hanford Site.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Mitchell: So probably from ’93 until maybe 2013, 2014 timeframe, he did tours for Hanford Site and he worked for PNNL part-time, however the contract was set up. So he still had his badge and he still had the access to the facility and such, and he would go out on these Hanford tours that they’re doing right now. In fact, at one time, I was a tour guide myself. I wasn’t real good at it. But he was really good at it, I understand, and a lot of folks have told me that. And a number of folks have been working at Hanford in the recent past go, oh yeah—if they work for Battelle—yeah, C.J. hired me in when I came in! Whenever that was. Yeah, he was out there for a long time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I kind of want to ask about that. How was that—I imagine that your father must have left a legacy—</p>
<p>Mitchell: Oh, absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: --at Hanford, and you would have become—kind of walked into that and been—and everyone—so many people would have known your father, and known you, and you came back and were working. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, kind of the continuation of your family’s work at Hanford.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, yeah, that was, and is, a good thing, not only to work at Hanford, but coming back—and today, whenever I go somewhere, I usually see somebody that I know, or somebody who knows me, or of my family. I think even you made mention of the fact, the Mitchell family is fairly well-known around here. But my kids, again, my 13-year-old son and my 6-year-old daughter when we moved back here in ’93. But over the years, being associated with—or seeing that, and hearing that and feeling that, it’s a big deal for us. We feel that we’ve done a lot of positive things in the community and contributed in a lot of ways. We’ve also been blessed and given an opportunity to do a lot of things here. Another reason why I came back.</p>
<p>Before I left the Air Force, I would come home and go to lunch with the chief of the financial organization there at Battelle. I’m talking specifically about Allan Johnston and then I bought his house when I came back. But I didn’t work with him directly; he’d already left. When I’d come back on leave, I would go to lunch with him, two or three times, during that period of time, feeling that when I did retire from the Air Force, I was going to apply for a job and hopefully work for him—work for them. I did end up doing the application part and in fact I was invited in 1993 for an interview at PNNL and Battelle, went through that process, flew back to Anchorage, Alaska, feeling I had gotten the job. I’m sure I’m going to get that job. Well, shortly after, I did receive a call or whatever it was, letting me know that I wasn’t going to be able to have that job, because they had an individual who had been basically reduction-enforced—ripped out. So they were going to take care of him and give him the opportunity to have that job instead. So sorry.</p>
<p>So, then I turned around and applied for a job with Westinghouse, who my mother had worked for before she became ill—she had dementia. Then I flew down for an interview with them, and I went back to Alaska. I know I’ve got that job. Well, I did get that job. And so I went to work for them in July, probably July 1<sup>st</sup> or right around July 1<sup>st</sup>, 1993. And that all worked out.</p>
<p>But again, folks knew something of me, they knew about me, they knew something of my history. A lot of folks think they know more about me than they think they know. But that’s with all of us. But, again, my family’s been here for a long time and has been observed for a lot of people, folks know my brothers and my sister and my mom and my dad. And so they feel that they knew me and that’s been a positive for me. And that’s one of the reasons I came back.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wanted to ask you about your mother. Was she a working mother, for your childhood?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, one of the things I’ve learned is that all mothers are working mothers. But! Outside the home. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, I should be more specific.</p>
<p>Mitchell: No, no. She did not work outside the home when I was coming along, but later on, she did go to work for Westinghouse. She was a secretary for a number of senior folks, I understand.</p>
<p>But that did have an impact on my youngest brother. Unfortunately, it has been a negative impact, in that he did get involved—I don’t know if it was here or when he was at University of Washington. He went to University of Washington, was a cheerleader there and graduated with a degree in marketing. But he also got hung up in drugs there. I think that’s where it happened. Somewhere.</p>
<p>But in 1974, ’75 when I was a lieutenant in Los Angeles’ GPS program, I got a phone call from Robin, my youngest brother. And he was very distraught in that he felt really lonely, he said. Because my mom wasn’t there when he’d come home from school, and just other things. So he felt alone. He was the youngest of the six of us. For the rest of us, we always had younger brothers or sisters. He didn’t have anybody that was younger. We all grew up and moved out, well, he’s still there.</p>
<p>So, yeah, that had an impact on him. Even to this day, he’s still dealing with some of those issues. As far as we know, he’s clean, he’s—he went back to school, Columbia Basin College, and then Washington State University Tri-Cities, where we are. And right now, he got an electrical engineering degree two or three years ago. I mean, he’s over 50 years old. But he’s not using that degree directly. He is currently working as a counselor in one of the organizations here in the Tri-Cities, assisting other people who are having substance abuse issues. But, I, for one, tie a lot of his problems to the fact that my mother wasn’t there, the rest of us weren’t there, and he did get off-track.</p>
<p>So, yeah, she did work outside the home after I was gone. There was a different dynamic in the family as a result. And I talked about the birth order situation. That was part of the deal in my view, and my perception—and this is all, obviously, just my opinion. But overtime, many parents become a little less attentive to their kids as the kids are growing up and that kind of thing, they’re doing other things in addition to being the parent and that, so things do loosen up a little bit, as far as the strictness. I believe some of that happened in my family when my mom went to work.</p>
<p>Not that she shouldn’t have gone to work, because she had the issues—not issues, but needs as well and desires to want to do other things, and she did become active in the community and in particular going to school board meetings and other things. Also, she was one of the committee members on getting the what we call, still, I think, the “new” police station here in Richland on George Washington Way. Her name’s down there on one of the plaques because she was one of the active members on helping get that done, as far as—I don’t know if she did lobbying or help raise money or whatever, but I know that she was a participant in that. How’s that for an answer to your question?</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s a great answer. I wanted to go back to Hanford for this next question. When you left the community in ’69, still very much in production mode. Not high production, but still, N Reactor’s running, we’re still processing. And when you came back, the Cold War was over. And you would, of course, in the Air Force would have been a service member during the Cold War and then still been in the—I’m wondering if you could talk about that shift in production to cleanup and the end of the Cold War as you observed it at Hanford and how it changed the community.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, when I came back here in ’93, they were still hiring more people. Excuse me. That’s why I was hired here, to help with Hanford cleanup. Hanford cleanup was going on for quite a while. I think it started in the late—like ’88, ’89 timeframe. Christine Gregoire who was our mayor—not mayor, our governor, I think at least twice—in fact, when I became a Columbia Basin College trustee, she’s the one that appointed me as a trustee. The reason I get into that is, it’s been going on a while. It’s been a change, certainly. It’s something that has to happen, should happen. We’ve had to fight for it, and we’ll probably have to continue to fight for it, because it has taken a long time and it’s cost a lot of money to clean it up.</p>
<p>So, before, during production when I was here as a high school student, things were very secretive, we didn’t know what was going on, but everyone was pretty much supportive of, whatever it is that’s going on needs to be going on. So when I come back—you know, I’d come back off and on, but when I came back in ’93, and now the mission has changed from production to cleaning up all the mess, at that time, in ’93, it was still supportive in that we need to clean up the mess. But over the years—I’ve been back 24-years-plus now—some folks—personally, I do believe that we have some strong senators and other representatives. Sam Volpentest was one. But again, as far as our senator, Patty Murray, I know she’s been a big supporter for Hanford, and others as well have had to fight for the dollars to ensure that we get things cleaned up and that we get what we need in order to do the cleanup. So that’s a big change.</p>
<p>But, having been out there, and having been a financial person out there, I am concerned that perhaps there’s definitely some waste going on out there, and I know that we—Hanford gets a rap for that; DOE gets a rap for that. But I’d have to say that, yeah, Hanford and DOE deserve a rap for some of that stuff, my opinion. Because I just think that it’s taking too long and it’s costing too much money. And I could get into some other specifics about my opinions about the Vit Plant and other things, but I won’t do that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, sounds good. Maybe off-camera.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Let’s see here, I think we’re almost—I think we’re almost done here. I just have a couple kind of larger questions. So, second-to-last question is, what would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, that it was an important mission that we had during the Cold War. And that it was truly a privilege to live in Richland, and I’d say the Tri-Cities overall, for that matter--a lot of folks who work at Hanford don’t live in Richland; they live in Pasco or Kennewick or Yakima or other places. But living in Richland, it was a wonderful place to grow up. One of the reasons to bring my family back here in ’93 is because it was still a wonderful place to raise my kids. And I think it’s still a wonderful place. I do have two grandchildren now in West Richland, my daughter and her family, and they’re going to grow up here as well.</p>
<p>I think it’s definitely needed and desirable that we try to build an economy outside of Hanford and diversify and come up with other things. I’m really pleased that my children don’t work at Hanford. Again, my son’s a history professor. I did try to get him to become an engineer, but he says, I don’t want to do that, Dad. And then my daughter’s a nurse. She also has a business degree, as does my son, has a business degree as well. She’s a Cougar and he’s a Husky.</p>
<p>Franklin: Quite a household.</p>
<p>Mitchell: But I’m a Trojan, and Trojans rule in my house. But I’m just really pleased to have grown up here. Like again, talking about my parents’ being courageous and that type of thing. The fact that they came here, they stayed here, and they built a great life here, I’m really thankful for that. Again, the friends and acquaintances that I have made nad we have made in the Tri-Cities overall and certainly in Richland, we’ve been blessed as a family for over 60 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’d say so. Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, certainly they have impacted our life tremendously. One of the reasons my family came here in the first place, my dad was 16 years old and then back a couple different times and then married my mother and came back with me, because of the Cold War, because of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South, happened because of World War II or after World War II, again, to the big cities of the North in particular, out to the West, resulting in really a much-improved for most all of us who migrated out of the South. Although some did better than others, certainly, and are still doing better, some, than others. But that also gets into, well, you have to do some things for yourself, and also we all have different circumstances and different situations we’re dealt.</p>
<p>But I think overall for the African American population, it’s worked out pretty well. There are a lot of problems, still. I certainly—well, education is one of the things, like I said, was big in my family. I think it’s still a key to success in this world. One of the reasons that I’m really pleased and happy to have been, and currently am being a trustee at Columbia Basin College, is to help other people of whatever background to find a path for themselves, to build a better life for themselves. I think a lot of that has come out of—well, again, World War II, the Cold War, the Hanford experience, and as I already said, we were blessed to have taken advantage of it. A lot of folks didn’t or haven’t, but a lot of folks still can. So I hope that they do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, well, Duke, thank you so much for coming and interviewing with us. It was a fabulous interview.</p>
<p>Mitchell: Well, thank you. I’m, again, happy that I was asked and had the opportunity. I’ve watched my dad do a lot of things for a lot of years, and I feel that he’s been an inspiration to others and helped other folks, including myself, to do better than they might have done otherwise. So I’m thankful for that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
K Basins
300 Areas
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Fluor Hanford
200 Central Plateau Area
Battelle
Westinghouse Hanford
Vit Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1953-1969 1993-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1993-2009
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with David (Duke) Mitchell
Description
An account of the resource
Duke Mitchell grew up in the Tri-Cities first in Pasco, Washington then Richland, Washington. Mitchell worked on the Hanford Site from 1993-2009.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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03/02/2018
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Baseball
Discrimination
Segregation
School integration
Basketball
Sports
Football
Nuclear weapons industry
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Radioactive Waste Disposal
Migration
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Facc23c7b2edfd56da0af412011f8ef6b.png
c1a5bfd981e679ff3c36c7ec02391ac2
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Wayne Martin
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: --the beginning and then we’ll get right into it. Does that sound--</p>
<p>Lori Larson: And you don’t have to politely look at me. [LAUGHTER] You look at him the whole time.</p>
<p>Wayne Martin: No, I will look at him. Because they always say is, if you’re being interviewed, look at the interviewer.</p>
<p>Larson: Very good.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, don’t stare into the camera.</p>
<p>Martin: Don’t sit there staring at the camera.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, looking into the camera freaks the people out that are doing it later. Because it feels like you’re staring at them, and you’re just like—ooh. Okay. Ready?</p>
<p>Larson: Yeah!</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, we’re on. All right. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Wayne—</p>
<p>Martin: Wayne Martin.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wayne Martin, thank you—on April 5, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Wayne about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Martin: Wayne Martin. W-A-Y-N-E. M-A-R-T-I-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wayne, when did you first come to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Martin: First time I came to Tri-Cities was like 1975.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Martin: I came and did work as an intern and then a couple jobs here in the Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: And where were you from?</p>
<p>Martin: I’m an Army brat.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Martin: So I’m from a lot of places.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: Since birth. Until I was 15 or 16. We moved all the time. A lot of different forts and Germany and the South and just a lot of different places.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and what did your father do in the Army?</p>
<p>Martin: My dad was a long-range artillery trainer, which is why he moved a lot. He was in the Army for 21 years. So, we ended up—he got to pick his last station, which was Fort Lewis. We had been to Fort Lewis once before. He picked Fort Lewis because he—pretty much, he kinda liked the Northwest. And that’s how we ended up in the state of Washington.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. When and where were you born?</p>
<p>Martin: I was born in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Although I don’t think we were there very long before we moved.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what year was that?</p>
<p>Martin: 1954.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your father serve in the military when it was still segregated? Did you ever ask him about that?</p>
<p>Martin: I don’t recall when the military was segregated; although he started, I believe, right around 1950s, if I recall.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Martin: He was Korean War. He was in the Korean War. Because he was from New Roads, Louisiana. And as he told me, the only way out of New Roads, Louisiana was to join the service—along with several of his other brothers and friends.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where is New Roads, Louisiana?</p>
<p>Martin: It’s about 30 miles north of Baton Rouge.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Martin: A little, small town. Very small town.</p>
<p>Franklin: Have you been there?</p>
<p>Martin: Yes, I lived there when I was in fifth and sixth grade.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Martin: My father was set up to do three short-term what they call temporary duty assignments. So he plopped us down with my mother’s family. Because both of them were from New Roads. We stayed in my grandmother’s house when I was—pretty much all of fifth and sixth grade, for as best my memory can be.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was it like to—do you remember what year that was?</p>
<p>Martin: Okay. Sixth grade, that was mid-‘60s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Martin: To be honest, it was my brothers’ and I first real experience with racism. We had lived in posts, they call them posts. Base for Air Force, post for Army. And we had lived in, like I said, Germany and a lot of different forts. And pretty much our lives were on posts. But going there was different.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why do you think the Army was—because certainly there were blacks and whites, all from around the US, but especially from the South, together in the Army. How was the racism different or more apparent off-post?</p>
<p>Martin: Well, if you know anything about the service, it’s like forced integration. You are under command. You are—and my father stated that they were subject to certain negative things if they didn’t have a decent one. And when you’re amongst the kids on post, everybody moved a lot, we all interacted with each other for usually a pretty short time. So we didn’t really experience a lot of negative racial tensions. You had a decent mix. I interacted with whites, Asians, and it was a—I always looked at it as a balance, balanced mix.</p>
<p>When we went to New Roads, Louisiana—I’ll tell you an experience there, the very first one that really kind of shocked me, is when we were driving into town, I saw a theater. When we got into—moved in with my grandmother, and we were playing. We went to a Catholic school, because one of our parents put us in the Catholic school. We were playing with the kids in the neighborhood. My brother and I, we were used to going to the theater. We always went to a movie on Saturdays on post. So I said, hey, wow, we saw a theater when we came to go to the movies. And they looked at us like, what are you talking about? Well, when we came into town there was a theater down there. And they basically looked at us and said, well, that’s not for us. We don’t get to go to that theater. And I said, well, why not? Well, that’s only for white folks.</p>
<p>And that was a shocker for my brother and I. We went home and asked my mom. And they politely explained things to us in a little more detail. So sometimes, I think, as you’re growing up, you kind of get protected a little bit, you know, by your parents. And from that point on, in that town is when I understood a lot more. Because there were a lot other incidences that happened. When we went to Catholic school, it was Catholic school for blacks. The public school was for blacks, and then on the other side of town was for whites. We started to see that difference. So, that was when the real lights came on about racism. That’s a long way around, here answering your question.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, no, that’s a wonderful, detailed answer. Were there still signs up when you were there for Whites Only/Coloreds Only for public accommodations or restaurants, drinking fountains or restrooms, that kind of thing?</p>
<p>Martin: To be honest, as we lived there—you gotta remember in fifth and sixth grade, we didn’t explore much of the white side of town. Black side of town was where we stayed, played, went to school. So we didn’t really see a lot of those. We saw maybe—I remember seeing maybe one when we went to the grocery store. But it wasn’t a real big part of our experience there. We were informed about certain things. Certain things came to me later on in life that I didn’t recognize at the time. The movie <em>The Help</em>?</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Martin: My aunt and several other of my aunts and other ladies in town, I remember them going off, saying they were going to work. And they would be dressed in something similar to what you saw in <em>The Help</em>. But they never really explained to me that they were going to take care of a white family. Later on, after asking questions about it, that’s what they were doing.</p>
<p>So, some cases you feel a little bit like, why in the hell didn’t people just explain things to us? I think there’s a lot of protectionism that occurs when you’re younger. So get a little bit from the kids, going to school, but not as much as when, later on in life, you start to see and recognize things. So, like I said, that was an interesting experience.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so. So you said you first came here in 1975.</p>
<p>Martin: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: As an intern, and I’m wondering, what was your internship?</p>
<p>Martin: It turned out to be more of a record-keeping thing that I did for one of the contractors out here. At that time, I didn’t work for PNNL, which, at that time it was actual Pacific National—no, Pacific Northwest Labs. I did that because a friend of mine, Nestor Mitchell, which is the son of CJ Mitchell, had said, hey, you can come down here and get a summer job and make some dollars. So, that’s how I ended up coming here for the first time.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you know Nestor?</p>
<p>Martin: Nestor? He went to school at WSU.</p>
<p>Franklin: And is that where you went to school as well?</p>
<p>Martin: That’s where I went, Washington State University.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what made you choose Washington State University?</p>
<p>Martin: When you’re young, you make decisions in odd ways. When I was going through high school, one unfortunate thing that happened was I lost my mother at 17. I was the oldest. She passed away when I was in eleventh grade. And so I became kind of like the surrogate mother. My brother is 32 months younger than me, and then my other brother is ten years younger than me. So he was seven; I was 17.</p>
<p>I tell you that, because the whole time I was growing up, I was always told, you’re going to go to college, you should go to college. All my aunts said, it was always evident that you’re smart enough, you should go to college. Well, I always intended to go to college, right? But that event caused me to have to think a little bit.</p>
<p>But then when the time came, my dad said, well, you know, I’m not going to be able to afford to send you much. I got a few scholarship things. And I said, well, I wanted to stay in-state, because of the cost. There was really only two options: University of Washington and Washington State. I said, you know, Washington State is just far enough that I don’t have to worry about being too close to home. A friend of mine, Dave Ware, he was a good friend of mine in high school, we both wanted to go and possibly become wildlife biologists and we figured that WSU had a good program. So I picked it, applied, and was accepted and that’s how I ended up there.</p>
<p>Franklin: How was campus life at WSU? Was that a big—I know you’ve been an army brat so you moved around a lot, but was that a big change? I understand there were—you would’ve been there in the early ‘70s, right? And that was kind of a period of some activism, turbulence, on campus, and real attempts to create multicultural opportunities for people.</p>
<p>Martin: Coming out of high school, there was a lot of issues in high school. I went to Clover Park High School. I remember there being, you might want to call them racial riots, but racial disturbances, racial interactions on campus. I came up in the era where, when we said the national anthem, we said, and justice for some. You know, we used to yell that out really loud.</p>
<p>And moved on into WSU. And WSU, there was a very small African American population, very few minorities. You used to get looks and kind of wondered what people might be thinking. But there wasn’t a whole lot of in-your-face as there was when I was in high school. You heard about those, you heard, talked to people, they were experiencing certain deals.</p>
<p>But to be honest, when I went to school there, I worked a lot because I couldn’t afford not to. A lot of my time was spent working and going to class and studying. That’s really—I mean. As a matter of fact, Nestor and a couple other of my friends, they didn’t study as much—matter of fact, Nestor ended up leaving after his third year. I think they partied a little bit too hard. But with that, they were talking about experiences they were having. They had a lot more free time than I had. That’s how I heard about most of them. Didn’t have a lot of in-your-face situations. So. It was reasonably comfortable, but, like I said, I probably worked 30, 35 hours a week while I went through school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, I had to play a little bit of soccer. Because there was a soccer club there. I learned soccer when I was in Germany. When I came to the United States, there were never any people who played. So they had a club, and I got to play that for maybe about two of the years, two-and-a-half of the years. Interacting with those guys, you interacted with a lot of people from other countries, because that’s who played soccer. So, it was interesting to run into people that were from Italy and Germany, and we went around to different schools and played. So, got a little bit more culture that way than just at the campus.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. How large was the black community when you were there? And was it a close community?</p>
<p>Martin: Oh. One, I don’t know how large it was; it was small. And as far as a close community? When you don’t have very many people, then people don’t really come together very much. I don’t really ever see myself as an activist. Heard about things. People called a few meetings and you’d go to them. But I didn’t see a large groundswell. Let’s just put it that way.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Martin: You’d have to go back and maybe get some data on what the size was.</p>
<p>Franklin: So what was your major?</p>
<p>Martin: When I went there, my intent was to become a wildlife biologist, so I majored in wildlife management. Wildlife management, and along the way, I minored in chemistry. Only because I was taking chemistry classes and kind of liked chemistry. And they said, well, you only need <em>x</em> number of credits and you get a minor. At the time, I thought, oh, okay, that’s nice. I’ll do that. [LAUGHTER] And in the end, it worked out to be advantageous for future things that I did. But wanted to be—me and Dave, we used to go fishing a lot.</p>
<p>Franklin: And who, sorry?</p>
<p>Martin: David Ware. David was a good friend of mine. White guy. We became pretty good friends. He lived down the street not very far from us. We always used to do stuff together. So, yeah, we’re going to go into the game department. That’s what I originally went for. Didn’t work out that way, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember which contractor you worked for when you came out here?</p>
<p>Martin: Oh. I want to say Westinghouse. But I might be wrong. It’s been a while.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I understand. And you said it was mostly record keeping?</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, it was just some records stuff. It was a lot of paper stuff. Which actually I didn’t care as long as I got a paycheck.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you hear about Hanford and—yeah. And why’d you come out?</p>
<p>Martin: Through Nestor, that’s how I heard, for the one summer. How I ended up selecting PNNL? Actually, it was CJ Mitchell. Because what happened was CJ was recruiting on campus at the time—</p>
<p>Franklin: At WSU.</p>
<p>Martin: At WSU. And I was getting closer to finishing, and Nestor says, you know, look! My dad’s recruiting up there. You might check with him and see if there’s potential for a job down here. Because he had come down, established himself for about a year and had a house. I was looking at game departments, Oregon and Washington. There were some openings, you know. But CJ started talking to me, and said, hey, PNNL has things in the area for wildlife and studies of wildlife. You should check into it.</p>
<p>So I did. And to be honest, what ultimately made my decision was the amount of money they were going to pay me, relative to the other amount of money. Again, I looked at the salaries and I looked at that. And then he talked to me about it and he says, hey, there’s a possibility for lots of different things you could do at PNNL. And at that time it was PNL. And I said, huh, okay. And then I put my deal in.</p>
<p>What they told me was, we have a department called Water and Land. There’s a job coming in for a project that’s going to start in February—which I was getting done in June. But you have a chemistry background, and what we’ll do is we can give you a job as a chemical technician for that eight months until this job opens and then you can transfer.</p>
<p>Well, again, I was looking at how much they were paying me. And I said, well, I can do that. So I accept the job, and it was a rotating shift job. Again, not being very wise or understanding what rotating shifts really do and really do to your body. That was the last time I worked a rotating shift of any kind. That was murder. But that’s what brought me here.</p>
<p>Franklin: What is a rotating shift?</p>
<p>Martin: Every week you change from days to swing to graveyard.</p>
<p>Franklin: Whoof.</p>
<p>Martin: Every week.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. That sounds—</p>
<p>Martin: Ha!</p>
<p>Franklin: How long would it take your sleep schedule to adjust to your new shift?</p>
<p>Martin: I would say it never did.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Martin: I was a walking zombie in many cases. It was a forced thing. But you’re young enough that really—that’s really what it was. You’re young enough to adapt.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: The work was—we were actually working out in one of the buildings that had a lot of radiation and high rad fuels. That’s what we did. So the work was active enough. So you weren’t—you never sat anywhere. You were constantly moving. So that’s what I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember what building you were in?</p>
<p>Martin: The 324 Building?</p>
<p>Franklin: That sounds—</p>
<p>Martin: There’s 325 and there’s 324. I think it was 324. The one that had all the manipulators. The actual project at that time was, they were looking at fuel rods and chopping fuel rods and formulating for glass mixture. That was one of the first vitrification projects. That’s what I worked on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah. That was my first introduction to radiation. And all of the training you have to have and protective things and everything you have to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of not what you thought you were going to do when you were in school.</p>
<p>Martin: Not—no. That first job was not. But, you know, it got me started. So it was good in that sense.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were your first impressions when you arrived, down to the—</p>
<p>Martin: Here?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: Warm. I like the warm, compared to on the west side and the rain. Since I had a connection through Nestor and his family, so I had that connection and was able to get engaged with their family and all of Nestor’s friends when I first came. So my landing here was pretty soft, as I would say. And I enjoyed it.</p>
<p>Got to experience a lot of lab and got to understand more about the lab as I looked around. Because one of the things we were saying is, this one job was going to open. Periodically, when I had time, I would check into that organization, and then read a lot of materials about what the lab did. Coming into it, you know, you had a lot of colorful pamphlets and all this stuff about—well, you know, it’s not untrue, but it highlights things in a way that makes it a lot more attractive than really what was going on. I’ll just put it that way.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I understand. We have a lot of that material in our archives, and, yeah, it certainly paints—I mean, it’s all promotional material, right, it paints the rosiest picture that it possibly can without outright lying.</p>
<p>Martin: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Where was the first place you stayed after you arrived?</p>
<p>Martin: There was a house that Nestor had, and it was on Hawaii Place in Kennewick, not far from the Columbia Center. He already had a house, he had a roommate, they had an extra room. Like I said, it was a soft landing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, no kidding. What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to?</p>
<p>Martin: There wasn’t a lot to do for young folks. We did a lot of traveling outside, going to Seattle, and making contacts with some of my friends from college in other towns. So, like I said, there wasn’t a lot. I got used to a lot of different things in this area with Nestor and his family. Enjoying the water. Nestor and I, we got boats and played around on the water. I already had a passion for outdoors. Fishing. Got a little bit more into hunting. David introduced me to hunting when I was in high school, so I got to do a bit more hunting. So I ended up meeting people who, after being here about a year or so—met a friend, Doug Usher, he was really into outdoor activities. So I made connections pretty easy. I think, to be honest, as I grew up, with us moving as much as we did, you learn to make friends or make relations pretty fast.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Martin: I would say that that’s a characteristic that I’ve acquired, and I think it came from moving a lot and then interacting with people. You make friends quick. Otherwise, you’re a loner. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right.</p>
<p>Martin: I think that that helped me in connecting with people here. A wide variety of folks. So, like I said, it was a pretty soft landing. From there, I mean, I never had any intentions—I didn’t think of—some people come and say, well, shoot, I’m staying here a couple years and then I’m off to something different. Didn’t really come with that intent. I was just coming off of being in college, being poor, or what I considered poor, most of the time.</p>
<p>Actually had learned about food stamps when I was in college. Some guy says, for as much as you make and stuff, you should check into food stamps. That wasn’t until—because I went five years—wasn’t until, I was in my, I think my fourth year that I found out that I could get food stamps. That helped out a lot.</p>
<p>But learning, coming out of that kind of environment, and coming to an established—and having a decent salary. Again, all of that was a big leap for me. And I use that term “soft landing,” because some people have hard—get hardships coming out, with very difficult to find a job, very difficult to make a connection into a town, right? I didn’t really have those.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you work the analytical chemistry job?</p>
<p>Martin: That was eight months.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And then what did you do after that?</p>
<p>Martin: Then I got into the Water and Land group. What you find out when you want to go into wildlife, wildlife management and wildlife biology, you really don’t do a lot of studying of animals. What you study is habitat. Because if you want to control the population of a particular species, then you control their habitat. Control how much food they have, how much hiding cover they have, how much water accessibility they have. So I had a lot of soils. Soils, and botany. And by going into Water and Land, I got hooked up with a group that did soil science. That soil science, we looked at a lot of different aspects of soil.</p>
<p>But what connected me, initially, was I got into waste and waste soils. One of the very first big projects was Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation project, where they were looking at these big waste sites from the mining of uranium. I had just come out of this group that was a lot of radiological, so I ended up learning a lot about radiation. So it was kind of the perfect project.</p>
<p>But one thing you have to understand about PNNL: it’s all about projects. You get the work on projects. If you don’t have a project, you don’t have a job. So whatever projects needed people, you worked on that. If you had a set of skills that would help that—so, by having a lab background, and then having a background in understanding environments, it was kind of a little bit of a match. And that’s where I got connected into waste management. That’s kind of what kicked off the first beginnings of what I consider the primary elements of my long-term career.</p>
<p>Franklin: Which was around waste management?</p>
<p>Martin: Yes, around waste management. And then it ended up focusing on geochemistry.</p>
<p>Franklin: What is geochemistry?</p>
<p>Martin: Geology, chemistry. So the chemistry of the earth. So, understanding the interaction of water, soils and how they interact. How once you put waste in the ground, it transports, subsurface transport. If you look at the things I’ve told you that I had in my background, they all kind of came together in that field.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you had mentioned earlier about your soft landing on the Tri-Cities and this connection with the Mitchell family who was a real—one of the big families in the area that people remember. CJ was a very public-spirited person. How would you describe life in the community? What did you do in your spare time? Do you remember any particular community events?</p>
<p>Martin: There were different types of events, but there wasn’t—you know, first off, the black population was not that large. I would say a couple percent. I don’t believe it has changed much over the years. I don’t follow the population numbers. I did follow some of the population—or, employment numbers within PNNL over time. But we created a lot of our own events, to be honest.</p>
<p>Franklin: Such as?</p>
<p>Martin: Such—well, we’d have potlucks and we’d have—oh, I would say, I know that there were some black churches that would throw some events and so I would go to those.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Pasco?</p>
<p>Martin: In Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: And I got to meet a number of other black families. The Sparks family, which is a pretty good-sized family here. I’m trying to think of the other names. It started with a B. I can’t remember the name of the family right now but maybe it’ll come to me. So that’s how I got to meet individuals in the community. They are the ones that explained to me a lot of the history. Or their experience. And about the different cities.</p>
<p>Matter of fact, they’re the ones where I had heard about what they called the sundown law in Kennewick. He goes, man, you realize back not that long ago, this is where blacks had to be back across the green bridge. At that time it was a green bridge. Any person that was in Kennewick at the time had to be back in Pasco. Of course, not even sure if that law is still on the books. You know how sometimes laws are still in the books but just not enforced? I’m not sure if that law ever got officially removed, how’s that? Now, take that for what it is. I don’t know. But they explained to me these things.</p>
<p>So they asked, well, where are you going to live? And I said, well, I was living in Kennewick with Nestor. And he says, yeah, yeah, we know the Mitchells. Many of the Mitchells lived in Richland. And I got to know a lot of his brothers, and they have one sister. Cameron actually came up and was at WSU for a little while, his younger brother, while I was finishing up.</p>
<p>So that’s how I ended up meeting and going to different events. Like I said, there wasn’t a lot to do here. You had to make a lot of your own activities. We’d spend a lot of time going to Seattle or Portland, up to Spokane, for different reasons. To be honest, a lot of them for what we might call partying. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>I didn’t experience a lot of racial deals. Oh, every once in a while, you’d hear somebody call a name out of a passing car. And you’d look at the car and then they’d be gone. But I didn’t really experience a lot of in-your-face—I think I might’ve said that before—here. Although others have. It could’ve been who I was around. Could’ve been just, I didn’t go to certain facilities or—it was difficult to find, getting your hair cut. Another reason I had to go to Pasco, because you would find folks. I found a young woman who everybody knew. Carmen Will was her name.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was it difficult in that you weren’t welcome there, or a white barber would refuse to cut black hair, or was it just, you were more comfortable in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Martin: Not necessarily—well, not necessarily east Pasco, but in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Pasco.</p>
<p>Martin: Once you talk to folks, you would say, okay, it is a little more comfortable in Pasco, there were more black faces in Pasco. I got introduced to—because you get your hair cut—look, I mean, you’re not going to go to a white barber. Not initially. You’re going to ask, and say, who cuts, man? And they tell you. You’d go to that barber. There was a black barber in Pasco. And then later on, I got introduced to Carmen. Carmen, she was in several different spots and she always did a good job. She also knew a lot was going on.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Martin: Oh. She’d say, well, did you hear about such-and-such and what happened to her at work? There were some incidences of people, racial situations, and some of the contractors. Interesting, you said something about union, people that you might have interviewed? Some of the black individuals who were in unions, they got a harder reaction and a lot more negative reaction than I did within PNNL. Now, I would call white collar/blue collar. I think the blue collar situation, a lot of times, those guys got in-your-faced, and had to react with people who were a little more vocal with their opinions. They also experienced lack of opportunities within their jobs, promotion, and we ended up talking about that. I can’t say that I had a lot of that in PNL. Oh, I mean, I would talk to a few other black individuals there and they would say, yeah, well, you know, to get a job at such-and-such, you got to know x, a person. And some of the black individuals didn’t see promotions like they thought they should’ve seen within PNNL.</p>
<p>The number of people, of black individuals, within PNNL was very small. When I looked at the numbers, I never saw more than—it was less than a hundred. As a matter of fact, I remember always seeing the number floating between 50 and 75, and the number of staff at PNNL increased from like 2,800 to 4,500-ish that I recall, watching those numbers. And that number of black individuals stayed very low. There seemed to be people attempting, as I would say, to bring about diversity. The Hispanic population increased.</p>
<p>But of course, when you—what you have to recognize with the national laboratory: it doesn’t recruit locally. So it doesn’t have to reflect the local demographics. It has to reflect the national demographics, as they always say. So because they recruited nationally, internationally. Which tend to make sense. But there are some jobs, hate to say it, you don’t need to be international to do. Janitorial, let’s pick. They have all those types of job. Welders. Some people in the bargaining units, you’d have to talk to a number of them.</p>
<p>So back to the original deal, I didn’t experience as much of it as I heard about people who were in other contractors on the site, out on Site. And I think you’ll have to compare my knowledge or experience or anecdotal information with others who may have truly experienced it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. You’ve mentioned the barbershop earlier. Was that a real kind of locus of the community—was the one of the major kind of meeting points or locus for the black community in the area?</p>
<p>Martin: Absolutely. [LAUGHTER] Absolutely. You’d go in there, and you would get to hear about a lot of things. I always would say, you know—I have a scientific—my background’s in science. I’m very careful about taking a broad input of information and then deciding what’s real and what’s not. So, with that said, you’d hear of a story. So I’d go and check with somebody else, and go, what did you hear what happened? And they’d have a little bit different twist on what happened.</p>
<p>I’ve also been a manager for a long time. And not something necessarily racial, but when an incident happens, it’s not always as it was first initially reported. You have to go gather—so, the same thing goes for things that are race-based. Go and really find out what really happened. But more often than not, things did happen. Then, as a black individual in the community, I’m going to be careful. And if somebody tells you there’s a certain place that you maybe shouldn’t go, then you don’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did you attend church?</p>
<p>Martin: No, to be honest. I wasn’t a regular—I was raised Catholic. So I went to Catholic school, went to catechism, my brother went to Catholic school. So, yeah, we always went to Catholic church. But once I got into college, I just stopped. Just wasn’t a major goal of mine. It wasn’t—so I never did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure. No, no.</p>
<p>Martin: So it wasn’t until later on, after being married, I started going to a more interdenominational church. Because I just—I am a Christian, I am faithful in that sense. But I’m not sure what your life is like, but you tend to flow the way everyone you’re around flows. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely no judgment. I don’t go to church. So I understand completely. But I was forced to go as a kid, and so was my wife. She went to Catholic school all twelve years. And you know, you just kind of, yeah, it can have the opposite effect, when you’re an adult.</p>
<p>But I was going to ask because—I ask that question because it’s my understanding from a lot of these interviews and research that the African American churches in Pasco played a large role in the community. And you had kind of mentioned that you would go to events at a couple of them. So I was just going to ask, for you or what you saw, what role did church play in the African American community in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Martin: For many blacks, it was the bedrock for them. It is where they could go and actually feel comfortable. To go and commiserate with individuals who are of their same upbringing. Many that may have come from the South, which a lot of them did and their families did, the church was a central point for the African American community. It is, should be, and well-recognized, and that still exists today. That is how it was in Pasco. I didn’t find myself attracted going to doing that. It just wasn’t in my—wasn’t something I really wanted to do. But I knew a lot of black individuals that did. For them, it made a big difference.</p>
<p>Black churches help people cope, okay, with what was happening around them. It was a central point for discussion; it was a central point for a lot of families and helping encouraging a lot of the youngsters make those next steps. So, yeah, I knew that—Morning Star is one of the churches that probably—I would say it’s probably the biggest one, but I’m not sure. So I heard a lot about them. The Mitchells, they went, if I remember—they went to the Baptist church.</p>
<p>Franklin: New Hope.</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, yeah. But they didn’t corral—Nestor never went. [LAUGHTER] We never really went that direction.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, I mean, yeah. Yeah, no it’s—</p>
<p>Martin: So that’s about as much as I know about the churches.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Martin: And with time and off time—because I’ve been here 40 years—I’ve always heard about them interacting with people who had—and gone to some of their gospel events, gospel singing events. I’ll tell you, they’re always extremely welcoming, open arms, in those churches. There’s no doubt about that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hmm, that’s good to know. We’ve been planning to do some outreach to the churches and talk to some of the folks there and interview—maybe hopefully interview the pastors about their roles in the black community.</p>
<p>Martin: That would be a very good thing to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, thank you. Well, it was not our original idea. It was the idea of AACCES and Tanya and Vanessa. Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including food, that people brought with them from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Martin: Well. Soul food, always the case with black individuals. But to be honest, the thing that I learned here, and the food that I learned here that I ended up liking is Mexican food. I mean, in Pullman there wasn’t a lot of it. So you ate fricking dorm food.</p>
<p>Franklin: Still isn’t any good Mexican food in Pullman.</p>
<p>Martin: Or you cooked your own. But here, it was everywhere. And it was inexpensive. And a taste that I wasn’t familiar with. I mean, we only lived in one fort, Fort Huachuca, and I think that was in Arizona, Fort Huachuca, and I don’t even remember a lot of it then. So I wasn’t exposed to it that much. But coming here, and then you learned a lot about Hispanic food. And damn if that stuff ain’t good.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, it is.</p>
<p>Martin: But people did bring a lot of their traditional Southern food. I knew how to cook a lot, myself. My mother was very good at teaching us how to cook.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did she teach you how to cook soul food-type stuff?</p>
<p>Martin: Yes. As I look back on what my mom did for us, or did for me, probably not knowing she was going to pass early: she taught us how to iron our clothes, wash our clothes, taught us how to cook. She was a stay-at-home mom, because we moved all the time. And in the end, that actually worked out extremely well for us. For me, after she passed, because then I had to do all that. Because my dad was still in the service, so he had to go. So I was the one that ended up taking care of a lot of that.</p>
<p>But as I moved on as a young man, I knew how to take care of myself. Which was—that’s not something I saw in a lot of other young people. I don’t want to say both female and male, but most of the males, they didn’t know how to hardly do any of that. But my mom taught—</p>
<p>When I lived in the South, you got a real good understanding. And of course we visited our aunts and uncles. There was a migration from New Roads to LA. So I have a lot of relatives that live in LA. Whenever you go to their houses, pfft, they’d always have food cooking, and it’ll always be Southern-type cooking. So I ended up learning how to do it myself. Even today, I mean, like, I still eat grits. You have to actually—you’re not going to go to a restaurant around here and find grits. If you do, you found something interesting.</p>
<p>I bring up that one food, because that’s something from the South. So here in the Tri-Cities, not a lot. There’s a couple of soul food places now. But you go to some families, you know, they would have—some black families, and you’d have a meal other than what I cook for myself. So, again, it’s kind of odd that the one food that really was new to me was Hispanic cuisines. I still, like I said, today, I love it. I go to taco wagons. You know. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: I know, me too, it was a real pleasant—I grew up in Alaska and lived in Hawaii.</p>
<p>Martin: Oooh, Alaska.</p>
<p>Franklin: Not really food meccas. Besides, you know, kind of the normal Chinese food and the normal American food. So moving here was—yeah, the variety and abundance of Mexican food—I’ve always loved Mexican food and it’s pretty legit here. You can get—as legit as you want to go.</p>
<p>Martin: Yes, you can.</p>
<p>Franklin: Which is great. What about community activities or events? Things like Juneteenth or—did you attend any of those?</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, I probably—for Juneteenth, I think over the years, I think I’ve gone to about a half a dozen.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why is that celebration so important to the African American community?</p>
<p>Martin: As you look at past history, there was an event that most of the black community would lean toward. A lot of things that are—people will ask the question, why do you have events like that that are separate from the white community? Not only that, but anything with having to do with black history. I’ve read a lot of books on black history. Our society, as I was growing up and going to school, they never highlighted much of the black history. Which actually, as I grew, really upset me, that I didn’t know these things. It wasn’t in the books.</p>
<p>So, Juneteenth is just one of the events. They wrap the beauty pageant around that particular event, because it was an event which helped the changing of recognition of slavery and so forth. But all of the other aspects of black history and highlighting it were so that’s not forgotten. And here in the Tri-Cities, there wasn’t a lot of events. I can’t remember when Black History Month was actually established. Sad that I don’t know the actual dates. But when that thing happened—I know I did a lot more within PNNL as time went on to lift the people’s consciousness around what the black experience and the black history has done for America.</p>
<p>People will question, why should there be something separate for you? And I always say to them, because if we didn’t do it, you may not ever really know. So, we want you to know that a bedrock of the United States was built on the backs of blacks. People need to recognize that. Not only white individuals or Hispanic individuals, but black individuals. I mean, some black individuals really don’t know the history. If they didn’t go to college and get exposure, they’re going to get what’s ever fed to them. Without highlighting it, and they get to see certain things, they might not have known. I just went to the Smithsonian African American Museum of History. I’ve now gone twice. Anybody I say, you need to go, and you need to walk through that a couple of times to understand the lineage there. I say all of that, because when an event happens here in town, you need to go and understand it. And I mean any person should go to it and understand some of the aspects of it.</p>
<p>So Juneteenth, back to the original question, is just one other way to highlight an event in black history. Some people say, well, why do you have one just for black girls? Well, in the Tri-Cities, I’m not sure many black girls would make it in the Miss Tri-Cities Pageant, you know? Was there something in that pageant that made it so that black individuals wouldn’t do very well in that pageant? I don’t really say that I would go there, because I don’t know. I would be making a falsehood. But with that event, it was more about the Juneteenth event and black individuals being highlighted for their experience and their talents associated with that event. Hopefully—you’re going to always get your naysayers and negative folks about just about anything. But it’s important to have those.</p>
<p>The people who have done that—the ones that have also supported the awards: one for African American kids, for educational awards; there’s also HAAP, the Hispanic Academic Achievement program; there’s also the African American Achievement Program, to bring funds to create scholarships for African Americans and for Hispanics. And people will say, well, why just for them? And I’ll keep going back to, there’s sometimes a competition that they don’t win in the big scheme of things, if you just pool everybody in one set, you don’t see the attention given to the minorities that are there. And trying to create some things and give advantages to some of the folks who don’t get those. But if certain people were to see my interview, they would say, well, we’ve heard that before. They just don’t want to agree. But you know, we can agree to disagree.</p>
<p>Franklin: Certainly. In what ways were opportunities limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Martin: Here, in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: During my time here?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: Because that’s the only thing I can—</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s fine. Or were they? Did you see anything?</p>
<p>Martin: I would say that there has been some, because I would always question why haven’t we seen more—and this was within the lab—why haven’t we seen more black individuals in interviews? It came from—to be honest, where I first got my eyes opened up was in the late—the mid-‘80s. Dr. Wiley, I’m sure some people have brought up that gentleman’s name. He is the one who—he became my mentor. He exposed me to a lot of what was possibly going on within the laboratory that he wanted to bring about change. So I can only speak to what I experienced in the lab. Outside the lab, it’s what people would say that happened that you would hear. I already kind of covered that; you’d hear different things. But in the lab, there were situations where you could see that there was something not quite right. As I said, I told you the numbers. Why is that? So, he helped me ask questions and improve my understanding of what he saw during his time.</p>
<p>Now, I remember he came from the South. He went to Tougaloo. It’s a historically black college. As a matter of fact, that was one of the very first things he hooked me up into, is doing a lot of things with the National Urban League and going around the country interacting with historically black colleges. Because I will say that, you know, I go to a lot of these conferences and give papers and whatever. I rarely see a black individual. Rarely. He went through and explained to me why we were not seeing a lot in some of the things around. So therefore that translates into not seeing a lot of them coming through our interview process. Because they aren’t at those, right? It took a long time for me to see and understand, and interfacing with a lot of historically black colleges. And that particular case was to let them know that science was an option.</p>
<p>But in the lab, there has been certain situations that occur. You know, like I said, a lot of things are not blatant or just obvious. You kind of have to dig a little to understand why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. Bill helped me to understand a lot of that. And I became a lot more proactive within the lab to bring about some of the changes and give some individuals interview—in the interview process.</p>
<p>So, again, I mean, nothing’s—with time, as time changes, you have to understand that things are slow. Sometimes you aren’t—I had a job. So I wasn’t spending a whole lot of time investigating that kind of thing. I’m mostly trying to keep my credentials up and doing what’s necessary, both in the lab and outside the lab. But it took me a little bit, but I got a lot more active in understanding what’s going on within the lab and encouraging and getting more diversity within the lab and did a lot more things, helping managers, helping our internal human resources department engage.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors and management when you were at the lab?</p>
<p>Martin: Actually, I had a very good technical mentor. His name was Jeff Czerny, white male, who took me under his wing and taught me a lot and gave me a lot of opportunity. Engaging with most folks, I think—and this is my own perception is—I have a general rule of saying, the best thing you can do is perform. Bill Wiley said, you know, you have to have the credentials. Without the credentials, they don’t even really let you in the door. And then perform.</p>
<p>So I had two paths I started off on. One, getting credentials, and the other, performing in my workspace. People picked me up on a lot of projects, because I had a performance rep, a very good performance rep. Once you get that and people get comfortable with that, they put you on their project, they’re going to get what they paid for.</p>
<p>The credential route was not something—I’ll tell you, honestly, no fricking way was I going back to college. [LAUGHTER] My first experience in college, five years, long, drawn out. And I figured, that was enough. I should get real, get a good paycheck, and I should be able to launch, right? Well, Dr. Wiley said, you are sadly—it’s sad that you have that perception, because it’s not going to work. Long story short, I went back and did the master’s thing. Did that, took me four years. During that four years, I had gotten married, had a couple kids—</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your master’s degree in?</p>
<p>Martin: Radiological sciences, the study of radiation.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did Dr. Wiley come to the lab?</p>
<p>Martin: Ooh!</p>
<p>Franklin: Was he there when you started?</p>
<p>Martin: Oh, yeah. He was—he was in the ranks. I want to say he came there in the late ‘60s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, okay. How long—was he manager of the lab when you started?</p>
<p>Martin: When I first interacted with him on a one-to-one basis, he had become the lab director.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Director, sorry.</p>
<p>Martin: Yes, became the lab director. And I knew of him, in the lab. But I didn’t have a lot of—his area was biochemistry, microbiology. The lab is set up around projects. And if the project subjects don’t overlap, you don’t interface with folks. So I knew of him. But, like I said, my relationship with him started in the mid-‘80s. Yeah. So.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were you treated on the job by your coworkers and supervisors?</p>
<p>Martin: Well. I didn’t really—again, didn’t really experience a lot of negative. If they held some kind of negative feelings, they didn’t make it obviously known. And so I got along well with folks.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Martin: Not a lot. Pretty much focused on work with them. I had a couple of people who I met on the job that became really good friends. Doug Sherwood and Brian Opitz. We became good friends, two white males. That part, I did get a couple of folks that I knew and interacted a lot with. Then later on, there was a few—as time went on, I picked up a few more that I did a few things outside. But for both the professional folks, not a lot.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe the working conditions?</p>
<p>Martin: In what way?</p>
<p>Franklin: When you were at the lab, like, kind of what environments did you work in?</p>
<p>Martin: I was primarily—I’m an experimentalist. So, when you say environments—environment is a big term. So I don’t know if you meant the environment—working environment, physically in a lab, doing your things, or the relational environment. Which one do you want?</p>
<p>Franklin: Both.</p>
<p>Martin: Relational, I only really focused on a few people who I felt comfortable with that I felt were actually giving me good scientific tutelage. And Jeff Czerny was one, that’s for dang sure. A couple other scientists, Ken Krupke, he was kind of a hardnose. I’m trying to think. Oh, I can’t remember the one guy’s name now. There were a couple other scientists who—Don Rai, he was another—he was an east Indian background. They were helpful. They were—and I think a lot of it came from is that—I don’t give up very well. And they could see it. And no matter what, I kept pushing them, pushing them. And I said, I don’t understand this. I need to understand this. What book do you got? Because I’m used to books; give me a book. And I’d come back with a lot of questions.</p>
<p>I think if you really showed initiative and really wanted to, you got a very good reception from the science community. Again, once given a task, and you perform for them, they got what they wanted, they came back, they kept coming back. And that was how things migrated into me being involved a lot more.</p>
<p>So the tutelage part, the working with folks, the experimental side, I learned a lot about safety. Working with rad—radioactive materials—you had to be very diligent about what you touched, how you dressed, you know, how you handled—it’s different than working in a non-rad. So operationally and safety-wise, that built up a strong working skillset that not many people had. I never had contamination issues. I always got what they wanted in a reasonable time. And then I was building up the academic part, so I made a very good connection between the two. So when they got stuff from me, it had already been thought-through. I think those two environments—I learned a lot. I got a lot of—so, me, as one person in there, I was okay. Others didn’t experience—of course, again, there wasn’t a lot of black individuals. Very few. A few Hispanics, but mostly white individuals, to be honest. And I think part of my—again, if you go back to my background, I was around white people a lot. So, I wasn’t uncomfortable; it wasn’t an issue for me to walk in a room and start talking to them. Which I think some of them, initially are not too friendly.</p>
<p>Franklin: Some of the white individuals?</p>
<p>Martin: Yes. They not quite knew how to react. But if I just focused on work, then there wasn’t a whole lot issues; I just didn’t talk about stuff about outside of work. Then they’re okay. You learn.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any people that you were able to talk to about stuff outside of work? Have kind of more—</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, Doug and Brian. We talked a little bit about—well, the racial things I experienced, they didn’t see a lot of it. But Doug had a really good friend, Mark Francis, a black individual. Actually, ironically, he was his first roommate and he actually went to Whitworth and I played soccer against him, against Mark. Then we all became roommates. So Mark was from, original background, from Trinidad but grew up in New York and was out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Martin: Believe me, he—yeah, man. Wasn’t good, I mean, it wasn’t the greatest thing going to Whitworth. And Doug went to Whitman in Walla Walla. Where there’s hardly any blacks in school there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I’d imagine.</p>
<p>Martin: But Doug has the right kind of personality. And Mark and I, we would talk and he would tell me the things he experienced. So, as roommates, we would hear and see—and then you just learn where to go, where not to go, who to talk to, who not to talk to. But as far as inside work, I had a few relationships that came out of it. But, again, there’s other people—hopefully you’ll get some other individuals that may have been at PNNL that can tell you what they experienced. I’m sure CJ must’ve said something.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned where to go and where not to go. That’s something that comes out in a lot of interviews. That’s kind of, it passes through the vine and it’s informal. Do you have any examples of where were places to go and where were places that you avoided?</p>
<p>Martin: There were some clubs. You didn’t want to go out to the smaller towns: Finley, Burbank, Benton City. Do your shopping in town. You never know what you’re going to get if you go out there. They didn’t speak a lot about Walla Walla. They said, well, Walla Walla’s—you know, there’s not much for you out there. So I wouldn’t go. Now, that may give Walla Walla a bad rap, but I’m going to go by what people who’ve been living here tell me. If I don’t really need to go, I didn’t go. There were certain restaurants they would say, well, you might not get as good service there as if you went to this one over here. So I’m going to try to stay away from the names so much, but that’s how—</p>
<p>Franklin: No, that’s fine. I was just kind of trying to—</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, that is how you end up picking. It’s based on what people—you’ve got to put some trust in the people you’re meeting, that they’re telling you the truth. And why go test it? [LAUGHTER] Not when there’s other choices.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. Right, right. Excellent. Back to working, what were the most difficult aspects of your job?</p>
<p>Martin: My career at PNNL was like 36 years, so you could split it into 17 and 17 years. The first part of my upbringing was actually being a researcher. The second was becoming a manager. I’ve told you a bit about the research side. I wasn’t—I went into management kicking and screaming.</p>
<p>Franklin: As many do.</p>
<p>Martin: [LAUGHTER] How they wanted and tried to encourage me to go into management, they said, look, you’ve got a good reputation, you have people skills, you have good enough technical foundation that you could lead technical people. I said, is that what it takes? I mean, the reason I say that is because it’s the management side of my work experience that was more difficult, because you are interacting with people—you’re now managing folks who, predominantly white individuals, a few females, and you’re dealing with big kids.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry. [LAUGHTER] No, it’s funny because it’s true.</p>
<p>Martin: Well, yeah. So, you transition out of this environment where you controlled a lot of stuff—your experiments, your writing. And then over here, you’re trying to get these folks to understand what they need to do in order to succeed at the lab. Being in management was difficult.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why’d you do it for so long?</p>
<p>Martin: [SIGH] As you leave the technical world, you—in order to be good, technically, you have to be actively and building all the time. Once you leave it and you go out of that realm, you’ve now left it behind, and to go back is not easy. So that’s first and foremost. I like challenges. And there’s challenges in the management side.</p>
<p>Back to Dr. Wiley again, before I really kind of left the technical world—he encouraged me to get my master’s. He strongly encouraged me to get my PhD. And in doing that, it helped me technically as I did it. But then he said, now you have the credentials, because in order to really move forward in this, he said—he told me, I knew I wasn’t going to become a Nobel laureate. I wanted to accomplish something. He was a very visionary kind of guy. He says, I was going to do that on the management side. His experience in the management area, he said, you know, you could do this, follow that track. So he encouraged me to go that route.</p>
<p>And, doing that, once you get into it—if you want challenges, you take the challenge and you move forward and you overcome certain things. So by doing that, I got exposed to a lot different world in the area of technology and research and development. And one thing led to the next. And you then start to somewhat enjoy it. In management, what you primarily deal with are the bad actors and bad incidences, we’ll call them. You don’t get to focus a lot on the good. You allow that to happen, you make sure that the environment that that is happening in stays safe, encouraging positive. And then you deal with, when there’s a safety issue or there’s a behavioral issue, you learn to deal with it.</p>
<p>An interesting conversation I had when I first became a manager, there was a lab director—this is after Bill Wiley had passed, and I’d done a few management deals—but Bill Madia came in as the lab director, and there was going to be some opportunities. He brought me in and we talked, and I’ll never forget this conversation. He goes, yeah, you’ve taken statistics, haven’t you? And I go, yeah. Yeah, I’ve done quite a bit of statistical stuff. He says, well, this laboratory’s made up of, it’s a subpopulation of a population. Oh, yeah, well, that makes sense, yeah. He goes, so, all the stuff that happens out in the population, it’s the same things that happen inside this lab with the same people. So the things you might find and what you might need to do is, your number one job is to protect the laboratory. You’re a manager now. You must protect the lab. And you will find there are people that steal, there are people who are sexist, there are people who—I mean, he went down through the list of the bad stuff that happens out in the population. Some of those same people working here. I go, like, uh, yeah? Your job is to make sure you understand those individuals. And if they exist, and if they’re bringing about negative things that happen in the laboratory, you need to find those out. People that drink on the job. Now, you know, let’s say I was relatively young, okay, and you hear this, and you’re like, whoa, what did I get into?!</p>
<p>That opened my eyes up to what my job was. And people who will try to cut corners, people who are not going to do the right things from a safety point of view. That made me think so much differently about how I managed, and it really helped me. Because I did find certain situations that were happening. You can see certain behaviors. I didn’t take psychology or sociology. I never took management classes, okay? You learn by doing. I got to go to some Sloan management deals and they had some management training deals. But you learn—as I said, I learned a lot on the technical side, I just took those same skills and learned more about how to be a manager. And as time went on, I learned how to enjoy.</p>
<p>So that’s it in a nutshell, really. I stayed into it because I kept getting other opportunities. Could’ve left and gone to other sites and had job offers at other places. But I tended to stay within PNNL, because I felt comfortable in the area and as well as my family too.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your racial background figure into your work experiences?</p>
<p>Martin: My racial background?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: Being black and being in there?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: I had several assistants. Here’s a thing, a game I used to play with my assistant. I was a hiring manager. My tonation and my ability to speak and whatever, I would have conversations with some individuals on the phone, and I don’t think they knew I was black, okay? Unless they—maybe back in certain times, they didn’t have Google. Google—[inaudible] some of them didn’t. So I told my secretary, okay, when this guy comes in, I want you to watch his expression when he walks in and I’m in the office and he walks to the door and sees me. And my secretary, white, she’s like, oh, okay. So she would walk him in and then she would look at him. And their first is they stop. And you know right then, they weren’t expecting me.</p>
<p>Now, I don’t want to make it sound like that’s a bad thing. But that shows you—the person comes in, and then we sit down and we talk, and we talk through the job. What do they want to—what is it they’re—I’m going to talk to them just like I talk to anybody else; it doesn’t matter what color you are. And I think they tend to get somewhat of a comfort.</p>
<p>But, you know? Being black in a predominantly white institution, I mean not just PNNL—the institution of science. It’s different. I learned early on that you must be aware as best you can when someone’s for you and when they’re not. You can make that measure, and I had to do that on a number of occasions. But being a hiring manager and being involved in that kind of stuff, you want to be fair. Some individuals would come to me—black individuals, who were experiencing—totally not even in my department, but wanting to know if there was anything I could do for them. In some cases, you have to be careful about where you go out and what questions you ask, about other managers. But I had to do that for some individuals, and I was willing to. But it was a challenge. I enjoyed it, for the most part.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. In what ways did the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Martin: Oh, well, I had the highest clearance you could have. It’s called Sensitive Compartmented Information. It’s like Top Secret in the Army. So I did a lot of classified work. In limited areas, in what they call a SCIF, which is Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is the next level. Quite impactful. I’ll tell you in the trainings, there’s a phrase I heard: for life. You had to keep this information that’s going to be provided to you confidential and secret for life. [LAUGHTER] I was like, whoa. So when you are in that kind of environment and being shared that kind of information, you learn to be careful about your speech, what you talk about, what you don’t talk about. Very enlightening. You only—it’s a thing called need-to-know. So you’re only privy to what you needed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Martin: Okay, so you weren’t exposed to everything. But for what you were exposed to, you understood why it was sensitive. It has a fundamental impact on how you viewed the sharing of information. Absolutely. And you know what, as Americans, tell Americans, there’s some stuff you just don’t need to know. Everybody thinks, everything should be free and out there and everybody should know everything. No. And that’s as much as I say! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. All right then. What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Martin: Only through what people told me. I mean, I learned a lot in the article you sent that I didn’t know. I didn’t know the living conditions. I knew they were relegated to east Pasco. But that one picture in there reminded me of Louisiana.</p>
<p>Franklin: The one of—</p>
<p>Martin: The shacks.</p>
<p>Franklin: The shacks, yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: The shacks. That’s the way it was in Louisiana. And I didn’t realize that it existed that way here in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective, what were their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights?</p>
<p>Martin: Here?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: I would say that the individuals who came here were courageous, were the ones who took a lot of the brunt of racism. As the article put it, Jim Crowism. The movement from the South to the North was no different than the move from the South to Chicago and the movement to here. They experienced some of the same things. Those individuals set—as I said, for me—set a path where I could actually thrive here. Without what they experienced in going through and hurdles they had to go through, like opening up the ability for me to live anywhere in the Tri-Cities. They did that. I didn’t. A lot of what they experienced and what they went through. And you know what? That’s the same as it is in America. There’s a lot of patterns of the same.</p>
<p>Again, I was shocked to hear that Kennewick was the Birmingham of the Northwest. I guess Portland was pretty bad, my understanding is. The Northwest was probably that new horizon. I think people that lived here didn’t know, or didn’t expect that migration to this—you know, the dam and the Hanford Project brought a lot of minorities this way, was the idea that there was work. And they actually could get work, is what brought them here.</p>
<p>I don’t believe in why you don’t see the numbers. The number of blacks that came to the Northwest was nothing like what went to Chicago and in there. I mean, a lot migrated to the main cities. Not as many here. I don’t really know much about Seattle. The Northwest doesn’t have a really high African American population. Again, I’ve seen the number sometimes but it’s pretty low. So, point being is, not as many came. I think they got the brunt of that racial—because a lot of the Southern whites also came for the same reason.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: But they came in much larger numbers. So, I think it provided a platform for me to do reasonably well here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Martin: Equal access to work. Equal access to promotions. Many were relegated to certain types of jobs. I even hear it, matter of fact, just like yesterday. I was at the barber. [LAUGHTER] Went to the barbershop and a black individual that I hadn’t seen in a while was working at PNNL and he said he had to leave because he wasn’t being given opportunities for a promotion. But then he got called by one of the other contractors out at Hanford and said, hey, we got a supervisor’s job for you. Of course, he shifted and went.</p>
<p>Now, why was there an opportunity there and not at PNNL? I don’t know. But it tells you something, that these things happen, and they happen more often than you might think. I would say, something I learned through some training, actually, it’s called unconscious bias. Have you heard that term?</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Martin: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: But maybe you could explain it for the sake of the interview.</p>
<p>Martin: People unconsciously make biases. They don’t realize they’re doing it. It’s probably—no, it is—from their upbringing. They have a built-in bias that expresses itself, but it’s unconscious to them. Unless they recognize they have this bias, they don’t see it happening. They just think this is just a normal occurrence for them. I think, within PNNL and other management situations, people have them, and they don’t realize it until something brings it to the forefront for them to: one, accept that it exists. I make that statement because they will say it isn’t, but it’s there. And I’ve got them, you’ve got them, she’s got them. Oops, talking about the camera person. Everybody has them. It may not be about race. It could be about religion. It could be about just about anything. It could be about foods. They have never test—some people may have never tasted Mexican food, but they—no, I wasn’t taught that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, they just know they don’t like it.</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, for some reason they just don’t like it. But anyway, that unconscious bias is a big deal, still today. That is something that I got exposed to and I also shared that with a lot of other managers to get to understand how to expand their consciousness about how they make choices, make decisions.</p>
<p>Franklin: What actions were and are being taken to address those issues of civil rights in the—</p>
<p>Martin: I think they’re talked about a lot more now. I believe, in some cases, some things were brought about in the lab because it was regulated. I may forget this agency’s name; I think it was called—it’s called OFCCP? Office of the Federal something Compliance. They monitored the contract, and there were certain things that—in order to have a federal contract, there were some issues around racial, ethnic, women—requirements that in order for you to hold this federal contract, you must comply to. Some of that drives behavior and management action. It’s sad to say that a lot of things that happened in America is not necessarily done because it’s the right thing to do, but because they got forced to do it. Some through regulation. And I think some of what happens in the lab was driven by being reviewed and being under certain types of consent orders, that they must do a better job.</p>
<p>I saw that happen. There is a lot of individuals within the lab who have—who truly do have a desire to see change. Some of them may be hampered by the environment they’re in. They have good intentions, but unless it’s driven all the way down, it just doesn’t happen. So I’ve seen a cultural change within the lab, over probably a 15- or 20-year period. Slowly but surely, people will put their arms around the fact that, you know—</p>
<p>And once—I brought in a lot of black students from historically black colleges through a lot of programs. Once they see that these individuals could perform and they could do just as well, they had credentials, you know. It’s just that they didn’t go out to certain venues that exposed them to where that population was there. And I think once they started seeing those and they said, oh, okay. There’s a little more comfort in that. I think more has happened over time. And you’ll find champions. You’ll find people willing to open up and willing to take—in some cases I think they’re taking a risk. And they do. Which is very—it was and is very encouraging.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were the important leaders of civil rights efforts in this area?</p>
<p>Martin: Whoa. Well, you had Webster in here, didn’t you?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, he’s one. I think that CJ Mitchell, because he had a platform that he could. When you look at AACCES, that organization, it has done a lot. Because it approached it from an exposure point, a cultural thing, and a gathering of information, and then presenting it to the people. What’s Eleanor’s last name? Eleanor, she’s the one that runs the Juneteenth pageant. Dang. I think her last name’s Sparks, because she married a Sparks, Wayne Sparks. Is she on your list to interview?</p>
<p>Franklin: I don’t know. We interviewed Ellenor Moore. Not the same Eleanor?</p>
<p>Martin: Ellenor Moore is Vanessa—is Leonard’s mother.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mother, yeah. Eleanor Sparks.</p>
<p>Martin: But look up Juneteenth in the—I think it’s—her short name is El, but Sparks. She’s the director of Juneteenth. If you can get an audience with her, I think you would get a very—and you know, she’s heavily in the black churches, she leads the gospel singing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you know her well?</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah, I know El.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Martin: If you want, I can call her and say—pass on your name or something.</p>
<p>Franklin: I find that’s some of the most helpful when doing these, especially across cultural barriers—</p>
<p>Martin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: You know, just trying to peer into a different community, that introduction helps a lot.</p>
<p>Martin: I’ll do that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Thank you. I would really appreciate that. You know, it just makes it so much more smooth.</p>
<p>Martin: She has had some situation within the lab, with the racial issues.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Martin: And I remember having—she would come to me, was one of those people that came to me and asked me, this is what happened. And I’d bring it up with other managers, saying, this shouldn’t be happening to her. And the guy—I’m not going to say his name—he had a pretty abrasive personality in the first dang place. He just—more of it got exposed. And she wasn’t going to put up with it. And some people just put up with things, right? But I’ll make sure that I give her your phone number and she calls you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Thank you. What were some of the notable successes in addressing civil rights issues in the area that you noticed or were a part of?</p>
<p>Martin: Never really part of any. Seeing, whenever they would have a soul food event, how welcoming the people would just flock to it. When they did that—because around food people just—I don’t know what it is about food, but it just brings them out. And then they would get a cultural lesson at the same time. Those kind of events always brought about real positive celebration, and across racial lines.</p>
<p>Juneteenth was another one, get people rallied around it. Those kinds of events are the ones I remember the most that are more positive. I rarely saw any large protests.</p>
<p>I remember, when I was on the board at Columbia Basin College; I was a trustee. And it happened that Katrina occurred. And there was a huge—the issue of poverty just rose its ugly head. So I put on three workshops on poverty that were held on campus. I say that because I don’t believe people realized how many black individuals lived in New Orleans. It’s like, greater than 50%, maybe it was 60%. It was a very large percentage. People didn’t understand why these people didn’t get out. And events were held so that people recognized, when you’re poor and somebody says get in your car and leave—you don’t have a car! How you leaving? No buses are coming down to take anybody anywhere. These people were trapped.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: The poverty level in New Orleans was, like, I think it was like 50-some-percent in poverty. Mostly black but also white. Well, I bring that story up just because people here, once we started having these workshops, they were like, wow, they didn’t realize—you don’t get it in the news. The news wasn’t sharing it. They just showed the aftermath.</p>
<p>So I had a young man who was working for me, black individual—I had a lot of relatives that lived—I think I counted 40, 42. Many of them were recently well-off, I mean, middle class. But they were devastated, right? So this one young man who was a black scientist, I brought—I helped him get his PhD. His mom lived down there, near one of my relatives and gave him time off so he could go down and help his mom. I bring these little ones up because people in the lab—there was a connection and I could tell them, I have relatives down there. I’m sending them money, whatever. I didn’t physically go down. These people are out. And that’s a huge black community.</p>
<p>That brought an enlightenment about poverty and racial perceptions. By having those workshops—and we had a lot of agencies come in and there was a lot of talk, primarily about poverty. And they didn’t realize how much poverty was in the Tri-Cities. How many people were in poverty. Numbers were shared. And people were surprised. I think the folks that work at the laboratory are a little bit more affluent. Tend to stay where you’re most comfortable, right? There’s also a financial culture. People will stay amongst people who have money.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, well, we segregate ourselves based on class, which often breaks down on race.</p>
<p>Martin: Yes, it does.</p>
<p>Franklin: And people but houses in new subdivisions and they move farther away and they just don’t interact anymore. The people without money get left behind. And those neighborhoods decay. And it just compounds the problem.</p>
<p>Martin: So the whole issue of poverty brought in both the perspective of race and class to this community. And there was a lot of conversation around it. Just the fact that—just because a person is homeless doesn’t mean they’re a drug addict or they’re this—no. An unfortunate thing happened to them where they were out of home, because they didn’t have the money. And it’s not like they’re bad people. If you look at it, that happened, and so Katrina brought a different type of conversation in this community. I think it did across the country. But it happened here. People, I think, were a little bit more aware. But as with everything, it fades.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. We talked about some of the kind of successes in addressing civil rights in the area. What were some of the biggest challenges?</p>
<p>Martin: In order to get people to come and live here, as far as black individuals, there’s not a lot for them. I think that’s a major impediment. I think just the area itself, just its physical location, the actual population of African Americans here, I think, it’s probably around 2%. It’s low.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: The Hispanic population is probably more around 30-ish, Tri-City-wide. Check my numbers on that one. But in Pasco it’s probably more like 70?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I think it’s, overall, we’re almost around 50, I think.</p>
<p>Martin: Overall in the whole Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Franklin: I think—last time I checked—at least in schools. Because I taught at—</p>
<p>Martin: Oh, in schools, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: I taught a class in American history, and Pasco was about 70% Latino, Kennewick’s about 50, Richland’s about 20-25. So I think if you average that out, you’d get somewhere probably around 40-50.</p>
<p>Martin: Between 40-50, okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: But it could be 30-40.</p>
<p>Martin: No, you’re a lot closer numbers.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s still pretty significant.</p>
<p>Martin: Yes. I mean, real significant. So, the fact that we have—it’s changing. That’s what’s changed here. I think it’s no different than the rest of the country. There’s this fear factor. I mean, I think you see all this immigration topics and fear. It has a lot to do with that changing face of America. I think you’re seeing some of that here. I don’t think. I know you’re seeing some of that here, okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: I’m not sure how people want to react to it. I sit on the board for Kadlec Hospital. Matter of fact, at present time, I’m the chair of the board. And looking at your service areas and looking at the makeup of who comes in for services and having to deal with the poor and the vulnerable. We have three hospitals: Lourdes, Trios, and Kadlec; Kadlec being the biggest, and we have probably 55-60% of the market. Trios has about 20-25. And Lourdes is a critical care hospital, so it’s going to be low. It’s restricted to 25 beds. And it has probably 10-ish percent. I tell you that because in working that scheme of things, you can see how people’s attitudes will get to who is the primary customers there. More and more people are of the Medicaid, which is healthcare for the poor. And of course with the changing baby boomer retirement deals, a lot of them go on Medicare, and those are hard to balance, because you get paid less for those for services than you do in the commercial market. And in that comes a conversation around who is the makeup of your customers.</p>
<p>So I hear conversations. I say, well, that is who we are. That’s who we have to serve. We have to figure out how we’re going to serve those better. So people will tend to, eventually, coalesce around certain aspects of race, of what you’re seeing. And understand that that’s who our customer is.</p>
<p>It’s actually a very positive—I’ve seen a very positive change. You want to make sure people understand and represent—and I represent myself as well as I can in those scenarios. So, the Tri-Cities is going through a change. Like you said, the Hispanic population being as large as it is, they’re more impactful, both from the dollar, as well as what they want to see for services. You know, you have some people say, why does everything have to be in Spanish and in English? Have you looked at who we’re serving?! I mean! It has to be. We must do that, in order to be fair, right? So I’ve seen those, I see them happening. It’s a good thing. So the Tri-Cities—you notice, I just say Tri-Cities. I’m not a native. Well, I guess I am now, but.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was going to say, you’ve been here a lot longer than I have.</p>
<p>Martin: I didn’t grow up here, right?</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Martin: So I just look at it as three cities. I call it Tri-Cities. It’d be nice if they were consolidated, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: Me, too. It could just be one city called Tri-Cities. I know, I’ve always—</p>
<p>Martin: That’s the way I put it, anyway. So, I hope for the better. I stay active. Even though I retired, I stay active and involved in things in the community. Less than I was, but enough to see change.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I wanted to add, just real quick, fill in some previous information. Where did you get your master’s and PhD?</p>
<p>Martin: My master’s I got though what they used to call the Joint Center for Graduate Studies.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right here.</p>
<p>Martin: Which is WSU, right here. And I got it through the University of Washington, because that’s who offered that particular degree. When I went to get my PhD, it had become WSU, and I was the first person who was able to stitch together a PhD program that was a joint between main campus and here. They had this thing called the residency rule. Pfft. Basically, what it said was, you must spend at least two years of your PhD on campus, on the main campus.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, probably because they want your residence money.</p>
<p>Martin: That’s not the way they present it to you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, of course not.</p>
<p>Martin: They say, what we believe is necessary is for you to be able to be embroiled in the academic environment for which you are—</p>
<p>Franklin: Paying handsomely?</p>
<p>Martin: No, no, not paying handsomely. That will make the foundation for your PhD.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: What a crock.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Martin: But I had to spend—I ended up, I had Karen [UNKNOWN] was the provost. We worked it out; she got approval through the main campus. I did three—two-and-a-half semesters on the campus. So I had to travel back and forth, left my family here and yadda, yadda, yadda. And then I finished it out here. Matter of fact, I had my office down here in the basement. I finished out here. So I got my PhD through Washington State University. I was the first person to get a PhD in environmental and natural resource sciences.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. Congratulations.</p>
<p>Martin: I was the very first person. That’s not always good. Because you’re the guinea pig. I really questioned whether I was going to go and get it, but Dr. Wiley, he was retiring. He said—you know, that’s the credential thing. If you look at me, I was close to 40, I guess. It was in the early ‘90s when I jumped off the cliff and did it. I was leaving an environment, scientific environment where I knew who my mentors were, I knew who my colleagues were. They were supportive. And I was going to go into a whole different thing on campus with professors I didn’t have any clue who they were, they didn’t have, necessarily, my best interests in mind.</p>
<p>So, I did that. They had my life in their hands. That’s a scary thing. At least it was for me, going and doing that. But I did it, and I worked my way through it. As I say to people, they go, what does it take to get a PhD? I say, well—I’m very simple in my approaches of things—I say, well, you only have to do two things: satisfy your graduate school; satisfy your committee. Get them to sign off on the documents. Once you’re done that, you’re done. You know? But! It’s not easy to do either one of those things, either one of those.</p>
<p>And long story short, I ended up getting it. I think I was the first person—because at the time when I finally got it, I got it as a WSU Tri-Cities student. I was the first person. So not a lot of the people now don’t have to do the residency program. There’s PhD programs here. But that’s where I got my education. So, my bachelor’s was WSU, master’s is University of Washington, PhD, WSU.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. When you came here in 1975 and then came back, how did you feel at the time about working, if not directly on the development of nuclear weapons, at a site that played a large essential role in the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Martin: Well, let me correct you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Martin: The national laboratory is in Richland. It has some facilities that happen to be on the Hanford Site.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Martin: So I never really worked for Hanford, how’s that? I worked at Hanford only because the facilities were on the southern part of the Site.</p>
<p>Franklin: You did work for a Hanford contractor.</p>
<p>Martin: Well! I don’t even count that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Martin: That was something I did to make some money.</p>
<p>Franklin: Certainly, though—</p>
<p>Martin: But we had an association now with the Hanford Site. I did projects that were related to problems at the Hanford Site. Some of the waste issues, some of the burial issues, yes. But I always want to correct people: I never worked, in my, let’s say, my real career.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Martin: So, how did I feel about working at the Hanford Site, the thing that was associated with the bomb?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Martin: You got to remember, I’m a scientist. That was one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever. Although, what it did to Japan was horrific. But yet, it’s the same science that creates nuclear power. So, it’s scientific discovery. I’m good with it.</p>
<p>I never had any—as far as waste disposal and its impact on the environment and all that, I understand a lot of that. I think a lot of it is overblown. There are contaminants; yes, yes. Some of them got in the river; yes, yes. But there’s actually more negative impact from fertilizers going into the Columbia than there was with radioactive material. Most of the problems out at Hanford, the waste problems, are pretty contained. There are certain amounts that are in the subsurface, granted, they’re there. But they’re there. Don’t be going out and drilling a well down there and pulling up water to drink. Wouldn’t be a good thing.</p>
<p>So, I have probably a slightly different perspective. But I’m very comfortable. Once again, because my background in science and I got to study a lot of those waste contaminants. As a matter of fact, my PhD was related to one of the components, carbon-14, and its transport mechanisms through the subsurface, explaining exactly how it happens, what happens. And I was able to prove that the general understanding was incorrect in how it is retained. So I have an association.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Martin: Wow, legacy. Most important legacy. Well, it helped end the war. Some people may not be—there’s a debate on whether we should’ve dropped the bomb or not. I’m not probably telling you anything haven’t already heard. But that is its legacy. It’s connected to the bomb.</p>
<p>Now, there are some scientific advances that are being made associated with the cleanup that have now been able to use in other cleanup activities that are related to Hanford and what was done there. Transport of materials above ground. This whole vitrification plant that’s going in. There was a vitrification plant, I think, in the UK, but this is going to be way bigger, much more complex. There is going to be science—there has been science that’s come out of it, from understanding what they had to do, and I think there’ll be further. So the first legacy is the bomb. The second is, what are the spinoff technologies that we’re going to see from what we study in the creation of the vitrification plant.</p>
<p>Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working near Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Martin: Say that again?</p>
<p>Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working near Hanford, or related to Hanford, and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Martin: Present and future generations, if you want to be involved from a scientific point of view in problems that are challenging, you come here. You come to the lab or you come to work at the Site, you are going to experience science challenges that you’re not going to find anywhere else. National labs, there’s more than just this one. Okay? So always, in part of my recruiting of individuals, was if you want to be involved in scientific discovery that is new, challenging, and transferrable, you come work at the lab. You want to take on a challenge that’s like nowhere else as far as waste disposal, you come to Hanford. Hanford has a lot of different aspects to that cleanup, from the mundane, people just driving trucks, moving dirt from here to there, burying it, to the people who have put together the vitrification plant and taken on the challenges of putting together a system never been done before. So that’s—if I put it in a nutshell, that’s what I’d put in it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Martin: The way I look at a lot of those issues, you just put them all together, I always say to folks, me as a black individual in America, I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t’ve had the opportunities I had, if it wasn’t for civil rights, if it wasn’t for affirmative action. For all those people who piss and moan about affirmative action, I would not have had—and I know it to this day—I would not have gotten the opportunity to go to school, gotten a job at PNNL. You might call me an affirmative action hire. I’ll be proud of that. Okay? So, I believe, as an individual, I ride on the shoulders of many.</p>
<p>I will tell you, this is kind of a story. I have an aunt, she’s passed away now. Auntie Anna. Auntie Anna was my mother’s favorite aunt. When I was struggling to decide whether I was going to go and get my PhD, because, seriously, I was like, why do I really want to go do this? I went down and sat with my aunt—she lived down in what they called the Jungle in LA, not a good part of town. We sat in her room, she smoked, and we’re sitting there talking, and I said, you know, Auntie Anna, I’m trying to decide if I’m going to do this. And she was pissed. [LAUGHTER] She goes, Wayne, I have known you for forever, and you know, me, your aunts and your uncles, we went through a lot of struggles. And they’re offering you this opportunity to go back and you’d be the only one in our family to get a PhD and you’re sitting here trying to decide whether you’re going to do it or not?! What is wrong with you? When you leave here, you go sign up right now. She made it apparent that I have opportunities because of her and others. I won’t forget that conversation. It is kind of part of why I went through and did it. She was one of them, besides Wiley.</p>
<p>So a lot of what is happening in America, for those that might hear me speaking or wherever, and for those that might even know me, I might not have shared some of these things with them. But without those things happening, I could’ve been born in New Roads, Louisiana and still be there under oppression. Because when I go back there, there is a lot of people who are not doing a whole lot, didn’t get a whole lot of opportunity. But for many of those, like my father, who left and went out and became in the service and we moved and I got to be exposed to different things. That’s who I’m made up of now. And without those, yeah, I have skills. But you know, there’s a lot of people have skills. They just may not have the opportunity to express them. A lot of the civil rights stuff is why I have the opportunity that I’ve had.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s very well said, Wayne. Thank you for coming to the interview with.</p>
<p>Martin: Hey, that was great!</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s been a wonderful interview.</p>
<p>Martin: Hopefully I said the right things or did the right things. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, no, you--<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/ww1Zsn1-Slk">View interview on Youtube. </a></p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
Westinghouse
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
324 Building
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1975-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Wayne Martin
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Segregation
Discrimination
Racism
Civil rights movements
Radioactive wastes
Radioactive waste disposal
Geochemistry
African American universities and colleges
Migration
Affirmative action
Poverty
Civil rights
Description
An account of the resource
Wayne Martin moved to Richland, Washington in 1975 and worked for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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04/05/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
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A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Aubrey Johnson
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Aubrey Johnson on April 9<sup>th</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Aubrey about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Aubrey Johnson: My full name is Aubrey, A-U-B-R-E-Y, Lee, L-E-E, Johnson, J-O-H-N-S-O-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. So, Aubrey, your parents came here, right? They brought you here as a small child?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yes, my parents moved here in 1946, April the 2<sup>nd</sup>.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where were your parents from?</p>
<p>Johnson: They were from Mississippi.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that where they moved here from?</p>
<p>Johnson: No, they moved from Mississippi to California, and then they went to Portland and worked in the shipyards. Just up at the end of the war they then moved here after they heard about the Hanford Project in order to gain employment. My mom, she worked at the cafeteria and my dad, he ended up working on the railroad.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Johnson: We lived in various places. I can remember my mom telling me that when we first got here, not having a place to live, we stayed in the kitchen of a pastor, Reverend Stewart’s house for a while. After they got employment and stuff, we moved into a trailer. And eventually, we bought a little small house, and we lived there for a few years. In 1948 they moved it down to the property they would live on now at 705 South Douglas.</p>
<p>It was a shotgun house. I once asked, well what is a shotgun house? It’s where you walk in the front door and you can look straight through and right out to the back door. There was no rooms to the side. In there, there was a bed on each side of the wall, there was a heater in the middle of the floor and there was an ice box. There was no running water, no bathroom or anything like that. I stayed there until ‘49 and I went to Mississippi to stay with my grandmother. And I stayed down there with here for a year and then I moved back here to Pasco. That’s when I started going to kindergarten and going to school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where were you born?</p>
<p>Johnson: I was born in Vancouver, Washington.</p>
<p>Franklin: Vancouver, Washington, okay. And were your parents living in Vanport, do you know?</p>
<p>Johnson: I think they were living in Vanport, because I know my mom talked about it all the time, Vanport, Bagley Downs, and I’m sure that was the area that they lived in, the Portland area.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned your dad working on the railroad. Was he a railroad man by trade or was he just kind of--</p>
<p>Johnson: He was a railroad man by choice.</p>
<p>Franklin: Railroad man by choice?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, any job that you could get, that’s what you took and you took whatever you could get first.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. What do you know about your parents’ lives before they came to work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Johnson: I really don’t know a whole lot about it, for me to see it because I was a baby, but my mom, she would tell me stories about her living in the South and the wages they had to work for. She’s like, son, I remember when I worked for ten cent an hour. I worked for twelve hours and made $1.20 for the whole day. But you could do a lot with $1.20.</p>
<p>She told me about when they were sharecropping and lived on the farms with her parents and stuff like that. There were 16 children in her family and so it was really hard for them having so many. It was basically farmers. You had to just try to scratch out a living the best way you could, especially when you don’t own your own place. It’s almost like you are an indentured slave. You’re in that situation.</p>
<p>One of the things that impacted me as a kid is that they never broke even. It was almost even, so they kept you there on the farm. So if you were trying to move or go somewhere else, it’s like you’re still owning. If you own somebody something then you can’t leave. And so that was the situation until when she got to be 16 years of age and then she got married and took off and left the South. My dad, he had told me he worked in restaurants and various places, and different type of work. They lived on a farm, also, in Mississippi. And you know, the struggles and stuff that he went through living there, and how hard it was. But the good part of it was that they lived in the country. So, the racist thing was there, but they wasn’t impacted with it like the people was in the city. That was a good thing.</p>
<p>I think my growing up, as a child, I wasn’t taught to be racist. So in our house it wasn’t talked about until I got to be about 14 or 15 years old and my mom she would tell us about the things that I just told you that happened to them, et cetera, et cetera. When I started going to school, there was only three kids in our classroom that were of color, and two of them were Oriental, and myself being black. We all played together, we laid on the floor and took naps together, et cetera. You find in kids, there is no racism until it’s taught to them, we all got along really well and so I didn’t see that. Living where we were living at, there were Caucasian people that lived on the next block up from us and over, which I went to school with and we all got along really well and it was a good thing.</p>
<p>I didn’t start seeing the race issue until I got in junior high school. One of the first things I saw is when they had a dance that we all attended. And it was probably about maybe eight or ten black kids that went to the dance, and the rest was Caucasian. And all the Caucasian kids stood over on one side of the wall; black kids stood on the other side of the wall. After dancing with the three or four girls that was there, I attempted to ask a Caucasian girl if she wanted to dance, and she said, no, not now. I said, okay. I turned around and walked back where the other kids was. When I turned around and looked, she was dancing with a young man of her own kind. And it’s just kind of like, well, why she didn’t want to dance with me? You try to reason out in your mind as a kid, well, maybe that’s her boyfriend. But it wasn’t her boyfriend because of who she was. I couldn’t understand why it was that way.</p>
<p>When I went home, I told my mom about it. And she said, well, you know she is probably forbidden by her parents. They don’t want us to intermingle because they are afraid that you boys are going to get interested in them, and this will result in interracial relationships, that’s the reason why it’s that way. I still couldn’t really understand it.</p>
<p>I had a friend, his name was Nolan Bench, I went over to his house one day to play. His dad came from Texas. We were in the house, and we were playing around, and his dad come home and he looked, and he looked at his wife and he looked at us and says, what do you got them kids in here for? We just looked at him, and his wife says, you leave those kids alone, let them play. When I went home I told my mom about it. And she said what did he say? I said, he said, what are those—the N-word—kids doing in here? And I told her, his wife said, you leave those kids alone, let them play. My mom told me, she said, don’t pay no attention to him, you go back over there and play. The next day, me and Nolan Bench, we were good friends, I went back over to his house. After a while his dad got so he’d come home and he wouldn’t say anything to us. We just kind of grew up together until actually after we got out of high school and he went in the military.</p>
<p>When he came back from the military, he told me his mom had passed. And he said, Aubrey do you want to go see my dad? And I said to myself, what on earth for? I said, well yeah. We went over and his dad was living right below the Blue Bridge in the trailer court that they had there. When we walked in his dad was sitting over in an easy chair. He had this big head, no hair on the top and just prickly hair sticking up on the side. He said, Dad, he say, you know who this is? His dad looked at me and says, no. He says, this is the little kid that used to come over to the house when we lived over in east Pasco. He stood there and looked at me for a minute. I guess he was trying to realize who I was. And then all of a sudden he stood up—which I thought was a giant of a man—but now, mind you, I’m six-three-and-a-half. I look at this guy and he’s only probably about five-nine, but he still had that big head. He says to me, he says, you know, I’m really sorry that I treated you kids the way that I did. That just really warmed my heart.</p>
<p>Found out that he had cancer and shortly thereafter he passed. And at some point he realized how he had impacted his kids’ lives, and our lives by being the way that he was. So he was just, I figured, trying to reconcile in his mind, wow, I did a bad thing. Because at some point, we got to realize the things that we do and be accountable for them. As we get older, we can look back on hindsight and see what we should’ve did different, and I think that was the kind of thing that he had there.</p>
<p>There were a few other incidences with a friend of mine as far as racism. North Beech in east Pasco, Caucasian people lived up there and I heard that there was a covenant for them not sell to any black people. Wehe Street was a street that ran north and south, and you could go North Wehe and go all the way through to the Dietrich’s city dump disposal. Anyway, my friend Mickey Donnell asked me, hey, Aubrey, do you want to go over to my house and play? I have a swing set. Well, I had never seen a metal swing set in somebody’s yard. We had like a wood swing set, and he had like the metal ones at school. I said yeah. We walked up Wehe Street and then we walked across the field and went in his back gate. We were there playing probably for 45 minutes or so and he heard his parents coming home because when they closed the gate, it was one of those metal gates, and clank! He says, Aubrey, you got to go! I looked at him and he says, run! I went out the back gate and I ran over to Wehe Street and then I walked on home.</p>
<p>So the next day that I went to school, I asked him, well, what happened? He said my parents were coming home and you wasn’t supposed to be over there. I said, well, why did I have to run? He said if you made it all the way over to Wehe Street without them seeing you, then they wouldn’t know if you had been over there or where you had been. I’m like, wow, that’s odd, that we played at school every day. But then that kind of showed me the racism that was there with his parents and stuff. Because now I’m beginning to be aware of the racial issue at this time, because this is like ’57 or ‘58 as we are getting older. It was just a bad thing to try to live through.</p>
<p>I’m going to fast forward. I’ve been out of school 55 years. And this will be my 55<sup>th</sup> year class reunion. I’ve never gone to any. I was talking with a friend of mine through Facebook and I told them, well, do you know I’m going to go to my first class reunion this year? I told them, you know the reason why I never came? He said, why? I said, because when I was going to school, because I wasn’t a jock, I didn’t have that many friends, I said, kids never really socialized with me that much. I said, so if they didn’t socialize with me then, why do I want to go and look at them now?</p>
<p>I just thought within myself, is that you can’t hold yourself back with grudges and all the rest of that stuff, or thinking how it was then. You got to look forward to how it is now. I said, I’m just going to go and take a good look at all of them and see what they look like. And there were a few that I was good friends with. And I’m hoping that they’ll be there and haven’t passed on.</p>
<p>There was this one guy that I was really looking forward to seeing, and he died here about three weeks ago. Dave Balfour. And he and I were real good friends as we grew up. His dad worked at, and he did also, at Pasco Clothing when it was in Pasco. But I just want to just see what they look like and stuff.</p>
<p>So I had talked to this one guy and he said, man, last time I went to a class reunion it was like going to an old folks’ home. I’m like, really? He said, everybody is broke down and really bad. It just kind of amazed me, because look at me, I’m 73 years old and I’m still holding on pretty good. People are like, you don’t look like you’re 73. Well, I’m not trying to look like I’m 73. You try to be the best that you are, at what you do, and you try to look as good as you possibly can while you’re doing it. It really makes a big difference.</p>
<p>Franklin: It does, yeah. You’re the same age as my dad and he’s—sorry, Dad—he’s in rough shape. Because he didn’t take care of himself. Yeah, it does, the way you take care of yourself plays a big role.</p>
<p>Johnson: Exactly. It’s like my father-in-law told me about forty years ago, or longer than that because I was 22 years old. He told me, he says, I want to tell you something. I said, what’s that? He said, don’t stay up all night every night. He said, if you take care of yourself when you’re young, yourself will take care of you when you’re old. And with him saying that, I stopped going out, staying out all night long. Because as a youngster, that’s what I did; 19, 20 years of age, like 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, you come home and then have to get up at 7:00 and go to work. And go to work all day and you’re half dead. Those were words of wisdom that I just grasped. I said, well, I know how to do that. I’ll go out on Thursday night, on Friday night, I’ll go out my wife and I, and on Saturday, and on Sunday I’ll go to bed so I can get a rested up for Monday to go to work. With that, I think it made a big impact on my health. As I begin to get older, I didn’t have all the aches and illness a lot of my friends did and stuff, because when I look at a lot of them, they—bad shape. I’m not trying to brag, anything like that; I’m just blessed to be able to be still holding on.</p>
<p>Franklin: That some good advice. Good to heed it when you’re young enough to actually make good use of it, too, that’s pretty smart. What part of Mississippi where your parents from?</p>
<p>Johnson: My dad, they came from right outside of Jackson, Mississippi—Florence. And my mom, she came from Lyons, Mississippi, L-Y-O-N-S. And they lived on Mr. Pillar’s Plantation. See, I don’t know what his first name was; his first name was always Mr. Pillar. You know what I’m saying? My dad’s parents, Willy Johnson and Charlotte, they had their own farm and stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did they sharecropping or did they have their own?</p>
<p>Johnson: No, they had their own farm. They may have had sharecropped before, but they had their own farm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your parents were pretty young when they left Mississippi?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh yeah. Yeah, like I said, at like sixteen years old, momma like, hey, I’m getting up out of here.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the pull factor? You said they went to California and then Oregon/Washington, what brought them out there? And how did they find out about the opportunity?</p>
<p>Johnson: Okay, well, it was a better way of life. I’m sure that they had heard on the radio about the work and stuff that was going on out in Arizona and California. And so you want adventure, you want to get away from the -ism from the old way that it is and go out and see what’s new. Whether you can make it or not, you feel that you can. As you move, and I’m sure that they didn’t just make one stop; they made a lot of stops along the way and they probably worked a little bit over here and made some money so you could move forward to the next place, and the next place. I heard a lot of my mom saying, well, yeah, we worked in Arizona there for a while and then we went to here, we went to there.</p>
<p>I remember her mostly mentioning working in California at the shipyards, working at the shipyards and she says, well, I was a scaler, I didn’t know what a scaler was, but what you’re doing is you’re taking a chipping hammer and you’re knocking the slag off of the welding and stuff. My dad, he was a welder in the shipyards. So she said, yeah, you’d go down in those tanks, but you go down in the bottom of the ship where they are doing all the welding and stuff at, and you work for long hours down there. You come out and get a breath of fresh air and then you go back down.</p>
<p>When they ended hearing about—the shipyard, after it closed, I think it was during the period that they had that explosion, because I know she was saying that they were living in California, I forget what they—it was right there out of Antioch, California, Vallejo area, and it was a shipyard or ammunition dump and it blew up. Port Chicago, that’s what it was. Then they moved to Vancouver, Bagley Downs or somewhere in that area and worked for a few years. When the war was over, everybody was hearing about this Hanford Project and they were building the mechanism for the bomb, and hey—well, it was just before the war was over—let’s go out there. In ‘46, I guess that was right at the end of the war, that’s where they came to, was out here at the Hanford Area. Then, like I said, moved to Pasco and working in the cafeteria and my dad, he went to work on the railroad and that’s where he worked at for a while.</p>
<p>You’re kind of a jack-of-all-trades. You just have to have a confidence level and say, I can do it if anybody else can. Such as myself, I’m a welder by trade, I drove truck, I drove a motor grader for years, I’m a cosmetologist, I had a restaurant, Aubrey’s Barbeque in Pasco, I was a furniture mover when I was down in California, I’ve been a laborer, I’ve been an inspector on a rock gravel equivalent and condensate tests and stuff. I’ve been well-rounded in doing a whole lot of different things. Whenever a person—hey, can you do this? Even if I couldn’t do it, I said yeah. Because they’re going to give you some instructions or they going to show you the way they want you to do it. It gave me the opportunity to get in there.</p>
<p>So I’m sure my parents did the same thing. Hey, can you do this? Yeah! Well, come on over here, let me show you how to do it. And then they show you what to do and that’s the way you do it. Because everybody want you to do it their way. If you were a dressmaker and you went to work for a seamstress and they say, can you make this? Well, sure I can. Well, this is the way I want you to do it. They’re going to show you how to set up the mannequin and they want you to do it just like they do it. Even though the results would come out the same, they want you to do it their way.</p>
<p>Franklin: That is pretty confident. What kind of education did your parents go through? Do you know the highest grade they achieved?</p>
<p>Johnson: Mom, she had a third grade education.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. What happened after third grade? Sharecropping?</p>
<p>Johnson: Well, that’s what she was doing. Mom told me, she said—I didn’t ask the question at the time because I didn’t know the question to ask—how old she was when she completed the third grade? Okay? She wasn’t eight years old; she probably was twelve or thirteen, or fourteen maybe when she completed the third grade. Because I remember her telling me that she was one of the oldest kids of the family and she had to help take care of her brothers and sisters and stuff. She says, when I went to school, she say, I had to catch a turn row, and I’m like, well, what is a turn row? She say, when you came home from school, you had to work all the way down that row picking cotton, or hoeing or whatever you was doing. When you get to the end, you turn around and you work your way all the way up to the road, then you go home. She said we only went to school for like maybe two or three months of the year, because during the spring and the summer time and stuff we had to hoe the fields, cultivate the fields, pick the crops, and there wasn’t much time left for school. Because you were trying to make it so that you had a living. And having a big family, it made it a lot easier, but then there was more mouths to feed and stuff.</p>
<p>She said, well, you know, son, when the Depression came, we never really knew it was a depression. Because we had food to eat. We didn’t have no money, but we had food. I’m like, wow, that’s really amazing because the people that lived in the city, they couldn’t grow food in concrete so they had to wait for some kind of assistance, for a kitchen or something. You see pictures of them standing around burning barrels and stuff and everybody trying to figure out where are they going to get their next meal.</p>
<p>But in the South, they had food and little or nothing of anything else. She said, well, we made cotton sack dresses. I’m like, well, what’s a cotton sack dress? The sack that they got they seed in, they would take it and cut it up and make dresses out of it. It was the ingenuity that they had with no education to be able to make stuff.</p>
<p>And like mom said, she worked in a dry cleaners for a long time, and she say it was like a sweat shop. It would be so hot in there, no air conditioning or anything like that. You was in there washing clothes, you had to do a steam press, ironing clothes all day long. She said, I would be so tired that I work sometimes twelve hours a day, and I would be so tired at the end of the day until I couldn’t go to sleep. I’m like, that’s pretty doggone tired, to where you’re so tired you can’t go to sleep. And I’m like, wow.</p>
<p>My dad, I didn’t really get to know him that well, because him and my mom didn’t stay together and he left at an early age. So I didn’t get a chance to reunion with him until in the ‘70s and I got a chance to—so my whole childhood, basically kind of missed being with him. And then as he got older, there wasn’t much conversation about the way that it was; it was about the here and the now and moving forward because we had to try to live as quickly as we could, and try to have camaraderie before he passed. He lived in Michigan and I lived out here. He had a pacemaker—I don’t know if they were excuses or what, he’s married again to another lady and stuff. Everybody is running interference, because they’re afraid that you trying to get something. They want to keep all their time. It’s just like, if you have a children by your first wife and you have a children by your second wife, your second wife really don’t want you interacting with your children from the first marriage, because you take away from this. So that was kind of the feeling I got from that as a young man and I look at it. He said, well, son, let me explain to you, see what happened. I’m like, you know what? Let’s not worry about the past; let’s just move on. So I didn’t really get a chance to learn any history about him, or how it was, or how his experience was.</p>
<p>I stayed with his mom and dad a little over a year, we were little kids out in the country. I can remember telling my friends, yeah, I remember we didn’t have no car. We had to go to town and when we went to town we went to Jackson, Mississippi a couple times we were in a horse and a wagon. He says, aw, you weren’t in a horse and wagon! You’re not that old! I’m like, yeah, I may not be that old, but I’m telling you we didn’t have no car, that’s all we had, was a horse and a wagon. It looked like it took forever to get to where you was going. My sister and I, we would hop off the wagon and we would play and run along the road, the horse was walking so slow. Then we’d hop back up in the wagon. We went to church, horse and a wagon, we went to the store, horse and a wagon. And talking with my cousins, they tell me that the same store is still there that we went to back in—when we were little kids, in the early ‘50s. I said that’s amazing, and the same old church, they kind of renovated it a little bit, but it’s the same old church, right across the street from the cemetery. And I don’t know what the name of that corner is, but--</p>
<p>I was being told, like, my uncle he was 102 years old; he died two years ago. And my dad, he was 89 when he passed. And the year before he died, our conversation was, I sure hope I live to be old as you is when I die. And he looked at me and said, I’m not dead yet. I said, that’s what I’m saying. If you lived to be 100, I hope to live to 101. I didn’t know that my dad had cancer. And he died the next year. I didn’t know he had died of cancer until the year after he was dead.</p>
<p>I went back to Michigan to visit with my stepmom and she asked me if I wanted to go to the hospice house where he had been. I’m like, hospice house?, in my mind. We went and it was a new establishment and I met the people that was there and his nurses, et cetera, et cetera. Once we got home, then I said I didn’t know dad was at the hospice. She said, oh yeah, she said when you came out here, they had moved him from the hospice house home. So he was basically at home so that he could die. I was talking to him on the phone the week before he died, and he dropped the phone and I heard the silence and I asked my stepmom, I’m like, Mom, is Dad all right? She said, aw, your daddy done sit here and he dropped the phone. I say, is he okay? She said, well, I believe they’ve been running some tests on him and stuff, but they haven’t said what was wrong with him, blah, blah, blah. But she wasn’t telling me the truth. I said, maybe I should come up there and see him. And she says, if anything happens to him, I’ll let you know. I said, I don’t want to see him when he’s dead; I want to see him when his alive. And the same week I got there on a plane and I got there on a Monday and I stayed until Thursday. And I came back home, and I told her before I left—because when I got there, I could see that he was in bad shape. I said, if he dies anytime soon, I’m not coming back up here. And he died that Saturday, two days later. I’m like—kind of blew me away and she kind of got an attitude. Well you coming? I said, I told you I wasn’t coming back up there.</p>
<p>This is my thing. My memory of my dad, seeing him sitting on the living room with his silk pajamas on, with his legs crossed, I don’t see him dead. I see him alive. And in my mind, that’s the memory you have as your last memory, and that’s my last memory of him. And I can see him right now. When she said, could you help me take your dad to the bathroom? And I got up and I helped walk him to the bathroom and she could took him in there so he could do whatever he do, and then he came out and said your daddy want to go lay down because he’s tired. And that’s when I knew the condition that he was in, but I didn’t know that he had cancer. Until the next year. That’s neither here nor there. Just—knowing about my dad and trying to give you a sense of not really knowing him.</p>
<p>My mom, she remarried and I was raised basically by her husband for a while, and when they separated, it was just me and her and my sister. We just made it the best that we could as kids. I didn’t get a chance to go and do stuff like other kids so much, because my mom, her thing was, because of lack of education, was work. Son, you got to go to work, son, nothing comes to a sleeping man but a dream, get up and go to work. I wanted to go and play. So my work was come home, we had chickens and ducks and stuff, you come home and you feed them chickens and them ducks and you give them some water and then you go out there and water that garden. You go out there and hoe them weeds off of the yard and we had a pretty good-sized place. For me it wasn’t go play, it was go work. That is what she instilled in me, is work. Now, my sister was completely different. Oh, sister, she’s so smart and it was like, education for her and she ended up going to college. But for me it was just like a struggle. When I came home from school, I’m like, Mom, look! I got a C on my paper! And she’d look and say, aw, son, I don’t have time to look at it right now. Just lay it over there. I’ll see it later.</p>
<p>It made a real big difference, because my mindset was that she really don’t care. If you don’t have that positive encouragement, it doesn’t push you to be better than what you are, you know what I’m saying? It was like, as I grew up, I thought that I didn’t have the ability to really learn, so I was very manual. Just show me how to do it and I can do it. But the thinking part of it—I didn’t think that I could think the process all the process through. I didn’t realize that I was as smart as I was until I went to school to become a cosmetologist. You got to understand and learn “hyponichium,” how to spell it, the definition, [UNKNOWN], et cetera. My friend told me, you got to burn a lot of midnight oil, you got to do a lot of reading. Now, it’s really hard to read a word that you don’t even know how to pronounce it. I was, I think, 43 years old when I went to cosmetology school. I would ask so many questions until the instructor told me, Aubrey, just write them down on a piece of paper and then I’ll answer them. Because you’re holding up the class. I was as old as my instructors and for me it was like, wait a minute. I paid $3,000-something to go to school and it was through a rehabilitation class where I got my back hurt. I’m coming down here to learn. I’m not gay, I’m not a woman, so it’s going to be harder for me to get the concept, because I don’t see it in my eyes the way that a woman sees doing another woman’s hair. So it would be just like, me doing like, oh, yeah, well, I see it’s just like this. You know? I don’t see that in my mind. So you got to draw a picture, or if I see a picture then I can emulate what I see. But you know what? I didn’t let that hold me back. Man, I would stay up and read and read. I got some little tapes that one of my instructors gave me and he says, take this home and put your headset on and listen to them. I’d put them on and go to sleep with them on. The next morning it would be as clear as a bell. I graduated with a 97-point-something average when I got out of beauty school. And then I started my own business. I was able to do that, it was the hands on and being very manual, gave me the opportunity to learn it.</p>
<p>[off-camera voice]: Are you guys doing an interview?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yup.</p>
<p>[PHONE RING TONE]</p>
<p>Franklin: Man, interruption city.</p>
<p>Johnson: It is what it is. My phone over there doing its thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, it’s fine. Yeah, usually people know if the door is closed—</p>
<p>Johnson: No big deal, because you’re going to edit it anyway. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: All right. When you went back to Mississippi, I kind of want to—how was Mississippi different from Pasco when you went there? What was remarkable to you?</p>
<p>Johnson: For me, going there, because I was so young when I went back, is that I was free. That’s how I felt when I went there, because we was out on the farm. It’s like, I didn’t see Caucasian people; I just see our family and our family friends would come over. It was just like, the first time that I saw a truck, to know that it was a truck, it was a guy sitting up on the hood of it, and he had two horses hitched to it and he was pulling it down the road. I’m used to seeing a wagon. So when I look and I saw that truck being pulled like that, I’m thinking wow, that’s amazing. I’m four years old and to me, it’s like, is that the way it’s supposed to be? When I started seeing cars, the only cars that I’d seen down there in the country—because we lived way back off the road—was the mailman would come down and put mail in the mailbox and then they would leave. But people rode horses. I just didn’t see it, being there, it was freedom and we was out on the farm, and we were kids and the only thing that we had to do was harvest eggs and just play.</p>
<p>Out here, I had ate some pills and stuff and I had gotten poisoned kidneys. And I was in the hospital up at Our Lady of Lourdes. I can remember this just like it was yesterday. They had me and this Caucasian kid in the same room and my bed was on the same side of the wall, but it was first when you walked in the room, his was behind mine. He had a little whistle that was a motorcycle policeman and when you blew it, it had little balls in it and they would spin around the wheels. So I walked to the edge of my bed and he was over there blowing the whistle and I stuck my hand over and he gave it to me and I blew it.</p>
<p>Now, imagine this, I’m three years old—people say, oh, you can’t remember back then, but I can remember this as well as I’m looking at you sitting over there across that room. When his mother came, she demanded that they move me or move him out of the room. Because she didn’t want him in the room with me because I was black, I’m sure. And that whistle that I was blowing, she snatched it out of my hand and grabbed her kid up and then that’s when she made her demands and stuff. That was my first part at racism. After I got to be in my upper teens to look back and see how it was, that’s the reason I make the statement of, man, I was free. Because I was free from—just that one incident that I can remember even there may had been some more.</p>
<p>When we would go to the store, my mom would tell us before we went, don’t put your hands on nothing. Don’t touch nothing when you got to the store. When we went to the store, we was forbidden to touch or do anything. We were just there with her and that was it. Like she had told me, she said when they went to the store, when she lived in the South and say she wanted to buy a dress. You couldn’t put it on and try it on. You just had to know your size. And if you took it home, it was yours, because no one wanted to try a dress that you had put on. Nobody knew you had put it on except for the store proprietor. But that was one of the conditions that they had. So it was just little things like that, after I got of age made me aware of how it was, their living in the South and how prejudice started to become—like I said, I wasn’t taught to be, but then I heard about it and it just really didn’t stick in my mind until up in the ‘60s. When the ‘60s came, then I was really aware, because I had started really paying attention, I had heard about Emmett Till getting killed down in the South and different stuff.</p>
<p>When my grandad died, my dad called up and he said, well, Papa died. I want you to come down here and go to the funeral. My mom took me and she said, son, do not go down there to Mississippi. I said why? She said because I’m telling you, them people will kill you. Because firstly, they know you’re not from down there. And you are not going to be saying yes, sir and no, sir, and all of that, she said, so don’t go. I didn’t go. I just heeded what she was saying. Because Papa died in ‘69 and the revolution, basically, what you want to say, of racism and trying to go to school, get education, the Jim Crow, sitting at the back of the bus, the freedom marches and all of that. They was killing black people like you wouldn’t believe. And a lot of it you didn’t really hear it on the TV, the bad side of it. Every now and then they would show you people strung up and stuff like that. She wanted to make sure that I wasn’t one of the ones that was in that situation. Without making a sound too horrific. She never said, you have to hate white people because of what they doing to us and blah, blah, blah. My sister told me, you got to love them to death. And if you love them long enough—the same thing that Martin Luther King preached—pretty soon we will get over it, and be able to live as one person, instead of being so divided such as we are.</p>
<p>I hate to say it, but I’m going to say this—in my mind, the only reason that racism is so alive, is because the Caucasian people are afraid that we are going to do them the way that they did us. And you can hear them, I watched a segment on TV a few weeks ago and this guy was saying that, well, black people are inferior, and the Oriental, they’re first, and we’re second. Our numbers are getting so small until they’re going to take over, and we are the superior race. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all this superiority stuff that they trying to beat into your head because they are afraid. And there is no reason to really be afraid. Because the first thing, black people are god-fearing people, and they love God, you see, because it would be hard for me to do something to you, unnecessarily, unless you were trying to do something to me. Because I’m afraid of what God is going to do to me. You know, that’s just like going to the church and stealing. I’m not going to do that.</p>
<p>That racist thing is getting worse by the day. And it’s like they’re reliving the past, all these guns, and shooting people, and police brutality, et cetera. Those were the things that was happening back then. And now here it is the reoccurrence of the same old thing, and it’s almost like it’s okay to go out and be brutal when you see they shot a guy 17 times, well, why didn’t you just shoot him in the leg? Well, we got to neutralize, is the word, we got to neutralize. If we neutralize it, we just kill it, and we done with it. You know what, if you kill it the person won’t have a chance to view his opinion. Well, he had a cellphone in his hand. Well, I thought it was a gun. But he’s dead. It’s so that it’s okay, and people allow it, so it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And you’re just like, what is it going to come to?</p>
<p>It’s the bad side of life that you wouldn’t want everybody to pick up a gun and start shooting and killing each other. That wouldn’t make sense. But, see, to me, out of fear, the people that’s in power will create a war in order to remain in power. And we see that happening with China, Russia, the ones that they empower, they impose they will up on other people. And they will start a war in order to maintain that power. It’s kind of the sort of thing that we’re doing here in the United States, is trying to maintain the power by advocating all this racist stuff that they got going on right now. We need to get out of that and just learn that we all need each other to be able to live together in peace and harmony. That’s the way it was designed for us to do. It wasn’t designed for all of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Out in the country in Mississippi, do you remember, was it pretty segregated out there or was it mostly black folks that lived out in the country where you were?</p>
<p>Johnson: It was mostly all black people that lived out there where we were. There was one Caucasian family that lived down by where our mailbox was, but I hardly ever seen them. Like I said, we were quite a ways from the road and stuff. But it was mostly black people. Now, when you went to Jackson, where my aunt and stuff lived, that’s where the segregation was. Because now you in the city, and the city is where the Caucasian people lived.</p>
<p>It’s just kind of like, say, east Pasco: it’s a rural area. So at one time, it’s where all the black people lived, over on the east side. And all the Caucasian people lived on the west side. If you didn’t have a reason to be over there, there was no reason for you to go over there. We lived in the country and the only time that we went to the city was to go and visit my aunt and her family and then we in turn left and went back to the country. So I didn’t get a chance to really see that racist thing. I was just a little kid, so I didn’t see it there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, I was just trying to build a comparison, I guess.</p>
<p>Johnson: I understand.</p>
<p>Franklin: I want to ask you about the life in the Tri-Cities. How would you describe life in east Pasco growing up?</p>
<p>Johnson: We was a village; we were a family. That was a highlight of my life, living in east Pasco until the ‘70s when it was Urban Renewal came in and removed, replaced. I mean, everything to me was east Pasco. At one time, there was four groceries stores in east Pasco. There was a dry cleaners and there was Kitty’s Grocery Store, the East Side Market, there was the Tin Top and there was JD’s. There was two night clubs, there was Norse’s and King Fish separate club. I think there were probably about eight cafés: it was Squeeze-in Diner, Bobby’s And Rays, Haney’s Café, Big Mikes, there was a café at the tavern, there was Belgian’s Pool Hall, there was Avery’s Café, there was a little record shop. It was like everything, basically, that we needed was in east Pasco, other than—we went uptown to buy clothes and stuff like that.</p>
<p>For east Pasco it was just like a family. My mom would say, son, you be at home before the sun go down. I mean, be in this yard. And she could yell and I could hear her for like three or four blocks away, and then I would head home. All my friends and stuff that I basically went to school with, all of us black kids—because they were doing busing—once we got off the bus, we all walked home together, we played together, we threw rocks, we rolled tires.</p>
<p>It was a lot of fun growing up out there, I hated to see it when Urban Renewal came. Because what it did, it removed the black people from the little shacks, they call them, the little homes they had to the projects. And then we lost everything that we had, because all of that was gone. It was just kind of a bad situation. It was supposed to be in the name of interests, the self-help co-op. Art Fletcher, I think, was the guy that came there that just pushed that over on us.</p>
<p>We had no representation. When they got ready to open that corridor to Big Pasco, they wanted to grab A Street—not A Street, Oregon Street. That’s a throughway from the freeway all the way to the river. Well, black people owned all that property from the railroad over. When I was growing up, we always heard that railroad property is worth no money, okay? So when this redevelopment come in, it wasn’t redevelopment; it was was reclaim. They came in and the city—you had to sell it. They gave you nothing for it.</p>
<p>I was talking to this lady the other day, her mom owned a block of land. I asked, how much did your mom get for that block of land? She said $18,000. There were no representation, so whatever the city said this is what you get, this is what you take. There was no negotiation. That broke down our whole community, because from Main, Front Street all the way over to Elm Street was all black people lived all through there. When they took half of it away up to Wehe Street and made an industrial area, you couldn’t go down and buy any that property six months after they bought it for the same price that they bought it for. The price had escalated so much.</p>
<p>It was just a travesty, because it was basically, probably a couple thousand people that lived there and they built a housing project. And I can remember there was only two families that lived there that wasn’t black. There was one Hispanic family and one Caucasian family. I don’t know what the capacity was, but the whole Arbor Elm Project was filled with black people. What happened is that the few dollars that they gave you, you ended up moving somewhere else if you didn’t move in a project, out of state, out of town. And slowly our little community just broke down to where it was nothing.</p>
<p>Now when I look at it and you say, well, what’s over there on the east side? Nothing. There’s no restaurants, there’s no pool hall, there’s no taverns to go to—even though I don’t go to taverns anymore. But there’s just nothing, everything was broke down.</p>
<p>But as a kid growing up, they can feel—we’d go over there and play baseball me and our friends and stuff, we could go to each other’s house and eat. It was like you was everybody’s kid, because everybody knew each other. If I went over to Sonny Boy’s or Leroy Milton’s and he was out there raking leaves, his mom would say, Aubrey, you go get a rake and you go out there and help him rake them leaves up. Or, you kids come in here and eat. That type of thing. It was just really a lot of camaraderie and playing and just having a lot of fun as kids and stuff.</p>
<p>We would go over to the railroad and shoot pigeons when I was a kid and stuff. That was one of the things that the boys did, we raised pigeons, bring them home, kind of doctored them up and stuff, the ones that we didn’t kill. The ones we killed, we’d come home pick them, clean them, and eat them. People would say, you’re eating a pigeon? Well, that pigeon was pretty good.</p>
<p>It was a lot of playful times and I had a good time living in east Pasco. I wouldn’t change nothing. And just thinking of it, I moved from Pasco and I went to California seeking a better life. Man, I’m thinking about all these things that I’m going to do and talking all about how great California is, and I moved to Los Angeles and I lived down there in the rat race. I moved from Los Angeles up to Vallejo, California and I stayed there for a while. But let me tell you something. I couldn’t wait to get back to Pasco. And when I came back, like I said, I got two houses. I didn’t live on the west side; I moved back over on the east side. And I’ve had the opportunity, countless times, people like, hey, you want to sell your property? They send you stuff in the mail telling you about how much your property is worth and we’ll buy it, so and so want to buy your property.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re talking about the property in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Johnson: Property in east Pasco. I get that all the time, right now. I’m not going to sell that property. That’s kind of like my heritage. My mom gave it to me, I’m going to pass it on to my daughter and I’m going to try to her, don’t sell it, keep it, because this is part of your heritage. And I tell her the stories about when I was a kid being raised up, so that she can pass them on to her kids. Because that’s her history, my history. I didn’t get my history, because I was out of a divided family. My mom worked two jobs and so she had very little time to spend with sitting down, talking to you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did your mom work?</p>
<p>Johnson: She worked out here at the cafeteria at the Hanford Area when she first came here. Other than that she worked at the Hanford House, she worked there for years as a dishwasher. She worked at Top Hat as a dishwasher.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where’s the Top Hat?</p>
<p>Johnson: It was in Pasco, across the street from the old post office, was the Top Hat Restaurant, that was the name of it. She worked there for years. She worked cleaning house, doing day work for different people. And pretty much as a kid, that’s what she did. She’d get up in the morning and get us fed and we had to walk to the bus and go to school, she got in the car, she drove, she went and did her day job cleaning house, she left that job and went to the other job. She washed dishes and she would always have a night job, and she’d get home at sometime 12:00, 1:00 in the morning. When I got in high school a lot of times I would go out and help her when she worked at the Hanford House, up here. I can’t think of the name that it was called before then, it’ll probably come to me later, but it was some other establishment that it was called, she worked there.</p>
<p>Franklin: The Desert Inn?</p>
<p>Johnson: Desert Inn, that was it.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wasn’t sure as to when that stopped being—we have old photos of it in the ‘50s, like mid-‘50s, and it’s still the Desert Inn. It’s that transient quarters. It looks kind of like an L or like V.</p>
<p>Johnson: Right. They added on to it now and upgraded it and made it look good, but it was the old Desert Inn, that was it. I could remember in high school, I would go there and she would call me like, son, I need you to come out here and help me. Because they would have a banquet and they would get dishes from it says Chinook Hotel, wherever that was from, towards Seattle, anyway. And they would have barrels of them, and she would have to run them through that manual washer. And what she would do is I would scrape them and put them on the racks and she would take two hot towels, and she would catch them when they were coming out. Then we would take them and put them in the barrels. And then all them pots—because at nighttime she had to have everything washed for the morning. I’d go out there, I didn’t get paid for it, but sometimes we’d be there ‘til 2:00, 3:00 in the morning washing dishes and washing pots, and I had to come home and go to school.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was a dishwasher in a steakhouse for about a year and, yeah, it was rough. Washing dishes is rough. It was rough, rough work.</p>
<p>Johnson: I know. People that never did it don’t realize how much work it is, you know what I’m saying?</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re really one of the most important people in the whole place. No one wants to—you can’t eat on dirty dishes, can’t cook in dirty pots, but yeah, you’re also the bottom of the totem pole.</p>
<p>Johnson: That’s right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that’s always the way it is with those kind of jobs. You’d mentioned earlier that you worked a lot in your spare time, right? You tried to play, but you worked a lot?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, I worked a lot.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Do you remember any particular community events growing up in east Pasco? The reasons the community would come together?</p>
<p>Johnson: Bible school. Bible school, that was one of the big things that we looked forward to in the summer time, as an event for us all to come together. The baseball games we would do, the school would have what we called wingdings and they would--</p>
<p>Franklin: I’ve heard of that before.</p>
<p>Johnson: Wingdings? Yeah, it would just be like a little school carnival that they would have within the school, and they’d have a sheet up. And then they’d have the thing called Fish and you’d have a little pole, you’d stick it over and they had a clothespin on it and stick something to it. They would have cakewalks, where you’d walking around in a circle and they had musical chairs, basically what it was. It was always that coconut covered cake over there that I wanted, and so I tried to position myself so that I would be the last one to sit down in the chair so I could be the one to pick that cake. It never worked out though. Other than that, it was really no events that I could really think of. Bible school was probably the biggest one. Because back then most of the kids went to church.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I was going to ask you if you attended church.</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Which church did you attended?</p>
<p>Johnson: I attended Morning Star Baptist Church. I was baptized in 1956.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did the church play in the community? In the African American communities in general.</p>
<p>Johnson: Church was the cornerstone of the community. Basically, everybody pretty much went to one of the churches that was there. And for us kids, it kept us out of the streets, because that’s what we did: we went to church. We would have Junior Mission one night, choir rehearsal one night, we’d have Bible study one night. Then on the first Sunday, we would go out of town or we would go to different churches and stuff, if we were in the choir and sing, it was like an all-day event. You’d get up in the morning and go to Sunday school, you go back home and eat, church starts at 11:00, you do church, you get out of that at 1:00, and a lot of times they would have a visiting church that would come and we’d go back to church at 3:00. It was like an all-day deal, for going to church. But it was a lot of fun for us kids because it gave us the chance to be together. When we would go to Bible study they’d have you looking up scriptures and stuff in the Bible. And then the one that got the most they would put a star. They had this big thing and they would put a star for achievement. So it kept you interested in doing that kind of thing.</p>
<p>The preachers of the community and stuff, it is like, they were responsible for the flock. Just like, you got in trouble, say, with the police or something wasn’t going on right, the church always had your back. They’d go down and, hey, what’s going on, or what’s happening here? We need to be able to attend to the situation. Is this person being treated correctly? The church was just like the pillar of the community and it was always the backbone for the black people.</p>
<p>Like I said, we lived in a house with Reverend Stewart which was the Pastor of Morning Start Baptist Church. It started in 1945, and we lived with him in ‘46. Like I tell them, I know if my mom lived in the house with a preacher, we had to go to church. [LAUGHTER] You know what I’m saying? So I look at it, when I go to church right now, even though there’s a few people that’s older than I am, like in their 90s and stuff, they haven’t been here all their lives. And I’m probably one of the oldest members of that church, Morning Star Baptist Church, because we lived with the preacher, so I know I was going to church when I was just a baby and as a kid, and got baptized in ‘56, and been going there ever since. And still go.</p>
<p>Franklin: What other churches were important to the black community?</p>
<p>Johnson: Well, they had the Saint James Methodist Church. And the thing was that we all kind of visited each church. Because whether you were Methodist or whether you was Baptist, it was still kids that played together, and all the churches came together. So if there was any type of a movement or anything, it was just like everybody was together. It wasn’t so much segregation. Like right now, they have Morning Star Baptist Church, they got New Hope, they got Greater Faith. Now, we got three Baptist Churches and you got just enough people would fill up one. See? But it’s all divided. And then there’s Ephesus Seven Day Adventist Church, there’s Saint James Methodist Church and then they had another church that was over on the east side, I don’t think it’s black anymore, I think it’s—Hispanic took it over.</p>
<p>But anyway, back then it was Saint James Methodist Church and it was Morning Star in the early ‘50s and then later on they built New Hope and then later on they built Greater Faith. But we were all kind of like together. It wasn’t the separatism like they have now with the churches. One church feels like they’re better than the other church or the members don’t want to go and participate in the other church. I kind of hate to see that because I discuss that a lot, one church got a real good choir, okay, and so when they have an event, a lot of people got to their church and enjoy their music, so forth and so on, their program. The other church over there have a program, the people from that church don’t participate. It would be better if all three churches at least one Sunday out of the month could come together and be just one church.</p>
<p>It’s like the bureaucracy go, everybody worried about their dollar. If you can get the money thing out of your mind, and say each Sunday we will all meet at one different church and all the collection that we take in will go to that church. And then the next time we’ll go to that church, and the next time it’ll go to that one. Because everyone wants to have it. Just like living here in the Tri-Cities, why do we need to have three city governments? Because each one wants to be able to get their money and so we got the mayors over here and the city councils over here, and at Kennewick they got theirs, and then Richland got theirs. But it’s all basically geared to the dollar, so we are going to split it all up so we can split it up this money. I got it, I’m going to keep it, I’m not going to let it go.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned the housing situation when you moved, first you stayed in the kitchen of the pastor of Morning Star. Then you lived at a shotgun house, right, until ‘48?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, I think it was ’48, that’s when my mom and they bought that little shotgun house that we had and they moved it from, on Oregon and Butte Street down to Douglas and Butte. They bought some property there from a guy, Eldon Wallace. I think my mom told me they paid $300 for it and we bought three lots, and they set that little shotgun house up on it. We, as kids, went to Mississippi. When we came back from Mississippi, I can remember this guy named J.O., J-O, probably his name, that’s what they called him. He was a carpenter and he added on to that shotgun house two bedrooms. But there was no bathroom. There was a faucet over at the corner that we got running water from.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you have an outhouse for the bathroom?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yes, we did, we had that up until 1956. We had an outhouse.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Johnson: ‘Til 1956. Because I can remember being in the sixth grade, because the kids would tease us at school about us having that outhouse and we had to go out there and use it. They would go to the yard and poke you in the back with sticks and stuff. We didn’t have a bathroom in the house up until then.</p>
<p>Franklin: It took a while for east Pasco to get the sewer connections and things. That was one of the major complaints that the black community had in east Pasco with the city was the lack of water.</p>
<p>Johnson: Right, the lack of water, the lack of sewage before they put it down on our street. There was Elm Street, which was one of the major throughways through there now, and then our street and the next street over. Some people had a cesspool. Unfortunately, we didn’t. We had to dig our own waterline and they dug it and it came from the Methodist Church down to our house so we could have water. Like I said, it was just a faucet and you go and turn it on, it was cold water and then you boil your water. I can remember being a kid where I had to take a bath in a tin tub. And they would boil water and pour it in the tub and then run some cold water and put it in there for you to cool it off.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your mom do the cooking and cleaning?</p>
<p>Johnson: Well, had a stove. At first they had like a little small stove and they would boil water on it, they would set pots on it and cook on this little old stove that sit in the middle of the floor. I called it a heater, because that’s what it did, it heated and they cooked on that little stove, it was just with an iron on top and it was real small.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember what it used for fuel?</p>
<p>Johnson: Coal, we used coal. My dad worked at the railroad and so they would bring sacks of coal home. Because he had to attend to the boiler over there, and so he would just get him a sack, bring it home and throw you some coal up in there and would get it nice and hot. It was a warm little old place, I can remember that. But that’s how they cooked until, I think probably around ‘51. My mom got a real stove and we had a propane tank sitting there and so then we had a real stove. We still didn’t have hot and cold water.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would your mom wash dishes and clean?</p>
<p>Johnson: In a pan, boil water, pour it in the pan and wash your dishes in the pan. And then have another pan rinse them off and dry them off, stack them up, because we didn’t have no counters—I mean we didn’t have no cabinets and stuff like that. They had just like a countertop they had made out of wood and you just put them over there and put a towel on top of them. It wasn’t like you had no six- or eight-piece setting, you just had like three or four plates and you had a few pieces of silverware. You just made do with what you had, the best way you could.</p>
<p>Franklin: How many siblings did you have?</p>
<p>Johnson: It was just my sister and I.</p>
<p>Franklin: Are you the oldest?</p>
<p>Johnson: I am the oldest.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Who else lived in your community? Were there many families with children or extended family, like grandparents?</p>
<p>Johnson: There was quite a few kids lived in the community. Yeah. There was a lot of people living in the community, as a matter of fact, kids, and some had quite a few kids. I don’t remember a lot of people living with extended families as far as their grandparents, because most kids lived with their parents. But I’m sure there were some that did, but I just couldn’t think of them right off the top of my head.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. Do you remember when Kurtzman Park was established?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: How important was that to the community?</p>
<p>Johnson: To the community, Kurtzman Park was kind of like a volunteer-type situation. Of course we didn’t have a park. And so when that was put in, it even brought our community together even more because of the camaraderie that they had they built the Kurtzman Building. I can remember them putting in the trees around the park and help dig the lines they had around there for water. When we were kids, Mom would tell us, go down to the park. We’d go down there and play, so it was like a safe haven. I remember there was a lady across the street, Big Irene, and the Butchers lived over across the street. Then there was California Street was a street there that nobody even know about, probably, anymore, and Wehe, they intersect. And they intersect right in front of the park and there was a row of houses there and I could probably name you everybody that lived in those houses. We would go there and we could stay there all day long and our parents didn’t have to worry about us, because that was a safe haven and that’s where all the kids would go. So it was a very important place for us. When we had our little meetings and stuff, we would have them there in the Kurtzman Building. Hey, we’re having a meeting on voting or whatever it was, and we would go up there to the Kurtzman Building. That was before they put that Martin Luther King stuff in, in the latter years. It played a real big part because I played there for years as a kid and then after as an adult, Kurtzman Park still was a big thing for me. We’d go down there, and they’d have Juneteenth, and the Fun Day, and baseball.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was going to ask you about sports, activities and events, and Juneteenth was what I was going to ask you about. When do you remember that, first participating in that, or that first happening?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh, boy, now that’s something I should really know because I am on the Juneteenth Committee. [LAUGHTER] I interact with them all the time and doing stuff right now. But that was probably somewhere in the mid-‘60s, Vanis Daniels, I think, was one of the--Senior was one of the persons to get that Juneteenth thing started here because they were from Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: What does Juneteenth mean to you?</p>
<p>Johnson: It was when the black people got their freedom. We supposedly got it when the Emancipation was, but we didn’t get it when the Emancipation was. They didn’t make you aware of it and so that was a celebration for us. It’s like when you say the Fourth of July. The Fourth of July don’t hold anything for black people. That wasn’t our event, but Juneteenth was. What it is now is a time where it used to be everybody would come together. People that has gone and moved away from the Tri-Cities—Chicago, New York, California—man, when Juneteenth came, everybody would come back to town and just all enjoy each other and be together. They’d have gospel events, then they would have the food and the singing, they’d have baseball games. It was something for the whole week that children and people could participate in. It wasn’t just a one-day event; it was a week event. They’d have roller skating, they’d have baseball, they’d have basketball events. It would play up until that Sunday. That Saturday was the big day, and then the day after it was just like everybody would go to church, and that was the end of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned Vanis Daniels, Sr. was a big—responsible for bringing that here, you said, because they were from Texas. Is that particularly a Texas event or was it celebrated most strongly in Texas?</p>
<p>Johnson: I think there was more than a Texas event. And the reason why I say that is that—the little history that I know about Juneteenth, see, Texas was one of the last states to get their freedom because they wanted the black people to stay in the South. Keeping you sharecropping and doing work and stuff. And the ones that had left and had went to Texas, well, they were trying to keep you going back to the South, so they didn’t tell you that the Emancipation had happened, so that you didn’t know. So you went back. But once they found out, that’s when they got their freedom. So they say that Texas was the last state that they got their freedom from the slavery act, at that time. I think that’s why we focus so much on Texas.</p>
<p>And when the Daniels helped got that going up here, and they’re still kind of, over that Juneteenth thing, is that they brought it from Texas. And that was the awareness of it, because if you had lived in Michigan, then I’m sure that you didn’t know that much about it. It’s like living there and that’s what it is. I should really know a lot about it because, like I said, I’m on the committee, but I’m sure that’s what it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: And there’s still that celebration every year?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh yeah, every year. I tell you, we’re gearing up for it right now, matter of fact, on the 21<sup>st</sup> we’re having a fundraiser barbeque, which I’ll be cooking over at Saint James Methodist Church. It’ll be sold at the people at the community and we hope to be able to raise a lot of money to help put on a lot of the events and stuff and bring new stuff. And we can do a lot of recognition for people that’s been instrumental in the community growing and give trophies, and plaques, and stuff for the kids so that they can have games and so forth and so on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can anybody come and eat your barbecue?</p>
<p>Johnson: Anybody. Man, that’s what we really try to get in.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because I really love barbecue.</p>
<p>Johnson: It’s not just a black thing, it’s for everybody to come, we have a parade and all of that. I think they’re trying to incorporate some other people with their parades and stuff so that we could get the Caucasian people interested in it. See, this is like that old stigma stands behind east Pasco to where it’s like, man, you don’t go over there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all this negative thing. </p>
<p>Franklin: I heard that when I first came here.</p>
<p>Johnson: Anybody can come to east Pasco, man, and when we’re having that event, we welcome everybody to come. Come over and buy some barbeque, and they sell catfish and all kinds of food, man. They even have some Hispanic vendors and stuff that was there, so that we can all enjoy together. Because that’s the kind of thing we can all have camaraderie and come together because we can sit down and eat together.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s true, yeah, food is great. And I wanted to ask—that kind of segue ways very nicely into my next question—do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including sports and food, that people brought with them from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Johnson: Music.</p>
<p>Franklin: Music?</p>
<p>Johnson: Music.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, what kind of music?</p>
<p>Johnson: Blues. There was blues and gospel, one of the two biggest things that we got and most of that originated in the South. They brought it out here and it was like—the blues to me, when I hear it was like the cry for freedom, it was like the slaves in the field, they be singing that downhome blues. It was a cry for freedom, they was telling their story the way that they felt. When it came out here it was just kind of like it was a big thing. It wasn’t jazz—jazz was in the city—but out here it was the blues and then gospel music was another form of cry for your freedom and your love of God where you get into the spirit of. The blues, you get into the spirit. Because if you got a sad—you and your girlfriend just broke up, and things not going right and somebody break down and start singing one of them more downhome blues. [singing] I lost my baby. Lord, what am I going to do? And here you sitting over there and you and your woman just broke up, it makes you feel real sad. And now you kind of reflect on your situation and it makes you think, wow, what can I do? Because now you want to try to rekindle what you just lost, bring it together. And it was through those cries of the blues and stuff that made you do that. So music was one of the most instrumental things that I saw.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any notable bands, venues, in east Pasco that you remember or musicians?</p>
<p>Johnson: I really don’t remember any black people that was—Jesse Cleveland and a few guys, they had a little band. There was a couple—James Pruitt and some of them guys did a little stuff at church. But there was bands that came to Pasco, I remember when Ike and Tina Turner came through Pasco and Fats Domino, they came to Pasco when I was a kid and played music. There were outsider bands that came in, but we really didn’t have any bands that I can think of. There could’ve been some older people that had bands, because I didn’t get a chance to participate. My mom kept me at home pretty good until I was about 15 years of age, so I didn’t get a chance to see and participate. But after I got to be grown, it was Maurice Wallace and a few guys from Seattle would come here and play and he was raised here in Richland. Johnny Guilory, he had a little band with a few guys and stuff, he came from Spokane, they would come down and play at Jackson’s Tavern. That was pretty much it for the bands that I can remember, other than that it was mostly gospel music and stuff, and that was being in churches.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about food? Did your mom cook southern food, soul food, did she bring that with her?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah. I was raised on that. I was raised on it, and my cooking experience—and I think that I’m a pretty good cook—is that she would always tell me, boy, come here and stir this pot. I would say, why I got to do it? How come my sister don’t have to go and do it? And she would say, you might get a wife don’t know how to cook. You come here. She made me learn how to cook. And I’ll tell you the truth: I am a good cook, and a well-rounded cook. That was like fried apple pies and stuff, I haven’t had a homemade fried apple pie in I don’t know when.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sounds really good.</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh, man, they are. And it wasn’t like when you go to the store and you get this little teeny fried apple pie like this. Man, the fried apple pie Mom would cook, they would be that big and I mean they would be full of apples, big turnovers and stuff. Man, that would be so good. Or sweet potato pies. She could really cook good. My niece, Tansy, she can cook one that taste just like my mom’s. Chicken and dumplings, I cook some really good chicken and dumplings because I cook them just like my mom.</p>
<p>At my church there’s different events that we have, the pastor’s anniversary, the church anniversary, et cetera, and they’ll say, well, Aubrey what are you cooking? And I’m thinking in my mind, why are you guys always asking me what am I cooking? I don’t see any of these other guys up here cooking nothing; it’s the women that bring other dishes. But then I try to treat them to some of the dishes that my mom made for us when we were kids. And I can remember, I did some chicken and dumplings. I did a roast pan, one of those turkey roasts for them. Man, they like to ate themselves to death. And everybody was sitting and they were saying to themselves, who made these chicken and dumplings? Somebody said, Aubrey did. I’m over there sitting and eating on them, gloating for no glory. Man, these chicken and dumplings taste just like the ones my mom used to make, and they went on. After that, every time they have an event, Aubrey, are you going to cook some chicken and dumplings? I’m like, no, I’m going to cook something different because I want you to get a taste of all the different things that I know, and I don’t want to be held down to where I got to cook chicken and dumplings every time in this event. We’re going to have the church anniversary here in a couple weeks, and they get up on the signup sheet and they’re already, Aubrey are you going to cook chicken and dumplings? I think I’m going to go ahead and cook some chicken and dumplings, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What other types of food would your mom cook, teach you how to cook?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh, man. Collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens. She cooked roasts and potatoes, a lot of rice dishes and stuff like that. She made a lot of sweet dishes, bread pudding, rice pudding, chocolate cakes—which I didn’t like because I don’t care for chocolate—coconut cakes, peach cobblers, just stews. It just depends on what time of year it was and we ate a lot of vegetables. When I say peas, like, purple hull peas—I cooked some Sunday—black-eyed peas, crowder peas, we had speckled butter beans, we had lima beans, we had corn, we had collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, we had squash. There was just a variety of stuff, but it was vegetables. A lot of chicken, very little pork, and very little beef. It was chicken, chicken. Right now, I’m a chicken person; I don’t eat a lot of beef.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, because chicken was, at that time—</p>
<p>Johnson: A staple.</p>
<p>Franklin: And one of the least expensive, right?</p>
<p>Johnson: It was the least expensive, it was a staple food. We would raise 100-and-something head of chicken a year, and we would kill them when they got of age and took them and put them in the freezer. We had chicken all year long. We would go to the river and we would fish, and so then we would have fish. It wasn’t because we were so poor that we couldn’t buy beef, we just didn’t eat a whole lot of beef, you see?</p>
<p>Like, I don’t eat a whole lot of beef, I don’t care for steak and stuff. Number one, beef has got to rot in your stomach. When you eat a piece of beef, it’s got so much connective tissue until it probably take about three days for the acids and stuff to eat it up. Chicken, you can take a piece of chicken and you could do it like this here, and you can crumble it, so it don’t take very long for it to break down. Fish, of course, you know that breaks down really fast. And then you get all the nutrients and stuff that you’re supposed to get from it.</p>
<p>Firstly, I don’t think—our body wasn’t designed to eat meat anyway. We’re supposed to be like eating vegetables and fish. All that beef and stuff, it’s just too hard for you to eat. A lot of black people, they raise hogs. I used to buy a hog every year, after I got up in my 20s, and I butchered myself and put it in the freezer and we’d eat pork chops and pork steaks. But then, when I started having high blood pressure, it was like, well, okay, you can’t be eating all that pork. So I couldn’t tell you right now when the last time I ate a piece of pork, like a pork chop or a pork steak or a pork roast. I ate a piece of bacon the other day for the first time in probably over a month. I haven’t eaten any—I eat a piece of sausage every now and then when I go to my girlfriend’s house, but I don’t eat a lot of it. But now chicken? Man, I had some chicken tacos the other day, my daughter, she baked some chicken the day before yesterday. And so eat lot of fish and eat a lot of chicken, and we eat a lot of vegetables.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about sports? Were sports important to you growing up? Were there particular sporting events the black community was really involved in, or any teams?</p>
<p>Johnson: Baseball. Baseball was one of the most sporting events that we were involved in and stuff. They would have, like I said, out of the park, Juneteenth, that was one of the highlights was the baseball games that they had. As a kid growing up, we played baseball on every vacant lot that they had in east Pasco that we could get on as kids. It wasn’t so much like playing tennis—I learned to play tennis when I got to be an adult. Basketball, well, I never had a basketball hoop. So I tried to play at school, but my mom was always like, well, you come home so you could do this work and make sure that we have food and stuff. That wasn’t something that I got a chance to participate in. And plus I probably wasn’t that good anyway, because everybody can’t be a Michael Jordan. You have to do what you do, for me it was work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Too true. Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you or your parents came from?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, most definitely. Because in the ‘60s when Equal Opportunity came, it opened up the doors so you could get into apprenticeship programs that they had out here, so you could make more of an income. And then the job market opened up so that you could have better jobs and stuff. It was a lot better out here, to be able to get an education, to go to school. Because you know in the South—my mom told me about when they went to school, she said half of the books wasn’t there because the books that they got were the books that the Caucasian kids had had. Then they tore pages out of the books and stuff, so that’s what you had to learn from, was the hand-me-down stuff that was no good. You’re only as good as your teacher, and if your teacher don’t have the facilities and the stuff to teach you with, then you’re not going to be able to get that much of an education as far as the books and stuff is concerned. Some kids, depending on where they lived, they were fortunate and they got a chance to get a good education. A lot of times where it started off with is like their parents were working for some Caucasian people that had kids, they played together and so they got a chance to read the books that those Caucasians kids had.</p>
<p>But then when you’re living out there in the country and stuff, you go to the little country school and when the city, or the county, whoever was giving you the books, they weren’t really trying to keep you—get you to have a good education. Because they wanted to keep you so that you couldn’t read, you couldn’t write; then you could always be taken advantage of. That was the thing for education.</p>
<p>Out here, is that we got a chance to go to school, I got a chance to get the same opportunity as education as a Caucasian did, I got a chance to read the same books that they did. I had some very loving teachers when I went to school out here, I didn’t see real prejudice thing from my teachers and stuff. Most of them were young, and the one that sticks out of my mind more than any teacher I ever had, her name was Esther Day, she was my first grade teacher. Mrs. Day was a mother figure to every child that went to school with us, especially black children. Because she was the type of teacher that would, well, Aubrey, what is it about it that you don’t understand? And she’d take and put her arms around you and she’d hug you. It made you want to do better, to learn more, just because of the way that she treated you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was she black or Caucasian?</p>
<p>Johnson: She was Caucasian. I didn’t have any black teachers when I went to school out here. They were all Caucasian teachers, but she was--</p>
<p>Franklin: For your whole educational--</p>
<p>Johnson: Whole educational thing. No. It’s just trying to emulate what you see, there was no black teachers out here, there were no black lawyers. So how could I want to be a lawyer when I didn’t see any black people being in that role? If I had been older when I left the South, then I probably would’ve seen some of that, but me just being a little kid, I had to emulate what I saw, and I didn’t see that. My dream was always to be a truck driver, run heavy equipment, to be a police officer or a beautician, and I got to be all of them except for the police officer.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I wanted to ask about that, kind of diverting form childhood here, but you mentioned a couple times. What was it about cosmetology that made you want to go into that?</p>
<p>Johnson: It was a gift. It was a gift from the man above. When I was a kid, I’ll say at the age of seven, and I remember very well, the girls were wearing poodle skirts, saddle oxford shoes, and I had to comb my sister’s hair. She was a year younger than I, and I would pull her hair back into a ponytail and then they’d take and tie a ribbon around it. Man, I thought that I could make that bow better than anybody that I knew. I think that was my first introduction into doing hair.</p>
<p>When I got to be about 13 years of age, a friend of mine, Leslie Williams, his parents had a TV and you would see different entertainers on there and they had the finger waves in the men’s hair and stuff. I remember this friend of mine, Robert Orange, he had to put a process, which was straightening his hair and he asked me if he wanted him to do mine. So I’m like, well, yeah! I came home one day from school and went over and he did it. When I came home my mom was so mad with me. Boy, what you put that stuff in your head for? Are you losing your mind? What’s wrong with you? We wanted to have the DA ducktail like some of the movie stars that we had seen, Elvis Presley, when they slick their hair back and they had like the greaser with the little thing in the back, they call it a DA.</p>
<p>Anyway, I got so that by the time I was 17 years of age and wearing my hair straight like that, in the process, I took and I started making finger waves. I could finger wave it and I got so good that I could close my eyes and I could see it, and I would comb it, cross my head, I’d go back and forth and I’d end up with a horseshoe in the back. When I went out and people would see me, like, man, where did you get your hair did at? I said, I did it myself. Ah, there’s no way that you did that! I’m like, yeah, I did, I did it myself. And so then it was like, well, do mine! $7, and you buy your own stuff. They went out and got them a jar of Posner’s, or Ultra Wave or we used Easy Off. Anything with lye base in it would straighten your hair, right. They’d come over to the house and I’d put it on them and we’d be out in the yard with the water hose, and washing it out of your hair. Because we didn’t know nothing about neutralization and stuff like that. So it’s a wonder any of us had any hair, because the chemical didn’t stop working, we just washed it, we didn’t even have sense enough to shampoo it afterwards. I would finger wave their hair and I’ll tell you, one guy told me, he said, man, you added many finger waves in my head until it made me seasick. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>That was my introduction to it. As time went on, I always had that interest in that. So by the time I got 18, 19 years old, watching TV and 77 Sunset Strip, and you would see everybody in Malibu, California and all that. To me, that was a means of being around a lot of women, was doing hair. That also gave me a big interest in wanting to do hair. As I had said earlier, I had to go to work, and so when I went to work, it wasn’t like I could go to school to learn how to do hair. But I would freelance and do different people’s hair all the time to make a little extra money.</p>
<p>There was a friend of mine had a beauty salon, he said, man, why don’t you come work for me? And hey, you can come in here and you can work and blah, blah, blah. When I got off work, working for the county, I was so tired I didn’t feel like going and doing—I would just do it on the weekends just for myself. And I always kept that interest.</p>
<p>When I was like 43 years of age, I got my back hurt when I was working down in California, moving a piano. So they gave me a rehabilitation. What do you want to do? And I thought to myself, I want to be a beautician. And the guys said, well, why do you want to be a beautician? I said, because that is something that will be here forever. Because women are always going to get their hair done. See, I didn’t want to be a barber. I’d have to do like four or five heads of barbering to make the money that I could make off of doing one woman’s head. That was the interest. Then I was pretty good at art, being creative. I got so after I completed my course and started doing hair, and then when people would allow me the opportunity to create, I could do my thing on they heads. People are so used to just cloning, they want the same thing all the time. So it’s really hard to, hey, why don’t you let me cut your hair? Especially with black women. Like, hey, I grew it out this long, I’m not going to let you cut it off, because it took me too many years to grow it, right. And I’m like, well, just let me cut so I could—so they are afraid to let you be creative and do something, until you find one person that will let you do something and everybody well, I didn’t know you could do that. I’m like, well, yeah I can do it. I’ve been doing hair for 27 years. You didn’t think I learned nothing? It’s just that you don’t get a chance to experiment the things that you know how to do and create new stuff, because people are so used to being afraid of getting their hair cut off and stuff.</p>
<p>That’s how my interest came was from my sister and then it was something that I always knew that would be wanted and needed. And then it allowed me to be around a lot of women. And right now is that I enjoy being around women. Because women don’t talk about stuff that men talk about. I listen to they problems and it just goes in one ear and out the other one. I’m not interested in a bunch of junk that guys talk about, because it is always the same thing, it’s about women. See, women are more intellectual. They would talk about stuff that makes sense. They would be sitting there and well, hey, Aubrey? And you get to be just like a place they can drop they problems. And what we do is we sit down and try to solve the problems of the world. And they’ll just like, well, what do you think about so and so and so and so and so, and I’m like, well, you know, I don’t know. What do you think? I throw it back on them to get they views and to see where they think about stuff that is happening.</p>
<p>And women are smarter than men anyway. I like being around women. Earlier? It would have been all about having a bunch of girlfriends. But you’d have a bunch of girlfriends but you wouldn’t have no money. I got smart to that. My thing was, you don’t date your clients, because you won’t have no money. You just have your girlfriend and the other is just about getting paid and be done with it. I enjoyed it, it’s been good to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: You still do hair?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh yeah, I go out to—I got some clients and stuff, especially, I like the old people. They can’t get out, they shut in, and they’ll give me call, hey, could you come over and do my hair? And I’ll go over and do their hair at they house for them. That’s a blessing for me that God enabled me to be able to do it, because they are so thankful to you. Because they wouldn’t be able to get it done otherwise. So, yeah, I enjoy doing it.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s really sweet. In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Johnson: In the work place. I worked Franklin County Road Department for 13 years. I started off with the survey crew. I was the first black person that worked on the road department. And I’m going to tell you, I call it natural hell. It was like, I always got the worst job dumped on. I can remember the first. The first day that I worked on the road department, and engineer, Pat Thompson, he said, hey, you want to work on the survey—I mean, I had just left the survey crew because the job had ended. He asked me, he said, do you want to work for the road department? And I’m like, well, yeah. He said, okay, well, come to work Monday morning.</p>
<p>So Monday morning I went to work and he took me out to Chiawana Park, and he wanted me to dig a ditch, me and this other guy that had just had got hired, Bruce Sanders. The ditch was probably form here to that wall over there, so I’d say maybe 40 feet. So what we did was measured the ditch. We’ll start in the middle work to the end. You got 20 feet; I got 20 feet. That’s being fair. Every time I would turn around and look, he’s sitting up on the side of the ditch smoking a cigarette. I’m like, man, we never going to get done with you doing that. When I got done doing my 20 feet of ditch, he wasn’t even halfway.</p>
<p>So I walked down to the river and I threw a few rocks in the river, and I was walking back up the hill and the engineer drove up. It was around 1:00. He says, what are you doing? I said, well, I got done digging my half. He said, I didn’t hire you like that. I hired you to work all day. I said, but we took half the ditch. I said, if he would have gotten down there and dug the ditch just like I did instead of smoking cigarettes all day, he’d’ve been done. He said, I didn’t hire you like that. I hired you to dig a ditch. And I said, well, then if I have to dig the whole ditch, take him with you and I’ll do it by myself. He put him in the car and took him with him, and I dug the rest of the ditch. And about 4:00--because we got off at 4:30, he came back and picked me up, and I was done. I worked patching holes in the roads and stuff, me and this guy, Amos Whitmore, this old guy.</p>
<p>I did that for a long time and then I started driving truck. I can remember asking them repeatedly, when am I going to get truck driver wages? Oh, you haven’t learned how to drive the truck yet. I’m like, okay… And I’m driving dump trucks and we’re hauling gravel, and spreading gravel, and so forth and so on. About four or five years passed and I’m still saying, when are you going to give me truck driver wages? And it’s still the same old story, well, you haven’t learned how to drive the truck. All right, well, I’ll have to go down and talk to the engineer or I’ll have to go talk to your supervisor. It’s always a put-off.</p>
<p>We had a meeting with the county commissioners and the meeting was pertaining to how we got our funding for the road department. They put a pie, and we got so much from gasoline taxes, we got so much from this, we got so much from that, et cetera. When they got through explaining how the pie was cut up, they said, is there anybody in here have anything else that they want to discuss? Basically, what they were talking about is about that pie and how that money was cut up. Well, I stood up and said, well, I do. Everybody turned and looked at me, my coworkers, supervisors, engineer and the county commissioners. I said, how long do you have to drive truck before you get truck driver wages? I said, because I’ve been driving truck now for about five years, and every time I ask when am I going to get truck driver wages, I always get put off. And I don’t understand why it is, because everybody else that drive truck getting truck driver wages.</p>
<p>That was the end of the meeting and I left and went back out to the shop. And my supervisor comes out and says, well, Aubrey you didn’t have to do that. I said, I don’t see why I didn’t. I said, they asked a question and I said, yeah, that was the answer—I answered the question that they wanted me to give—well, no, they wasn’t talking about that. I said, I understand what you saying. But I wanted them to know that—why I couldn’t get truck driver wages. About an hour later, the engineer came out. So evidently the county commissioners went to talk to him and he said, well, you’ll get truck driver wages on your next paycheck.</p>
<p>I noticed one day, my supervisor, he says, hey, Smokey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I kind of turned and looked at him, because first I’m wondering, like, who is he talking to? He says, hey, Smokey, I want you to go over there and do so and so and so and so and so. I just went over there and did what he told me to do. I’m thinking in my head, why is he calling me Smokey? Because, see, there is nothing black on me except for my hair at the time—which I don’t have nothing now—because I’m paper-sack tan. Okay? It’s got to be a word of -ism or racial slur but it’s okay. But, see, the thing to me was, I didn’t want to make a big issue about it because I wanted that job. Now here is something now that I got to swallow this and go on along with the program so I can maintain this job, because it was hard enough to get.</p>
<p>I had been putting an application after and application. I think that I had worried Franklin County so much. Because every day, I would go up to the Franklin County and I’m like, do you got any openings today? No, not today. I went so much until they finally told me, you don’t have to come up here every day. We got your phone number; if we got an opening, we will call you.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, I got a phone call on a Saturday asking me to go to work for the survey crew. And it was only going to last about six weeks. They were building SR-16, a road up out of Mesa. And I worked on that until the completion and then I went over to working for them.</p>
<p>But that was one of the kind of bad issues for me because I had to live with that, and pretty soon it just got so that I just let it roll off my back, okay. I can remember working out on the Road 32, 36, 38 in that new housing area off of River Haven, and they were putting in these oil streets. Now we got a tanker truck with the oil spouts running off the back of it and it’s shooting tar out onto the ground at 440 degrees. In order to keep the tar from getting on the curbing, they had me and another guy to walk along with a sheet of ply board. He had one end with the rope and I had the other end with the rope, and we kind of drug it along the edge of the ground and kept even with the truck so that they nozzle was right in the middle, you see. They’re squirting the tar there and it’s not getting on the curb in that River Haven area.</p>
<p>The next day, my supervisor says, well, you know, Aubrey we’re going to have Theo to go down there and do blah, blah, blah, blah. And what they did is they took the rope and they nailed it to one end and nailed to the other end. Now, you take this and put it around your neck, and you carry this plyboard along the edge of the curbing, and I’m walking up on the edge of the grass, carrying it on the curbing. But this is the ironic part of it, the nozzle from the spray truck was right in the middle of the board. And when they hit the ground, where does that steam—it’s going to come back up. Man, I would have so much tar on my face until my eyelids would be stuck open. Because you’re getting that mist that’s coming up off the ground. And then you get so far down the road, you get down to where the curbing is and I would take diesel fuel on a rag and then wipe my face with it so I could get it off of my skin. And that burned your skin a little bit and stuff.</p>
<p>But it’s just little stuff like that, that I had to endure in order to keep that job. And I can imagine—which I never heard them make any ridicule, laughing and going on. But when I’d go in in the evening, I would take off my shirt and I’d be out there, man, and I would have tar all over my arms and stuff, on my face, and get it off. No one never said a thing, but it was always was that same old thing.</p>
<p>Whenever there was a demeaning work or anything to be done, it was always, hey, Aubrey. Come over here and dig this ditch, come over here and do that. Me and a guy, we was out unloading cross-ties off of a truck. We were building a fence out there at Chiawana Park. I remember, he would catch one end, I’d catch the other end and we’d throw them on the ground. Another guy driving the truck along. He drops the doggone thing on my finger. Finger fills full of blood, right, aching like you wouldn’t believe. It was this finger right here. And he says, aw, you’re just being a cry baby. He had this sharp knife, he took it and drills a hole in and it let the blood out. Well, when the blood popped out, then the pressure went off and it quit hurting. So we kept throwing cross-ties.</p>
<p>The next morning when we went out there to go do it, they sent him to go do something else. Well, Aubrey you can throw those cross-ties off by yourself. You don’t need him. So that’s what I had to do, unload that whole truck by myself with the cross-ties. You see, it was like I had to strain to do it. And I was a pretty good size fella, nice and strong, and stuff. But it was a strain trying to drag them things off of there and then drop them right beside the hole and stuff. When it would have been just as easy with a guy, got it done much faster with two people doing it. Instead of saying—what I’m saying is, I always got the demeaning jobs working for them, and I worked for them for 13 years.</p>
<p>I finally managed to get truck driver wages and then later on I got to run motor grader. And as my supervisor says, he said, boy, you’re the best in the business. Because I learned how to do stuff on the motor grader that most people couldn’t do. I could do it backwards. My supervisor, he would look and he had been a motor grade operator and he says, I don’t see how you do it. I said, well, see, it’s real simple; but I would never tell him. See, you got a level in your butt if you know it. So if you’re going down the road, and the road tips and your body is go over this, your body equilibrium always is going to keep you sitting straight up. Even though the road is set like this, your body is going to tip back the opposite way, you understand? And so all you got to do is keep your body sitting straight up all the time. So whether its tipped like this, your body just want to keep it set, so the machine is tipped over, so you’re still keeping the same cut. To me it was simple, so if I’m going backwards, say, like, we’re fixing a crosscut, I’d push across the hole, pick the mobile up, drop it on its side and then I would just drag it backwards. So if the machine started to tip this way, I would push over to this side and raise my body back up. So I could do stuff. And he says, well I’ve never seen nobody do it like that.</p>
<p>But I never did tell them how to do it. They would always come and get me. They had one guy which was the lead operator and we were building the new road. Hey, Aubrey, I want you to run first and let him run behind you. And, boy, he would be so mad. Because my supervisor say, you go straight; he goes crooked. He wants the shoulder of the road to be cut straight. So I’d get in that thing, and what I would do was I’d look down the road and I’d pick out a fixed object and just head to it and just keep it between your legs. That would keep you going straight. And he’d be doing like this here. He would go and so it would be crooked.</p>
<p>It was a lot of stuff that I had to go through working for them. It showed me the bad side of a person in a good way. I learned that you have to go through a lot to get a little bit. Now that I’m at the age I am, I can look back and I can see all the bad stuff. What I try to do is not to duplicate what I see. That’s why I say, there is so much hatred in the world, and for no reason that it is, other than just ignorance. People have to learn how to get over it and start doing better by everybody else. Because I wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to them that happened to me. So why would I do the same thing that happened to me to them? You don’t. Seemed like that should have been a lesson that should have been learned a long time ago.</p>
<p>It’s like—I hate to hear this term, illegal aliens. See to me, an alien is somebody come from outer space. Why can’t they just be illegal immigrants? But it’s a demeaning word that’s used when all of us was immigrants to this country. I mean, I was born here, but this is not originally where we came from. We all migrated here one way or the other, by force or by choice. Everybody wants some of the horn of plenty. That’s what this is, the horn of plenty. That’s why everybody wants to come to America. And so, it’s like, I got it, you want it, you can’t have it. By all means, it’s like, keep everybody out of it that you don’t want to have none of it, and the ones that’s here that want some of it, you try to deprive them of having it. It’s not a good thing and it’s racist, for number one, and it’s bad. I don’t know how people can live with themselves at the end of the day when they go home. Do they ever think about it? And they’ll pray to the same god that I’m praying to. And I wonder, do they ever think about the consequences of their actions? And if someone did the same thing to them that’s being done, how would they feel about it? You know.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about your parents’ work, education, I’m thinking specifically about Hanford. How long did each of your parents work out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Johnson: Well, my mom, she worked there, probably like two or three years, until they phased out that area. Because I can remember in the ‘50s, she was still working out there in the Hanford Area, in the cafeteria. She did dishwashing, waiting on tables and stuff like that. Like I said, I was so young until, I really didn’t get a chance to really hear a lot about what she did. I know she married a guy named Eddie Gix and he worked out there. I can’t remember—he wasn’t in engineering, because he didn’t have that kind of education—he worked in the machine shop. So he had to get some type of formal training from wherever he had worked at before, or whatever he did, he was shown how to do it and then that’s just what you did.</p>
<p>Franklin: This would’ve been your stepfather?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, Eddie Gix.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was he Caucasian or black?</p>
<p>Johnson: He was black.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did your father work for Hanford?</p>
<p>Johnson: He didn’t work for Hanford. My father he worked for the railroad. Eddie Gix, he worked for Hanford, and my mom she worked out there at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: How old were you when your mom married Eddie?</p>
<p>Johnson: She married him in, probably about ‘49, ‘50, probably about ‘50, ‘51 somewhere in there. So I was real little, yeah. Like I said, my dad, see, he left.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, right. So, Eddie, you were close to--</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, I was real close to him. As a matter of fact, I even carried his name until I got into high school. I went into school as Gix, Aubrey Gix, G-I-X. Some of my friends, they see me right now and they’ll say, aren’t you Aubrey Gix? And I’m like, yeah, that was the name I went through in school, but I’m actually a Johnson. That was my dad’s name, and that was my birth name. But Eddie Gix was the person that I could emulate, that I cared about. Having a step-parent is the one that do the most with you, it’s the one you care the most about.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did Eddie work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Johnson: I don’t know, actually, how long he had worked there, because I believe he was probably working there before him and my mom got together. I’m sure he was. But until, probably about ‘54, ‘55, five or six years somewhere in that period that he worked there. Because in, oh, probably about ‘56, somewhere in there, that’s when they separated.</p>
<p>What happened is that he was working on the dam by then down at The Dalles. And he came up missing, so everybody thought—because they did a search for him and everything—thought that he had fell off in the water and had drowned, but he hadn’t. He had took off and went to Chicago. We found out, oh, probably about fifteen years later, he got in contact with one of our friends, my mom’s friends. He looked in the phone book and he’d seen their name in there and he called them and then they got in contact with my mom and then she was in contact with him. He had left and went to Chicago and stayed with his sister and did whatever. I didn’t really ask a whole lot of question about why or what or what he was doing. All I know is he was gone. By then, my mom, she had moved on. So she was just taking care of me and my sister, the best that she could. She didn’t have a husband. She finally got married in the ‘70s, yeah, the latter part of the ‘70s, she finally got married again. I don’t know what happened to that marriage, because I left and went to California. When I came back, that was over. I don’t know whether they was compatible, or if she was mean and talked too much, or what the situation was, you know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe any interactions you or your parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities area that stand out to you?</p>
<p>Johnson: My mom, she was kind of a private person, so we didn’t really visit a lot. She had a couple friends that she visited with that I looked up to. Other than going to church, we didn’t really interact that much with other people because she worked two jobs, so she was too tired to really interact. We went to church. She didn’t go every Sunday, because she was trying to fix something to eat for us, and she’d just be tired.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm, oh, yeah, I can imagine.</p>
<p>Johnson: She had, Aunt Etta Bee, was one of her best friends who—that’s what we called her, Aunt Etta Bee—her and her husband, and they lived down the street and they were best friends. They would go back and forth to visit with each other. We would do the boat races, that was the big thing, the Water Follies, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. We would go to that every year; that was a big event for us. Watch those boats go down at Sacagawea Park go back and forth. They were doing like the circuit, it was the little hydroplanes; it wasn’t the big stuff they have now, the unlimiteds. Your pen not working?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah, I guess. Oh, there it goes.</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s got plenty of ink, I just haven’t used it for a while. I wanted to ask you, where did you go to school?</p>
<p>Johnson: I went to school, grade school at the naval base, that was my kindergarten. I went to Whittier School for a couple years before going over to Longfellow and then back to Whittier School in fifth grade, fourth, fifth grade. Then over to Emerson school, sixth grade, and then to McLoughlin, and then from McLoughlin to the high school.</p>
<p>I got ran over working for the Franklin County Road Department. I got my foot crushed and so I got rehab and I went to CBC and I took, I think it was about a year-and-a-half, and I took a welding course. I went to school at night and completed that and got a certificate of welding, a certified welder. That was basically my schooling, was right there, just right there in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did segregation or racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Johnson: It didn’t give me anyone to emulate was number one. Because there was no black people there with a higher education, that I knew of, to really want to emulate. I heard about this guy called, I think his name was Duke Washington, and he had went to college. CW Brown and Norris Brown, they were basketball players for Richland Bombers, and that was in ‘50s. There wasn’t nothing about academic subjects that made me want to be anything of a lawyer or a doctor, or anything like that so it didn’t really impact my education.</p>
<p>Racism, it didn’t really hold me back from getting an education, because you could’ve went to school. But there was nothing there that enhanced—I didn’t hear about a lot of stuff when I went to school, that the other kids heard about. I’m sure that they never told us about going to college. That wasn’t a thing that I heard about, going to college when you get through with high school. It was just like, try to go to high school and get a high school diploma so that you can go and get a job working in various work forces out here in the area, or getting into an apprenticeship program or something like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s a really good way to put it. You were able to get one, but the structure of it was one that, you didn’t have role model—no role models, there were no successful blacks for you--</p>
<p>Johnson: No, there wasn’t. I think there were a few older guys, I think Tom Jackson, it that was his name, he used to be a school teacher when he was down in Texas. I didn’t know nothing about him. Joe Jackson, he was the first black mayor of Pasco, and he was a city councilman, and he was a dear friend of mine until dying here just a year ago.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I’ve been trying to talk to his brother--</p>
<p>Johnson: Webster?</p>
<p>Franklin: Webster, he’s been very reluctant. I shouldn’t say that on camera, but I’m going to have coffee with him this Friday. So hopefully, we’ll--</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, they just live right there on the same street, so Joe, he and I, we’d go down and sit there and solve the problems of the world, we’d sit and talk about different stuff like that. He was a person of higher education, but he was an engineer. By the time that I was aware that he was an engineer, it was like, I was up in my 20s. It’s just like saying, hey, I want to be an engineer. Well, what is an engineer? There wasn’t nothing that was in school, to me, that set apart that was something that I wanted to do. To me, I was like manual. I need to get into something that I can use my hands with, to be able to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because your parents worked, your friends’ parents worked.</p>
<p>Johnson: That’s all I saw, was work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Kind of on the flipside of that, who were some of the people that influenced you as a child?</p>
<p>Johnson: Heh. Phew. Now that’s a hard one there. Because, like I said, there was really no big influence that was there for me. And I guess, maybe watching TV? It was just, I just didn’t see it. For me my influence was just work. When I would pass the truck lines and I would see diesel trucks out there, I was intrigued, like, man, I would really want to drive one of those. Well, up here it was ran by Caucasian people, so it was my thing just to be able to get up in it and see what it looked like.</p>
<p>I worked for a guy named Hezza Thompson. No, his name was Ezra Thompson, and he stayed out here by Connell and he was a farmer. A friend of mine and I, we were just looking for work and we was passing by his farm. I’m like, hey, let’s go down and see if he got something we can do. So we did and he looks around and he says, well, I got a bunch of tumbleweeds out there. He says, you boys can go out there and cut them. And I’m like, yeah, okay. My thing was, never ask a man how much he’s going to pay you if you want a job. Just go and do the job and get paid whatever he give you when get done.</p>
<p>We went out there and we was cutting tumbleweeds until when end of the day came, he says, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you come back tomorrow. I came back the next day and went out there. And he raised Hereford cows, bulls, and we went out there and did some more tumbleweeds. He asked me, he said, well, I got a fence I want to build. He says, you want to come out the next day and I’m like, sure. So I went out there the next day and he had a diesel truck out there and it was loaded with posts for fencing. He said, you know how to drive that truck? I said, yeah. [CHUCKING] He says, well then just go ahead and unload it, he says, and when you get through unloading here, just drive it down a ways and then unload. Because it was on a flat bed. I’m like, yeah, okay.</p>
<p>Of course it has instructions right up there in the truck. All you got to do is just put in one gear and I knew how to drive a stick-shift, a manual. I got up in the truck and I looked up there and I kind of read it, because he was gone. And then I figured where it said air brake and then I pushed it—pssssheeeew--the brake went off and then I put it over in first gear and pulled my foot off the clutch—rrrr—and just kind of walked along, like, man, I would just really like to drive this on the highway, because I want to get out of just one gear. So that right there was intrigue for me, just to be in that truck. I worked all the way until the end of the day, until I got down to the end of the line. That was my thing with the truck.</p>
<p>I would see different guys out on bulldozers and I’m like, man, I would love to just run one of those bulldozers to get on it. I never did get a chance to get on a bulldozer or a tractor, anything like that. So it was just trucks. When I got the opportunity to go into trucking, that’s what I did. I drove truck, and I drove truck for years. When I was moving furniture I drove truck down there, in Northern California for about four or five years. That was my thing, just being the guy thing was driving the big truck, do the big rigs and stuff.</p>
<p>I got on a bulldozer—I worked for George Gant. He had his own construction stuff. We was out doing the fairground, we did that over in Kennewick, the center part of it. It used to be like a dump site and we leveled all that off and made it to what it is now and he had this big D9 Cat he had rented. He said, do you think you can handle that? And I’m like, well, yeah. I jumped on it and I was driving, I drove maybe one pass with it. When I backed up, it took so long to get from point A to point Z, to push that load of dirt that you had in front of it, I was done. I backed it up and I got off of it and I went and got back on the motor grader. Because you could see your quick results. That was just, you move a whole lot of earth at one time, but that was too slow for me so I never want to run a bulldozer after that.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned bussing and I just wanted to know, was that bussing of the integration bussing kind, or did you just catch the bus to go to school?</p>
<p>Johnson: It was the integration bus. That was the ideal thing is to bring the kids from the east side and the black kids to the west side in order to bring the kids together. Because they brought kids, Caucasian kids, et cetera, from the west side of town over to integrate and went to Whittier School. There was black kids going to Whittier and then there was Caucasian kids that was raised in the area that was there and then from out of town and we went back and forth. That was something that I went through was the bussing at that time, back and forth.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did that go on for you?</p>
<p>Johnson: All the way up to high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you remember about that? What was it like to go to school with kids who weren’t in your neighborhood, and to leave the confines of the neighborhood?</p>
<p>Johnson: You know, let me tell you a short story. A bulldog will hunt if he like you. He’s not a hunting dog, but he will hunt if he like you. So is that, when I went to school with kids that was outside of my neighborhood, I was as I am to you. Just like you’d say I’ve been knowing you all my life. I interacted with the other kids, and the kids liked me so well until I had a few friends that I brought home with me to spend the night. And I went and asked their parents, hey, Jerry wants to come and spend the night with me, you think it’d be okay? Well, if it’s okay with your parents, it’s okay. They came and spent the night with me and we went to a wingding and stuff, and it was just like the time of his life, the times that we spent together and there was a few kids that were like that in school.</p>
<p>But up until I got into junior high school, it was that we were all as one, everybody just played together, we had fun together—there was really no really racial issues with the kids. They parents was probably racist, and I didn’t really go to their houses and stuff. It’s just like, there was no reason for me to go to the west side because I didn’t live over there. So I basically stayed over in my own neighborhood and did my own thing. But I went over to the west side to go to school with the kids, and when that was over with, I went back over. Whatever they views was at they house, I didn’t get a chance to see it, I didn’t hear it, because when they came to school we were just all kids playing together, going to school together and having fun.</p>
<p>When we got into high school, I think that was at the time when kids got to be promiscuous as girls and stuff. They were afraid of the interracial thing, not having to be around those boys. I mean boys, period, and then especially the black boys and stuff. Because you want to not have that interracial thing, and so it was almost something that was forbidden. At school we kind of associated a little bit but not a lot. That’s why I was saying about going to the reunion, is that I didn’t socialize with those kids when we went. It was kind of like—shh. Standoffish-type of a thing when you got on the one-on-one. But as long as we was sitting in the classroom, it was okay. But outside of the classroom, it was a different thing.</p>
<p>I remember going to a parade downtown and the girls that were on the float was throwing candy. And all of us kids from school, we’re all just standing out there and we are running and grabbing candy. Some candy fell on my feet, and me being the dummy, I said, ooh, look! And when I did that the kid that was standing next to me jumped down and picked it up. And I’m like, well, hey that’s my candy! And he said, no, I picked it up. It’s mine. But they gave me half of it. That made the connection with us kids to be closer, even though I’m sure at their homes, their parents probably told them something that was completely different.</p>
<p>My mom told me, she said, don’t bring them to my house if you can’t go to their house. And she was talking about girls. Not no boys—girls, Caucasian girls. She said, do not bring them here if you can’t go there. She was instilling in me a racist-type scenario, because I knew I couldn’t go to their house and so I didn’t bring them to my house.</p>
<p>Let me tell you the story. I remember we had went to a teenage club, was called Avery’s. And there was a couple girls that would come over on the east side and go to the club. One was Ginger Frohlich and this other girl, her parents—what was her name? Anyway, it was this other girl. And we were just friends, we weren’t dating or none of that kind of stuff. I had a car. And this one girl, she asks me, she said, let me drive your car. We’re in high school and I’m about 17 years old and I’m like, okay. We were driving the car and I remember we went down on Oregon Street and when we got down to the corner of A Street and turned on A Street, we were getting ready to go to her house. And the police the police was coming up the street.</p>
<p>She had her lights on bright because you flicked the lights before you dim them, that’s when the dimmer switch was on the floor. And I told her, I said, dim your lights. And she said, what? I said, dim your lights. So she stepped on the dimmer switch, the police makes a U-turn, and he comes and he pulls us over. He asks for a driver’s license, she showed it to him and stuff. She had just turned 18. I was still 17. His question was to her, what are you doing over here? Because it was on the east side. And she says, well, I was over here at the teenage club and I was on my way going home. He says, okay, you get there right now. And this is in Pasco, okay, and I’m going to follow you home to make sure that you get there.</p>
<p>We’re driving on and she was living on 14<sup>th</sup>. Janet Khan, her dad owned Khan Construction. When we crossed Sylvester Street, they lived in a duplex right down the street, a duplex. When we got to the house, their parents were standing out in the yard with their bathrobe on. Meanwhile she says, just before we got to her house, she says, where do you guys want me to drop you guys off at? And I said, what do you mean, drop us off? Because you’re driving my car. You’re not dropping me off nowhere. She said, oh my god, what am I going to do? We pull up in front of the house and meanwhile the police gets out and their parents is walking over.</p>
<p>They had called to the dispatch, the dispatch had called their parents and—okay. They didn’t read her the riot act or none of that when I was there, because once she got out of the car I just slid over in the driver’s seat and it just pulled on off and went on. But then that made me realize that she didn’t want her parents to know that she had been over there on the east side, socializing with us black kids. That just kind of put a wedge between the camaraderie that we had. At school we could be one way, but then when we wasn’t at school in the private sector, then it was a completely different story. And it was kind of a bad thing but, hey, it is what it is.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever have any relationships with any Caucasian girls, growing up?</p>
<p>Johnson: Oh yeah. After I got older.</p>
<p>Franklin: After you got older.</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, after I got older, I did. I had a relationship with a Caucasian girl, matter of fact, she’s an attorney now. But I didn’t have many. Matter of fact, I didn’t have many relationships with girls, period. Because my mom, she made me stay at home. So I was in my 30s before I had a relationship with a Caucasian girl. But my mom she always made sure that I was at home, working and doing stuff like that.</p>
<p>Something that was kind of like—I want to interject it, that I hadn’t even thought of—she had (?) because we used to go swimming a lot in the summertime and that was to keep us active and doing stuff, and basically not getting into trouble or doing stuff that the other kids may do. We’re at the swimming pool, your parents know where you’re at, they don’t have to worry about nobody kidnapping you, or doing nothing to you, and then my mom would come and pick us up.</p>
<p>I often wondered, after I got in my 50s—my mom would take us to the Pasco Carnegie Library. And we would go over there, and we would read books, and we joined the book club. A few years ago, I was at the Pasco City Hall and they have the showcase with memorabilia and different stuff in it, and I’ve seen this paper that was in there. It was on the celebration of x amount of years the Carnegie Library had been there. But when I started reading it, and it was saying that a library book club that they had back in 1957 or somewhere in there, and then it started naming off all these kids that had participated and completed. I saw my sister’s name and it said Elaine Gix, because I told you that we were going under Gix name. And when I saw that, I said, well, my name got to be in there. When I read down, got almost to the bottom of it, there my name was. I was so excited until I started yelling, there’s my name! And this guy walks up and says, where? I’m like, right there, that’s me, that’s me! Because I had completed that.</p>
<p>The point that I’m going to make with that, the parallel of this is, that every day my mom would take us to the library. Of course, we didn’t want to go to the library; we wanted to go and play. And back in those early days, man, I’m talking about hot. See, there wasn’t all these trees around here to absorb and put off oxygen for it to be cool. It was like a 108, 110, 116. I mean, there was days when it was 120. It was hot. My mom would always say, you can’t go outside and play because you’ll get sun stroke. So she would take us to the pool. And then she would take us the library. You know what, I was in my 50s, if not in my 60s when I realized why she took us to the library. It was so they had air condition. We didn’t have to be out there in the sun. So the days that we didn’t go to the pool, we went to the library. At our house, we didn’t have no air condition. Until up in the latter years and we got an old swap cooler and it was so humid. Then she would be there to try to cook and stuff and she would come and pick us up at 5:00 in the evening and bring us home so that we could eat. When I thought about it just a few minutes ago, the things that they did to ensure that we had a good simple life, that you don’t even think about. And you know what, it was just amazing that I even thought about that.</p>
<p>It was really good to be a kid, being brought up then. I learned how to be visual at that age because I never got a book that was all words. I always got a book that had pictures. I could look at a picture, and a picture’s worth a thousand words. After you completed reading a book, you had to go and give an oral report to the librarian of what you read. She would take the book, and she would be thumbing through it. Man, I could be so precise about what I read in the book, but I absorbed part of the writing of what I read, but it was the pictures that told the story. Because I’d always get a book that had pictures in it. It told the whole story for me.</p>
<p>That was why I was so amazed when I saw my name, because then it reflected back is that, how I made it through that. And you had to read a total of maybe 20 books within a month’s period of time. That was a lot of reading. Now, my sister, she could read so fast until the teacher would tell her, slow down. Because, boy, it was just like—prrrrrr.</p>
<p>Franklin: I loved doing the reading club when I was a kid, too. It wasn’t because of the AC, but, yeah, my mom would us out of trouble. Go down to the library and do the summer reading program.</p>
<p>Johnson: It was basically the same. Keep us out of trouble, and to me, it was the air conditioning because we didn’t have no air condition. And I’m a lot older than you, so you probably had AC in your house and all of that, so it was just to read. I’m sure that had something to do with it because they were trying to figure out how they was going to make it so that it would be easier on us. Because she would always say, I don’t want you to go through what I went through. You need to learn how to do this, this and that. And for my sister, it was like, you need to get an education. But me, son, you need to get out there and do this. Son, you need to get out there. She made sure that I had to be manual.</p>
<p>Franklin: It was still important, though, for her to—going to the library was an experience that she wouldn’t have had as a kid. So, practical reasons but also important—yeah.</p>
<p>Johnson: Exactly. It’s just like going to school to be a welder or a plumber, everybody is not able to go to CBC or to a college and get a master’s degree. But I mastered my skill. I have mastered being a cosmetologist. I know the theory of it, I have years of hands-on, I am a master at what I do. When I went to school, I could show my instructor stuff that they would just sit there in amazement and like, wow, how did you learn that? A lot of stuff, I created myself, like doing finger waves and stuff like that. And I still do them, and good at them. I could show you some pictures on my cell phone.</p>
<p>Anyway, it was just, impacted my life so much of the little simple things that had happened growing up as a kid that I really didn’t think about until after I got to be older, to see the things that my parents had to go through in order to make sure that I was able to take care of myself. I think that was the whole idea. And my mom could look at me and say in her mind, he’s not going to be the one that goes to college and gets no degree. If he can just learn how to do something to where he can take care of himself and put food on the table and put clothes on your backs—that’s all they were really looking for then because everything was simple. It wasn’t like living in a $300,000 house when you could live in a $20,000 house and be perfectly comfortable. Because in a $300,000 house, all you got is just more bills, you know? And you got a certain level of expectation that goes along with it. You got to keep it in a certain condition and all of that. There’s only three things you’re going to do in any house, I don’t care how big or how small: eat, sleep, use the bathroom. You can do that in a cardboard box. [LAUGHTER] Seriously.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. So I wanted to ask—since your mom, for a small time, worked out at Hanford, and your stepfather worked at Hanford, I wanted to ask, what was your reaction, or what do you know about your parents’ reaction to learning that they had kind of worked at a site that was crucial to the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Johnson: That was something that was never discussed. Matter of fact, I don’t know whether they even really realized what Hanford was doing, when they were doing plutonium and all of that—because I had heard that they had built the mechanism for the atomic bomb and all this different kind of stuff—that they really realized what they were doing when they were working there. Because I heard just recently when they came and that a lot of guys, black people were doing the cement work and stuff for these reactors and all of that, and they was going down there and digging holes and doing different stuff and they wasn’t told what detriment that that was having on their body. And, hey, later in 30 or 40 years you’re going to have cancer. They wasn’t told that, even though the government knew it. But it was like, hey, we got to get this work done, we got to have somebody down here to do it. So, who are we going to get to do it? And that’s just the way that it was. I don’t think that it was something that was discussed; it was just a job. You didn’t really realize what you were doing.</p>
<p>One of the things that really upset me with this Hanford thing is, because I know of a lot of people, black people that ended up with cancer. Man, it took them forever to get any money out of that, when the Caucasian people had been getting paid all the time. And you go to the doctor and then you’d send all your research papers and stuff back, and then they’d say, well, you need this, or you don’t quite have all that together. And it was years, and years, and years, because there was no awareness there. There was no person that was really reaching out from Hanford to make you aware of the moneys and the stuff that they had out there for you to receive.</p>
<p>A lot of times, I think people was already dead. And then they family members or somebody didn’t tell you, hey, your dad died and he died from cancer; you probably need to get into contact with them out there to see if there’s any moneys that you are due because of his death from working in that. It took them 20, 30, 40 years. I know John Mitchell, he just got his money and he was in that plutonium incident that they had out there. Before he died—I think he’s been dead maybe five or six years or something like that. And he just got paid. And he was in it back in the ‘50s. It’s like totally ridiculous. To me, I don’t know if you want to put it on say, being racist, but why are we so uninformed as black people about the benefits and the conditions of where you at? Why are you putting me in harm’s way? It just—pfff—it kind of just blows my mind.</p>
<p>Another thing I want to touch on, I had brought a couple of things that I had did. They were just like this one right here. I was one of the persons that—and I’m going to let you read it—that help formulate and start it—I was the first Acting Secretary of East Pasco Better Development Association. I did an interview with a reporter. As you read down, Aubrey Johnson said, blah, blah, blah, blah as we went all the way down, okay? And it just behooved me that when they came out that weekend and we were out doing the cleanup, is that they took a picture of the Caucasian person, which was the president, to show that we were out there. Why didn’t you take a picture of all of us out there cleaning up? You understand what I’m saying? And to me it’s like, we want to put the captain at the helm, and to show it. When I mentioned it to him, he said the same thing to Dennis. He says, I don’t know why they put my picture on there, why they didn’t put everybody’s picture on there that was out there doing the cleanup. And it takes the emphasis off, in my mind, of what it was all about. And it goes on, well, Aubrey Johnson said, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he was a person that helped start this thing and yadda yadda--</p>
<p>Franklin: They also misspelled your name, is it A-U-B?</p>
<p>Johnson: A-U-B-R-E-Y.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, they also misspelled your name.</p>
<p>Johnson: [LAUGHTER] Like my daughter told me, she said, Dad you get no credit. And I’m like, yeah, honey I understand how that is.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, they spelled it A-B-R-E-Y. I almost missed it for a second, because I was like--</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, who is that. And they misspelled it and they mispronounced it. And I don’t know why it was, always when I was growing up, I heard them say, well, what’s your name? I’d say, Aubrey. And they would say, well, do you have a short name for that? I’d say, yeah. Aubrey. Well, they’d say Ay-brey. I’m like, what it is about your hearing that you can’t hear Aubrey coming out of my mouth, where you’re trying to make my name be everything else except for Aubrey?</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s not really an uncommon name.</p>
<p>Johnson: It’s not.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re not the first Aubrey I’ve ever met.</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, and it’s a Southern name, Aubrey. Yeah. So, I don’t understand why people--</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Johnson: Would you repeat that?</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford? You mentioned a bit that you knew that they had built some of the reactors and poured the concrete. I’m just wondering, were you ever interested in learning or did you ever take it upon yourself to learn about the contributions of African Americans at Hanford?</p>
<p>Johnson: I know a lot of them were scientists, because I have a some of my friends that are scientists that work out there for Hanford, engineers and stuff like that. But I never really talked about them—I have a nephew that works out there and he says, well, I work on the Star Wars project. It’s stuff that they do that they don’t talk about, you know what I’m saying. It’s kind of held in secrecy, so you don’t get chance to really ask a whole lot of questions about a whole lot of things that they do. Other than doing the manual part of, oh, I run the copy machine, I work for the Federal Building, I do this and I do that. It’s just menial things. But as far as them being able to tell you exactly what they did, a lot of it was held in secrecy, and so they couldn’t tell you.</p>
<p>Not only that, I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in it, so I didn’t ask them a whole of questions about it. It’s like, even today, the only thing that I’m glad of is that I didn’t go out there to work. Because I’m telling you man, I see a lot of my friends with cancer that’s all of a sudden. And I mean young guys! Some of them are younger than me, and women, cancer, And where are they getting it from? They got it from out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Johnson: It brought a lot of work here to the area, it opened up the doors so that pretty much anybody could get a type of job. Even though you started off at the bottom as being a custodian, and kind of like, if you stayed there long enough you might be able to work your way up to a management part of it. If you was—a lot of the black people that’s here that’s in scientist and managers and stuff like that, mostly came from other areas, Savannah River, different places like that to come out and fulfill the needs of the scientists and stuff like that. But there wasn’t homegrown to go out there and work. So it’s like the basic person, if you get to be a manager or you got a BA degree and you could go to work, you might make it up to be a manager. But if you don’t have an interest in scientist, or if you’re not in drafting, or engineering, you’re just a basic hands-on scheduler or whatever, it pays good money and it gives you the chance to have a better living condition, better home, more money to spend for yourself and for your kids.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the major civil right issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cites?</p>
<p>Johnson: Civil rights. Civil rights in Pasco was—I remember one time we had a march over in east Pasco. And we marched all the way downtown. I think it was in the latter part of the—no, it had to be in the—see, I was working for Franklin County Road Department, started work there in ’66. So it had to be probably about ’68, somewhere right in there. I think if you research it you’ll find that someone set a tree on fire up there at Volunteer Park. But we had a march from east Pasco and someone had set a cross over there at Whittier School and set it on fire. And we marched all the way downtown, and we was chanting, We Will Overcome the conditions that they had. And it was basically an outcry for the whole United States of America, because it was from the South. Some of the same conditions that they had in the South depriving you of the economics, the fair housing, all of that was things of concern.</p>
<p>When they did that east Pasco—not east Pasco development, but the co-op, and the reclaiming that area and they built the housing project. Oh my, I’m getting lost here in my thought because there is a point that I want to make, is that, my thought is just gone on that one right there, because there was a point that I wanted to make about that and it was during that period of time. Oh, I know what it was, is that, when they came in and bought your houses, they gave you a little bit of money—so what they did, my mom had a little house, a little shot gun house that my mom had bid on. They gave her x amount of dollars for the house, but we kept the land. And so what we did, we built another house which is the one that is there now.</p>
<p>The contractors that they had to do it, as far as I’m concerned, they didn’t have no inspectors or they just didn’t care. Because the houses that they built was half-built, it wasn’t built right. They guy that puts in the patio door is either put in backwards, because the screen should be on the outside not on the inside. That door should’ve been over here. But you wouldn’t walk in from this end because you’re up against a dead wall. So they put it in anyway. Or like the dishwasher, they put it in and there was nothing for it to bolt to except for the little edge that was about a quarter strip wide and they put two screws to hold that in there and what is the vibration going to do? Tear it up. So my mom never did use it. She’d wash dishes in the sink. Because it busted that. And I was like, Mom, they’re not doing that right. Now, son you’re just—just leave that alone now. They know what they doing.</p>
<p>Since she was from the South, never having a voice, she didn’t want to really complain a whole lot about the construction of the house. But I didn’t live there, and I’m looking at it being done. And I’m like, Mom, they’re not doing this right. I’m not a carpenter, but I mean some stuff you can just see. It’s like, in our hallway, if you put a sheet of ply-board, you don’t carry it into the living room and then cut it. You could look up there and you’ll see this long piece of ply-board go across like this and back, sheetrock. Then there’s an edge where that protruded—that should’ve been cut off flush at the wall and then the next sheet of ply-board going all the way across it, or sheetrock. Why they did that and how they could get away with it, I don’t know.</p>
<p>I went to put a ceiling fan in in the kitchen. Well, you know what? When I went to screw the screws in, there was nothing to screw them into. Because it had to be a hole this big and the light fixture sit over here on the side, and all that was over there was like tape and they had puttied over it. When I went to put in the screws, it just went straight through into nothing, no sheetrock. It is like, the ceiling fan is there, but you can only use the light. Because if you turn it on, it does like this.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh my gosh.</p>
<p>Johnson: I didn’t take it down; I just left it, but I don’t use it. Stuff like that it. It just half-done. And the inspectors for the city allowed it to happen, because they didn’t go behind them and check what they was doing. I think that they gave the bids to all these private contractors to do stuff looking for the federal government to ensure that it’s being done right. But the city government is contracting it out and then Bob Smart, he built all those houses over there and they was all done wrong.</p>
<p>There was one house, I heard, that got burnt down because they wasn’t doing it right and so they had to go back in and redo it. They burned it down during the era of the black movement, with the Black Panthers and stuff. To make them redo it. Stuff like that, it just irritated me to no end. And as I got to be an adult, and I’d go down and I would look, and I would say stuff to my mom. And she would say, you know, son, just leave that alone. I don’t want to make waves with.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there a local Black Panther organization here?</p>
<p>Johnson: They came from Seattle.</p>
<p>Franklin: They came from Seattle. How long—did they come and set up shop for a while or would they just come over from--</p>
<p>Johnson: They would just come over. They came down and recruited a few people from the Tri-Cities area that was interested in getting involved. But there was no big movement over here. It was kind of like a hush-hush-type situation. Because if you can’t get a big movement of people involved and you only got maybe ten people involved in the Black Panther, then you really don’t have no Black Panthers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were they welcome in the community?</p>
<p>Johnson: Well, yeah, of course. Because, see, Black Panthers—people look at it like, the first word associated with it is black. It makes you think that it’s something that’s bad. But they wasn’t, they wasn’t bad people, they were trying to get equality. Where you could see something was indifferent or something that wasn’t being done right, they would voice their opinion about it. Because we were so held back from our views, as soon as you had a peaceful organization trying to get something done, all of a sudden the government would paint it as bad organization. And it would make everybody think that these people are really bad. The name of Black Panther, they associated with Huey Newton down in San Francisco. What they were trying to do is to help the people rise above the poverty level. They was distributing food, they were doing medication, they were doing doctors and all that. But how did they paint the picture? They painted the picture like it was a bad organization of people. But then once they got to be so big and then when the government come in and tried to remove you through force, hey, there was a person that you had to reckon with, because they fought back. That’s what they don’t want. They don’t want you to fight back. They want you to do everything in a peaceful manner, but they are the ones with the guns that come near you.</p>
<p>In Philadelphia, when they burned that, blowed up that whole city block of people just to try to get a few people. That’s the government that is doing that. That’s why I say, there is no win because they got the Air Force, the Army, the National Guard and the Marines. How are you going to win? There is none. So we have to learn how to sit down and discuss it, just like we’re doing, and figure what it is that we can do to get rid of it.</p>
<p>I had a friend of mine who said, well, hey, man, why don’t you get involved in the politics or different stuff so that you have a voice? I was like, man, I ain’t interested in that. I was young, and I ain’t interested in that. Don’t nobody want to listen to me. It’s just like, oh, he’s just babbling on, he’s just a radical. If you say how you feel about something in one way, or you show your indifference about the way that things are done, it’s like, if it’s not somebody else’s idea, if you ain’t going along with them, then they don’t want to hear it.</p>
<p>The Black Panthers, if it had been enough young people that was involved and organized, I think we could’ve gotten a lot better situations here during the ‘60s. And if we had had a voice or some educated people here, we wouldn’t have gotten taken advantage of, of our properties and stuff that we had, we would’ve got the top dollar for it.</p>
<p>Just like, right across the street from where I live, they took some of those same houses that they had to move—they either tore them down or you had to move them. There were some people that had a little bit of money, they bought some of them old houses and moved them over across the other side of the fence and set them up and then lived in them or rented them out. So if they was good enough for you to move them over there and live in, why they wasn’t good enough for them to be over here? But they wanted that industrial area, because they have that corridor all the way to the river, and they got it. They just redefined and reclaimed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What about the NAACP? Was there a functioning NAACP here?</p>
<p>Johnson: There’s not a functioning NAACP now. With Dallas Barnes and Joe Jackson, and his brother, Webster, and I, and a few people, we talk about it all the time trying to get people recommitted and let’s getting that started again. But it’s really hard to, because young people don’t see the struggles that the older people, such as myself, went through to have equal opportunities and stuff like that. There’s no safeguards that we have. The young people don’t see it, so they don’t really understand it and the old people are dying out. So there’s no one to carry that on.</p>
<p>When I was in California, I was involved with the NAACP, and my girlfriend and I and stuff. And so there was like job opportunities. There was a Safeway store that people had complained about putting the applications, they didn’t get a job or stuff like that. We had some Caucasian people that was affiliated with us, so we had them to do is some of the black people had put in the application and then we had some of the Caucasian people went down and put in the application. Weeks later, the Caucasian people got hired, but the black people didn’t. So now we got something that’s valid, you understand. So what we did is we boycotted that store. The black people in the community just didn’t go down there and spend no money. We was out there marching with our signs and it was hurting they business so bad until they were like, wow, okay. We’re going to hire three people to work in the butcher shop or blah, blah, blah, blah. So it ended up getting some black people jobs.</p>
<p>The NAACP was really good for, as far as I was concerned, job discrimination in various forms, or a lot of times with your employer. The only thing that I saw that was negative to me about the NAACP is that if it didn’t go national, it was really hard to get something done on the local level. To me, that was a negative thing, because you know what? A small concern of yours is worth all the weight in gold to you, but to them, it’s not a big issue. And I don’t feel that you’re being represented the way that you should. When you have to take your concerns to the national level and then they got to view it and see if it’s something that they want to get involved in, to see if they want to help you with that situation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I wanted to ask, so you talked about local issues, what actions were being taken in the ‘60s and later to address the local civil rights issues?</p>
<p>Johnson: We had meetings at a few churches, where some of our black leaders would come together and we would discuss, trying to take a group of people, our church leaders and stuff—like I say, Boise Cascade, and they wasn’t having fair practices as far as hiring and stuff. Voice your issues with them as far as trying to get black people hired out there. The thing was, now you got to go through the employment office to be able to get hired. But now, if you have Caucasian people that’s running the establishment—and I think it was Floyd and Jerry Frasier was working there—you can’t hire black people just because you’re black. See, it was just like when they voted in president Obama. The black people had the illusion that, hey, we got a black president, man, we are going to rise above, he going to be able to do this and that. But the bureaucracy—because he got to get with the Congress, with the Senate, the House of Representatives, and everybody is so bent on trying to keep you from doing as much as you can until you really don’t get the chance to do the things that you could. The black people are now saying, here a few years ago, well, he did nothing for us. Well, it wasn’t so that he did it for us; he did it for everybody. He made it so that no child should be left behind. You have the opportunity, if you could keep a C grade level, then you would be able to go to school, go to college, and you won’t have to pay for it. They’re looking at getting a piece of the rock in their hand just for themselves, but they’re not looking at the big picture. The big picture is that you got to do it for the mass. It’s like asking the question, what did Martin Luther King do? He did it for everybody so they have equality, instead of just for the black people; he did it for everybody. That was the thing here and with our black leaders, the few that we had, was trying to see that we had the opportunity to get good jobs.</p>
<p>When they was profiling, you’d go in and you’d have to put down there, the first thing when you put in the application, are you Indian, Native American, Island Indian, they have all these different, black, blah, blah, blah, blah. How do I know that when you see that I’m a black application, you take it over here and drop it in the garbage can or run it through the shredder? The economical thing, it said that you got to hire so many black people on this job in order to fit a quota. So in that period of time, it made it so that you may have 100 Caucasian people working, but you got to have at least ten blacks. That’s 10%. So you have a quota that you have to meet. How do we know that quota is being met? We don’t know. Until you go out and see how many people’s been hired since that point. But now you had 100 people to put in an application, why wasn’t there more? We all put in application for the same job. It should be first come, first serve. Especially for menial work like being a janitor. It’s like, how many janitors did you have, how many people did you have running the Xerox machine? So you kind of had to have somebody to oversee what they were doing, and those were the groups of people that were doing that in order to make it so that it wasn’t being profiled in that way. Because it was very negative.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were some of the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Johnson: Reverend Bill Wilkins; Magee, and I can’t remember what his first name was; Art Fletcher; Tom Jackson, that was Joe Jackson’s dad; Franklin D. Noah, he was an educated man and he was very boisterous, went to city council and different stuff like that. It was even on a smaller level that we had a few people that was, could kind of help out with that civil rights movement. James Pruitt, he was very instrumental. He was a liaison between the police department and the community. Reverend F. A. Allen, he was a pastor at Morning Star, and I know he was one of the spokespersons for some of us as black people. And I’m sure there are some others, I’d have to really think, from the top of my head I don’t remember if C.J. Mitchell was affiliated with it, but I’m sure that he was with the movement.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the notable successes of the movement?</p>
<p>Johnson: Well, the successes was Kurtzman Park, the job opportunities that we had. Housing, it opened up the doors so that we could buy houses in Kennewick. Which I know you done heard about they didn’t want any black people there anyway. So it kind of opened up that door. I won’t say a whole lot for Richland. I remember when it was just a few people, C.J. Mitchell, the Browns and the Rockamores, when they first bought houses out here in Richland. That movement, that era, opened up the door for us to move up and have a better way of living and better housing and something for our kids to be able to not go through, that’s already been set in place for you.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges? Or failures, or kind of things that weren’t solved? Maybe things we’re still struggling with.</p>
<p>Johnson: You know what? Since I’m not really in the workforce, I don’t know if it’s the work, but I’m sure that a lot of working conditions at Hanford in particular, is like, I know of several people and this is what I was told, they say, well, we’re going to phase out your job. But I want you to train so-and-so and so-and-so how to do it. So now you actually are losing your job, but you’re training somebody else to do your job. Why would they need you to train somebody else to do what you’re doing—and this is a black person now—and you’re going to give the job to somebody else? What you do is you change the title of the job and then you give it to somebody else, of course you’re doing the same thing. You can say that you phased it out, and now you have to go somewhere else and look for a job. I heard that in several instances from different people that was working out here in the Hanford Area. That’s what they did.</p>
<p>The thing that really got me is, with one person it was like almost at the point of retirement, and all of a sudden it’s like, we are going to phase what you’re doing out. If you don’t have the amount of years that it take you to be able to get your full retirement, you got to figure out something else in order to be able to get it. And you got to work back for the government. If there is no government job for you to do, you just kind of, your dream of being able to sit down and do nothing, you end up having to go back to work somewhere else. I’ve seen a few people that do that. I’m like, I don’t understand it you worked out there for all those years to retire, and now you got to go and work somewhere else? Something is wrong with that picture.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Do you have any memories of—you would have been very young, but I wonder if you heard about the Hazel Scott case in 1950.</p>
<p>Johnson: I heard about it, as a matter of fact I read about it. When she came, she came to the bus station in Pasco and she tried to eat at the lunch counter. And they refused to let her sit at the lunch counter and eat. She complained about it. I believe that I read in the history that she was married to a Caucasian person. You can probably google that because I had time when I was like, just a couple, two or three months ago, I was telling somebody about it. [PHONE RINGTONE] That’s my girlfriend.</p>
<p>Franklin: She’s like, where are you?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, are you done yet?, is more likely.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you get abducted by these guys or something?</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah. But that was something that my mom had told me about, her being there and stuff. Because what really got me is, I always wanted to eat at that lunch counter when I was a kid. We would go to the bus station and I would go downtown and get papers from the Tri-City Herald. I’d get ten papers and we got a nickel a piece for selling them. 50 cent was a lot of money for us little kids. And we would go to various places to try to sell these newspapers. I’d go by the bus station and I’d see that big lunch counter in there and stuff. When you go in, there was never no black people in there, there was always Caucasians, and they’d always turn and looked at you. And not only that, even at Woolworth’s, it was the same way. When you went in there to sit down at that lunch counter, the Caucasian people that was in there, they wasn’t used to seeing blacks sitting next to them, eating. So they’d turn and look at you and it made you feel somewhat indifferent to where you’re, hey I’m not going back there anymore. So it was kind of a—[PHONE RINGTONE] Would you please quit? [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Johnson: Not really involved, but I participated in the march that they had. That was about as much as I could do, or making people aware, or talking with the black people that was my age and giving them my view about stuff that we need to be trying to do to change ourselves. That was my thing, was trying to keep people motivated, and telling them the things that I think. See, because me, since I wasn’t being raised racist, when I hear somebody saying something that’s racist, then I would try to show them the difference. You don’t need to do that, well, why don’t you do this, do that. Then they’ll make it even better, because now it’s, like a friend told me, if you can educate one person on how not to be racist, he’ll change 100 people. Because he’ll go back and say, hey.</p>
<p>Have you ever heard this before? A Caucasian guy walks over to a black guy and he gets annoying—and I’ve had this happen, I’m going to give you a scenario.</p>
<p>A friend of mine and I, we went over to the Cowboy Club over on Kennewick Avenue, over in Kennewick, that’s what it was named at the time, I don’t know what it’s named now, because that’s when I used to go to the tavern. Since I was kind of a western-type dude, I used to ride horses and all of that, I had boots on, my hat, my duster and all my gear; my buddy Johnny Mock, he had on his stuff. We went in and we sat down and the bartender came over and gave us a beer. Everybody was looking at us like what are they doing in here. We sat there drinking our beer and stuff. So pretty soon one Caucasian dude, he got up and walked over and says, hey, how you doing? Well, pretty good, how you? My name is Bill. What’s yours? My name is Aubrey. He extended his hand; I shook his hand. Then he just made this little trivia talk. And I told the bartender, I said, hey, give Bill a beer. Man, let me tell you something, when that conversation ended we was best of buddies. You know what he did? He went back and told his buddies, he all right. Next time we went over there, people didn’t look at us the way that they had looked at us the first time we were there. Because they were afraid of the unknown, but because he got educated just that quick, you understand, and he’s like, man, they’re all right.</p>
<p>I hear Caucasian people say all the time, man, you’re different than the other people. And I say to them, what other people do you know? Because you’re trying to make it different, but what you’re doing, you’re stereotyping off of something you seen on TV or something that you heard. Because evidently you haven’t interact with enough black people to be able to see what their views is, to see how they feel about the situation. And we all feel, and pretty much bleed the same. We all want the same thing. It’s just that you got it and I want it. That’s the only difference there is. But once you get to know me, you’ll say he’s really a nice guy, he’s not as radical as I thought that he was. But I can be. Yeah, I can be. If you’re doing something to me, brother, you better believe I’m going to put it on you as best I can. But because you don’t see that side.</p>
<p>When my friends, when I would hear them saying stuff that was negative or that it was going to be detrimental to them, I’d say, no, you don’t want to do that. This is the way to do it and then you don’t have to deal with that problem. And then it’s like, whoa. That was kind of my thing, as far as the black movement is concerned, is educating your friends that’s around you to emulate what you’re doing. Don’t do what’s expected of you; do something that is totally different, and then you catch everybody off guard. And then they’ll say, wow, he is different than what I thought. I didn’t realize people was like that. And I get that all the time from people. I’m very outspoken about whatever it is. If you don’t want to hear it, don’t ask me. If you don’t want to hear the truth, don’t ask me. Because I’m going to tell you just like it is.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts here in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Johnson: It made us aware, because we were looking on the media down South and in Detroit, Chicago, Michigan, and New York. We got a chance to hear a lot about Malcom X, Andrew Young, Abernathy, Revered Martin Luther King, and all the things that they were doing trying to get equality, in all the places. Even though there had been black people in New York area since back in the 1800s that was prosperous, when they redefined the area, when they first came in I think it was 98th or 99th Street, somewhere in there, they came in and they tore all that out in order to be able to build the high rises and all of this and that. The black people was musicians, you had your doctors and your lawyers—and I didn’t know that back then until I started doing a little research on it—to see that we was well-represented back then.</p>
<p>When I started looking at the movement, I started seeing the movement in the South. Then I looked at the same movement that was happening, that was in New York, up in that part of the area in the North. The difference was, Martin Luther King was preaching peace; the Black Panthers was, if you do it to me, I’m going to do it back to you. That was the difference. The Black Panthers wasn’t willing to take the head beating, the dog biting, the water hoses and all the rest of what the people in the South had tried to endure through a peaceful movement. That was the difference that really impacted me, because I had two views to look at: a peaceful view, and a positive-negative view. Out of the positive-negative, don’t allow it to happen to you, then it won’t happen. But if you allow it, it becomes a condition. Such as my telling you about the guy calling me Smokey, my supervisor. If I hadn’t been so feared of my job, I could’ve stopped that the first day that he did that. Then he either had to let me go or he wouldn’t’ve did it no more. It’s like looking at the positive out of it and so it’s a positive-negative situation.</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective and experience what was different about civil rights efforts here, compared to the national effort?</p>
<p>Johnson: We didn’t have a big enough movement here; we didn’t have enough people involved. We had too many older people that was afraid. They brought the South here with them. Don’t make waves, just go along with the program, go along to get along. Then the younger people had more of a radical view, and I among them, that is I’m not going to let it happen to me. That was up into the ‘60s, I started feeling like that as far as getting beat up and that type of a thing, is like, that’s not going to happen to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did it ever happen to you?</p>
<p>Johnson: No, sir. No, I never did get beat up, none of that, I never was in no fights, I never was in no fights at school. I kind of missed all of that. Most of the kids didn’t mess with me because I was pretty big. I mean I was skinny and tall, but I was pretty big. I think I got into one fight in junior high school and man, after that was over with--</p>
<p>Franklin: What were your experiences like—did you ever go over to Kennewick, because I’ve heard a lot about—I guess what I want to ask specifically about is sundown laws and the sign. I wanted to ask you if you ever had any experiences with that.</p>
<p>Johnson: I never saw the sign. I heard about the sign. The only time that I went to Kennewick, I can really give you some views on that, because I can remember as a little kid my mom took us over to the Roxy Theater that was over there. That was in the daytime, at a matinee, and then we were out of there. I didn’t know nothing about no out-of-there-before-dark.</p>
<p>But I can remember in probably about, let’s see, I was in high school, junior high school, probably about ’60, somewhere in there, you still couldn’t live there. It was a Caucasian lady and I can’t remember what she had did, but she had to go to prison, and she had a black lady, name was Martha Walker, I believe, that worked for her. She gave her her house and I can remember it was next to Colers’ grape field. Because I can remember we were going to the grape field—you know what, it might’ve been even in the ‘50s that that happened—they burnt that house down so that no black people could live over there.</p>
<p>I can remember, my sister was married to a guy named Dave Dumas and he was—we went over to the dojo that they had over on Kennewick Avenue, which is a karate practice. And when the karate practice was over, we were driving back out of Kennewick, and we were in a Volkswagen and the police pulled in behind us. I told Dumas, I said, man, the police is behind us and he said, yeah, I know. I said, well, make sure you don’t be speeding because you don’t want to get no ticket over here. We were coming out of the highlands, going down and we were going to go down and go on over the overpass and come back into Pasco. We got right to the top of that hill where that church is. The police put his light on us and pulled us over. He comes up and asks for his driver’s license, he shows it to him and he looks all in the car. My sister was sitting in the back and I was sitting in there and him. He asked him, he said, what are you pulling me over for? He said because you was driving too slow. And he says the only reason I was driving under the speed limit is because I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t speeding so you wouldn’t give me no ticket. The officer said, well, what are you doing over here? And he says, well, I just came from karate practice. He says, well, I’m going to tell you something, don’t let me catch you over here no more. And he turned around walked back to his car and we got out of Kennewick.</p>
<p>The only time that I can remember going over to Kennewick other than that, we went to the Highland Theater Drive In. And you know where that was, as soon as you get up there, right there on Clearwater, across from Vista. And man, we would go to that theater and then we were out of there. We would go to Sander’s Field was where we had baseball games and when we got through doing baseball, we were out of there. But it wasn’t like, go over there and hang around. Something that I reiterate, you didn’t live over there, so there was no reason to be over there. It wasn’t like, hey, I’m going to go over here and just joy around over here in Kennewick at nighttime. But it was that I found that the police didn’t even want you over there in the daytime.</p>
<p>Even since back then, I’ve been pulled over in Kennewick, and get a negative attitude out of the police. Because when he pulls me over the first thing I say when he walks up to the car is, what’s the problem, officer? Do you have your driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance? I’m like, I do. And I get it and I give it to him. And I want to know, again, what is the problem? Well, I noticed that your taillight is out or you didn’t give a turn signal; it’s always some negative misdemeanor crap. And I’m like, okay, well, let me check it and see. I flip on the turn signal and the turn signal is working, the brake light is working. There’s really no reason for him to pull me over than just to see who I am and get my information, so in the event that he see me over again, he knows who I am. Because he really don’t have no reason for stopping me and then let me go. I’ve had that happen right here in Pasco, not only in Kennewick. But in Kennewick I was just, as a kid and as a young adult, I knew, as they say, your place, and I knew it was not in Kennewick because I had no reason to be over there. I stayed out of there because I didn’t want to have no problem with the police, period.</p>
<p>Franklin: Makes sense.</p>
<p>Johnson: Yeah, because the police is the higher authority. And whenever he says something, that’s what it is. A friend of mine and I had been out in Richland one night. This is in the late ‘70s and he had this beautiful black Cadillac, four-door Brougham, with the gangster white walls and all of that and we were coming out of Richland. And I told him, Columbia Center Boulevard, that overpass, I told him, I said, make sure you’re not speeding because the police always sits up under here and you won’t see his car until you’re right up on him. Because it sits in a shadow. He said to me Aubrey Lee, I’m not speeding. I looked over the speedometer and he’s going 60 miles an hour. Sure enough, State Patrol. The State Patrol gets behind us. He didn’t pull us over; he just followed us. When we got about halfway of the distance between the bridge and that overpass there, at Columbia Center Boulevard, because it wasn’t Ely, because it wasn’t built then, he put his light on. My buddy Charles said, man, I don’t know why he turned his light on because I’m not doing nothing, I told him, I said, well, you better stop. He said, man, I’m not going to stop, I ain’t thinking about him. I’m not doing nothing. He just kept on driving. Next thing I know, I see State Patrol coming from the other direction, coming from Pasco and he comes up to where that little turnaround is. He turns around in the turnaround, and so I’m telling him, I’m like, man, you better stop. I said, because you don’t want no problem with these police. He says, but I’m not doing nothing. I said, man, just go ahead and stop. Then he finally pulls over and he stops.</p>
<p>The police pulls up behind him, State Patrol, and then there was a State Patrol behind him. Both of them get out of their car and they’re on each side of the car. He says, what’s the problem, officer? Give me your driver license, registration, and proof of insurance. So he gave it to him. He goes back and gets on whatever, and he calls in to find who he is or whatever information he needs and he comes back. He says, what are you pulling me over for? And he says, you were speeding. And he said, no, I wasn’t speeding. He said, yes, you were, because I have you on my radar and it say you were speeding. So then I spoke up and I said, no, he wasn’t speeding. I said, that’s not true, because, I told him, I said, make sure you slow down because the police is always sitting up underneath this overpass, I said, and he told me he wasn’t and I looked at his speedo and he was going only 60 miles per hour. I said, so he wasn’t speeding. He says, yes, he was, because I have it on my radar that his going over 60 miles an hour. He asked him, well, how fast I was going? Officer said, you were going 80 miles an hour. He said, I wasn’t going no 80 miles; I wasn’t going but 60.</p>
<p>Now here is this argument. So I tell him, I said, man, don’t even argue with the man. You know how fast you was going; just wait until you go to court. He said, why would I sign a ticket, accepting a ticket for going 80 when I know I wasn’t going that fast? He said, when I go to court the judge is going to look at the ticket and see where I signed it and that’s what it’s going to be. The officer said, well, I’ll tell you what, you’re going to have to sign this ticket now. If you don’t, I’m going to take you to jail. So he said, I’m not going to sign the ticket. He said, if I write the ticket for $70, would you sign it? He said, no, I’m not going to sign it, because I wasn’t going over the speed limit. We hashed back and forth, back and forth.</p>
<p>Charles got frustrated and he drove off and the police is right behind us, man, the lights is going like you wouldn’t—I’m like, man, what are you doing? You better stop, I say, because you don’t know what these police are going to do. Finally, I talked him into stopping and the officer came up and he wasn’t irate about it. Why did you drive off? Because, he said, man, it’s frustrating. You’re trying to force me to sign a ticket saying that I was going 70 miles an hour, when you said I was going 80 at first, when I was going the speed limit. He says, I’m not going to sign that ticket. The officer told him, well, when you go to court, you have the opportunity to explain to the judge what he situation is. He says, but, see, that’s not fair. Why would I have to go to court to explain a situation when I didn’t sign a ticket saying that I was going 70 miles an hour when the judge is going to hit the gavel and I got to go and pay for it? And he says, well, that’s blind justice. And he signed the ticket and then we left and went on about our business.</p>
<p>When time came to go to court, he said, I lose more money—because he was an ironworker—I lose more money going to court than what I would missing work. So he says it don’t make sense for me to go to court, because it’s saying already I’m guilty, because I signed a ticket. And I’m like, yeah, that is kind of messed up. The judge is not hearing nothing that you’re saying. Anyway, he went ahead and paid the ticket so that he—as far as they was concerned, he was guilty and he was guilty anyway when he signed it.</p>
<p>It’s kind of a bad thing and I talked to a person and he says, well, it’s not an admission of guilt. It says down at the bottom of the ticket that it’s not an admission of guilt. But if you sign it and accept it, who do you think the police are going to believe, you or them?</p>
<p>I had the same thing happen to me out here in Richland. Edward Ash and I had went to the river shore back in the day. I went there to get a drink and the guy that was there, he was dancing back and forth, a little fat guy and he didn’t pay any attention to us standing at the bar. I didn’t yell at him, hey, I want a drink, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just told him, I said, man, come on, let’s go. We got in the car and we saw Rayford Guice and Ray Andrews and they said, man, where are you going? We’re going to go down here to the bowling alley and they had some super good hamburgers with the egg on it and all of that. You know, let’s go and have a hamburger. And it’s probably about 11:30 at night.</p>
<p>We left out of there and we were crossing Swift. And I look down the street and I saw the State Patrol coming from where the Federal Building is. And now he’s about a block from the intersection. The light changes, just as I pull off, this guy is trying to beat the light, so he turns in front of me making a left-hand turn. So I stop right in the middle of the intersection. The guy behind me had pulled off behind me, so when he stopped, now I’m trapped in the middle of the intersection. And here the police is, now he’s about half a block or less. So then I went ahead and crossed the intersection. As soon as I cross the intersection, he throws his light on me.</p>
<p>He pulls me over, gets my license and all of that, and he asks me, had I been drinking? I told him, no. I said, I haven’t had a drink. I said, I went down there to the club to get a drink, as I said, and I didn’t get served, so we were going to get something to eat. He says, okay, I want you to do a sobriety test. I want you to hold your head back and put your finger on your nose and all this different crap; I did that. Then he wanted me to walk backwards up the incline of the sidewalk in that crack; so I did that. Then, he says, well, I’m going to have to write you a ticket. I said, what are you writing me a ticket for? He said failing to yield the right-of-way to an officer. I said, but I didn’t—you didn’t see that guy that turned in front of me? I said, he forced me to stop in the middle of the intersection. I said, I couldn’t back up, I said, I only had the choice but to go across the street. I said, I saw you when you was down at the Federal Building. That was two blocks away. I said, why in the world would I pull out in the front of an officer when I’m seeing you down there? He wrote me a ticket anyway.</p>
<p>When I went to court, officer wasn’t there. And the judge asked me how I did I plead; I told him not guilty. And so he says, well, we going to have to get him in, and so I probably stayed in court for a couple of hours before they finally got in touch with him and he came. They had the officer to get up and tell his story. He said, well, yeah, he failed to yield the right-of-way and I was blah, blah, blah, blah. Then he had me to get up and tell my story. And I told him just what I told you. I said, I saw him down the street, I went to cross the intersection, I say, and just as I start crossing the intersection, this guy was trying to make a left-hand turn and actually he ran the red light. I say, he turned right in front of me. I had to stop, I had no choice. And now I’m like in no-man’s land in the middle of the road; I said, the only choice I had was to go ahead and go across the street. I said, the officer was far enough down the street, there was no danger to him. He says, well, do you have a witness to that? I said, I sure do! Because Edward Ash that was with me was there. He says, well, you better get him up here. So he got up and told the same similar story, which was true. And so then he says, well, I guess I have no choice but to not find you guilty. I said, well, I sure appreciate that, your honor. But tell me this, since it cost me to lose a day off of work, am I going to be reimbursed for being off of work? And he told me, just like that other man had said, well, that’s blind justice. He hit the gavel, telling me to get on—he didn’t say get out of here; he just hit the gavel and the case is over, you can leave.</p>
<p>That’s no fair, because I told the officer, please, don’t give me no ticket, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong. So what’s up with that? It’s just like, did he not want to be wrong? Was he being racist? Because racists exist in every place that you go; it’s not just in Pasco, it’s not just in Kennewick, it’s not just in Richland; it’s in Eltopia too, it’s in Sunnyside, it’s in Prosser. I’ve been in Yakima as a teenager and had police to pull us over in the ‘60s and the ‘50s. The question is, what are you doing over here, and don’t let me catch you over here no more and stuff like that. We was afraid to drive our cars over there. We would borrow our parents’ cars or somebody else to go back up there. Because we were interested in them young ladies that was up there. And you had to go right through Union Gap and it was always in the Union Gap area where you got pulled over the majority of the time from the police. It’s not just a situation that’s here in the Tri-Cities; it’s a situation that’s everywhere. And we have to learn how to get beyond that so we can all live here together, because we’re all dependent on each other. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And I’ve lived long enough to where most stuff I could just let it slide off my back and just continue to go ahead and do my thing. I don’t have to interact with you if you don’t want to interact with me and I’m perfectly fine with that. And if do, then, hey, we okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were your experiences in other places different from the Tri-Cities? What kinds of work, housing, and social opportunities were available to you?</p>
<p>Johnson: Well, I won’t say Los Angeles, because when I went to Los Angeles, I had a friend of mine that owned an apartment building, which I managed for them. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law, they owned an apartment building, had a 28-unit apartment building. So I worked for them managing their apartment building and stuff like that. I went to Dominguez Institute when I was down there, and had took a welding course, because I wanted to be an underwater welder. Until my instructor told me, he says, do you realize how much carbon and stuff that’s going to be in your nose when you’re down there in a bell? I’m like, no. He said, well, do you ever blow your nose when you get through welding and all the soot and the carbon coming out? I’m like, yeah. He said, well, it’s going to be way worse. So if I were you, that would be something I wouldn’t do. And he was like, as you say, a soul brother, but he was a white man. And whenever I seen him, and I still say it today, he says, what it is, what it ain’t, what it be like, bro. [LAUGHTER] I thought that was so cool. That was the thing that he told me. And I said, well, I want to be an underwater welding. He said, no, Aubrey, you don’t want to do that. I’m telling you that these are the conditions that you’re going to be doing. And if you’re going to do anything, just go and get you a job, but you don’t want to do that. He was a person that had my interests at heart. I really liked that. Like I said, I worked for my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law when I was there.</p>
<p>When I moved to Vallejo, California, I had a girlfriend that was well-established and she was involved in politics and stuff, and she was retired at an early age and so I lived with her for a while. And then I went to work for a moving company, Cozy Moving and Storage. And I drove truck, moved furniture, until I got my back all racked up moving a piano. Because they never did want to fix their junk and stuff, and like, hey, you need to fix that truck, you need to do this. I was driving a diesel truck and the passenger’s seat actually had a metal band that you band boxes with to hold the seat to the floor. And when you stop, the seat would do this, rock. I told my supervisor, I said, you know what? If I ever have an emergency where I have to slam on them brakes real hard, if that band busts, that guy is going to go through the windshield. That guy drove that truck over a year in ‘65 and they never did fix that seat. And all they had to do, they could either weld the frame to the thing that was on the floor—well, we don’t have to time to fix that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was always one of them old kind of excuses. It was like, your value really wasn’t worth anything to them, other than moving their furniture and getting stuff done.</p>
<p>When I finally hurt my back moving one of them pianos just like that, the upright. Me and another guy, we got it tipped back bringing it out of a storage vault and then he let it go. It had that strain on my back and my hand was on that thing, I couldn’t even turn that loose. And I had to raise that piano back and it messed up three of my vertebrae, my L4, 5, 6 and my lower lumbar. I ended up moving because my mom was sick, I went through the state industrial deal, and I went to beauty school and that.</p>
<p>But down there, I don’t know if it was a black thing, I don’t think it was; it was hard to find a job, it just took a long time, especially when you relocate from one area to the other area. Like I said, girlfriend she was well-established, so she had a nice house and all of that so I didn’t really see the poverty thing in LA. I very seldom went over to the east side in Watts or over in Compton.</p>
<p>The few times that I did go through there coming from school, you could see a lot of the destruction that had happened back in the ‘60s, where the buildings and stuff was burnt down. They didn’t go back in and redo it. They had built a project stuff, because I was looking for them to reclaim that whole area. Because that area used to be really central, was really popular back in the ‘30s, and ‘40s, and the ‘50s. It had night clubs and theaters, et cetera on it. When it got burned down, I thought to myself, they will come back in, and an urban renewal type situation will come in and buy all of this vacant land along the strip and then redevelop it, which is maybe something that’s coming in the future. I don’t know what’s happened to it since I’ve left, those are the things as far as housing.</p>
<p>The police—psssh, was murder on you in California. I tell you, they had Chief Daryl Gates’ battering ram. That was his thing. They even had a song out about him. The police was extremely hard on you. I had an officer to pull me over—as a matter of fact, I was going with a Caucasian girl at the time. And I won’t say it was just because she was in the car with me. Even with the black police, is the thing that got me. He’s got, his co-person is this Caucasian police officer. I said, is he trying to be extra hard on me because she’s in the car with him, to show her, hey, I’m equal on black people such as I am, on anybody else? Because he had no reason to pull me over. And he says, well, where are you going? No, he says, where are you coming from? I said, I’m coming from home. He said, where do you live? I said, I live at 4044 Gelber Place, which was right up the street. He says, here on your registration, it says that you live in Washington. I said, well, yeah, I do. He said, I just asked you where you live. I said, well, listen, I got to live somewhere. I said, I’m down here going to school. So it don’t require me to change my driver’s license or registration as long as I’m out of the state every 90 days, I said, I go back home and then I come back. He made me prove to him that I was going to school, which I had my welding gear and all my credentials and stuff was in the trunk and I showed it to him.</p>
<p>When he got through looking at that, the thing that surprised me, he told me—and it’s a black officer, now—don’t let me catch you back over here, because if I do, that car is going to belong to me. I said why you’re going to take my car? He just turned and walked away and got in his car and drove off. But I tell you what, every time I left the house, man, I was looking for him. Because if he had impounded my vehicle for whatever reason it was, it was going to take an act of congress for me to take it out and money. Because all they got to do is move it and take it over to Inglewood, and I’m living over in the Baldwin Hills area—I don’t know where it’s at. Because LA is build up in different precincts in the city and stuff. So if you’re over in Compton, they got a whole system over there, if you’re in Inglewood, they have police station over there, and if you’re in Baldwin Hills, they got a police station on there. In different areas, depending on—they can shift you around, they shift your stuff around. So you just can’t say, it’s going to be there. So if it’s there for four or five days and they charging you $35 or $45 a day to get your car out plus the initial towing fee, suddenly it costs you $200 or $300 for no reason.</p>
<p>Anyway, I hate to just babble on, but it’s just—to answer the question, it’s like that, and most of the people was living in, in LA, was the jungle. And all the black people that had moved in to all these real nice apartments that the Caucasian people used to live in. They had moved out into the Valley and that was being bought up and renovated in a real nice area. The other people was, like I said, over in Watts and Compton. I never really went over there so I didn’t really have a chance to see what that was like or their project.</p>
<p>Franklin: I just have two questions left, kind of big reflective questions. What would you like future generations to know about living in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Johnson: The contributions that we as black people made, to help build up, and the sacrifices to help build this project out here. Because we did a lot of the basis for the reactors and stuff. We poured the floors and did all that hard menial work. Not saying that Caucasian people couldn’t do it, but it was a lot of back-breaking work that you had to get in there to do. Then you had to do the rebar and all of that. It was kind of like we were black gold, in essence that we were very important to the contributions that we made and it probably would’ve taken a lot longer to do what we did. You don’t take a mule to the Kentucky Derby. He can’t outrun the thoroughbred. So it’s just like me and the guy that is digging the ditch. I dug the whole ditch, because every time you look around, he got a cigarette in his mouth. I could out-work him on any given day, because it was something that I had to do, because I had the motivation, because I was trying to be able to put food on the table, I had to pay rent. With him it was like, oh well. He had somebody that was looking out for him; I didn’t have nobody looking out for me.</p>
<p>For our future generation, they need to know the contribution that we had, and why we had to work so hard. It wasn’t just to put food on our table and clothes on our backs and for shelter. We had to work hard because that was all that was there for us to be able to do. We was the mule for that generation. When they didn’t have tractors, we had to go out there and plow. They didn’t have enough strong-backed people to get in there and do it with a song in their mouth and in their heart. You go to the resource that you have.</p>
<p>They recruited, from what I’ve heard, and what I’ve read over the past, they recruited black people from the South to come here and work out there in the Hanford Area. That’s how a lot of them got out here, was through that. And then some came, and then they would go back home, or call back home, or write back home and tell them how good it is. Hey, man, check it out, I’m making 65 cent an hour. Man, that’s more money than I ever made. I’m only making 25 cents an hour out here. I’m going to send you $10 and you get on that bus and you come. So they’d leave their family, they’d come out here and they work, and they make up enough money to send back and get their family and then they’d move out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else that you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Johnson: Something that we don’t want to have to go back through. I hope that I’ve helped lay the foundation and the black people that gave contributions, too, to where if you read the story, you don’t have to experience it, it’s like listening as someone else. My friend told me at one time, he said if you listen to what I’m trying to tell you, you won’t have to experience it, so just take my word for it. That’s what I did. When I bought my first house on 17<sup>th</sup>, I had just got a settlement from Franklin County when I got my foot crushed and I think they gave me $4,000 or something like that. And my friend which was an older man, he told me, don’t take your money and spend it on buying a car. He say, go and buy you a piece of the rock. I looked at him and I said, what is a piece of the rock? What are you talking about? He said, buy you a piece of America. I said, what do you mean? He said, go and buy you some property or buy you a home. He said, because that car is going to depreciate in a few years and won’t be worth nothing. He said, but that house or that land will appreciate, and it will always be of value to you. The longer you keep it, the more value is going to go up. His last words was, take my word for it, so you won’t have to experience not doing it. Because I already did and I’ve laid the groundwork for you, so just take my word for it. I looked at him for a while and then when I got my money, I took half of it out and went and bought me a car and then I took the other half of the money and I went and bought me a house.</p>
<p>Let me tell you something, I still own that house and I just said, thank god for that. Because I see so many of my buddies that don’t have a house and they’re still paying rent. That was in ’72. I’m like, wow, that was the best piece of advice that I could ever have had, from a person that already went through getting to where I want to be.</p>
<p>So for the young people that’s coming along, I hope that they’ll be able to realize the sacrifices and stuff that everybody did, so that they can have it much better. With my daughter, I try to educate her all the time about how it was so that she can see how it is, so that she can move along and take advantage of all the advancements that’s at her fingertips. And for her to educate her children, so that they can move along and get better chances in life, so that they don’t have to go back through the struggle that they went through. God forbid if things continue to go the way that it is, is that we will regress, the whole United States of America.</p>
<p>Let me say this before we discontinue or get done. I had went to the Caribbean on a cruise, my girlfriend and I. I think Jamaica and they were showing us all these plantation—rum, places that they had. We didn’t see any of the cane fields and all that kind of stuff, but they showed these old plantation rum factories that they had, and how they had the channels for the water to go through them. And you can actually walk into them and see all of that.</p>
<p>The guy that was giving us the tour, he started laughing and then he says, you know, when we want comedy, we watch the news of the United States. That’s the comedy to us, and he started laughing. My girlfriend’s daughter told him, she said, listen, we’re not here to hear that. We’re here for you to be a guided tour guide and just tell us about what we’re seeing and what we’re going through, and what it was, et cetera, et cetera. We don’t need to hear that.</p>
<p>And with saying that, the United States right now is the laughingstock of the whole world. Everybody is looking at us when they used to look up to us. And it’s that we have got to make a change. And if you see something that is being done wrong and you don’t do something about it, you are as much of the problem as anybody else. As we become adults, we all know the difference between right and wrong. It would be wrong for me to do something to somebody that’s not done anything to me.</p>
<p>Those are the things that I tried to instill in my daughter. Because the rest of my kids—well, all of them are grown, my daughter, she’s 27, will be 27 on her birthday. But I try to instill that into her so that she won’t have all that negative stuff to look at. She have nothing but positive stuff. She wanted to be a veterinarian when she was going to school. Love animals and still do. And I would tell her all the time, now, this is what you do. All those Caucasian kids that you’re going to school with that want to be doctors and stuff, you take the same classes that they take. And that’s going to be your guidebook to get you into college, to where you’ll be able to be that veterinarian. Because you’ll have taken all the required courses. Because their parents know what classes for them to take, and they’re going to make sure that they get them. I don’t know. She was like, well, yeah, Dad, that’s what I’ll do. She was honor roll student and all that kind of stuff.</p>
<p>She was right up the ladder until she got right at the end of high school. I don’t know what got I her or got in her mind, it’s just like, she lost focus. And it seemed like—you know, and I should know; this is what I think it was, but I don’t know. We were staying in 17<sup>th</sup> and all of her friends were Hispanic and a few Caucasian, and a couple Asian. Very few black kids. When she started going to high school, it was like a whole new world opened up for her, to be around the black kids and her being raised semi-white, and having a whole different outlook, and the culture is like, all this is new to me, and if it’s new, I want to do it, I want to be around it, I want to see what it’s all like. And it’s all fun and she’s trying to solve the problems for everybody else is that she let herself go lacking. So then she lost her vison, and once she lost her vision, then being a veterinarian is something that just flew out the window.</p>
<p>I’m like, wow, I say, that’s too bad. We got to stay focused on what we want to do, don’t let nobody deter you from doing that. You got to have somebody to help you along the way to put you in to the things that you need so that that vehicle will get you to where you want to go. She’s doing okay now; she just started a new job today with Charter College as an intake counselor. She’s doing okay. She was working for T-Mobile as a consultant there, selling phones, and she did quite well with it. But with this job she wanted to work as hard, and she’ll make as much money, if not more. Because she was doing pretty good; she’s only 27 and she was making $50,000-something last year selling cell phones. But man, you look at all the hours that she worked for minimum wage. But then her commission check would be the thing to take her over the top and make her the money.</p>
<p>The thing that got me is that—which I didn’t know much about it is that, out of the commission check, they take a higher percentage of taxes out of it. And I’m like, how do you know where your taxes is going with that? I mean, it’s on there, but how do you know? Okay, they take 8% normally and they’re going to take 10% or 20%. How do you know that they pay that 20% into whatever fund they said? They just put it on a piece of paper and tell you that. You don’t know. Is they taking that money and say, okay, we’re going to split this up between our managers over here and then we’re going to take this other 10% percent and put it into this fund over here? You really don’t know. So I encouraged—I said, you know what? You need to get in contact with the IRS and tell them, hey, they was taking out 15% of my money because I made x amount of dollars. Because it seems like you being double-taxed. Because the IRS is going to get you when you go into different tax brackets. So why is there a different tax on commission? I don’t understand it. It might very well be. But I just don’t understand—it’s almost like a double standard because you don’t really know what’s going on with your money. It just kind of like concerns me. I told her the other day, I said maybe it’s something that I need to look into for you. Because she is just kind of passive-aggressive, if you don’t do nothing to me, I won’t do nothing to you and, Dad, I’d rather let it go and not be bothered with it. Because you know what, I got another job now and no big deal. I’m going to make more money with them, you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, yeah, I see what you’re saying, but--</p>
<p>Franklin: Aubrey, thank you so much for coming and interviewing with us today. It’s been a wonderful interview.</p>
<p>Johnson: It was very enlightening for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Excellent.</p>
<p>Johnson: You can see I got the gift of gab. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, no doubt. Well, thank you so much.<br /><br /><br /></p>
<a href="https://youtu.be/wEZQwVvihkg">View interview on Youtube.</a>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1946-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Aubrey Johnson
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
School integration
Racism
Segregation
School integration
Cooking
Baseball
Affirmative action
Migration
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Description
An account of the resource
Aubrey Johnson moved to Pasco, Washington as a child in 1946.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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04/09/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9feca12a12b9e9cbfd55292b8456d72a.mp4
ddd27f490df8e74a98061feb5126553c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Emmitt Ray Jackson
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Emmitt—it’s Emmitt Jackson?</p>
<p>Emmitt Jackson: Correct. Emmitt Ray Jackson.</p>
<p>Franklin: Emmitt Ray Jackson, on March 23<sup>rd</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Emmitt about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name?</p>
<p>Jackson: It’s Emmitt, E-M-M-I-T-T, Ray, R-A-Y, and then Jackson, J-A-C-K-S-O-N. Ray is important because my mom entrenched that into me. You know when you’re young and she says, never let anyone call you out of their name.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you mean by that?</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, you know, well, growing up, being one of the first black families here in the Tri-Cities and Richland, and growing up and you’re really into an all-white school or neighborhood and that type of thing, you know, there’s a lot of—in that time in the ‘50s, there’s a lot of people getting used to each other and understanding their ways. You know, you being different and as far as the color goes, you were sometimes a target, okay. We have people coming from all over the country here, so it wasn’t—you didn’t know what kind of individuals, their background or where they were from and what their culture was and how they were raised. So it was easy to single you out, if you will, or to say, oh, there’s one of those, whatever “those” is. So that’s always stood with me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gotcha. Emmitt, where and when were you born?</p>
<p>Jackson: June 5<sup>th</sup>, 1950 in Kadlec Methodist Hospital. And you know if you’re born in the Kadlec Methodist Hospital, you’re a native, because it was the old Army hospital in Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Yeah. So you were born here in Richland.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did your parents move here from?</p>
<p>Jackson: From Louisiana. Shreveport, Baton Rouge. My grandparents and mom then came up from California up to here because they heard there was jobs here.</p>
<p>Franklin: And when did your family come to the area?</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, man, they were in—probably, I don’t know exactly. My sister was born here, too, Joyce.</p>
<p>Franklin: Older or younger?</p>
<p>Jackson: Older.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Jackson: Joyce, so she was two years older than me. There’s ten of us in our family; we’re all like two years apart.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, that’s a big family.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yeah, it is. So ’47, ’48. I’m not quite sure about that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your parents moved to Richland?</p>
<p>Jackson: They moved—well, actually, to north Richland, to the trailer courts.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So your parents, from the moment they moved here, were connected to Hanford.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did your—did both your parents work out there initially, or how--?</p>
<p>Jackson: See, my father—my step-father, that’s who I really know--my father worked out—he was in the Army. And at that time it was a military—you had the military here. So, when the military broke up—I’m sorry, when the trailer courts broke up, then we moved to Richland. 409 Robert in Richland. That was, oh, jeez, I wasn’t in grade school then, so that was somewhere like ’54, something like that. But my sister went to John Ball Grade School in north Richland. You know what’s interesting about all that, I don’t know if you know who Joe Essie is, but he’s a trainer out here. So we were talking one day about segregation and integration and all that. And he was talking about segregated communities, and I go, you know what, Joe? I actually lived in a segregated community. Because north Richland, you know, the trailer courts were divided. You had your black section and then you had your white section as well. So it was interesting. But I never knew the difference; I was young.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did your stepfather do out on Site? Why was he there?</p>
<p>Jackson: You know, the way I understand it from Vanis—Vanis told me this, is that when the trailer courts broke up, I think it was DuPont or GE here at the time. A lot of the Afro-Americans moved to Pasco, and a lot of them went to work at the railroad or went to work for the construction. My stepfather was one of the first ones to go to work for the contractor. So he went to work out at the Site for GE. He was a janitor. He worked 24/7.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah?</p>
<p>Jackson: Well, yes, you know, ten kids. In fact, he was a janitor here at—what was it?</p>
<p>Franklin: The Joint Center?</p>
<p>Jackson: The Joint Center for Graduate Studies. He was a janitor down at Joint Center for Graduate Studies on Lee Boulevard. We spent many a day in there washing and waxing, mopping them floors and that type of things. Our treat was great, because we used to go to Zip’s and we’d get hamburgers and fries and milkshakes. So then when they moved it out here, he was a janitor out here. He was the first janitor here. He worked at Lourde electric in the evenings. He did a lot of work on the side in the evenings as well.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, working hard to support—for a big family.</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ lives before they came to Hanford?</p>
<p>Jackson: Okay, my mother grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana and she—as much as she went to school there, she went to college there for a couple years, and then they moved up here. Then she started raising a family, yes. And she was a mother—that’s all I’ve known, she’s been a mother, yeah. Raised kids, she raised ten kids: six boys, four girls. She also babysitted. She raised a lot of other kids here as well. She did that for quite a long time. She spoiled each and every one of her kids. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>It’s interesting, because we think about now—because my daughter and how she was raised, you’re always trying to do better for them and make it easier for them and that type of thing. People talk about—I can remember growing up, and kids—because I played sports and stuff, and I can remember a lot of times the guys would say, god, I got to get home because we’re having steak for dinner! We didn’t know what steak was. It was like, neck bones and ham hocks and red beans and rice and greens and cornbread, and different things like that. So it was pretty interesting, the cultures and just the learning that went on while we were growing up here in this community.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. How long did your stepfather work out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, man, jeez. Man, I’d have to look that up. He was out there for 30 years. Well, you think about it, let me see if I can go back. Let’s see. So I was in the service, so, ’50, ’72, came home started working ’77, ’78, ’79. He probably passed away about ’80. So I would think about 30 years. Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he ever talk about his work?</p>
<p>Jackson: No. We knew what he did. And in fact, he worked at the building that was up a ways here.</p>
<p>Franklin: In the 300 Area?</p>
<p>Jackson: The 300 Area, yeah, he worked in the 300 Area. In the evenings we would go with him, on weekends and stuff like that, to his other jobs and help him and that type of thing. So we knew what he did and we knew what the work was and that type of thing, yes.</p>
<p>When you say work—you know, the one thing I always wondered about though was—he was really good with his hands and carpenter. There wasn’t too many Afro-American craft people out here, right? So I always wondered, well, how come he never got the opportunity to go into one of those crafts? That’s always bugged me. Will always bugged me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Felt like maybe there had been a ceiling there or maybe an expectation of black workers at that time?</p>
<p>Jackson: Well, there’s definitely a ceiling, yes. Because when Hanford was being built, you had your black dorms and mess halls and everything was separated out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he talk about working in any other areas, or was he mostly in the 300 Area?</p>
<p>Jackson: He was mostly in the 300 Area, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So you initially grew up in a segregated area of the Hanford—the north Richland trailer camp, which is different from the trailers in the construction camp.</p>
<p>Jackson: Correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then you moved into the town of Richland.</p>
<p>Jackson: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: So moving into the town of Richland, that would’ve—Richland was a closed city, in that you had to be employed by GE or doing government work to live there, but was it a segregated area?</p>
<p>Jackson: No. We lived on 409 Robert which was right off of Thayer, across—it was a two-block street, and across from on the other side of Masonic Temple and Richland Baptist Church. And then Shirleys, the other black family that lived out by Denzo’s, and then the Wallaces lived below the hill, the Lewis and Clark area. And the Rockamores lived down there, and the Mitchells lived down there, too, as well. Let’s see, what is that? One, two—and then a little bit later, the Bakers came and they lived right behind us on Rossell Street. So we’re all scattered around.</p>
<p>Franklin: But you can, it seems like you can distinctly remember the black families in Richland.</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, yes, of course. We—[LAUGHTER]—oh, yeah. There wasn’t many of us. It was like, you’re alone sometimes. So, yeah, we knew each other and we recognized each other whenever we saw each other and that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: When so many other African Americans had moved to east Pasco, whether by design—whether by—because east Pasco was unofficially-slash-officially the black area of the Tri-Cities—</p>
<p>Jackson: Correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: So many families had moved there and had a very vibrant black community was there, did your family feel a pull to move there, or was there a reason why your parents didn’t move to Pasco and stayed in Richland?</p>
<p>Jackson: I don’t know why we moved to Richland, other than maybe it was close here. We bought that house there, 409 Robert. Our grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson, they moved up to east Pasco. In fact, they helped to build the Greater Faith Baptist Church there. Our grandfather was a deacon, and our grandmother was in the choir.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Jackson: We were always going back and forth from one city to the other.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you had a lot of interactions with folks in Pasco.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. That makes sense.</p>
<p>Jackson: You know what’s interesting about that, is that it was like—because most of—the Wallaces and the Browns—oh, I forgot the C.W. Browns, the Browns, they lived on Smith, over by Marcus Whitman. There was always that connection because of athletics and then that type of thing and the competition and all of that. So there was a little—there was always some competition that went on there between us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes, and we played for the Bombers, for Richland. We’re quite proud of those connections. Because it always seemed like, going through school, there was someone older than us who would lead the way and chart our path. That type of thing. In fact, Fred Milton. Fred Milton lived out in West Richland, his family. I don’t know if you heard that name before?</p>
<p>Franklin: No, I haven’t.</p>
<p>Jackson: Well, Fred Milton was—he was a beast. He was very athletic, very powerful. Let’s see, Fred was two years older than me, yeah, two years older than me. Theartis was five years older than me and of course then you had C.W. and Norris Brown, they blazed the trail as well. They’re the oldest. I can remember this one time, this guy was picking on me in junior high. Fred found out and he talked to the guy, and the guy left me alone after that. But you always had that protection. You could go for help or support, which was very, very important.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, right.</p>
<p>Jackson: But Fred was—do you know? He was a heck of an athlete, nice guy, nice person. When he was, I believe when he was a senior, you know we had Arctic Circle here, you know where the—what’s the Greek place in Uptown Richland? What is it? It’s—oh, Fat Olives, the Italian place, I’m sorry, Fat Olives, yeah. So Fat Olives is there, used to be an Arctic Circle.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry, what’s an—is that like a—</p>
<p>[camera operator]: A drive-in.</p>
<p>Franklin: A drive-in, okay.</p>
<p>Jackson: Italian. It’s what?</p>
<p>[camera operator]: A burger.</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, I’m sorry. A burger—Burger Ranch is a--you know, in Kennewick, is after them, they’re the same principle.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that like a chain?</p>
<p>Jackson: Yeah, it was at that time. It was an Arctic Circle and they had burgers, and, man, that’s where, you know the fry sauce?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yeah, that’s where the fry sauce generated from.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh. ‘Kay. That’s funny, I grew up in Alaska; I feel like if any place I would have heard of that, it would have been there, but you never know. Okay, a drive-in.</p>
<p>[camera operator]: You’re from above the Arctic Circle.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] It wasn’t quite above the Arctic Circle.</p>
<p>Jackson: And so I can remember one time, they went down to go to lunch there, and they wouldn’t serve him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Fred?</p>
<p>Jackson: They wouldn’t serve Fred. So the seniors there at school, they boycotted them, boycotted the Arctic Circle. And God, that was in the early—like in ’64.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like the entire senior—like, the school seniors? Not just the black seniors, but—</p>
<p>Jackson: Yeah, well, there wasn’t—there was only one or two—Bob. Bob was Fred’s brother. There wasn’t many of us around.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that an effective—did they—?</p>
<p>Jackson: I don’t really know the outcome, but the fact that they did it, and they did it in Richland was very supportive. It said a lot about how we progress and how we come together as people.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Wow, that’s really something. How would you describe life in the community growing up in Richland?</p>
<p>Jackson: You know, what’s interesting is that—we’re getting ready to have our 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary, right? And so I can remember, we’d be down—or at Marcus Whitman, that’s the grade school that we went to. The Bakers and I would be down there and there was Theresa Kay, Levon and Levette, they were twins. So we’d be down there swinging or doing playing or something, and inadvertently, some kids would come by on their bikes and call us the magic word. And, man, it was amazing. They’d be on their bikes, and don’t you know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But of course, they have to go on the pavement, so golly, they could never outrun us. There’s always retribution to be paid. So growing up, you had that kind of stuff.</p>
<p>But then on the other hand, you had people that were just the opposite, and just treat you just like people, welcome you into your homes, played with you, your kids and family, that type of thing. I can remember one of our rules was, growing up, is that we could never go into another house. That was one of the rules, that you can never go into someone else’s house.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why was that?</p>
<p>Jackson: It was—I don’t know. I think it was protection. Because you never knew what to expect and that type of thing. And you didn’t want to be overbearing, if you will. Not knowing—it was virtually an unknown. My parents—everyone came from the South. That’s the way they were raised and their cultures and their attitude. That was one of our rules.</p>
<p>But growing up, man, I can talk about my life growing up. I can chart my brother—since I was the second oldest and we had, there’s ten of us, and you can see that the progression of the differences and the change in relationships within their friends and the other families and how people treated them or reacted to them as time went on. And it was a positive. It was really positive.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, things trended upward?</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, yes, oh, yeah. Definitely did. Growing up, you had your issues. I can remember one time in high school, there was this—in fact, we were juniors. There was the ASB president. You ran for ASB offices. So one of the guys there was running for office, and Mac Hall was the science hall and math hall. Man, that was taboo for me; I never went over there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why?</p>
<p>Jackson: Science and math? Math and I did not compute, did not get along very well, right. I’m a history major, by the way. And you have slogans and you have pictures up and that type of thing. So they had—and in fact, the guy that was on the team, we played ball together. He was from Chief Jo; I was from Carmichael. Carmichael and Chief Jo came together at Col High. So we played ball, sophomores and juniors. At that time, when you’re a junior, you played varsity or you didn’t play. They didn’t have the different teams broke out, sophomore, JV and all that kind of thing. So he was running for office, so there was these slogans, and they had these black kids, stereotypes with big eyes and big lips eating watermelon, right? It was very derogatory.</p>
<p>Franklin: in the high school?</p>
<p>Jackson: In the high school, in Mac Hall. I never went there, I’d never go over to Mac Hall very—I think I went to typing, had a typing class there or something. No, I had a speech class there with Mr. Law. Anyway, so we went—one day Levon came, and Emmitt, have you seen this? The Harrises were there at that time too. I don’t know if you’ve talked to--run them down, the Harrises?</p>
<p>Franklin: I don’t believe so.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yeah. So, they came to me and said, Emmitt, have you seen this? I said, no, I haven't seen that. So we went up there and we saw it and I saw it. So then we went to the principal’s office, and they took made them take it down. I’ll never forget this. At that time, they told me, he says, Emmitt—these were the girls—and they said, Emmitt, they treat you different because you’re an athlete. I’ll never forget that. Because you are treated different because you’re an athlete. But particularly, within the community, if you’re playing basketball at Richland, you’re looked at as one of the leaders. Now, everybody, all the boys want to become a Richland basketball player, at that time. That’s what you went for.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s kind of come out in several of our other oral histories, that there was an additional status in there for the athletes and maybe some of it trickled down to the non-athletes, but there was a distinction there that was made and led to a larger acceptance, it seems.</p>
<p>Jackson: Mm-hmm, it definitely was. If you’re an athlete, because you’ve got additional contribution for the whole, I guess, is why that is.</p>
<p>Franklin: What else did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Jackson: My spare time. My spare time was around ball. Because, you know, there’s ten kids in my family, and I recognized at an early age that, hey, if I’m going to get to go to college, it’s going to be on a scholarship. So I really—that was my effort.</p>
<p>I can remember in ninth grade, Mrs. Black, she was my history teacher at that time. I loved that lady. Washington State history. She made me work, man, but I remember I got an A and I studied for once in my life. I mean, I really cracked that book. She used to tell me, Emmitt, you know what? You know how many people make it into the NBA and go on and this and that? You got to study. You got to get your grades and that type of thing. So she made a difference in my life. Most of my time I was doing athletics, that type of thing, and went to church. We did a lot of fishing, a lot of riding bikes, a lot of listening to music and dancing amongst ourselves. Just trying to enjoy life and get through it. A lot of fishing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yeah, fishing was good.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any particular community events?</p>
<p>Jackson: I was involved—one of the things that I’m quite proud of is that Don Dicenzo and I started the Bomber Fallout. That was the radio station that we did. It kept going after we left and for a while, and I don’t know if they do that anymore. But that was quite fun. We reported on different events and different activities that happened at school on the radio, played music and that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, that’s cool. You said you were living in Richland. What type of house were you living in?</p>
<p>Jackson: At first it was a three-bedroom prefab. And then we expanded it to another room, another big room.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s still not a huge—</p>
<p>Jackson: We had bunk beds.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes, we had bunk beds.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Did you attend church?</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What church did you attend?</p>
<p>Jackson: The First Baptist Church, it was right around the corner on Thayer Drive. And also the Greater Faith Baptist Church.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that’s the one in Pasco.</p>
<p>Jackson: That’s the one in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did churches play in the respective communities?</p>
<p>Jackson: We went fishing on Sunday, but we couldn’t go fishing unless we went to church. So we always went to church, always in our white shirts and our Sunday best. Always did that. But then, when you went to church—if you ever went to church in a black church, it’s most of the day—then-days, it was most of the day. So we would go in the morning, and you’d eat at church, and you would go to evening church, evening services as well. So you were there most of the day. It was enjoyable, because there’s kids and you get to listen to the Word. The one thing about it growing up is that you found out that you had more than one mother. Because it didn’t matter if that was son or your daughter, you got reprimanded all the time. So you really learned to be respectful, you learned to treat people with kindness, help people. You learned the godly way of how to live.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. You mentioned this a little bit, but I’m wondering if you could expand. Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including food, which you kind of talked about, that people brought from the places they migrated from?</p>
<p>Jackson: We had a lot of barbecue. But I think it was the food, like all portions of the pig, for example. I ate cow brains. I used to love pig feet. We ate neck bones, greens, ham hocks, black-eyed peas, cornbread. All those came from the South, but I’m sure other people that live there had some of that as well. But that’s what we ate. A lot of chicken, a lot of chicken. Lots of chicken, hamburger, that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: The cheaper cuts that can feed a family of ten.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes, you feed a family of ten, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: I mean, that’s a lot of food to make.</p>
<p>Jackson: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any other community activities or events that people--may be unique to where they had come from that they brought with them?</p>
<p>Jackson: When we were there, mostly it was, at that time, it was Afro-Americans and the Caucasian, white folks, and there wasn’t a mix. I can remember in second grade, the Guajardos, Robert Guajardo was there at Marcus Whitman. Then after that, they moved to Pasco. So there was a few different cultures of people there, but not a whole—not really a melting pot, not like it is today.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Were there opportunities available here that were not available where your parents came from?</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Such as?</p>
<p>Jackson: Well, for example, one of the things that really changed me as far as professional was that my stepfather, when he worked out there at GE—it might have been—was it GE then? It was Battelle. They had C.J. Mitchell that started this youth opportunity program. So my father got me into that. So I went to work out there in the summer times when I was like 15. I was a serviceman out at PRTR, that’s Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor. So you got the charts of the atoms and that type of thing. So I’ve got—I started, golly, there’s more to this, there’s atoms and periodic charts. That’s something that you would get in school. But that was kind of foreign to me.</p>
<p>The first year when I went out there, I was—and there was a lot of us, a lot of folks from the Oranges, Little Baby and Big Baby, the Oranges from Pasco, Mozetta Orange and Carl Orange. Man, we just had a great time. Because every week, we’d always meet together and we’d talk about our experiences, so we really got to know one another. So the first year, I was a serviceman, I helped the servicemen out there. The people out there were really good to me. They adopted me—[LAUGHTER] We had a lot of fun out there.</p>
<p>But then I go, golly—the second year, I go out there, and I go, there’s more to it besides just being a serviceman. Golly, I want to work in an office, I want to be in a shirt and tie. So I went to—the second year, I got to work for Gary Petersen. I don’t know if you know him.</p>
<p>Franklin: I know Gary very well, actually.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes. Him and--god, what was the other dude’s name? I can’t think of his name right now. But I worked in communications—no, I’m sorry. The second year I was out there, I was in Xerox machine. I was out there with Mr. Thomas. And the third year, then, I got to work with Gary. I got to write a story out there. You know, they publish in the Battelle Greenie and stuff. I wore a shirt and tie everyday to work. Man, I was on top of the world. I was cool, then. Plus, you get that check every week.</p>
<p>So Gary made a difference. He really—yeah. That part was a special moment, a special time for me in my life. Yeah, that made a difference. Kind of looked at, hey, it coupled the real world with the athletic world and you got to work towards your future, that type of thing.</p>
<p>So one of the good things about growing up in Richland no matter who you were is that, from the time you go to school, because this is the largest, per capita, the most PhDs in the country. So it’s a scientific community out here, so your aspirations—and you’re expected to go to college. So that was one of the driving forces of living here in this community.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you went on to college?</p>
<p>Jackson: I went on to college, I got a scholarship to Fort Silicon and played basketball, got drafted. I got drafted, went in the Army. That was interesting. Went in the Army for two years, got out of that, and then I finished up my degree here at CBC and then I went to Lewis and Clark State College on another scholarship. I finished my degree over there.</p>
<p>And what’s interesting, when you’re in the service, particularly in the Army, and I was over in Germany, you’re either with the brothers or you’re not with the brothers. Because there’s a big separation, at that time it was really segregated, the different classes of people, and so you tended to stay together. It was difficult for me, coming from Richland, because, hey, I grew up in a white society. I’m comfortable—I didn’t grow up everyday with brothers or sisters; it was always these white dudes. So when I got in the service, I was still—I had a difficult time making the transition, but I still—I went with whoever. But I was still part of that brotherhood.</p>
<p>So when I got out of the service, and I lived in Richland, I was getting ready to go to Central, and Fritz Schenkman got a teaching job at Lewis and Clark State College with Dick Hannon. So Fritz comes in and says, hey, Emmitt, do you want to go to school in Lewiston? Lewiston, Idaho? My first question was to him, well, how many black people in Lewiston? Well, there’s Tony, there’s Eric on the team. That’s it. Man, I’m just coming from a different environment, I go, I don’t know. And he says, oh, well, you come out there and go to school there and graduate and have a good time, enjoy yourself. So I said, okay, Fritz. So I went there and surely enough, man, it was a great time, got my degree, played ball, met a lot of good people, yes. And it’s because of my diverse background that that came out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. That’s really interesting. Yeah, I could imagine the transition to Lewiston would have been a little—might have been a little jarring or at least being like, Lewiston, man.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes! Lewiston. Lewiston, Idaho of all places. But it’s not much different from here, it’s just smaller. You know, that culture.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Jackson: What I started to say, I think, a little bit a while ago about our 50-year reunion, some people will say, well, golly, it must’ve been tough growing up here in Richland. Golly, you’re in a classroom, you’re the only one. And you’re doing this, you’re the only one out there. You kind of stick out. And you go through, there’s been some—you’re kind of ostracized or there’s name-calling or this or that. And you know what I tell them? I say, I had a great time. I mean, I learned a lot. You learn how to get along, you learn how to deal with different people, you learn how to maneuver within the system. So it wasn’t all that bad. You could take—I guess you had an option. You could be above it, or you could be in the middle, or you could be below it. You could feel like you’re ostracized and picked on and I’m the only one, this person did this to me, this person did that to me. But that’s not the way to live. You won’t get anywhere that way.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s true. Could you describe any interactions you or your parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities area?</p>
<p>Jackson: Interactions. Well what do you mean by—some unusual interactions? That type of thing?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, anything that sticks out, memorable, positive, negative.</p>
<p>Jackson: You know, I really think for the most part, it was good. Our upbringing, like I said, sometimes you had those difficult situations, but that just made you stronger. I can remember, we walked a lot of places, the stores and the doctors, and that type of thing. Sometime people would go by and holler at us, and if I was with my mom, that really hurt me, because they’d drive by in a car, there was nothing I could do. And I certainly—I would liked to have picked up a rock and throw it, but you couldn’t do that, something like that. But there’s a lot of times and things that you’re just powerless, you’re helpless. And you just had to take the high road. You had to keep on going. Because if—you know, when I was little, I used to fight all the time. But gosh dang it, then after a while, you get tired of fighting. You can’t beat the world! So you find different ways to work those situations.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned that negative depiction of blacks in the high school. I’m wondering, were there any other ways that segregation or racism affected your education?</p>
<p>Jackson: Was there any other ways? You know, man, when I was in school, I got in trouble a lot. Not bad trouble. Because I was like--I liked to have fun. You say different things in the classroom or something to get people—so I knew that they knew me. I remember Tom Lidup, he was the vice principal. But difficult—I think it really hinged upon the attitudes of the administration and the people. For example, Fran Rish, I don’t know if you’ve heard that name before?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, the stadium.</p>
<p>Jackson: Pardon me?</p>
<p>Franklin: The stadium is named Fran Rish Stadium.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yes. Man, he was a heck of a man. He was a PE teacher, and he had a lot to do with kids and how their development and that type of thing. I can remember the first day when I went to Richland. We were standing up on the balcony, looking down at that floor, thinking about, golly, we could play there one day, down there. And Mr. Rish came up to me, and he started messing with me. He started jiving. He had—man, he was probably like 6’3”, probably 240, just thick man. He just started messing with me and stuff and had me start laughing. I’ll never forget this, I was leaning over the rail like this, and I went up like this and I hit him in his chin, and his chin went like that. But he was the type of person that didn’t matter who you were or what you were, he would help you. So those kind of people really helped shape the environment of the school and people’s attitudes and that type of thing.</p>
<p>When I was—I couldn’t swim. So we had to go to PE. So we went to PE, and the first day there at the big pool, we were all lined up at the pool and you had to swim across the pool. I happened to be at the deep end. So Mr. Rish says, guys, okay, go! So everybody jumped in. I jumped in, too,right, and I couldn’t swim a lick. And he pulled me out. He goes, Emmitt, how come you jumped in? And I said, because you told me to. So you had that kind of a trust in people. That helped counter any of the negative part.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there anyone else that influenced you as a child?</p>
<p>Jackson: Golly! Man. My family, my—I told you about Mrs. Black. Teachers, man, teachers—it’s different now, I believe, because the teachers then had more time. They had more flexibility. They didn’t have limits on what they could do to help. Doctors called, doctors came to your house then. Do doctors come to your house now? Teachers don’t go to your house. That type of thing. So Mrs. Biggs, Mrs. Biggs was our first grade teacher. She had, I think, had most of us in our family. She helped shape us. Mrs. Mitchell. I can remember Mrs. Lane, Mrs. Sagaster. Man, she was a short lady, red-headed lady, a spitfire, and everybody called her Mrs.--what did they call her? Sag Bag. But she was really authoritarian person. That’s the kind of person I really needed. So I used to help her like crazy, and I did well with her. And then Mr. Brian Feld. Just the teachers and coaches. The coaches that I grew up—Mr. Jurastich in high school. There’s Mr. Easton—I mean, Mr. Dudley. He was a track coach. But one that really helped, stands out, is Mr. Jenson, Max Jenson, he was the coach for cross country, him and Mr. Hepper, they were cross country and track coaches. They really helped shape me. And they helped so many people.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time there?</p>
<p>Jackson: Well, you know, I’m thinking—I was thinking about that, just thinking about some of the things that you went through. Like the signs. Not many people know about that, that it upset us and that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any specific signs?</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, yeah. The signs in—well, for example, you couldn’t go to Kennewick. You couldn’t go to Kennewick after night, after dark. You had to be out of Kennewick after dark. And I can remember some guys from Pasco being chased from Kennewick across the bridge because it was after dark. But they got that sign up there, you know, they had the sundown laws. They just, what is it, 15 years ago or something like that, they took them off the books in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was it really just that recent?</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, it might have been longer than that. I would have to look that up, do the research. The sundown laws that they had. In fact, they had a plaque on the bridge. On the old bridge, it said that. The Martin Luther King—Martin Luther King, Junior. Golly. Civil rights. I can remember we had the riot here in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, could you tell me about that? Did you participate in that?</p>
<p>Jackson: No, I didn’t participate. Because I lived in Richland. I can remember when we were seniors and we played Pasco, we beat Pasco on Pasco floor, okay, in Pasco. So there was all sorts of stuff that went on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like what?</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, like people getting beat up, some cars were vandalized, and that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was any of it racially motivated, or--?</p>
<p>Jackson: I don’t—people would have construed it as racial because of the differences in the makeup of the diversity of the schools. But it was the fact that we beat them. It was just—it was a way to—oh, well, you beat us, but you’re not going to beat—you’re not going to win the fight.</p>
<p>Franklin: Didn’t Pasco have a pretty sizable black—</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, yeah, they had Ron Howard, Diggy Johnson were on the team then. And Gordie Guice, and Madison—yeah, yeah. They had—yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of actions were taken to address the civil rights issues that you just brought up?</p>
<p>Jackson: Well, you know, I told you about the issue with Fred Milton, and the response was that they boycotted Arctic Circle. Being in Richland, it wasn’t—because there was so few of us, it wasn’t that pronounced, if you will. So I would have to—look, I’m trying to think of what kind of things that occurred then. Other than the riot and the sundown laws and different areas. You know, you’d hear from time to time there was discrimination, actual discrimination, whether it was housing or you couldn’t go here, or something happened to someone or something like that. Other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot of, what should I say? Movement. There wasn’t a whole lot of movement, other than the movement being progression—relationships getting better as time went on because of the movements outside of the area and different people coming into the community.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were the important leaders of civil rights in the Tri-Cities area?</p>
<p>Jackson: It’d be the pastors. Yes. Then it would be the pastors. God, what’s his name? God, I can’t think of his name now. He went on to Washington, too. Oh, man, what is his name? He’s passed now. God, I can’t think of his name.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was he a pastor?</p>
<p>Jackson: No, he wasn’t a pastor; he was a civil rights guy. Oh, man.</p>
<p>Franklin: Maybe I’ll be able to find it.</p>
<p>Jackson: I’ll get it for you before I leave here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, sounds good. What were some of the notable successes in civil rights in the Tri-Cities and at Hanford?</p>
<p>Jackson: Notable civil rights. Well, I would have to say, if you think about it, when I was little, I lived in a segregated trailer community. I can remember you couldn’t go past the certain railroad tracks, certain areas. Now you can go anywhere you want to and do what you want. It depends on you. There’s that ceiling—even when I went into the workforce here as a professional, there was a ceiling. There still exists today issues in the classroom, I believe. I can see it, I can feel it. I’ve talked to different kids.</p>
<p>My daughter experienced some issues in the classroom. She’s good in English. So she wrote this paper, it was a good paper. This teacher went out of her way to discredit her. This teacher even went to the point of saying that she went on a porno site and got the information off the porno site to put in her paper. So we were there, her mother and I, and the administrator, and I could not believe this. I could not believe the attitude that that person had. But my daughter was able—it made her stronger and she was able to overcome that kind of stuff.</p>
<p>But I guess what I’m saying, no matter how good it gets, you’re still going to have those situations, those issues. But as far as movement goes, let’s see. CBC did some things as far as, they had the bell, the Ring the Bell March. Dave Shaw was an individual that impacted the area, came from outside the area. He was here, he was union relations. And so that was—I’m trying to think of other events that happened. Gosh. It’d have to be the churches. Those were very positive. I can’t think of an event, when I was growing up, other than the ones we talked about, where there was actually a civil rights movement or that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Jackson: Directly involved in civil rights efforts. I’d say, I would always try to be positive, but I’d always try to lead. Because I knew my brothers and sisters are coming behind me. I’d figure, well, if I could do it, they could see that they could do it. That type of thing. Civil rights. I think, I would think just my attitude towards people. I coached around here for 25 years. Some of the best teams that we’ve had were the mixed teams, we had different kinds of people, kids there. In fact, I believe I might have been the first black coach here, thanks to Jim Castleberry. That’s interesting. Other things. And the outreach programs, I was in HR. At HR, started with Rockwell. I was in management development and training.</p>
<p>Franklin: When was this?</p>
<p>Jackson: This was in ’77.</p>
<p>Franklin: And was that your—because I wanted to actually move to talk about your work at Hanford. Was that your first job out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Jackson: In ’77, yeah. ’77, Rockwell hired me, yes. Mary Oxen hired me in ’77. And I always wanted to get in HR and Mary—so I worked in management, development and training with Don Sandburg, and the idea was when an opening came up in human resources, they would see if they could work me in. So it worked that way. I got in HR and, man, I did the hiring out there for skilled crafts for, I don’t know, six years, seven years, something like that. Did labor relations.</p>
<p>I can remember, we hired our first black painter out there. First black painter. And then we hired--at that time there was very few people of color out there. So, that was one of my objectives. I can remember, we had servicemen, so we had these interviews. Some of them, I found—Mr. Thompson—they adopted, they took me out there to show me the ropes, to show me the different skills and what was required and that type of thing, and I got to go around the country to do some recruiting. So here, like I was saying, we didn’t have very many different diversity of a workforce out here. You know, there’s always, how do you get there, right? So one of the techniques was, the managers, they always wanted you to give a firm handshake and look at them right in the eye. Particularly Hispanic culture, they aren’t going to do that, most of the time. So, hey, when you go out there, this is what you got to do. It made a difference. So we started getting a diverse workforce in some of those lower skills, and hoped, the idea that they could go up to another level.</p>
<p>Then after I did that, I became the college relations person. So college relations, and the comment was from the managers out there in the workfield was, we can’t get any Afro-Americans to come here. They won’t come here. Well, if you don’t go where they are, guess what, you aren’t going to get any. So we started recruiting all over the country. We started looking at diversity in college populations, and it made a big difference. We got—managers started to recognize that there was talent out there and there was people that would come here and go to work. I’m really proud of being able to do that.</p>
<p>We had a community ambassador and I did a lot of outreach programs, community ambassador programs. We brought—Xavier University had this math builders program. They’re the number one, if I remember correctly, the number one graduate of Afro-Americans in pharmacy. They contribute to these math builders, bio builders and chem builders program. What they are is that they are programs that students become entrenched in those skills. So then when they get in the actual classroom, they’re comfortable, they aren’t nervous and that type of thing. Then they can do well in them and go on. So the students that go through that program at Xavier, then they went on to Tulane, I believe, and they graduate in pharmacy. So they had the number one graduation rate of Afro-American pharmacy students because of that. So we were able to bring that to here. That model to here to the Tri-Cities. In fact, we did it at CBC. There’s a lot of students, a lot of kids today that will tell you that that made a difference in their life. There’s things like that that really made a difference. Once again, man, I know this stuff. Huh?</p>
<p>Franklin: So it’s 3:35.</p>
<p>Jackson: Oh, wow! We talked that long?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes. [LAUGHTER] An hour and five minutes. When did you want to—when did you need to leave by? Because I can adjust the rest of my day.</p>
<p>Jackson: I should probably be leaving here pretty soon.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, like five, ten minutes?</p>
<p>Jackson: Okay, that’s cool, that’s cool.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, sounds good. I just have one, a couple, one more question about your work and then we’ll wrap up to the ending big questions. How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and supervisors and management?</p>
<p>Jackson: You know, it was competition. It was competitive. There wasn’t many—the workforce out at Hanford hasn’t been that diverse. Maybe—one of the issues is, you look at the executives out there, you look at the management, there’s a sprinkle in here, a sprinkle in there, but there wasn’t anyone—there wasn’t a progression. I did a lot of management boards and that type of thing, so I understood the process and I understood how you get promoted and how it worked. It was difficult for a person of color to get promoted, because they were not—they were in the workforce, but they weren’t in the workforce, if you understand what I mean. It’s like, what churches do you go to, what organizations do you belong, where do you have dinner, that type of thing. All those played a big part. So, I was—the workforce, for me, it was competitive. Being an athlete and competitive nature, but that wasn’t the right way. But it never—we did good things, were able to accomplish things.</p>
<p>I can remember this one time, this one time. So we had college relations, right? So, we’d hire internships. I hired Betty Matier one summer. She’s a professor from Walla Walla, College of Walla Walla. We were going to do this symposium. The symposium consisted of different stations—it was at the Hanford House, so we had chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, different stations, different careers there. We invited the colleges to come in. All the colleges of Washington, most of them, came. A lot of their students came, and students from Oregon, Idaho. Man, there was this mass of kids there, young students. We fed them, we were able to feed them at that time, so we feed them and everything. I got the president to come and do the opening presentation.</p>
<p>But I can remember our VP calling me into his office, because—see, they kind of left me alone, they let me do my thing, so I just—so I was doing it. When he found out about it, he calls me into his office, and that man was hot. That man was hot! And he goes—he was this close, he got this close to me. He says, Emmitt! He goes, we don’t want a black eye on this organization! [LAUGHTER] Because then Westinghouse—this was Westinghouse at the time, they’re a very conservative company, they’ve never done anything like this before. And it was well-received, did well and everything else. But to his credit, he came back and he says, hey, Emmitt, that was good. He thanked me and appreciated. But it didn’t help me. It didn’t help me. And this was a big thing, this was a big time. Big time.</p>
<p>Franklin: A lot of effort.</p>
<p>Jackson: Yeah, it took a lot of effort, took a lot of coordination. We had a lot of good networks with the colleges and universities and the people. So it went well, it went well.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with your coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Jackson: Not much. They’d have—you know, they’d have parties and stuff. I wouldn’t go to them. I wouldn’t go to parties. I just—no. Man. No, my friends, we played ball. I was still ballin then. So we played ball. That’s what we did. Got together and that type of thing. Not really—if they played ball or they were involved in athletics or coaching—my outside thing was, I think I started coaching, probably five years after that. Plus I was on the—see, I was on the board of trustees at CBC college for like a number of years, I was a chairman of the board, I was on the state board of education, so I did—I’ve done a lot of things outside of the work environment, too. Because that’s where my interest lies. So I was always doing something like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. We’ll go up to the big wrap-up questions, and this is one of my favorites here. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Jackson: During the Cold War. What would I like to let them know? Future generations. Well, I think it is what you make it. Opportunity exists everywhere you go. You know wherever you’re at—one of the things you need to do is you need to relax and take your time. You need to network. You need to be observant. You need to understand—if you don’t understand, seek the answers. Look for open doors. You know, a door closes behind, there’s always another one that you can go through. I just think you’ve got to network and you’ve got to—one of the things is that, it doesn’t happen tomorrow. You’ve got to have stamina, you’ve got to have energy, you’ve got to have vision, you’ve got to have insight. And you’ve got to pray. You’ve got to be humble, you’ve got to be respectful, and you’ve got to be kind. And you’ve got to be able to lend a hand to somebody else, too, you know?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Jackson: You know, it’s interesting, because the budget out here is—when the democrats are in, the budget does well. But you talk to—but this happens to be a what? Republican. And it’s amazing, to me, how they groan and moan, people groan and moan about the democrats, but when the democrats are in power, budgets are good, life is good. And then they moan and groan when the budgets get cut, and it’s usually on the republican side. That—I don’t understand that. I just don’t. One of the things we haven’t talked a lot about, Obama, mentioned that. I’m in a workforce, I think there’s only two of us out there, two Afro-Americans. But most of the folks, a lot of the folks out there are Trump supporters. So they had Obama’s picture up in the—you know, we have all the Presidents’ pictures up. So they had, they send you one. This is kind of off the record, by the way.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, do you want to say this off-camera?</p>
<p>Jackson: I’ll say this off-camera. Remind me to say that off-camera. But one of the things, you know, I think of the Kennedys and the Martin Luther King and the impacts that they made, it’s really impacted my life, and I don’t know where we would be without them today. Because the way, the differences in things that happened, they made a big difference, made a huge difference. But I’ve seen since Obama has been president that there’s been a backlash. We’re kind of retrenching, because my sense is that, before it was like, okay, the diverse, the people of color are going to be here, and we’re going to be there, and we’re always trying to catch up. But then when you get the President of the United States is a person of color, then the folks or whoever they are that think that they’re ahead, they really become sensitive and become challenged and they become nervous, because, oh, the most powerful country, the most powerful position in the world now is a person of color, all right? So now, uh-oh, what am I going to do? So I sense a backlash to that. I sense there’s some fear and some re-trenching going the other direction.</p>
<p>Franklin: Very much so. I think I would agree with you.</p>
<p>Jackson: And it bothers me. It troubles me. My daughter lives in Atlanta. [LAUGHTER] Oh, man. She lives in Atlanta, right. She’s born and raised here; lives in Atlanta. She had some issues in high school that weren’t very good.</p>
<p>Franklin: Here?</p>
<p>Jackson: Yeah, here in Richland. She was able to come over, part of it was athletics. But she was able to overcome that. So she got this opportunity, she works for Johnson & Johnson. So she lives there and she loves it. She loves it. It’s a chocolate city, as you know. She got this opportunity to go—they wanted her to go to Charlotte. So she went down there for a while, and they just—the people that she worked with really liked her. She’s a very likable person, smart and talented. So she went down there and they wanted her to—an opening came up and they wanted her to go down there. She didn’t want to go down there. The reason that it was so funny to me, comical, because, she goes, Dad, it’s just the opposite of Atlanta. I go, what do you mean? She said, well, here, I interact with black doctors and nurses and all these other kind of professions of black folks. Down there, what do they call, the guys that put you to sleep? The people down there are just the opposite. They’re white doctors and nurses.</p>
<p>And I’m going, where would you live? You went to school here! And I’m going, wow, the transition and the comfortability, it’s just fascinating to me. It really, really is. And she likes it down there, but it scares me, because of the attitudes. She goes to some places and I’m going, oh my gosh. So I send her all this stuff to arm yourself with, some mace, this and that. I taught—I’m always checking on her. I’m like, hey, if I don’t hear from her I get a little nervous. And she told me one time this truck went by with these two big old flags, rebel flags. And I go, oh my gosh, where are you at? You know? Hot dang. It just bugs me that she’s there and the attitudes and that type of thing. You never know.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, you never know. Well, Emmitt, thank you so much for coming and taking the time. I know you’re a very busy man, and I appreciate you taking the time to come and talk with us about growing up in Richland and working at Hanford.</p>
<p>Jackson: Well, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
General Electric
300 Area
Battelle
Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor (PRTR)
Rockwell
Westinghouse
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1950-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1977-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Emmitt Ray Jackson
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
Discrimination
Sports
Basketball
Migration
School integration
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Description
An account of the resource
Emmitt Jackson was born in Richland, Washington in 1950 and started working on the Hanford Site in 1977.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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03/23/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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67b815e354f07cfdcb4bb5cdc870a2f2
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0c24d9d36a9d1aadff8a145d38874c8f.mp4
1b2eaeabc4d03bc6668819d7d9650844
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Kathy (Brouns) Harvey
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: All right. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Kathy Harvey on June 29, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Kathy about her experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Kathy Harvey: Full name.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, please.</p>
<p>Harvey: Katherine, K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. Helena Brouns Schiro Harvey.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Harvey: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You were born here, correct?</p>
<p>Harvey: I was born here in Richland, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so your—when did your parents come to Richland?</p>
<p>Harvey: My father—after the war. They both came after the war. My dad came—I know he interviewed for his job here during that big flood that you see pictures of, often.</p>
<p>Franklin: The ’48 Flood.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yes. He came then for his original interview and then came to work then, about that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he come when it was flooding?</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, he talks about coming for his job interview, and he got off the plane and they had to drive out to Benton City to get to Richland, because it was all flooded.</p>
<p>Franklin: And he still took the job.</p>
<p>Harvey: He still took the job, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Well, he didn’t want to stay in Oklahoma. That’s where he was working.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah. Ah. And what did your father do—what position did he interview for?</p>
<p>Harvey: He was a research chemist with, I guess it was GE then. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm. And was that his background, chemistry?</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, he was a chemistry—he had a PhD in chemistry from Iowa State University.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. And then when did your mother—</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, probably after the war, because she was in the Army. She was a nurse. She went to Japan after the war. I think the day she finished basic training, the war ended.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Harvey: And so then she was sent over after the war, during, I think they called it the occupation. She was there for I don’t know how many years. When she got out of the Army, she came to Richland, because her parents had moved here during the Manhattan Project.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, so your parents met here.</p>
<p>Harvey: Here, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Not before.</p>
<p>Harvey: They met here, because my mother’s parents had come out here, and I don’t know if they came after the war ended, to work. I believe it may have been. I don’t know if my grandfather actually helped build the Manhattan Project or if they—I can’t recall, if he came after for a job. But her parents came out from Wisconsin and they brought, I guess, you know, three of the kids. There were four kids in the family, and three of them came. So two of them graduated from Richland High School. So, they must’ve come when their kids were in high school, I guess. But my mother was the oldest, and she was already gone and moved out. But then she came back here after the Army, because she was discharged and now her parents were here. So she came here to live with them.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how did she meet your father?</p>
<p>Harvey: It was a blind date, from what I understand. My dad lived in one of those boarding houses that the single guys lived in, down by, I guess it was that big flat area where the hospital, Kadlec Hospital, was. I remember seeing those places. He lived there, and his roommate I think was Jerry Saucier, who also worked out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that’s a name that’s familiar.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, okay. They met somehow through Jerry, and possibly my mom’s brother, Bud Neidhold, who—there was something about them hooking up this date. And I do recall my mother’s sister, who is still alive, said that my mother was a rowdy. She was 30 years old, she’d been in the Army, she’d been—had a wild life. She liked a good time. In fact, all of her pictures of her time in the Army, there was young, handsome men hanging around her, most the time. She had this date with my father, who was like the most decent person she could ever go out with. She had spent the afternoon out on a boat with some other construction worker, and she came home drunk, and she had a date with my dad that night. Her sister was furious at her, because she said, this is going to be the nicest guy you ever met and you’re ruining it! And she was so mad, she put her in a cold shower and filled her full of coffee and sent her out on the blind date, because she didn’t want her to mess it up with this nice man. Somehow he must’ve been impressed. So he stuck around. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Harvey: So he was this quiet, sedate, chemistry guy and she was this wild partying animal. But somehow she settled for him. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. And did your mother ever work out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, she did. She was a public health nurse out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Public health nurse.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, she worked in the industrial health stuff. They hired their own nurses then.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: And when were you born?</p>
<p>Harvey: ’54.</p>
<p>Franklin: ’54, okay. And so tell me about growing up in Richland.</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, it was very odd, looking back, although at the time we thought it was completely normal; we thought that was the way the world was. And then when you look back, you realize, oh, that was really strange. You’ve probably heard this before—you know, all of the dads went to the Area every morning on buses. And we didn’t know what they did. They just went to the Area and did their job. And they came back on buses in the evening. And they didn’t talk about what they did. Some of them were engineers, which we thought was odd, because there were no trains around. Some of them were technicians, which we didn’t know what meant. And then there was the people like my dad who were chemistry scientists and we didn’t know, what did that mean. And they never talked about what they did; there was no conversation ever about it. But we didn’t care; we thought that was completely normal.</p>
<p>The other interesting thing was, because nobody was from here, very few people had family in the area, other than themselves. And of course we didn’t—I didn’t think of this until later—every summer, in our neighborhood—because there were lots of families with children our age; there was a pack of us. Every summer, the families left and drove to the Midwest on road trips to see their grandparents. Because nobody had grandparents in the area. So that was an interesting thing, that everybody was from the Midwest. And we just thought that was normal. When you read other kids’ books about having family around, we thought, that’s odd. Now, I had my grandfather and one other friend in our neighborhood had a grandmother that lived in the area, but they had come there because they were there. So that was an odd thing, too, that we thought was normal.</p>
<p>One of the oddest things was that it was completely flat; there were no tall buildings. We thought that was completely normal, too, and we didn’t realize there was a reason why there were no tall buildings. The hospital was flat. When the Federal Building was built, it was a huge deal because it was the first elevators we ever saw. And it was only so high because you couldn’t be high enough to see out to Hanford. So they kept the height down, is what we were told.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that why--?</p>
<p>Harvey: That’s what they told us. That was the word that got out. And one of my friend’s mothers worked in the Federal Building, so she was in the know. It was limited to, I don’t know how many, seven stories or something. But the reason why, it couldn’t be tall enough to look out at Hanford and see what was going on. So everything was very flat. There were no elevators; there were no escalators. There was two stores that had second floors and you walked up the stairs to them. That was very odd, too. And, of course, it was dusty and dry, and the dust blew and stung your legs and the dust storms would come in and mothers would yell, close the windows! Put towels under the windows! To keep the dust out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Even in the ‘50s and ‘60s.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yup, yup. Because right around town, it was green right in the city. But we were over on the west side of the city, and you were right on the desert line. So the dust came in, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Harvey: The other interesting thing, looking back, is the wildlife: there wasn’t any. That may have been normal at the time, because there was a lot of pesticides used and DDT around that time. But there were no squirrels. There were no crows or blackbirds. Chipmunks. The only snake you saw was a rattlesnake once in a while that would sneak into town. Very few spiders. And the only birds I remember were a few robins now and then. But when you read children’s storybooks about wildlife, we thought that was odd, because we didn’t have that. There was badgers—stories about badgers out at Badger Mountain. The boys would go out there and shoot them and hunt them, but I never saw one. I never knew anybody who ever had one, that ever got anything. Because there was no wildlife. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. Yeah.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your parents become involved with civil rights issues?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, the story—this is, again, my mother’s sister, I think she was the one that told me this, she asked my mother one time, how did you get involved? Because in their families, nobody else was. It was not anything that they were raised with. But my parents were Catholic, and they were very involved with Christ the King parish, and Father Sweeney was there then. There was a CFM, Christian Family Movement, I think it was like a Catholic married couples’ family, like a prayer group or something that would get together once a month, and there were small study groups in people’s homes. And I know my parents did this. We had people from the parish would come over for an evening and they would probably do a Bible study, something like that, and talk about Christian family life.</p>
<p>My aunt Dode told me that when she asked my mother, how did you get involved in civil rights, why did you do this? She said, we were in the CFM movement and we spent time with couples talking about Christian life and living Christian values as a family. And we, Dick and I, we felt like this was something that we needed—we wanted—we had a passion to do something rather than just talk about it. And we looked at what could we do? What would Jesus do? What was the thing we could do in Richland? And that was why they chose civil rights, was that, we can work on that. That’s going to be our passion that we’re going to go with this, because that’s where God was sending us. That was kind of what got them into it, from what my aunt Dode said.</p>
<p>They did it, they came home from a meeting, and maybe there had been a discussion at the meeting about African Americans or civil rights or black people, and my parents probably spoke up and said something and realized they were a minority and they were going to move from this prayer group to find a more action-oriented group of people that were willing to fight for social justice.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did they settle? Or, where did they—when they decided to act, where—how did they do that?</p>
<p>Harvey: What did they do? The next thing I remember is that they quit having the CFM group and instead they started going to meetings in Pasco, in east Pasco. Because there was nothing much, there was nothing going on Richland; there were no black people in Richland. So, they must’ve connected—I think CORE was pretty active then, or it was a group over there. They became very involved in CORE. I remember hearing lots of talk about CORE. They would go to CORE meetings, we would have CORE meetings at our house—</p>
<p>Franklin: And that’s the Congress of Racial Equality.</p>
<p>Harvey: Congress Of Racial Equality, mm-hmm. And then the NAACP came in there, too. I don’t know which was first. Shirley might remember all that, because that’s where she met—my parents met the Millers then, through that group. And they met the Slaughters. But the Slaughters came later. I don’t even know when the Millers came to town, I don’t remember that. I just know that whenever this happened—which you might be able to see by the file, by the minutes of the meetings of what years my father was the secretary of the group. I was probably in junior high level then, because they couldn’t have done much before then, because there were so many of us kids that my mom and dad couldn’t have—we had too many little kids running around the house. So I remember it, probably when I was in junior high, they started getting, or maybe fifth, sixth grade, they started getting into it.</p>
<p>They would go to meetings several nights a week. They were going to meetings or there were meetings at our house that they would attend. People started coming around, we started meeting black people coming into the community. And then slowly they must’ve identified black people in Richland, because then we started—there was the Jacksons, which you’ve probably heard about from Wally Webster and Robert Jackson. Yeah, they became very close with the Jacksons. In fact, Mrs. Jackson became my brother’s piano teacher. So we were very close with their family. I don’t know, I mean the Mitchells were there, but we weren’t close with the Mitchells because they were republican. From what I understood. They also were very involved with the democratic party. Then it kind of went into the democratic party from civil rights, it kind of evolved.</p>
<p>Franklin: So they were republican before the civil rights era—</p>
<p>Harvey: No, no, my parents were never republican.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, no, the Mitchells were—that was the—</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, there was something about that, that they were republican or—you know, CJ was a businessman, and he was more, from what I heard from my parents, and from what I learned, because I was friends with the Mitchell kids, too; I went to school with them. You know, their family was focused on business. Taking care of his family and having a successful business. And not—they weren’t going to speak out on social justice. He was focusing on his family and his business. And my mother, she was pretty radical and if you didn’t believe the way she wanted you to believe, she let you know about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: But you were friends with some of the Mitchell children.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, in high school. Because then we all went to the high school. And then I met—my sister was in class with the oldest one, and then I was in class with Nestor. And then my brother—I mean, they were the same ages as us, so we were all in the same classes. We knew each other.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever see anything in high school, any kind of discriminatory treatment or adverse treatment?</p>
<p>Harvey: You know, I personally didn’t. I’m sure it happened, and it was probably that more subtle, that it wasn’t blatant. In our high school, at Richland High School, there was a small—there were not that many African American kids. They hung out together and they had a club, I think. We were friends—I was friends with them, mostly because they hung out right near where my locker was, and I knew them because I knew the Mitchell kids and the Skinners?</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Harvey: Okay, the knew the Skinner kids because my mom was real close to Eddie Skinner; she was kind of in our neighborhood area. So I knew the Skinner kids real well and I knew the Mitchell kids, and then the Thurmans. Have you come up with that name?</p>
<p>Franklin: I think I’ve heard that once.</p>
<p>Harvey: Okay, they actually were Catholic and they came to Christ the King and lived in Richland. I remember that they were one of the first black families that moved in. So we were close friends with them, because they were Catholic also. Well, any black family that came to Richland, we became close friends with because there weren’t that many of them. So, out of this group of African American kids in the high school, probably half of the families were friends of our family. So, you know, I knew them. And I’m sure there was discrimination going on, but I don’t remember seeing anything blatant. I’d hear more about it from my mother, and it wasn’t in the school, it was more with the older kids that were being treated roughly by the police or by the courts or something like that. Particularly, I remember the Skinner kids. There were some older boys that I used to hear about getting in trouble.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of civil rights issues were the focus of CORE and of NAACP? What was the focus?</p>
<p>Harvey: What did I hear the most of? Well, housing was an issue. That was a huge issue. I don’t recall Richland—I mean, Kennewick. The housing in Kennewick was the huge issue. That was the one that my mother got involved in. You’ve probably heard the story from the Slaughters about them getting their house and, of course, we didn’t know what anything was going on, but we heard later that my mother went with Mary Slaughter to look at homes. She would pretend she was the one renting the house and get the landlord to say this would be fine. And then she would turn to Mary and say, okay, Mary, will this work for you? And then the landlord would be trapped.</p>
<p>So I know there with the housing in Kennewick was the big issue. I don’t know, in Richland in particular. I know there was a lot of political stuff that I don’t even remember, because the issues—we used to hear about issues but I can’t really think what they were. But we just went along with them. There would be picketing, there would be rallies, and the kids would be making the signs. We’d have, in our basement there’d be all these posters hanging out, and us kids would be down there painting the signs that would say whatever they were.</p>
<p>I remember, though, the one that my youngest brother, Tom, who still lives here, he remembers—because he was younger; he was in grade school. There was a white supremacist Ku Klux Klan guy coming to talk at a rally in Richland. And I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he was pretty well-known. My mother had a sign—she carried a sign that my brother painted. She had told him what to paint, and it said—his was name was Clark, because it said, Ku Klux Klark, you’re whistling in the dark. And she got arrested for that rally and there was a picture of her in the newspaper holding that sign. She got arrested and I don’t think she spent time in jail. But I remember seeing that picture of her in the paper. My younger brother who was a kid was with her at the time, but I don’t remember his picture. He could tell you more about it if you want to talk to him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember around when that was?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, Tom was born in ’61 and he was probably seven or eight years old maybe. Less than ten, I think.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so like 1968.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, probably between there and the ‘70s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Interesting. I’ll have to see if I can—</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, he was—I can find out the guy’s name, because my brothers remember who this guy was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Harvey: He was a Ku Klux Klan guy from the South that came up for some white supremacy rally. And I remember, this was a huge issue. Anytime they could make a stink about something and bring focus to civil rights issues, they did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your—who?</p>
<p>Harvey: My parents and their group, the group. I just remember a lot of this, rallies, a lot of letters to the editor, letter to the senators. I remember letters to Senator Jackson and Slade Gorton, I remember letters to him. And they were getting us kids to get involved and stuff and write letters whenever there was some perceived injustice going on, which there was, I’m sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any other notable picketing or rallies?</p>
<p>Harvey: You know, I’m thinking, there were so many, and I didn’t go to a lot of the rallies. We were put together making signs for them. And then the rallies would happen—I don’t know why I wasn’t there. Maybe I was in school, maybe I was out doing high school stuff, independent, maybe I was working by then. I don’t recall that. No, I’m sorry. I don’t remember what the rallies are.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, that’s okay.</p>
<p>Harvey: And then evolved until voter rights issues. That was another big issue, too, was getting people registered to vote. I know I did do a lot of that, canvassing to get people out to vote. I did a lot of that stuff, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: : And was that mostly in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Harvey: No, that was—I remember doing it in Richland, mostly, in my own neighborhood area. Just around Richland, going from door-to-door to get people to register to vote. And our parents would set us out to do that with some of the other, the Miller kids and the Jones kids, Sabrina and Junior Jones. I remember, we had lots of stuff we were doing with them. The Slaughter kids. We’d be out doing that stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were some of the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Harvey: In this area?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Harvey: The names that I heard, Robert Jackson, I heard a lot. Dallas Barnes, I heard. Ernie McGee, and he passed away, but he was a name I heard a lot of. Herb Jones, until he left the area. Norm Miller was big. My dad. The Slaughters. There were the Pollards, too, have you talked to them?</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>Harvey: Hope Pollard. The Bauersocks.</p>
<p>Franklin: The--?</p>
<p>Harvey: Bauersocks? Yeah, they’re friends with Shirley. Phyllis and—hmm. Shirley—Andy would know how to get in touch with them. And the Pollards were there. You know, if I look through all the notes over there, I would see all the other names and remember them. But you’ll see them when you look through there, you’ll see the names of people, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sounds good. What were some of the notable successes of the civil rights movement here?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, getting black families into Kennewick was notable. And I remember getting the Thurmans into Richland. That was a big issue. When the Thurmans moved to Richland, that was big. I don’t know if there were any black families. The Jacksons came, and the Thurmans, and the Mitchells. And then the Skinners came. If I look through my high school year book, I’d see all the other ones that were there, but I can’t remember off the top of my head. Just getting people there.</p>
<p>And they were good people; they were good kids. In school, they were well-known, they were popular, they were—people respected them, liked them, from what I could tell. I think one of the things that was really noteworthy was the presence. Because in my circle of friends, we lived in, of course, a white middle-class neighborhood in one of the government houses. All the people around us were just white middle-class people from the Midwest. They didn’t have any inclination towards civil right or social justice. And here my parents came in, they brought this to the forefront.</p>
<p>I think one of the most noteworthy things was educating the other children that we were friends with. Because there were six kids in our family, and we all had a lot of friends. And the friends all hung out at our house a lot, because our home was one a lot of people came to. It was a very open home, and my mom—the door was always open. There was lots of kids around all the time, the neighbor kids running around. And my mom was very vocal and she talked a lot about what was happening. It was the process of educating and spreading the word out slowly. It wasn’t doing big things, picketing, making a big name for yourself doing public speaking. My parents didn’t do that; they were more the behind-the-scenes workers. The influence they had on the people they met day-to-day, because you kind of slowly infiltrate the thought process of those people.</p>
<p>My friends now still talk about the influence my mother had on them and my father had on them to change their thinking and make them look at civil rights as something acceptable. Because what they would hear from their own parents or from the television in this white middle-class neighborhood was that was an issue that was somewhere else. During the race riots of the ‘60s, those are troublemakers, they’re dangerous. As the Black Panther movement and some of those, like, those are really bad organizations. But from my parents, and being around my parents, they learned that, no, those weren’t. And my mother tried to join the Black Panthers, that was another funny thing she did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Harvey: Oh, yeah. There was something about the church, instead of giving money to the parish, she wrote a letter and said her funds were going to Black Panthers that year. She sent a letter to them with a membership and wanting to join the group, I think it was in Chicago. Well, they wouldn’t take her. They said, no. They sent it back and said that—I don’t know what, that was what I heard, that they didn’t let her join. But she wanted to join all those militant groups. She got angry. She had a temper and she would get pissed off and angry and want to do these things.</p>
<p>But the fact that she did that influenced all the children that hung out at our house. They were young kids from grade school all the way through high school, because they were all there. So that was probably a huge—I would say that was a huge influence that they had, not just on us kids, but on the non—the kids who weren’t coming from families like ours, that had no other exposure to this.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, kind of raising awareness of—</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, mm-hmm, throughout the whole community. So we’d go to school and we’d talk in our classes and my friends would talk. It became—I think it brought awareness of what the issues were, especially in Richland, because you weren’t surrounded by other cultures to be exposed to, to see that there was—you didn’t see discrimination, because there weren’t other cultures to discriminate against.</p>
<p>Franklin: Or for the few African Americans in Richland, especially those in Pasco, it was so much more kind of informal racism—</p>
<p>Harvey: Yes, yes, yep.</p>
<p>Franklin: --or, what’s the word I’m looking for? Beneath the surface. It wasn’t outright like Jim Crow of the South; it was subtle.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, very subtle, yeah. Very subtle, yup, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your parents spend much time in east Pasco with the community?</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you go out there with them as well?</p>
<p>Harvey: I did, but I remember going to houses to do things. You know, pick up this, do that. But my younger brother actually spent more time there, because of his age. When my parents—because my mom got more and more involved as us kids got older and got more independent in school. So we were getting up to high school and then she was free to go, but she still had this young kid at home. So he got tagged-along. So he actually would have more stories about going into homes and he might remember the people there more. Whereas I was watching from afar.</p>
<p>Like, I remember, instead of dinner coming at a reasonable hour, now dinner was always hours late because she wasn’t home. And it was some thrown-together thing, because she was gone doing something in east Pasco. She was there a lot. And then she got involved in the Hispanic community over there, too. That became another big focus, that she became very involved with the farm workers union. She became involved in, what was it, Community Action Council, over there that was in Pasco. And that was more—well, now, I don’t—I think it was more of the migrant farm workers active stuff. But I’m not sure, you’d have to look that one up. Because then she got very involved with different groups. We didn’t have any other big ethnic groups around that I recall, other than the blacks and the Hispanics, because they were the farm workers. So those were the two that she got real involved in. And then we started to have—you know, we had friends there in the Hispanic community, too, that became part of our circle.</p>
<p>Franklin: As opposed to successes, what were some of the biggest challenges of the civil rights movements?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, from my parents’ perspective, one of the challenges she had was with the Church, because my parents were Catholic and they were very involved in the Catholic Church. And she was very, very angry that the Church wasn’t more progressive. If she would get in fights with the priest, Father Sweeney—she called him a white, racist bigot because he wouldn’t put a political sign in the yard about something about civil rights, in the rectory front yard. And she would get very angry at the Catholic Church about women’s issues. Because then, of course, it evolved into women’s rights, too. That was probably one of her biggest challenges, was her frustration with the Church. Because she was born and raised a Catholic, and she was a very strong believer.</p>
<p>I do remember a conversation that—frequently when I’d come home from school, they’d be sitting around—she and Shirley Miller and my mom and whoever else some of the women were in the group—sitting around the kitchen table, talking. Oh, Margaret Gregor was another one that was part of the group. She was in Richland, too. And talking about how pissed off they were with the Catholic Church, and they should just leave the church and go to some other, more accepting—I think Margaret Gregor was the one who said, but if we leave, there’ll be nobody left to change it. So we have to stay and fight. So I know that was a challenge, to stay and fight the Church. And my mother did. I mean, she fought until she died. She fought the Church the whole time. But she kept going, every week, she’d go back to mass. And my dad was more quiet. He didn’t talk as much as she did. He was more of the silent type in the background that was doing the work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your father or mother ever face any blow-back or recrimination for their work in civil rights, either professionally or in the community?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, in the community, through the parish, they did. I remember them going to some parish party one time, and we kids were home alone because we were older. They went to—it was at a house that I won’t mention the name, but—it was some big parish house. And they came home furious, early. And my mother was just livid red because they were telling racist jokes there. And she told them there was a goddamn white bigot—racist bigot, to the host of the party, she went up and screamed it in his face and marched out the door. Then I think she became labeled in the parish after that. Not that it bothered her at all. Most of her friends became—she became social in this other group. But maybe there, they did.</p>
<p>I don’t know about other—my older sister, I think confided—she confided more in her about her feelings about things. So my mother might have confided more—she might know more about it. And I don’t know about my father, either.</p>
<p>I do remember the first black man we ever saw—that I ever saw was a scientist who came out to Hanford to work. He was doing some sabbatical work or guest—and he was from Africa. He came out to work at Hanford and my dad brought him over for dinner. I don’t know if—I remember he came to dinner and he had this beautiful African accent. But us kids were just amazed because we’d never known a black person before, and it was just like, wow, this is really cool. So I don’t know if he ever received—if he ever had any repercussions of what he did. I don’t know. I never heard anything about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was he out there marching as well?</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah. In fact, I have pictures of my parents marching on George Washington Way when my dad was in his late 80s, still standing there picketing the war.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, the Iraq War?</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm. When he was—he was 90 when he passed away, so he was in his mid-80s, probably, and he was still standing on the sidewalk picketing with Jim Stoffels—he’s another name you might talk to, is Jim Stoffels.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, I know Jim—I’m a member of BRMA.</p>
<p>Harvey: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: I know Jim well, yeah.</p>
<p>Harvey: So Jim was out there on the sidewalk with him, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, World Citizens for Peace.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, so he was out there, yup, ‘til the very end.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Harvey: And my mom, too. I have a picture of her doing it, too, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Good for them.</p>
<p>Harvey: In fact, when she passed away, the Social Justice Committee at Christ the King Church put up a plaque for her in the church vestibule, in honor of her and her work on the Social Justice Committee at the parish. So I think as the church became more accepting, she became more involved. And they did create a social justice committee and then she became active in that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Richland also had its own Human Rights Commission; were your parents involved—</p>
<p>Harvey: They were, and I don’t know anything about it. It’s probably in the files.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, that’s fine, that’s fine. Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Harvey: Not—you know, in high school, other than painting signs—but us kids were more like, it was more like a social activity. It was fun. The parents would be upstairs putting something together and we’d be down in the basement playing pool and ping-pong and painting signs and having a great time. It was this—I don’t know how many kids, whatever parents were up there, we were downstairs doing it.</p>
<p>And then there were political—I remember political gatherings at the house. I remember Jim McDermott had a campaign function at our house, and a lot of those people were there, multicultural, multiracial group there. I participated in that, mostly because there was a keg of beer and you could drink. Even though you were only in high school, you could sneak in and get drunk off the beer.</p>
<p>And hearing a lot of the politicians’ names that were running for office. I remember Jay Inslee’s name, he was there. Hearing these names all the time—because then as my parents moved into the—you know, it became—I don’t know if CORE disbanded or what happened to CORE, but it went from NAACP and then into the democratic committee, and a lot of those people moved into the democratic party and started becoming more mainstream active there. And they kind of joined, I guess, NAACP and democratic group. Because my dad’s efforts went there, too. So I remember those types of functions.</p>
<p>But as far as doing more on my own—other than going to political rallies when I became high school, I remember going to McGovern rallies and Shirley Chisholm rallies and stuff like that. But I don’t remember doing other things.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts at Hanford and the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, probably because it brought it up to the forefront. It was in the newspaper, it was on the news, and made people in the community aware. Even though you didn’t have—in Richland, there was nothing going on. I mean, you didn’t see it. And if you didn’t go to Pasco, you didn’t see it. I mean, us kids didn’t see it because you were living in this white community, middle-class community. But seeing it on TV brought it to the forefront. We’d talk about it in school, we had classes that you’d talk about it. And then the Black Power movement with the youth group—the African American kids in school, they had some sort of club they formed—and they would talk about it. So the national brought it in and brought it to the awareness, I guess.</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective, what was different about civil rights efforts here?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, I don’t think we had the violence that you saw. And we didn’t have—I don’t know about the poverty. It was different, maybe, because it wasn’t inner-city poverty. The poverty was in east Pasco. But there wasn’t the violence of the rioting and stuff that you saw elsewhere. I mean, I never felt unsafe, even when I was in east Pasco. And I had a good friend whose father had a business in east Pasco, and they were white. They traded business with the east Pasco community and were respectful of each other. I don’t remember anything in particular about it. So maybe that’s how it was different. It was smaller, I guess. From my perspective as a kid. And it was just something that was part of—we didn’t think it was anything unusual; this was just the way our family was. So it was mainstream. It wasn’t anything unique to us; it was just life.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Harvey: You know, I didn’t know anything until I saw the video that CJ Mitchell was in. I didn’t know anything about it that I can recall. I don’t remember my parents talking about it with us. They probably did with their own group, but with just the kids, I don’t remember them discussing it. Their conversations were more right now, what’s going on now, what do we need to do right now, with their friends.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. From your perspective, what were their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights?</p>
<p>Harvey: Of my parents?</p>
<p>Franklin: Of African American workers at Hanford.</p>
<p>Harvey: Okay, repeat that again? What was--?</p>
<p>Franklin: What were their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights?</p>
<p>Harvey: At Hanford?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, probably that they built it. That was probably huge. I mean, I can’t imagine that whole Manhattan Project happening without the workers. And they made up a piece of them. And the people—you know, the people that were out there at Manhattan building it, they weren’t from here; they all—so they probably were aware of African American people. Maybe some of them had worked side-by-side with them before, I don’t know. I mean, the fact that they actually came and did the work, that’s pretty significant.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Do you remember when you learned about what was being made at Hanford?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, we knew, because of the Richland Bombers. And we knew that was our mascot. But it wasn’t really something you even thought about. Really, until I got—I remember in high school, seeing the bomb mascot, and then, I remember being very aware then, because—you’ve probably seen at the high school, there’s the bomb on the floor, and you weren’t allowed to walk on the bomb; you had to walk around it. You know, I don’t remember—probably—</p>
<p>Franklin: Really? You weren’t allowed to walk on the—why was that?</p>
<p>Harvey: Oh. Because it was sacred. It was the school mascot. And it was the warhead. Have you seen it?</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah! Okay, so, when you were walking—that was the mixing area. I haven’t been in the high school in many, many, many years, but that was the main mixing area, and you didn’t step on that. That was—you didn’t step on the mascot. You walked around the mascot. That was the rule. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting that they painted it on the floor then, but okay.</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, it was a tile or something, isn’t it? Or is it painted? I don’t remember.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think it’s painted.</p>
<p>Harvey: And it’s kind of right in the center, so it’d be like the cougar was right there, the Wazzu cougar was right there. Don’t step on the cougar!</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure.</p>
<p>Harvey: Or the Husky, you know. You don’t step on, that’s our motto. Yeah. So I don’t remember ever not being aware that what we did at Hanford, I mean, we made plutonium for a bomb. But I don’t remember ever thinking, well, what do they do there? I never even thought about it, you know, as a kid you didn’t think about it.</p>
<p>I do remember, one of my friends who went to school with me, and she went to Gonzaga, and at our five-year class reunion, we were at our reunion here, and we’re sitting around talking, and she said she never realized how weird it was to grow up here. Because like I said, we thought this was normal. She was sitting in her dorm room at Gonzaga and they were talking about things you did in school to get out of school. Like, you’d pull the fire alarm. We did that a lot. Or you’d pretend you were sick. Or you’d pretend it was that time of month and you had to go to the bathroom right away. Or you’d have, somebody would call in a bomb scare to the school, you know, one of your friends would skip class and call in a bomb scare. And they were all kind of laughing about these things.</p>
<p>And Barbie says, oh, yeah, I remember when the Whole Body Counter came to school. That was great! And they look at her and go, what? And she says, the Whole Body Counter. When it used to come to school. And they said, what was that? Well, you know, you’d get your whole body count of your radiation count, your uranium count done? And they all looked at her like she was completely nuts; they were horrified. So then she explained what it was. But she’s told us, I never realized that that wasn’t something everybody else did. That we did it, and nobody else did that. But it came to the school, and you went through it. And that was what it was like growing up here; you thought that was completely normal stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Did your parents ever talk about—being so focused on civil rights, did they ever talk about their reactions to Hanford’s role and the building of the nuclear arsenal?</p>
<p>Harvey: You know, I don’t remember them talking about it, other than it was a job at a time where there were no jobs. You know, my mother’s father, when they came out, he was unemployed and they were destitute. So it saved their family. It created a new home for them. And my mother had a very close affinity to Japanese people, because she lived in Japan, and she became friends with some Japanese people and she had a very high respect for them. She never talked about feeling guilty or remorseful for that. I never heard that.</p>
<p>Yeah, that’s interesting, because—and they weren’t really involved in the stopping nuclear proliferation; that wasn’t something they were involved in at all. I think Jim Stoffels is involved in that more now. He was the one in the group that went that route. But they were not that—they were in peace, no war, but they didn’t specifically target nuclear war, atomic war. That was something we grew up with; it was just a part of life. And the bomb ended the war. That was it. That was what you learned.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure. And purportedly kept wars from happening.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yep, yep, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was Jim involved in civil rights efforts with your parents? How long did that relationship go back?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, he—I don’t recall. His name is on some of those papers in there, though. So, I believe it is. Or you could ask him, because I don’t know when he came and became involved with it. He was more of the peace thing, I got the impression that his focus was world peace and ending war. So it was probably more about the Vietnam War issue or that sort of thing, that he kind of came and became friends. Because I don’t remember when I was a kid if he was around. He was more somebody we got to know when I was older, like maybe even out of high school, that he came on the picture.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure. I’ve interviewed Jim, just we never talked about it, because I knew of his peace/war concern and down that route.</p>
<p>Harvey: So you’d have to ask him that. I haven’t seen him in a year.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’d be interesting to—</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, you’ll have to ask him that, because I’m not sure when he came in.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. I just have a few more questions here. So you graduated from Richland High, right, a Bomber. And then what did you do after that?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, I knew I didn’t want to go to college right away, because I was really sick of school. So I actually moved to Tacoma, because one of my friends from high school was going to college in Tacoma and she wanted a roommate. So I moved up there, lived there for a year with her together. And then met a man and fell in love and we moved in together, and he wanted to go back to school at Wazzu to get an engineering degree. So we left Tacoma and ended up in Pullman together. And I started college there, then. Actually, I started at CBC and then I went to Pullman. After a year, I transferred to the University of Washington. So I went to school there and that’s where I graduated from there. And I married this man and we had children and we divorced 15 years later. But we stayed over there in Tacoma. And I went to school and I got my degree in nutrition. So I’m a dietician.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Harvey: Yeah, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Harvey: [LAUGHTER] It was very interesting. Very unique. It was just such a unique, interesting thing. I don’t know. The only thing, I didn’t realize—you can’t explain it to people, it was so strange. But when my daughter, my youngest daughter was in a book club when she was in grade school, and one of the books the book club read was, I think, <em>The Great Glass Sea</em>. It’s a children’s novel about living in Los Alamos during the same time period. And it’s a children’s book. A young girl and her father or her mother or something are physicists or something that go and live there. And when I’m reading this book with my daughter, I realize, this was my life exactly. That the way this story this girl is talking about growing up in this government village, building a nuclear bomb—and there was mention of Richland in the book, because they were all part of the same project. And I just said, it suddenly dawned on me, this is what my life was. And I didn’t realize it was anything unique or different at the time. You didn’t even know it until you talked to other people that came from other places. And I told my daughter that. Because she had been in Richland lots of times. And I said, this is what Richland was like.</p>
<p>And you don’t see that now, because now you see this—there’s a lot of green. It’s such a different—almost a normal community now, compared to what it was then. It was not normal. It was weird. But you thought it was normal, that was all it was. As you got older, you could go to Pasco and see a little bit of normalcy over there, that that was what the world was like. Kennewick was kind of odd, because it was more like a suburb; it wasn’t—there wasn’t much in Kennewick. There wasn’t much reason to go to Kennewick; it was kind of just a dull place. Whereas Pasco had some big buildings and old houses that really look cool, like farm houses. So you felt like there was some culture in Pasco. Richland had nothing. It was just ugly. [LAUGHTER] And there was nothing to do, as a kid, you know. There was just—there was nothing to do. You could walk to the river and float down the river. There was not a lot to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to civil rights and how they impacted your parents’ life and your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Harvey: Well, I thought it was really unique and very brave of them to take that on. My mother was like that. She would get a passion about something. And then the thing I learned from them is that if something’s wrong and you’re going to complain about it, don’t complain unless you’re willing to do something. You don’t have to do something big. Because neither one of my parents were leaders; they just became the working bees. And I heard that a lot from their friends over the years. John Slaughter says that to me all the time. He says, your parents were the working bees. I ran into Jay Inslee one time on an airplane flying back from Washington, DC, years ago. I went up to him, because we were walking in the aisle, and I introduced myself and I said, Jay, I remember your name as a kid growing up, and I told him who I was. And his response was, oh, yeah, Dick and Nyla, they were the workers. They were the workers. Those are the people that you really need in your organization.</p>
<p>And probably what I learned was that that work is as important as any work. You don’t have to be the leader; you just have to say, I’ll be the person to stuff the envelopes, or I’ll be the person to get the poster board and paint the signs. Any little bit can make a difference in the outcome. And I learned that a lot. And that’s kind of the way I’ve always taken things, that when there’s something—a project that needs to be done, I’m not afraid to say, well, you know, if I don’t volunteer, nobody will. And I have no reason—I don’t have any right to complain about it, if I’m not willing to volunteer.</p>
<p>And so I guess my legacy from my mother and father is that I’ve done a lot of volunteer work with the nutrition field that I work in. I work in kidney disease and dialysis. I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone many, many times to—I say, well, okay you need a volunteer; I can do that. And it’s a lot of extra work. It is. I mean, my parents did a lot of extra work. And the family survived. My mother wasn’t there cooking dinner, doing laundry, cleaning the house. We didn’t have any of that stuff, and we survived. She was out doing other things. She was working hard to see what she could do to make the world better for other people. And my dad, too.</p>
<p>And I think that’s one thing that I’ve learned from them is you don’t have to be a leader; you just have to be a worker. And if you’re not willing to step up and be a worker, then quit bitching about it. Just shut up and go stick your head in a hole. So. And that was kind of the, I guess, that was the way I see them. Now, my brother and sister may say something completely different. That’s just my impression.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. Well, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to interview with us today. I really appreciate your perspective on your parents.</p>
<p>Harvey: Thanks! Mm-hmm.</p>
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1954-
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Kathy (Brouns) Harvey
Description
An account of the resource
Kathy (Brouns) Harvey was born in Richland, Washington in 1954. Her mother Nyla was influential in local Civil Rights movements.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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06/29/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Discrimination
School integration
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F308708a50c5d3255fff49081116f2946.JPG
7504f73a4fb2271d503d0fd147062f3f
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff5ff790c9c56b6d9393251b940eeb4b7.mp4
c0e41977e83f11154b807d447330db45
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
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Gordon Guice
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Gordon—how do you say your last name?</p>
<p>Gordon Guice: Guice, G-U-I-C-E.</p>
<p>Robert: Guice. Gordon Guice on January 23<sup>rd</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Gordon about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Guice: Gordon Joe Guice. G-O-R-D-O-N, J-O-E, G-U-I-C-E.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thanks, Gordon. So I usually start off by asking how and why you came to the area, but your parents actually came to the area. So I’m wondering, I’d like to start there, if you could tell me about your parents and how they came here.</p>
<p>Guice: Well my dad, Joe C. Guice, was in the service. And when he got out of service, he came to the State of Washington.</p>
<p>Franklin: And do you know what year that would have been?</p>
<p>Guice: That was in the late ‘40s. After ’43, you know, around that area. My mom was out this way also, and she came out this way via the railroad employment. She ventured out this way at the Hanford City at the restaurant and she was a waitress there.</p>
<p>Franklin: That would have been the construction camp?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, that’s the construction camp. She was a waitress. And she met my dad.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Guice: And the rest is history right there. And they, shortly after that, they got married. Dad was a laborer and he specialized in cement finishing out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Where were your parents from?</p>
<p>Guice: My parents are from Texas. My dad’s from Longview, Texas, and my mom was from Naples, Mount Pleasant, Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: I don’t know Texas—</p>
<p>Guice: Southeast Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so kind of close to the Louisiana—</p>
<p>Guice: Right on the border.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, great. It’s my understanding that the Manhattan Project was segregated, that work crews and things were segregated, is that—did your parents talk about that at all?</p>
<p>Guice: My dad, he didn’t bring it up very much, but he was a foreman, and back then I can remember when he come home with all of his buddies. They would all carpool. And my dad was a foreman, so he would talk about his crew, and all I seen was Afro-Americans as his crew. So I kind of take it at that. He was just a black foreman and all his crew was black, you know. I mean, when he went to the dams, it was more of the integration. When he went to the dams—he worked on a lot of dams. Lower Monumental, Little Goose, Ice Harbor. They worked on all those dams.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Guice: A lot of cement.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: That was his forte.</p>
<p>Franklin: Cement?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how long did your—did your mom talk about working out on Site at all?</p>
<p>Guice: My mom didn’t work onsite.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, sorry.</p>
<p>Guice: Just my dad.</p>
<p>Franklin: Just your dad, okay.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: So where did she work during the Manhattan Project, then?</p>
<p>Guice: During the Manhattan Project, she was a waitress, she cleaned houses, in west Pasco for some doctors. She worked at Frank’s Grill, that was a restaurant downtown. And she later on, after we got a little bit older, she worked for Pasco School District. She was a bus driver for 35 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, for 35 years.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, and my mom went to Columbia Basin College when I was in like junior high school, and she got a cosmetology license and she done black hair with the old irons on the stove. She done all the black ladies’ hair.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Did she have her own shop or—</p>
<p>Guice: No, she done it in our kitchen. [LAUGHTER] In our kitchen.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. When were you born, Gordon?</p>
<p>Guice: In 1952, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. It’s my understanding that life in the Tri-Cities was somewhat—although not formally segregated, there existed informal levels of segregation. Did your parents ever experience that, or talk about their experiences with that?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, it was there, because you could see it. There was boundaries in Kennewick, and there was boundaries coming out this way to Richland. But my—I was raised to try to get along with everybody. And that helped me in the long run. It was there. And we had some bad times in the early ‘60s, some riots and stuff like that. But I guess there was a lot of copycat stuff going on, because there wasn’t enough of us to cause any real problem. But we wanted to be heard. And there was a few things that happened, but it never got out of hand.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you mention bad times in the early ‘60s, do you mean nationally or locally?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, I mean, the national stuff started the local stuff. As far as I’m concerned. Stuff would—that’s why I say copycat. It was real problems, but when you see someone doing something, stand up for a cause, you take it upon yourself to try to join in and try to make things right. I’ve always been one to—and I was raised that way—to keep my eye on the prize. My dad always taught me that. To keep my—no matter what. He said, it’s going to be rough. You’re a different color; you’re going to have to do certain things better, and you’re going to have to be there. You know, it’s just a little tough, but that’s life. I took that to heart. It turned out okay for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. When you say copycat things, is there anything in particular that you remember from that time that happened locally?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, in ’68, I think they had the Watts riots around that time. And then there was a demonstration downtown Pasco where some trees got torched right in front of the—that’s why there’s no trees there anymore. They got torched in front of the courthouse. That’s the first time I ever got tear gassed—was wrong place at the wrong time. But it was a demonstration. I don’t remember anybody really getting hurt. There were a few—[unknown] comes to mind. He got killed by the cops over at—</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s someone local?</p>
<p>Guice: Yes, someone local. By the cops. There’s rumors around that. They probably shouldn’t have done—come to the certain extent, to take his life. But you know, that still happens now. It was there, and you dealt with it, man. I had my eye on the prize.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the prize?</p>
<p>Guice: To have a future. To have a future. At the time being, when we were little, your future was out here at Hanford. That was the best jobs—the best-paying jobs. I really concentrated on what my dad told me. We were to ride around in east Pasco, and we had our old co-op station. Maybe Vanis could—because he was one of my mentors, always. Vanis always done good. You had Ed Smith, you had Dr. Wiley, CJ Mitchell, people out here that lived in Richland and they worked out at Hanford. But getting back to my original story, I would ride around with my dad, and he would see—he would show me guys older than him that worked out here that retired. And he would go see some of those guys over there playing dominoes. That’s what you want to be able to do when you get that age.</p>
<p>Franklin: Instead of having to work.</p>
<p>Guice: Instead of having to work. So get something that has a pension and some benefits, so you can relax when you get older.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Did your parents ever talk about what it was like growing up in east Texas?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, I experienced it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, that was really segregated. I’m talking like, white-only bathrooms, black-only bathrooms. We would—me and my brother would always get in trouble when we went back to Naples, Mount Pleasant area, Longview. We were just used to getting what we wanted and going up to the front of the line. And more than once, I got pulled on the collar and told that the people of a different color were supposed to go in front of me. And I was just really—really kind of shocking, because I wasn’t used to that. That’s why I’m saying, it wasn’t that bad here. It was bad, but it wasn’t like that. I mean, people calling you down in the South.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because there was that formal segregation.</p>
<p>Guice: It was formal. It was written. And you obeyed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, right, for fear of your life, probably.</p>
<p>Guice: Right, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Especially after Emmitt Till and things like that.</p>
<p>Guice: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how often did you back to east Texas?</p>
<p>Guice: Every summer.</p>
<p>Franklin: Every summer.</p>
<p>Guice: Every summer, we would get on the Southern Pacific, and it would go up north, and we would go to St. Paul, Minnesota, it’d take two and a half days, and go all the way back down to Texas. My mom didn’t want to go on the other trains—we rode the train—because she said it was too dirty. So we spent two days on the Southern Pacific. St. Paul, Minnesota, we’d go to and look out the window in the train station, look at the Mississippi River, which—I was three, four, five, six—we went every summer to be with my grandparents.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Yeah, I was going to ask who you were seeing there, but that makes sense. So I’d like to go back to this—you mentioned there was this demonstration in Pasco in the late-‘60s that you said you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: I haven’t heard of this yet, but—maybe because we just started the project, but I’m wondering, how were you—why were you there that day?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, for one, I was Afro-American, black. I guess I was brown or Negro back then. Didn’t know what I was for a long time. But I can remember there was a bunch of us: me and my buddies, we got together at Kurtzman Park. Why it really started, I can’t remember. But we ended up in the park across the street, at the city park, right across the street. And it just escalated from there. There was some stuff going on, like, all over the country. Like I said, I can’t remember when it started, but we went over and the trees got set afire. The cops came and they shot teargas to disperse the crowds. So that’s how I kind of got caught up in that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Tell me about going to school in Pasco. Were the classes that you went to—actually, I’m going to back up. Where did you live in Pasco? Did you live in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Guice: Not at the beginning. Way back in the day, in the late ‘50s—I was born, like I said, I was born in Pasco. But right across from the courthouse, there was—it’s the senior citizen apartments right now, it’s called Parkside.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: Parkside, I was born in Parkside. And then we moved—we were moving on up, one up the street to the Navy homes, and I was in the Navy barracks, right there on 4<sup>th</sup>—4<sup>th</sup> and 1<sup>st</sup>, on the corner right there, where the Boys and Girls Club is now, in those apartments there. I stayed there until 1966, and then we really moved on up, and we moved to east Pasco. We had a house. So we moved into east Pasco in 1966, Owen Avenue—</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, sorry—</p>
<p>Guice: Owen Avenue. Vanis lived two doors down, across the street from us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. How close to you in age is Vanis? How close were you guys? Or far apart in age are you?</p>
<p>Guice: Oh, probably, I don’t know. I’m 65, and I think Vanis might be in his late 70s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so he was somewhat—you mentioned earlier he was somewhat of a mentor to you, kind of someone that you looked up to.</p>
<p>Guice: Anybody that stayed—you know, my dad—anybody that stayed out of trouble, went to work everyday, had a car, had a roof over his head, he was doing all right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: That’s what it was about.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, making a good life for yourself.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Tell me about going to school in Pasco. Were your classes integrated, segregated, either intentionally or unintentionally?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, we were bussed from we’ll call it junior high—not junior high, but in grade school—we weren’t bussed during that time. But in grade school, I attended Captain Gray. I went to Captain Gray, and I look at my pictures every once in a while. And my kindergarten class, my first grade class, I think it might have been, oh, a couple Afro-Americans, and some Latinos, a couple, and then the rest was Caucasian. And that’s just the way it was all the way up through school until we got to high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever experience any racism or intimidation from other students or school staff when you went to school, because of your color?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, you mean me personally?</p>
<p>Franklin: You personally, and/or did you hear of any? Did you observe any?</p>
<p>Guice: Oh, it happened. I would be really naïve to say it wasn’t happening. But my point is that—I was an athlete. A pretty good athlete. So I might have got away with some stuff that normal people, the average joe, didn’t get away with. I’m not boasting, but I had—because I had to intermingle with some of my Caucasian friends on the competition fields. So, you know, we hung out more than people that were just in a group and didn’t get into the activities and stuff like that. It kind of trickled down. It was there. You would hear it. You would hear it, but I would try—in ’68, our basketball team in Pasco, when the times were kind of heated, we started winning, and it really brought the whole community of Pasco together. It was through sports. Anybody that you interview will know about that time, because it was a real—from ’68, ’69 and ’70, that’s when we really started winning in basketball. And I was a part of that. It brought a lot of people together. Sports does that. You forget about color when you’re rooting for your team or for your town, your city, your state, or whatever. It was there. It was there. It was there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What were your interactions with people from the different cities, like Richland and Kennewick?</p>
<p>Guice: Hmm. Well, like I said, it goes back to sports. I done a lot of stuff that if you weren’t playing, people of color didn’t get to do. But I was really fortunate. But you know, there used to be a sign on the Kennewick bridge, don’t get caught over here after night and stuff like that. We would ride over to Zip’s, yell things out the window and take off, and get over across the bridge before we got caught and stuff like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Guice: Oh, yeah. That stuff happened all the time.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of things—can you repeat them?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, no, not on—not on TV. [LAUGHTER] No. Well, you weren’t supposed to be over there, and we were going to show them that we could be over there after dark. It was like—it was pretty bad. And we didn’t branch out to Richland, because we’re not supposed to be over here, and the black kids from Richland didn’t really come to Pasco. So it was—you met them through sports. We’re really good friends now, after all that—you know, after the years. I got some of my best friends are people that I grew up and played against from Richland. But it was just—it was known that you didn’t go to certain places.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I’ve heard a lot about that sign, and I’ve never seen a picture of it. I’ve heard people say that it exists, and that it didn’t exist. Did it exist, that sign on the bridge?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, it exists.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember what it said, verbatim?</p>
<p>Guice: No, I don’t remember what it said.</p>
<p>Franklin: But the spirit of it, though, was no—</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, as you were going north across the old Green Bridge, it was up on the right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Guice: And Zip’s was right around the corner. That’s how far, just to tell you how intense it was, you could almost throw a rock from the bridge to Zip’s. I mean, it was just right around the corner.</p>
<p>Franklin: It is.</p>
<p>Guice: And we’d pull out that parking lot, and we had to stay in the car and drive and get the heck out of there before they chased us. Blew a clutch out in the parking lot one time and we had to get out and run. The clutch spring broke on my buddy’s car.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you ran across the bridge?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, we ran across the bridge.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, hell-raiser, huh?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Well, for a good purpose though, it sounds like. How would you describe life in east Pasco, like the kind of community life and community events? What kind of community events were important to you growing up?</p>
<p>Guice: Juneteenth was a big one.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, tell me about that.</p>
<p>Guice: Well, that’s when the slaves got their rights and stuff. And we always celebrated and it was a big deal down at Kurtzman Park. We would have basketball tournaments against Yakima, the black people from Yakima. We’d invite people from Richland. There wasn’t many people in Kennewick, so they were kind of left out. But it was mostly Juneteenth and barbecues. And then back then, east side would play against Navy homes in sports. Because there were a lot of black people in Navy homes, where I grew up. You could just see them walking down the street, and we would meet and have these big baseball tournaments and stuff like that. But official stuff, it was Juneteenth.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hm. Why did they call it Navy homes?</p>
<p>Guice: Because it was a Navy barracks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and was there a big Navy presence in Pasco?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that left over from World War II?</p>
<p>Guice: No, I think—don’t quote me on this, but that’s where the Navy stayed, in the Navy homes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So eventually, you graduated—you played sports throughout high school—basketball and baseball, right?</p>
<p>Guice: Yes, sir.</p>
<p>Franklin: Tell me what happened after high school.</p>
<p>Guice: After high school?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: I went to Washington State University.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Guice: I played basketball there. I got a scholarship and played basketball. I was recruited by Jud Heathcote, Marv Harshman—they were my freshman coaches. Jud went on to Michigan State and he and my high school coach, Don Munson, recruited Magic Johnson.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, really?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah. I got letters from Coach. But I went up there for a year, and I was a snap pledge at Sigma Nu Fraternity—I was a frat boy. It was two black—Afro-American—fraternal brothers on the whole campus of Washington State University.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Guice: Bill Skinner was the other one, and he was from Pasco. We were the only black fraternal brothers at Washington State University in the ‘70s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you know each other?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, I went to high school with him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Guice: I grew up with Bill. That’s—because I didn’t go through rush, to get to go see all the houses. I was what you call—I was a snap pledge, and it was because of Bill. It was probably six or seven other people from Pasco that were in the house. So, that was a big part of my life.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah. So it was kind of like a little home-away-from-home.</p>
<p>Guice: Right, right. It was probably the Madisons, Bill Skinner and myself.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that was in 1970, ’71?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Still was probably a pretty charged time. Was there anything—any tension out at WSU campus?</p>
<p>Guice: Ooh, boy, yeah. Black Panthers. It was really rough for me at the beginning, because they couldn’t understand why this guy was standing all over here with all these white guys. But it was comfortable when I seen Bill. I was 17 years old, away from—not far away, but away from home. And it was comforting. But I would’ve never gotten out of there if I hadn’t joined that frat. It was really—it gave me some structure. It was kind of like being in the military. But, you know, a little lower key, but there was certain things you had to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Guice: Jud—Coach Heathcote—and Harshman left after my freshman year, and I came back to home. I had a scholarship to play for Dick Hannan in ’72. We were state champions at CBC in 1972. But then I went back and played for George Raveling and got out of school in 1975. Best time of my life.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why is that?</p>
<p>Guice: I met a lot of good people, done a lot of things, I learned a lot about myself. Because you had to do your own clothes, you had to pay your bills—you grow up. Some of the teammates I had, I still talk to today. It’s just pretty cool. A lot of fun, a lot of fun.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you major in?</p>
<p>Guice: Physical education.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Earlier you mentioned the Black Panthers.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were they active on the WSU campus?</p>
<p>Guice: There was a group of Black Panthers on the campus. Yeah, the hats and the leather coats.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you have any interactions with them?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, I got called a few names, you know, until they figured out who I was. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why? Was it because you were—</p>
<p>Guice: Because I had no business being over there with all them white people. You know? I was like a fly in buttermilk to them. You know, after they got to know me, and seeing I was there playing ball, and I would go to the parties, and they figured out I wasn’t an Uncle Tom. It was okay, but you still have your militants. It took a while for some of them to come around, but eventually they all came around.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that a common phrase aimed at people, maybe, in your situation at that time, Uncle Tom?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because I know—I’m obviously aware of the history of that character, but was that—were you called that by any of them?</p>
<p>Guice: I was called—well, I wasn’t called that to my face, but you know, it got around that maybe that’s what I was, I had to kind of prove myself. People from Pasco—it was a bunch of people in Pasco—Affirmative Action, we got financial aid and a lot of kids went to school. They would be in a certain—at the hub, inside of the Student Union Building, you had your little section. And they seen I could go to the section and nobody—I was an okay guy. It’s all right, but yeah—people from California—the students from California that were in that Black Panther group, they didn’t understand that—</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, right, because they were maybe from a—</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, completely different. Through no fault of their own.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. It was a much bigger scene, they had been much closer to Watts.</p>
<p>Guice: Right, right there, and maybe even participated.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Pasco’s such a smaller community—yeah. And did you kind of eventually make—you mentioned you kind of made peace—</p>
<p>Guice: It was all right. By the end of the year, it was okay, it was all right. You still had your guys that just hated everybody, but that’s all right. I didn’t pay no attention to them. It was okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there any organized activity in Pasco, either mainstream like NAACP or militant like Black Panther that you remember?</p>
<p>Guice: I can’t remember any Black Panthers. But CAC, Community Action Committee. That’s how I actually got into the theaters—Affirmative Action, back in the day. But, yeah, they would have neighborhood meetings and stuff like that, trying to see what we could do for the community, what they could do at the time for the community. So it was—I’m proud of Pasco. It was a lot of people that done the right thing back then.</p>
<p>Franklin: And this CAC, this was primarily an African American aid organization?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, I guess it was formed by the government. It gave them money, and they would try to—Community Action, you know—make good waves in the community and housing and help people get scholarships and go to school with the Affirmative Action program. That’s how—go to CAC, man, they’ll help you out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Do you remember the NAACP being active in Pasco at all?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know if you remember, but Art Fletcher? He was the first black Republican. [LAUGHTER] He was—god, what President was that? Was it Nixon? But he worked for the President. And Art Fletcher lived in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really?</p>
<p>Guice: So the NAACP was kind of big.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you know Art Fletcher?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, I knew him. I used to hang out with his son, Philip.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What role did he play in—</p>
<p>Guice: I can’t—he was a mucky-muck, man. He was a bigwig. He’d go back to Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you mentioned he was a Republican.</p>
<p>Guice: I think that—yeah, that’s what we called him.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Okay. Because that would have been—you know, that was kind of after—</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, that was way back there. Yeah, I’m thinking he was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, that’s just interesting—I mean, not to say it doesn’t happen, but generally, that was after kind of the great political shift, after civil—okay. So you ended up, after college—oh, sorry, before that, I wanted to ask—you went to college and you graduated. What level of education did your parents get through? Do you know?</p>
<p>Guice: They graduated from high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: They both graduated from high school.</p>
<p>Guice: Yes, sir.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then you mentioned your mother went to CBC.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, and got a cosmetology license. She was a hair dresser.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wanted to ask about your dad again before we came to your Hanford work. You mentioned he worked at Hanford and then he worked out on the dams. Did he go back to work at Hanford at all?</p>
<p>Guice: My dad?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: No—oh, yeah. See, he was in the union. I don’t know if you know how that works—</p>
<p>Franklin: I don’t.</p>
<p>Guice: Okay. So, they need <em>x</em> amount of laborers, especially cement finishers out at Hanford. They call the hall, the union hall—the laborers’ hall. And they would ask—they have a list—one, two, three, four down. And if you’re on the top of the list, so you’re one of the 12, you got to go out there. See, the dam had a call. So those guys that were 13 are number one, so he would go out there. So he worked on the dams and back out—it just depended on the layoffs and the hiring. He was back and forth forever, as long as I can remember, between the dams and Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Always doing concrete.</p>
<p>Guice: Always doing concrete.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was the union—you mentioned he was usually a foreman of a crew. Was the union in general, was it integrated, or was it a separate African American—</p>
<p>Guice: No, it was integrated.</p>
<p>Franklin: But generally, though, he was on an all-black—he was the foreman of an all-black—</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, I mean, just from what I could see. He would talk about his crew and he would name people and those were his buddies. It was five or six of them in the car, and they all worked for them. So I just took it for granted that was his crew. But I wasn’t—oblivious of white people being out there, too. I mean, when you do that, you have to work together, but his crew was predominantly black.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. How old do you—when do you remember finding out what was being made at Hanford? How old were you when you kind of cognizant of what was going on out there?</p>
<p>Guice: I was probably in junior high school. And the reason I say that—my best friend, Ron Howard—we grew up together. I been knowing Ron since the third grade. And we played ball together all that time. But his dad, Roy F. Howard, worked at Battelle. They had the beagles over there, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story about the dogs they had over there smoking cigarettes?</p>
<p>Franklin: I have. In fact, we have pictures in our collection.</p>
<p>Guice: Okay. He worked over there, and then Mr. Howard would come home and tell us about some of the stuff that was going on out there. So I was probably in the seventh grade.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Guice: I figured out that it was something weird going on out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: And you didn’t want to go out there too far. I mean, there were stories about the river and getting stuff, but I’m still here and I played in that river all my life. But there’s a bunch of stories going on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did you ever—so your father worked there during the Manhattan Project.</p>
<p>Guice: Yes, sir.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he ever talk to you about when he found out what he was working on, what all that concrete he was pouring was for?</p>
<p>Guice: You know, there was a lot of radiation. I don’t think they really knew what they were getting into, because you know, the statistics are showing now—I’m not going to say that’s what caused it, but the numbers are overbearing. People that worked out there that they started getting all this stuff and they’re now no longer with us.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: So I can imagine—I’m going to tell you like this. I can imagine how it was for them. You got between me and my dad. And I worked out there. When I worked out there at 100-N, Tank Farms, we’d have to do maintenance and we could get 300 millirem a week. And it takes 1,000 millirem to make a rem. Okay, we’d get that in a week. Say you got that in five days, the number that you got on that Monday fell off on the next Monday. So you sat in the bullpen for a week. So, my point being is you can’t even get that a year now. That’s how much has changed. So there was no regulation back when my dad was working, and I don’t even think they knew what they were getting into.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: Because I don’t think he ever had to dress up, or—I don’t remember him telling me that he had to put on booties and a white suit to do anything.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Did he talk about—did he ever talk about the bomb and its role in ending the war and his part in that?</p>
<p>Guice: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Or how he remembered that?</p>
<p>Guice: No, he didn’t share anything like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Guice: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was your dad working out on Site when President Kennedy came to the Site?</p>
<p>Guice: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you go out there to see him?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Tell me about that. Tell me about that day.</p>
<p>Guice: Well, we just got in the car and we went out and sat on the side of the road and watched him drive by. That was pretty much it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you go out to N Reactor and watch the speech and all?</p>
<p>Guice: No, I think we were on George Washington Way. Him and his buddies, they got the day off. Just waved at him when we drove by.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So, eventually—after graduating, you—what did you do after you graduated?</p>
<p>Guice: When I got out that summer, I got employed by Employment Security for the State of Washington. I was interviewing the counselor for the unemployment office—Employment Office, not the Unemployment Office. They taught us the right way to say that. But I was there for 13 months, and then I got wind of United Parcel Service, UPS, was hiring. Back in the day, they didn’t advertise, so it was somebody that worked there that I played softball with that let me know that the main guy from Seattle, Mr. Campbell, was coming down. And I got hired in ’75. I worked for UPS from ’75 to ’80. And then in 1981, I left there—I was getting into the fitters, so I was just kind of waiting on the list. I went out and I worked at Boise Cascade for 13-and-a-half months and I then got in the fitters in ’82.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then where did you—and that’s how you came to Hanford, right?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: So tell me about that. Tell me about your time working at Hanford and the different jobs you did and things like that.</p>
<p>Guice: Okay, well, I’m a seam fitter out of Local 598 in Pasco. 35 years in the trade. My first job was at Hanford #2, when they were building 2. We had 1, 2 and 4, and 3 and 5 were across the mountains over at Satsop. I was doing the construction, and that was a really—that was really a wild time. I’m surprised that place is still standing up.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’ve heard that. Well, 2 is—is 2—one of them is not completed, right?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, see, we got 2. 1 and 4 is sitting out there; they’re mothballed.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s right. Yeah, I’ve heard stories about that.</p>
<p>Guice: “The Boomtown Cowboys,” it was an article in <em>Playboy</em> about the Boomtown Cowboys.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really? And that was the people that worked at WPPS?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah. A lot going on, man. [LAUGHTER] And a lot of travelers. I think at the time there was probably 3,000 travelers in the Tri-Cities from all over the country working there. They had all three of those places going. Well, five of them: 3 and 5 were going also over in Satsop. So it was a bunch of people here and bunch of stuff happening.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then it all went bust, right?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, in what? ’80—God, right, I was only out there for a little bit right at that time—I think in ’83, ’84, they shut it down. The bonds went bad and—shew.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did you do then?</p>
<p>Guice: I hit the road.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Guice: I hit the road. Traveled all over the United States. Mostly on the west side. Because of my radiation experience, I worked in Pocatello, Idaho at INEL, on their side. I worked there off and on for three to five years. And then just all over the country. I worked at Oswego, at the nuclear plant in Oswego. Just all over the country. Once you got that clearance, you could pretty much bounce around all over the place at these nuclear plants in the United States. They’d even pay you to apply if they didn’t hire you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Guice: They’d send you 100 bucks just for applying. Because it was so hard to get people that had already been cleared and they didn’t have to go through all the schooling. So that happened right out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah. Some of the best training around.</p>
<p>Franklin: What are some of the other sites out at Hanford that you worked at?</p>
<p>Guice: I worked at 100-N, K Basin, FFTF, Fast Flux Testing Facility, over at 1 and 4 for a little bit, and my last job, I was a general foreman over at the warehouse on Stevens, right down Battelle Boulevard, that big warehouse there. That was my warehouse. I ran that. The pipefitters’ general foreman for 12 years right there. And all that pipe that’s out south of that, that was my laydown. I still call it mine. I’ve only been retired two years, but I still say mine. But we took care of all that, and when they had a material request for the Vit Plant, we put the stuff on the trucks and sent it out to them so they could build the place. And it’s still going on now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. You mentioned a bit ago about Affirmative Action and the CAC. Did that also play a role in—when you got into the Pipefitters’ Union? And how diverse was that union when you—</p>
<p>Guice: Well, like I said, I went to college in ’70. But from ’68 to ’70, and it went on after that; I’m just talking about some of my friends. If you done okay in school, and you—you had to take a test, you had to go the employment office, your math test, your dexterity test—if you got past that, there was a pretty good chance that the people at CAC and Affirmative Action, you could get into the Electricians, Laborers or Pipefitters, depending on your test scores. And it played a big part—I could’ve gotten in in ’70, but like I said, I went to school. So I missed out on probably like 12 years. I didn’t miss out; I wouldn’t be where I’m at now. I wouldn’t say I missed out. But the opportunity was there, if you were a person of color, to get one of these jobs. And that was the way—that was the tunnel to it. That’s how most of the people from Pasco got—Affirmative Action was big.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What are your feelings about Affirmative Action?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, it helped me. It helped people of color. I don’t know how it really started. But I’m glad it did. I guess it was equality in numbers. Quotas, if you don’t mind me saying. And they had to have them. Wrong way to do it, but they had to have them. And then—it even went into females after a while. So, it just helped people when people don’t want to stand up and do the right thing, to get your foot in the door. Sometimes you have to knock them down, and Affirmative Action done that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. In what ways, if any, did security and secrecy at Hanford impact your work when you were—</p>
<p>Guice: Can’t talk about it.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Guice: I signed. I can’t talk about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Really?</p>
<p>Guice: Seriously.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, that’s cool. That’s funny; I’ve never gotten that answer to that question before.</p>
<p>Guice: I was—I don’t—there’s things I can say, and I’ve seen stuff. I was supervision, so I’ve seen a lot. Some of that stuff—I’m not going to say, to get to where—should I say this, or should I say this—I’d rather not.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, no, so I’m not asking about what kinds of secret things did you see; I’m asking, like, in what ways did that focus on secrecy and security impact your daily work at Hanford? How was that different from working in a non-secure environment?</p>
<p>Guice: Structure, discipline. You had to have it, because there was like zero tolerance. There was, for instance, walking by and looking at somebody’s screen. That was a no-no. Leaving your screen on for more than two minutes, that was a no-no. Just certain things that, due to training—harassment, zero tolerance. That was really a big deal, also. It was just things you learned in your training to get out there. Certain things that you didn’t do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Let’s see here. I’m just kind of looking through the rest of my—</p>
<p>Guice: That’s fine.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did you—when you came back to settle in the Tri-Cities—do you still live in Pasco today?</p>
<p>Guice: Yes, sir.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how come you choose to move back to Pasco?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, for work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Guice: I came back in 2000. And I helped build the plant at the Chemical Depot, the demilitarization plant, to get rid of all the bombs.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, down in Umatilla.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, Umatilla, the Chemical Depot. So we built that, and that’s the reason I came home. Get on the phone and call, my number came up. And I went out there in 2000, and I was there from 2000 until 2003, and we completed that plant. That’s the reason that I came home, and then shortly after that, 2004, I came here, and I was there until ’16.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you still have family in the area?</p>
<p>Guice: My brother’s here; my sister’s in Waukegan, Illinois. Mom and Dad have passed, and I have ten grandkids, nephews and nieces that are still here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, that’s quite a big family. I forgot to ask about siblings. You said you have a brother and sister?</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, my brother Rayford, he’s a welder-pipefitter, retired.</p>
<p>Franklin: Older or younger?</p>
<p>Guice: Younger; I’m the oldest.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, you’re the oldest. Then you have a sister as well?</p>
<p>Guice: Sister, Jackie. She’s a respiratory therapist in Waukegan, Illinois.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. That’s great. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Or actually—you didn’t work at Hanford during the Cold War. Well, you did a little bit at WPPS 2. I guess, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford, how about that?</p>
<p>Guice: This generation?</p>
<p>Franklin: This generation and future generations.</p>
<p>Guice: What would I—I don’t understand the question.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m going to rephrase that question. In fact, I might just scrap that question.</p>
<p>Guice: No, don’t scrap it.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think I have a better question.</p>
<p>Guice: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about growing up during Civil Rights era?</p>
<p>Guice: I would probably share what my parents shared with me. It’s to respect where you come from, respect your elders, because there was people before you that paved the way so you could have a better life, and to respect that. And if they carry that on, it’s never going to be okay; there’s just too many people. It’s never going to be okay, but if people keep their eye on the prize, and do the right thing, and respect where they come from, and give back. When you get to wherever you want to go, try to help the person next to you or behind you to get into a safe place.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s beautiful. Is there anything else that you would like to mention related to migration, segregation, civil rights, and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Guice: Well, I would like to say I’m probably really grateful that I didn’t experience the really, really bad stuff. I’ve always had pride in my color. I was raised that way. But I was also taught you got to get along to get where you want to get. I’m not saying kissing any butt or anything like that—I hope I didn’t say nothing wrong—but you got to get along with people. And we did that when I grew up. That’s the reality, and it’s life. But you can—if you want to, there’s probably nothing that you can’t do if you really want it. Not saying it’s not going to be a rocky road and you’re going to have to take some stuff, but if you keep your eye on the prize, you can get there. And some people do and some people don’t. I wanted it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, and you got it.</p>
<p>Guice: Yeah, well, I was raised that way.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, it sounds like your parents did a good job.</p>
<p>Guice: Well, thank you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gordon, it was really a pleasure to interview you. Thank you for coming out and talking about your experiences growing up in Pasco and working at Hanford and just your whole life.</p>
<p>Guice: Well, thanks for having me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Guice: Appreciate it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, no problem. Okay.</p>
<p>Guice: Thank you.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
100-N Reactor
Tank Farms
WPPS
K Basin
FFTF
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1952-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1982-2016
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Gordon Guice
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
School integration
Racism
Sports
Pullman (Wash.)
Basketball
Affirmative action
Description
An account of the resource
Gordon Guice was born in Pasco, Washington in 1952 and worked on the Hanford Site various times between 1982-2016.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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01/23/2018
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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b21137d55e399764c2563418a2147543
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9753b3b5a7233d9657637096b118b84f.mp4
2c59ed8ae69153b41cc1c9bbd360a0dc
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Mae Fite
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: Yeah, I think—are we ready to go?</p>
<p>Lori Larson: All righty?</p>
<p>Franklin: All right. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Mae Fite on April 5, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mae about her experiences living in the Tri-Cities and/or working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Mae Fite: It’s Mae Fite. M-A-E, F-I-T-E.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Thank you. So, when and where were you born?</p>
<p>Fite: I was born in Linden, Texas in 1946.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And when did you first come to the Tri-Cities area?</p>
<p>Fite: My parents moved us here the first time in 1948. I don’t know when or how long we stayed. And then my mom moved two of us children back to Texas. And then my dad, evidently, came and then they had another child there. And then in 1950, she moved the three of us children back to Washington. And then in 1951, my dad moved back. And then in 1952, he went to Alaska and worked for a while before he came back.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh! What did he do in Alaska?</p>
<p>Fite: I have no idea. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m from Alaska originally.</p>
<p>Fite: It was probably construction of some sort, but I have no idea what he did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, there was a lot of building going on after the war. Yeah, that makes sense.</p>
<p>Fite: At that point, I was like four or five.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, all you knew was he went like really far away.</p>
<p>Fite: Well, I don’t even remember him being gone.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And when you say came back to Washington, were your parents in Pasco the whole time?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hm. Yeah, I was in Pasco, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And Linden, is that in east Texas area? Where is that in Texas?</p>
<p>Fite: That would be more, closer to the Arkansas border.</p>
<p>Franklin: Texarkana area? There were quite a few families from that area that came up to Pasco area.</p>
<p>Fite: They were following someone that came here originally and then they came for work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that the case with your mother and father? Do you know how they found out about the area?</p>
<p>Fite: Well, my mom—my grandmother’s husband is a Daniel. So he was following the Daniels family here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Relatives of—Vanis is a relative—</p>
<p>Fite: He’s Vanis’ great-uncle.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow, okay.</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: So it was kind of this extended family migration.</p>
<p>Fite: Right. One came, says—I think it was William Daniels came and said, there’s work here. I’m assuming that’s what they did; I’m not sure. Because this is all oral history, so it might be a little fuzzy. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, as it is, yeah.</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah, so my grandmother and her family was here, because it would’ve been my grandmother, her husband and their three children. And then my mom and dad and our family moved. But like I said, my mom didn’t like it here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p>Fite: [LAUGHTER] So, they moved back to Texas. And then after she had my youngest brother, there was no one there to help her with her kids. So she came back so her mom could help her with us.</p>
<p>Franklin: And it was your grandmother that was married to one of the Daniels.</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hm, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What was it about the area that your mom—did she ever tell you why she left and--?</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah, there was nothing here. [LAUGHTER] Weeds blowing, tumbleweeds, you know. Texas, at least there was trees. But there was nothing here in the Tri-Cities. Just dirt. She didn’t like it. And she wasn’t the only one that didn’t like it; there was a lot of people as I worked through Hanford, they said their wives came and the dust was blowing, they called it the termination winds?</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Fite: And they were out of here, you know?</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ lives before they came to work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Fite: They were farmers. And Dad also worked in the forest and drove trucks for the forest. So, Mom was a housewife. She didn’t work. She was busy raising children.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hm. How many siblings do you have?</p>
<p>Fite: Four. There’s four of us. I’m the eldest of the four.</p>
<p>Franklin: Eldest of the four, great. You kind of talked about your mom’s initial experience of coming to Hanford. What about your father, did he ever talk about what his initial experiences were like?</p>
<p>Fite: He never really did talk about it, because with him working, you know, he was out to support his family.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Where did he work?</p>
<p>Fite: When I was growing up, he pretty much worked on all the dams on the Snake River. Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Bonneville, John Day.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s—</p>
<p>Fite: Then he worked one in Wenatchee. Then from there—he was working at Ice Harbor, and he went to work for JA Jones. So he stayed there until he retired.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that when JA Jones had the Hanford contract to do most—</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did your father do at all these dams?</p>
<p>Fite: He was a carpenter. And when he retired from JA Jones, he was a general foreman for the carpenters’.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your father talk about the work crews that he was on? Do you know if they were segregated or--?</p>
<p>Fite: They were all integrated.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Great. Let’s see here, da, da, da. Tch, tch, tch. Sorry. I’m trying to formulate my questions for this situation. Oh! Where was the first place that your parents stayed in when they—or that you remember staying in, your family living in when your family arrived?</p>
<p>Fite: In east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what kind of housing was it?</p>
<p>Fite: The first home, Mom said they lived in a tiny little trailer, like a little travel trailer.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Fite: And then we moved to, in 1950, I think when we moved back, there was a little home there across the street from Morning Star Baptist Church. We lived in there in like a little fourplex. And from there we moved to Parkside Homes. My sister was born in 1953 when we were living in Parkside. Which now you can see the little area over there, they call it the Navy Homes Park over on 4<sup>th</sup> Street? And then Dad built our home over on Owens in east Pasco, and then that’s where we grew up.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember, like, the kind of quality or the construction of the homes? Was it similar to other homes in Pasco, or was it--? I’ve heard that—and our research found that some homes in Pasco didn’t have running water at the time.</p>
<p>Fite: Oh, we had all the utilities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, okay.</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah, so we were fine.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, good, well, that’s good.</p>
<p>Fite: Just dirt road.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. The roads in east Pasco were unpaved at that time.</p>
<p>Fite: Right, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe life in the community? What did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Fite: As a kid, we just played a lot. But as I grew up and I would find part-time jobs babysitting and whatever. So yeah. But my spare time was just reading. I loved to read, so I didn’t do a whole lot of nothing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, that’s good. Do you remember any particular community events that stand out to you?</p>
<p>Fite: Going to church every Sunday.</p>
<p>Franklin: Church every Sunday. Yeah, which church did you attend?</p>
<p>Fite: Morning Star Baptist.</p>
<p>Franklin: Morning Star. And what role did the church play in the community?</p>
<p>Fite: It was our center of everything. Your activities, if you needed information, friends, whatever, the church was center. Our thing at home was if you wanted to go out on Saturday night, you make sure you go, because you’re going to go to church on Sunday.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Always church on Sunday, right?</p>
<p>Fite: It was always church on Sunday. Mom wouldn’t allow us to do anything on Sunday if we hadn’t—if we wanted to go do anything, we had to make sure we went to church on Sunday.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sounds just like my mom.</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: The community of east Pasco was largely, if not completely, African American, right?</p>
<p>Fite: Pretty much. At first it wasn’t. It was segregated, because as the blacks moved in, the whites moved out. But where we were living was on Owens. So on Beech there was white families and on Douglas behind us there was white families, and then all over on—north of Lewis was all white until 1971 when they came in with the Urban Renewals. And then as they were removing the blacks out of their homes, they moved over to the north side on Lewis—yeah, Lewis. All the white families moved out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm. Familiar theme. Were there many families with children or extended families such as grandparents?</p>
<p>Fite: All of us had grandparents.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Fite: I had one grandmother here with nine grandchildren. All of my mom’s siblings and all of their kids. So it was extended families. If it wasn’t, it was aunt and uncle or something that was there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. Do you recall any family or community events or traditions, including food, that people brought from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Fite: I don’t know more than just our families, but it wasn’t anything different than Mom cooked all the time. She was an excellent cook.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of food did she—did she cook like Southern food, soul food type food?</p>
<p>Fite: I don’t think so.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p>Fite: If she did, I didn’t eat it. [LAUGHTER] I don’t remember. She cooked a lot of things different.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about, I know Juneteenth is a very important—</p>
<p>Fite: That just started recently in the last 30 years I guess. That wasn’t something we did when I was growing up.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. What about—was Kurtzman Park around when you were growing up?</p>
<p>Fite: It developed when I was growing up. Before then, it was just an empty field.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. What was the—did you—what was Kurtzman Park to the community, or what is it?</p>
<p>Fite: It was just a park. It wasn’t anything that we did special in the park. I don’t even know where the name Kurtzman came from. When I was growing up, it was just an empty—just another field.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hm. Do you remember when the park was put in?</p>
<p>Fite: It had to have been in middle school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you play in the park at all after it had been--? No, nothing too special.</p>
<p>Fite: I didn’t, but my brothers and sisters did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, your younger brothers and sisters? Yeah. Excuse me. Were there opportunities available here that were not available where your parents came from?</p>
<p>Fite: I would say so. That just the fact that they was able to work wherever they was working at was fine. Like my mom, she worked in most of the restaurants. But for us, the one thing I remember is that we could not go into the restaurant and sit down and eat. We could go to the fast food places and take our food, but we couldn’t go into the restaurants.</p>
<p>Franklin: And this was here, in Pasco? In all the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: I imagine not in any of the restaurants in east Pasco.</p>
<p>Fite: Well, they didn’t have any restaurants in east Pasco.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Fair enough.</p>
<p>Fite: I mean, there was two, but there wasn’t enough room there to sit down and have a family meal.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. And so you weren’t—do you remember any restaurants or experiences like that in particular?</p>
<p>Fite: Well, I went to apply for a job at Louberry’s [?] there on 4<sup>th</sup> and Lewis?</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hmm?</p>
<p>Fite: And the one question the guy asked me was, if a customer spanked me, what would I do? And I said, I would slap him. And he said, well, then you wouldn’t be able to work here. [LAUGHTER] So—I mean, I was being honest with him, because I had never experienced someone to do that to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, like, spank you on the behind?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm, yeah. He was flirting, you know. So my answer to him was, if you’re hitting me, I’m hitting back.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, that’s good for you. I mean, one person’s flirting is another person’s harassment. Wow. So you were—was that something that your parents had told you, like, we just don’t go, we just don’t sit down in these restaurants because we can’t? Or how’d you know that? Do you know what I mean?</p>
<p>Fite: Well, there was a restaurant there on Lewis and Wehe? I think that’s where it is now, called Wilky’s. So we would get out of school, we would go there, and all the white kids could go inside and get their food, but all of us African Americans, we had to stand in the window and get ours. So there was nothing that you was told that you couldn’t go in, but it was just, that was the way it worked.</p>
<p>Franklin: Would they just not serve you if you went inside?</p>
<p>Fite: I have no idea. I never did go in.</p>
<p>Franklin: That was just like the way it was?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Fite: I would say pretty much everything was limited as to what you could or could not do. But it wasn’t outwardly spoken; it was more covert. It was just like you couldn’t do this. For instance, there was the Eastside Market that was on the east side. There was no black or any other ethnic groups that was cashiers until later, after ’60-so. Then they finally hired people. But before then, there was no opportunity for working there in the stores.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, so blacks were excluded from employment, even on the east side of town, by white-owned businesses. Could you describe any interactions that you or your parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities area that stand out to you?</p>
<p>Fite: Such as?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, positive or negative interactions? Maybe with people in Kennewick or Richland?</p>
<p>Fite: Well, Kennewick, no one had any interaction in Kennewick. You could go there and shop, but you couldn’t live in Kennewick. And Richland, the only way you lived in Richland, you had to be working for the Hanford Site. So, Mom and Dad had friends that lived in Richland that worked at Hanford, so they would go and visit with them, but other than that, I don’t know. And if they—I didn’t really travel much with them, when they went out to visit with their friends. I was pretty much a homebody.</p>
<p>Franklin: Makes sense. Well, you’re young, right, too. And probably when they went out you had to look over your brothers and sisters, being the oldest?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Where did you go to school?</p>
<p>Fite: All Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Which schools?</p>
<p>Fite: Pretty much went to all of the grade schools in Pasco. At the time, middle school was McLoughlin Junior High, and then I graduated from Pasco High and then I attended CBC, got my AA.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did segregation or racism affect your education throughout your schooling?</p>
<p>Fite: It didn’t affect me for the fact that I got an integrated education. But it affected me because the teachers didn’t encourage us to think about going to college, the advisers didn’t talk about extending to college. But when I got graduated from high school, I had skills to be able to get a job as office worker, so it really didn’t affect me in that sense. But the fact that we couldn’t participate in school activities was sort of sad.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you mean?</p>
<p>Fite: Well, the girls couldn’t be cheerleaders. Boys could play sports, but the girls pretty much was limited from being on cheer squad, but we couldn’t be cheerleaders. So it was sort of disappointing in that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Is that another one of those kind of unwritten rules that you just—</p>
<p>Fite: Unwritten, but then they would tell you, no, you can’t participate.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Fite: It’s sort of sad.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s really sad. And it was just kind of another unspoken or I guess spoken thing where blacks were encouraged probably to go more into trades and not encouraged for college prep.</p>
<p>Fite: That is correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what made you want to—what made you go to CBC, what made you decide to go to college?</p>
<p>Fite: Because that was always my goal. I wanted to go to college.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. Who were some of the people that influenced you as a child when you were getting educated in elementary, middle and high school?</p>
<p>Fite: No one.</p>
<p>Franklin: No one?!</p>
<p>Fite: I didn’t have any role models, you know. So it was sort of sad.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you know, what education level did your parents attain?</p>
<p>Fite: They pretty much got through starting high school, but didn’t graduate.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was education for you important to them? Was that something that—</p>
<p>Fite: It was.</p>
<p>Franklin: --they had stressed to you?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hm. Very much so.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you think that was a benefit of being here, versus maybe being back in Texas, or--?</p>
<p>Fite: I don’t think it would’ve mattered where we would’ve been raised; I think that was something they wanted us to do, was to get our education.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then after you got your AA, where did you—I assume you probably went to work.</p>
<p>Fite: I was already working.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were? And where were you working?</p>
<p>Fite: Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hanford, okay, great. So tell me, what sort of work did you do?</p>
<p>Fite: I was a clerk, and for years I always was a secretary for Hanford. So I started in—actually, my anniversary date was yesterday, 4/4 of ’67, I went to work at Hanford. I started out as a temporary file clerk, but I passed my typing test eventually and they pushed me up from file clerk to a expediter clerk, worked for two expediters. And then from there, I moved up—at that time, you didn’t have to apply for the job; if one came up, they just pushed you to that next level. So I went from the clerk to the secretary in employment. And in employment they put me in secretary in the <em>Hanford Project News</em> office, and I worked there for four years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Fite: And then that company was ITT. It didn’t renew its contract. So then I went to work for ARCO in 271-T in the 2-West area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow.</p>
<p>Fite: And I worked there for about three years, because when my youngest son started kindergarten, I talked to my manager that I needed to come into town because I didn’t have a babysitter for them while he was in school. So I needed to be in town, because I was a single parent by this time now; I had gotten a divorce. I came back downtown and then I’m thinking, hmm, I’m taking all these classes in accounting. I need to be a clerk; I don’t need to be a secretary any longer. So I talked to my manager and so I was secretary of accounting. So he says, well, there’s an entry level in payroll; do you want to take that job? I said, well, I need the experience. I’ve got the years, but I don’t have the experience as a clerk. So I took that, and from there I just stayed in clerical. I went form payroll to insurance and I ended up being the pension clerk for Hanford. I did all the pension estimates for all of the companies except Battelle management. But all the unions and non-exempt for Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, math—you must be really good with math.</p>
<p>Fite: Not really, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh!</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Fite: That’s what I was telling her, I did okay here at WSU until I had to take pre-calc. [LAUGHTER] That was the end of that class. I went, oh, no. But I love math, you know, but, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: It sounds like you received a lot of support for kind of getting moved up or trying to find a position that matched your interests. Sounds like you at least at times had supportive managers?</p>
<p>Fite: I don’t know. It was just interesting how I’d be moved one place to the next. Hired in and then it just worked out really nice. But for a while there, I was the only black secretary that they had at Hanford for the company I was working for. That was interesting. And then, most of the positions I was in, I was the only African American in that position in those offices.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did you spend most of your time in the downtown, the 700 Area of Hanford, or were you kind of all around the Site?</p>
<p>Fite: It was kind of all around, because where I end up was at the Stevens Center.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Fite: So you just move where the companies found the position for us to be stationed and whatever.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did you retire from Hanford?</p>
<p>Fite: 2006.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. So you were there for 39 years.</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. That’s impressive. Man, they just don’t make careers like that anymore.</p>
<p>Fite: Well, I didn’t go to work to stay there that long. I only was going to stay long enough to work until we paid the hospital bill off from my second son being born. But it ended up, I had a career, so when my divorce came, I just kept working.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. And you were able to support your family on that. That’s really something. Did you acquire any skills or experience on the job that helped you later in life?</p>
<p>Fite: Not really.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Fite: I—</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, sorry.</p>
<p>Fite: I started volunteering after my youngest son graduated from high school doing income tax returns for the AARP.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, great.</p>
<p>Fite: And I did that until 2000—I think 2000. And then I stopped doing that. My granddaughter graduated from high school and I thought, oh, I started doing that when my grandson graduated from high school and I quit when my granddaughter—</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Fite: --graduated.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. I love that program. I had them do my taxes this year.</p>
<p>Fite: That was rewarding.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s good. Yeah, it’s a really wonderful program.</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s a really nice thing to do. Could you describe a typical work day out on Site?</p>
<p>Fite: Ah, it was just a lot of work. Because we started out, it was five eights and then I ended up, it was four tens. But I just stayed busy, you know. There’s a lot of stuff you just have to get done.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors or management?</p>
<p>Fite: I got along fine with them. There was a lot of politics in your job, but I didn’t get caught up in that.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were you treated on the job?</p>
<p>Fite: Fine. I mean, if they didn’t like me, I didn’t know it. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Was it ever difficult to often be the only African American in your group or in the—</p>
<p>Fite: It didn’t happen until I went to work for Westinghouse, and I worked for [UNKNOWN] and he just had a different management style. I just had to talk to him about, you know, pretty much embarrassing me in front of people. And he pretty much stopped after I talked to him.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. Very direct, huh?</p>
<p>Fite: Hmm?</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re very direct.</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah. I don’t have time for politics. [LAUGHTER] You know? You want me to work for you, work with me. I don’t come in and—I don’t drink coffee, I didn’t smoke. So I figured if I was giving him eight hours a day for my—I think I should’ve been respected for my—if I did his work, he should respect me in that what I was doing. So if I needed a raise, I went in and said, it’s time for me to get a raise. And I pretty much got them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah. I was going to ask you if that worked, but sounds like it did. What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Fite: None.</p>
<p>Franklin: None?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you based always in Pasco in this time?</p>
<p>Fite: No, I lived in Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, you lived in Richland at this time?</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah, I moved to Richland in ’67. And so I pretty much was not in Pasco after that. So I was pretty much in Richland. But raising two boys, that kept me busy, so I didn’t have a lot of interaction with anybody with work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did you primarily live at in Richland?</p>
<p>Fite: On Rossell. I bought a home in Richland. So, before then I rented a couple of little houses. They were always the little prefabs or the precuts. And the home I bought was a precut.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Fite: And I sold it in 2015 and moved to Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, made the trip back. What made you want to move back to Pasco?</p>
<p>Fite: I didn’t want to own a home. So I’m looking at—after my parents passed away, and I’m going, oh, that was a lot of work to take care of their property. So I thought about, hmm, I’m going to retire now. I don’t have anyone home but me. Why am I sitting here doing yardwork? So I sold my home. Now I rent a duplex in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Cool.</p>
<p>Fite: It’s really nice.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I bet. It’s nice not to have to deal with all that.</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-mm. And the kids won’t have to deal with it either.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s really—that’s a lot of forethought, I think. If your kids don’t appreciate that, they should.</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah, they do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Good. Could you describe the working conditions that you worked in? You worked primarily in an office.</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm. They were really nice, yeah. They had the best of whatever they had coming out.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the most difficult aspects of the job?</p>
<p>Fite: I don’t think there was any, for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your racial background figure into your work experiences?</p>
<p>Fite: None, because I treated my coworkers just like we did my classmates. You know, talked to them, whatever. If we had a disagreement about something, I tried to work that out. But I didn’t—I never had where I had to have management come and talk to me about something I’ve done that they didn’t like.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways did the security or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Fite: It didn’t impact it, but it was sort of funny, because when I was working for the <em>Hanford Project News</em> office, we would handle the Hanford Science Center. So they sent me down one day to take one of the displays down and to revise it. Well, the next morning, I got called in. They says, you need to get your Q clearance. As long as the thing was on the wall, it was fine, but the minute we took it down to redo it, then it became Top Secret. So I got my Q clearance after that. So that was the fun part. But I’m going, oh, that was hilarious. But since I didn’t go down there and do it on my own, I was instructed to do that, there was no problem with it. But yeah that was interesting.</p>
<p>Franklin: But you needed to get a Top Secret clearance in order to handle the thing that previously had been on the wall.</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: That sounds like Hanford.</p>
<p>Fite: [LAUGHTER] It was interesting, you know. And then eventually we didn’t need clearances any longer.</p>
<p>Franklin: That is a really good story of the security and secrecy.</p>
<p>Fite: Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you feel at the time about working for a site, for a large organization that was involved in the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Fite: It was fine, because I never did really get involved with any of that. I mean, one of my jobs I had to do as a secretary was keep track of all the precious metals that they use out there at Hanford. And so that was interesting. But other than that, I really didn’t ever get too involved with what they were doing with the Site.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Fite: That they would ever get it cleaned up. [LAUGHTER] Which is never going to happen.</p>
<p>Franklin: I really like that answer.</p>
<p>Fite: You know, if you think about it, everything has got to be a half-life, so they’ll be out there forever doing that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Yes, they will. Especially if the—well, I won’t go there. What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford in the Manhattan Project? Did you learn about—</p>
<p>Fite: Nope.</p>
<p>Franklin: No? Have you learned about them since you started work there, have you looked into that history at all, what the Manhattan workers did, the building of Hanford?</p>
<p>Fite: No, no, I haven’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So moving on to kind of like civil rights activities, what were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Fite: It didn’t happen until ’67, I think it was. They started having some of the different problems, you know, nationwide that came here, but I didn’t get involved in any of that. I could see what’s going on, and you could see some of the differences where you could go in the stores and see different people that had been hired so you see that that did bring some change here. We could live where we wanted after a while. So it was a different thing. But that was nationwide; it wasn’t just in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure. So you would’ve graduated in—</p>
<p>Fite: ’64.</p>
<p>Franklin: ’64, and was that from Pasco High?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-hmm!</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any episodes of like racial strife or conflict there, or was that after your--?</p>
<p>Fite: That was afterwards, if there was any there, yeah. I mean, our biggest thing was having the different schools competing for the homecoming and stuff like that. But that didn’t have anything to do with race; that was just school competitions.</p>
<p>Franklin: But there was always, though, that kind of unspoken thing, like maybe you wouldn’t have felt totally comfortable in restaurants in other cities or—you know, because you had talked a little bit about some of that unspoken segregation that was existing at that time. But that didn’t affect the education in any--?</p>
<p>Fite: No, because school was integrated, so we didn’t get involved in any of that. I mean, it was just the fact that, like I said, there was things we couldn’t do in school, but that didn’t have anything to do with how we sit in the classroom or anything like that, or ride the bus. It was always, find a seat and sit down.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What kinds of actions were being taken to address civil rights issues in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Fite: None that I knew of. I wasn’t participating in any of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. Had you heard about the Hazel Scott case in 1950? Where she was refused service—okay. How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Fite: Nothing that I know of. I mean, I don’t think it ever really made an impact on what we were doing as far as work was concerned.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you see, over your time at Hanford, did you see a change in the type of positions that African Americans were being hired into, or did you start to see greater representation of African Americans or minorities in general at Hanford?</p>
<p>Fite: I just worked in that one section of payroll, so I didn’t really see a lot of stuff going on in the larger scale of Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about in your section?</p>
<p>Fite: No. I didn’t see any difference there, because there was black managers and the individual employees that had their degrees so they had their jobs. So I was non-degreed, so I wasn’t involved in management at that point.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you eventually—you mentioned you went here for a time, did you end up finishing your degree?</p>
<p>Fite: I didn’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. You just took—</p>
<p>Fite: I got to pre-calc and that was the end of that. [LAUGHTER] I got most of my basic classes taken care of, so I didn’t ever go off into my electives, because of the calc to do that. I was going for my finance degree.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah, I see. What did you—so you said you quit Hanford in 2006. What did you do afterwards?</p>
<p>Fite: Retired!</p>
<p>Franklin: Retired, just—</p>
<p>Fite: [LAUGHTER] That’s what you do. You just go and do other things, yeah. I didn’t go back to work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, just kind of keeping busy. Did you travel that much—did you travel much outside the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Fite: I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah?</p>
<p>Fite: Well, yes, my sons and I—because we didn’t have a lot of money, we did an awful lot of day trips. And then whenever I could, I would go take them to Disneyland and different things like that. And then I would allow to go to classes in different places by themselves so their mom didn’t have to be there with them.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were your experiences in other places different from the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Fite: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Fite: I never run into where I was not allowed service at all.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Fite: Nothing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Nothing?</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Fite: I can’t think of anything I think I’d want to pass on to someone about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Did you ever feel—just kind of knowing what was being made out there, and maybe about the waste—did you ever feel anxious or scared or nervous about Hanford, you know, about the—all the stuff that was going—all the secrecy and all of that?</p>
<p>Fite: Uh-unh, because it wasn’t like that was something that was just talked about. I mean, things that now I worry about, it’s like they’re saying downwinders. They released different things out in the atmosphere and then let us know about it. So now we’re having health issues and we’re saying, okay, how do we get treated for these or that part of some of this stuff that they did back then. Because they didn’t consider the population.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hmm. Is there anything else that you would like to mention related to migration, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life at Hanford and the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Fite: Nothing that I know of impacted me at all.</p>
<p>Larson: Did you have any, as a single mom, in raising your boys in Richland, did you ever have any concerns or issues with their schooling?</p>
<p>Fite: No.</p>
<p>Larson: No?</p>
<p>Fite: No, they were just happy little boys that got along with everybody. School was good for them, you know, they went through all the schools in Richland. So they just had a really good education and they was able to do whatever they wanted to do in school. There was nothing they came home and said, Mom, they won’t let me do this. They didn’t receive some of the same thing that I experienced.</p>
<p>Franklin: They didn’t receive some of the things that you experienced?</p>
<p>Fite: Mm-mm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was the situation in the kind of unspoken segregation that you had grown up in, was that different? When you moved to Richland, was it different in Richland? Did you still experience that kind of thing?</p>
<p>Fite: We still experienced it, because when I moved into my home, the black cat—stray—and the neighbor guy brought it over and threw it in my yard. And I thought, that isn’t my cat. Why did you do that? And then they would have the welcome neighbors. I never received that. So it was unspoken there, too, when I first moved there. But by the time I left, they were all really nice neighbors. Because I didn’t let that bother me. I said, okay, you don’t want to be a neighbor with me, fine.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Fite: But I didn’t create any problems with the neighbors, and so then they didn’t have a problem with me. But they all looked out after my boys after I knew about it. They said, yeah—because they were latchkey kids. So they watched out for them for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, that’s sweet. Well, Mae, unless you have anything else you want to say? Thank you for the interview.</p>
<p>Fite: Well, thank you for inviting me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Awesome. All right.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
JA Jones Construction
Hanford Project News
ITT
ARCO
271-T Building
200-West Area
Westinghouse
Hanford Science Center
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1950-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1967-2006
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Mae Fite
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Migration
Bonneville Dam (Or. And Wash.)
Snake River (Wyo.-Wash.)
Segregation
School integration
Civil rights
Description
An account of the resource
Mae Fite moved to Pasco, Washington in 1950 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1967-2009.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
04/05/2018
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4413dba878d935c364e3373f38c08769.JPG
d256ea67536b42ca9342d8c9df1ca46f
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F34b536e092c0e476f22d3547ad32e8ae.mp4
f67062fd73e25d245349df92c33957cb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Vanis and Edmon Daniels
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Vanis and Edmon Daniels on May 7<sup>th</sup>, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the Campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking to Edmon and Vanis about their experiences living in the Tri-Cities and/or working at the Hanford Site. And for the record could you state and spell your full name for us starting with Edmon.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Edmon Leo Daniels. E-D-M-O-N, L-E-O, D-A-N-I-E-L-S</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Vanis Daniels. V-A-N-I-S, D-A-N-I-E-L-S, number two.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Where did your parents move from?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: My parents were originally from Texas but when he came here he was working in Utah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your father, Vanis, Sr.?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: My father, yes. He came here from Utah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where in Texas were your parents from?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Cass County, which is a little place. Kildare, I guess it is. I guess that’s where—Kildare, Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long had the family been there?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Forever, I guess. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know. It goes back a ways, quite a ways. Because my mother’s family, her father was Indian, so I guess they had been there before anyone else was there. [LAUGHTER] Her father, I really don’t know a thing about her father. I don’t know anything about either one of them, but, you know. I guess they had been there forever, probably their parents and their parents, that’s how it works.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your father doing in Utah before he came out?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: You know, I really don’t know.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: He worked in a defense plant, but what they were doing, I really don’t know.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did he do in Kildare before leaving Kildare?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: He worked on the railroad. Mm-hmm. Southern Pacific.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Southern Pacific.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, that’s those questions. Did your mother also come with him at the same time?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: No, she came the next year, ‘44 I think it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did he come to Hanford?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: ’43.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: ‘43.</p>
<p>Franklin: ’43, and then she followed a year later?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about their lives before they came to work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I really don’t know. It was just probably she worked at home.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: It was during the Depression and my dad had a job. No one else hardly had jobs. I mean, there just wasn’t anything for anyone to do. They did a little farming and stuff like that around here. My dad grew up on a farm, and he said once he left there he never worked in a farm again. So he went to work on the railroad. Since he had a job, and other people in the community didn’t, he helped raise his sisters—well, he had two sisters—both of his sisters’ kids, because the oldest one had eight kids, her and her husband and he got killed on the railroad by a train.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who was that?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: CJ Mitchell. The younger sister had a daughter, and my dad helped raise all those kids, And then my mom’s brother did farming and stuff like that, and he would help subsidize them when they needed money, loan them money or whatever they needed. He was making probably at that time, probably a whole two dollars a day form daylight to dark or sunup to sundown.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Big money.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Your father’s sister married a Mitchell?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you said the younger sister—I’m sorry. So, I’m just trying to figure out families here, what was your mother’s maiden name?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Ida Lee Cole.</p>
<p>Franklin: Cole, okay. I know there were several families that came up here from Kildare, right?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re related to the Mitchells and what other families here are you related to?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The Miles, the Richmonds--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The Browns.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The Browns, the Weavers.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The Wallaces.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s very extensive family network that moved up.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: For both of you, I’ll start with Edmon, when were you born?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I never tell my age.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, are you older or younger than Vanis?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I’m much younger than he is.</p>
<p>Franklin: Much younger. Vanis when were you born?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: 12<sup>th</sup> of June, ’37.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, okay. Thanks. What do you know about your parents—I guess we’ll start with your father since he came first. What do you know about his initial experience of coming to work at Hanford and finding a place to live?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, at that time when people was coming to Hanford, they all lived out in the barracks. And what my father said, when he came, the barracks were being built but they wasn’t completed. He said his first night out at Hanford, they slept on the ground. I guess they had a tent, I don’t know. But they built those barracks quickly, I think within a year or so. They had—well enough to—50,000 people. Their living condition, that’s where you lived if you was working out there and everything was segregated by race--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Gender.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah, gender and the whole works. My father lived over here, my mother lived over there; male and female they didn’t stay together.</p>
<p>Franklin: Even though they were married?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Even though they were married. Safety’s sake. Because they was working 24 hours a day, so someone was working, you wouldn’t want to leave your wife in barracks full of other mens and everything, and you go to work and she was there. So, everything was segregated and the barracks was made up of—and at that time, they couldn’t tell everything, but they had barracks on everything. People don’t realize this, my mother said there were barracks for homosexuals. The homosexuals had their own barracks. And this is something they told us after we became adults. Most of the ladies’ jobs was to clean up the barracks and cooking.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Working in the mess hall.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah, working in the mess hall.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that what your mother did?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yes, that’s just about what all the ladies did. They needed some typing done, but like I said, most people at that time was—very few people could type. So they went out to Benton City or someplace to the high school. And I ended—when I started working out there, that lady—they got a couple of ladies that knew how to type from the schools and the Army would go and get them at the school and take them out to the Hanford Site and they were type up whatever was needed and then they’d take them back home. When I started working out there Dolores was still working there, she had the most time—I think she started working out there ‘45 or something like that, she had more time in than anyone.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Except Charlie Gant.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah, Charlie Gant. Well, he started back East in ’39. But as far as the ladies who was working there at that time, she had more time than anyone else. Like I said, I think she said she was like 16 when she started working there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. When did you start working at Hanford?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: ’66.</p>
<p>Franklin: ’66. So your father and mother lived in separate barracks. How did they make time for each other? Did their schedules match up? What do you know about their personal lives during that period?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, it was sort of like a courtship all of a sudden, because they had a place where the husbands could go and visit their wives or if they had girlfriends, whatever it was. But at a certain hour, you had to get up and leave. But since they could not get a room in Pasco, Kennewick or Richland they would go to--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yakima.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yakima. They’d catch the bus and go to Yakima. It’s so odd the way people’s mind worked, but an Oriental guy in Yakima let the blacks have rooms. They was out there building something to drop over there, yet the Oriental guy was the one that treated them like they were people instead of just someone. There’s good in people and there’s bad in people. [LAUGHTER] That’s how they would spend time together. They would be able to, I know, like he said, he’d go and visit her sort of like in a waiting room. And then, I don’t know if any of you guys have been out past 300 on out to the ferry—they used to have a ferry out there. My father said that they could get together and go catch the ferry across, over to the Franklin side and picnic, fix up a lunch and they’d have a picnic over there. It was sort of like courting all over again, I guess. [LAUGHTER] Only he didn’t have to worry about appearances, it was just the way things were.</p>
<p>Franklin: Just had to worry about making sure he wasn’t in the women’s barracks after closing.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Right. The deal of it was that the ladies would go in to clean up the barracks. Like I said, they said, people was working 24 hours a day. So my mother says one time the ladies went to clean up the barracks and some of the guys who probably—if they were working, let’s say, the graveyard, they were sleeping. And a couple of ladies got attacked. So after that, the army would go in and get all the guys out and the ladies would go in and clean, clean up the barracks. It was just a different way of life back then, because—you’ve got to remember, it was the ‘40s, and like my mother said, they ate three meal a day. Like I said, it was the ‘40s, and three meals a day to some people were rare and you ate as much as you want. I know, I remember reading someplace about how much ice cream they went through every day, but she said that some people would eat, eat, eat and put food—</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Hide food.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Because they weren’t accustomed to eating like that. I mean, that was a different time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because they’d come out of the Depression and food may had been scarce.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: You could just imagine that all of a sudden you got three meals a day, a place to sleep, and you’re working and you’re making more money than you ever made, and its costing very little and you can eat as much as you want. I forget how—it wasn’t very much that they--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: It was like $1.30 a week or something like that they paid, and that was for room and board.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about like the wages. Do you know what your father was making back in Texas and how that compared to what he made at Hanford?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, they say that they was making a dollar and hour. Which was a lots of money and they was working like ten or twelve hours a day, five-and-a-half days a week sometimes. So that was a lots of money. Like I always tell him, I had a cousin, he passed a year before last I think; and I was talking to him a couple of years ago, and he said that he was making five dollars a week when he went in the service in ‘43. My mother was making fifty cent an hour. She was making almost as much in one day as he was making for a week. When you look at that, that’s just like, okay, like right now, you make $3,000 a week. I come along and I’m making ten times as that much. [LAUGHTER] And you’re working harder, and I’m not working that hard. Because my father said that they went to work and he said they was getting breaks and everything--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Never heard of it before.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: All of a sudden, wait, we can quit working, sit and talk for ten minutes or five minutes or whatever their breaks time was. It was just different out there, and, like I said, the money was great and you didn’t have to do that much with it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What did your father do at Hanford?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: They was construction. They were just about probably 90% of the people out there, like I said, it was building.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you know what specifically he worked on building?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, they say that him and few other guys—they just loaded some guys up in the truck and took them out and they poured the first concrete for—was that N? D or whatever.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: No, for B.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: That’s what most of the men said, they worked construction. Building things, building all those things that they’re tearing down now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. DuPont mostly recruited through the South, whites and blacks. And you talked a bit about segregation. Did your father ever share any experiences or stories with either of you of racism and segregation from whites during work or out at the construction camp?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, it was segregated, just—you go in, and they tell you which way to go. You can’t go here; you go here. So that’s a form of segregation right there. I look back and I say, you know, you’re building something to defend the U.S. and yet, at that time, I just call it, tell the truth, people were so dumb, they didn’t even want everything to be level.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Equal.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: There was a guy over there who didn’t care what color you were. If he wanted to drop the bomb, he wasn’t going to go, well, I’m going to drop the bomb on these, but those guys, they’re okay, or those, they’re okay. You think about it and you think, how did people get along with themselves? But that’s the way they was brought up; that’s the way it had been for years, and stupidity grows. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: So there were no—well, actually, I’ll ask that question in a minute. Did your father or mother ever tell you what their first impressions were when they arrived here? Did they ever talk about that?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I remember my dad and my uncle talking about, when they first got here and they arrived in Pasco at the train station, and it was just completely different. Because they go out and they took them out to Hanford, and even the bus or whatever they went out there on, it was like, you go to the back, the others sit up font. There’s a story that I had a cousin who came here—him and my father came here from Utah—and the bus was full, so he sat down by the white guy in the white section and the guy told him to get the hell up out of there. He said he got up, pulled out his knife and sit on the guy’s lap and put it around his throat and he said, I’m riding and don’t you move or else I’ll cut your so-and-so and your throat. [LAUGHTER] It was something they was accustomed to, because that was their life, but you look at it now and say, god, that was so silly. It’s just something that you tell kids about now and they can’t imagine things like that going on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I understand that. So there was no children’s barracks, of course, so you guys—your parents didn’t bring you, right? You stayed in Texas. When did you come to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: ’51.</p>
<p>Franklin: Both of you?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did your parents stay at Hanford?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Boy, I really don’t know.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Let’s see.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I think they lived out here in the barracks.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Let’s see. I think Dad came back to Texas and I think he came back again in ‘47. I think it was ’47.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did you stay when your parents were out here?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: His oldest sister, we stayed in our house, but his oldest sister and her kids moved in with us and she kept all of us while he and my mom and my older sister were here working.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, your older sister came up here as well. What was her name?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Lily Mae. She was named after both of her grandparents.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you know, what did she do up here?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: She worked in the--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Same thing.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Barracks cleaning.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Cleaning and cooking.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What brought your parents back to the Tri-Cities in ‘51?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Work.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: They were here before.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: They were here already.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I think it was a way of—better living conditions and with—how many of us was it at that time, eight?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Well, seven of us because she had Marge with her, the baby.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: It was a way that he could work and make more money and be able to do more things for his kids.</p>
<p>Franklin: Eventually, in ’51, they were here and they moved you guys up here, they decided to move the family out of Texas?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was your dad was still working at Hanford at that time?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Was he still doing construction?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did he work out at Hanford for?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: He retired in ’64, I think it was.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: No, it was before then, I mean, after then. Because when I started working out there he was still working for a few months.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: He had retired, but he just went back and worked some.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I figured when you’re retired, you don’t go to work.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: You should tell that to a lot of the retired people I know.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Oh, yeah, now, I know, they retire and they bring them back to work.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: You got to do something or else you not going to be here long.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did he work construction the whole time?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did he—did he kind of progress up through management or did his job change at all? Because I imagine that by ’64, he would’ve built up some seniority.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Well, the deal of it was, they worked for different contractors. They worked through the laborers’ union. And at times he was what they call the foreman of the job, he was the boss, and at other times, he was just a—</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: A regular worker.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: A regular worker, common laborer.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. When you folks got here, what were your first impressions of Pasco and the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: To get the hell away from here. [LAUGHTER] Where we were from was trees, there was greenery and everything. And you get here, and it’s the desert and all you see—I didn’t even know what a tumbleweed was. You learn real quick what they are!</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, I really didn’t have an impression. Because, with both my parents being here, and me being the youngest, I didn’t—I don’t remember very much about Texas because I didn’t go any place; there was no one to take me. All my sisters who were older, being a little boy, they wasn’t going to take me any place. Because they might’ve been going to meet their little boyfriend or something and little boys will talk. So they wasn’t taking me with them. [LAUGHTER] So I don’t remember doing very much in Texas at all. Like I said, my parents was here. He remember a lot; I don’t remember anything, you know, about what all was going on. Because, like I said, I probably stayed home all the time and that was it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. So, really, when you got here, it was the first community you were part of or where you would have left the house a lot.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah, well, like I said, we lived in this house here, my uncle lived here, my great-uncle lived next-door to us, my uncle lived—There wasn’t very many houses around anyway. Like he said, there was nothing but tumbleweeds and fields.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where was the first place that you guys stayed at after you arrived?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: We stayed a couple of weeks on Douglas. And a guy I never knew his name, we called him Radio—and he had started to build a house. He allowed people to put trailers on his property. That’s where my mom and dad was when we got here. My uncle had a house, my great-uncle had a house, and between the two trailers and the two houses, they were able to house us until my dad could find a place. And he found a house, Ms. Jensen, that was like a couple of blocks from Douglas there on Beech Street. She told him that he could buy her house.</p>
<p>Well, he went to the bank to borrow some money to buy the house. And no bank in the Tri-Cities would loan him any money or anything. And he came back and he talked with Ms. Jensen. And she told him she say, you mean to tell me they won’t let you borrow money to buy a house? He says, no. She says, I’ll fix that. She went back to the bank and she opened an escrow account and she carried the mortgage herself. And that’s the way my dad was able to buy a house.</p>
<p>Now, they would let you have money to buy an old raggedy car. You could buy all the old cars you wanted, but no money to buy a house. Pacific Finance, I never will forget that, was the only finance company that would loan money to blacks. And I don’t know what the interest rate they paid, but I know back then, the ceiling on interest in the State of Washington was 12%. I’m sure that all the blacks paid 12% on their loans from Pacific Finance.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did the banks give your dad a reason why they wouldn’t lend to him?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The deal of it is, I don’t know what they told him, because I wasn’t there. But it was known that from 2<sup>nd</sup> Avenue, which was where the bus station was, east, they had what they called an imaginary red line and all the blacks had to live east of that line. And they just did not cater to you at all.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because if you were in a redline district you could be denied an FHA loan--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Right, any, personal loan or anything--</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes. That is a sad, sad part of American history.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Ugly part of American history.</p>
<p>Franklin: It really is, it really is.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: I just saw on the news this morning that they are getting the policemen in this country to go back to Washington D.C. and going through the black museum and learn something about what blacks have had to endure throughout the history of them being in this country. And maybe they will have a little more empathy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. The house on Beech Street, did that become your permanent residence growing up?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: For me, there was no hard part, because, like I said, as a little kid—kids, they don’t worry about that that much. I mean, we just went and played and had fun. I never worried about, oh, that guy doesn’t look like me. That guy can throw a ball, we’re A-Okay. I didn’t worry about anything like that, and that’s the way it was. I went to Whittier Grade School and we would go visit everybody. If I went to one of the white kids’ house, his mother would fix us some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and we would eat. And if they came to my house, my mother would fix peanut butter and jelly sandwich and we’d sit around. Kids, we don’t worry about that when we’re that age. All you’re worried about is having fun and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. [LAUGHTER] But you know, it’s just something that’s not part of your thinking. My thinking was, let’s have some fun. Not, worry about all that other stuff. That was that, though, so we had to worry about that.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Well, it was a little different for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, Vanis, what about you? You were a little—you were a teenager, right?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Thirteen.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were thirteen?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, what about for you? What was the hardest part?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The hardest part for me was the transition. And no one to help you sort of transition. Because in Texas, you went to all-black school; here everybody went to school together. When I go to Pasco High School—because I was a freshman—and you go to Pasco High School and the whole while I was in high school, the most blacks that was in the school at one time, I think, was like 13 or 14, in the whole school. To get thrown in with a bunch of white kids and they are prejudiced, too, a lot of them were, some of them wasn’t, but a lot of them were. And when they would get together, they would just be mean, like bullying. They would bully you.</p>
<p>We, as the four or five black boys that were there at the school, we had to get together and shut them down. Because we’d get together and we’d say, okay, now you want to fight? Now it’s time. Let’s get it on. But as long as they could separate you and had you out there by yourself, and there’d be two or three of them, never one on one, then they would bully you and stuff.</p>
<p>So it was kind of hard for me to transition. And even years and years later, I have actually talked white kids and white grownups that, if they walk in a place and there’s a lot of blacks, there the first thing they want to do, they say, we get scared we’re ready to get out of there. I say, well, what do you think about me? Everyplace I go, when I walk in the door, I’m the only black there. I say, do you see me running? No! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Even on my job—and I retired in 1999. I don’t think I worked but one job in all those years, other than construction, that it was more than one black on the job at any one time. I worked in inhalation toxicology for Battelle Northwest and there were three of us. But other than that…</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry, just writing. Just trying to write this down real quick. How big was the house on Beech that you guys ended up living in and then how big was your family?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: It’s five bedrooms, kitchen, dining room and it was--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: One bath.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: One bathroom and eight of us kids! [LAUGHTER] Well, no, I take that back. It was nine of us in that house. Nine kids in that house.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Was there?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Mm-hmm, because Daniel was here.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah. And then most of the time, as I remember, that there was always some relatives who would come up and they would stay there. Because I can remember, we had a roll-away bed and we would bring it into the living room. I slept on the roll-away for quite a few years, because it seemed like it was always an adult cousin or somebody--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Or somebody.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: --living in the house with us. Because if they came up from Texas or wherever, if they didn’t have any place to live, they would come and live with us, the cousins. The house, it was always full of relatives. Because I can remember just lots of cousins who would come up and they would go to work. I never thought about it then because on payday they would give me a quarter. Hey, I had lots of money. [LAUGHTER] It was just natural for me to have someone else there besides my brothers and my sisters. And if I kept a quarter on my pocket or whatever they would give me. At that time a quarter, you could buy lots of stuff with a quarter. Now if you got a dollar you can’t spend it because you got to have some more money to spend it. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Who else lived in the community in east Pasco? Was it primarily African Americans?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, at one time it wasn’t. But mostly, that’s where the blacks lived, they lived in Pasco. But when we first moved there, we were the only blacks on the block. But there was only four houses on the block. I know, in front of us and straight on down the street, there was a trailer camp—which we called it a trailer court, and it was black. But up the street, our house is still there—my sister live in it—and a couple other houses that are still—from a three-block area, there are just a couple other houses that are still there.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Three. I think it’s three in all that are still there. There are houses where houses were.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah, they built some new houses there. But we lived here, my cousin lived across the alley. But that was white families lived up that way--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah, to the north.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah, and like I said, it was very well segregated. And then the whites started moving out. And most of the blacks even moved out, later, later on. But I would go to school and walk up the street to Tollivers’, which was a white family, and we’d walk to school. We didn’t worry about, she looks different than I do, he looks different than I do. We just was kids and having a good time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Were most of your neighbors and people you knew also transplants from somewhere else other than the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Oh yeah.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Most of the people at that time was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there many families with children or extended family in your neighborhood, like grandparents and such or was it mostly immediate family?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: You know, mostly it was--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: I don’t remember.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I know the Tollivers, it was just two girls and the mother and father. And right next-door to them was Leroy, his mother--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: He had a sister, too.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah. And, god--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: I can’t remember the name of the people that lived where Gilbert’s house is, and she had a couple kids.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: At that time, you don’t be asking where you from. At that age, I could care less where you were from.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: But 90% of the people were transplants.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe life in the community?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Terrible.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: From my viewpoint, it was A-Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s quite a divergence.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah. He was a little older, so he—but from my viewpoint, it was just fun. I’m a kid, I’m having fun.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: You’re, what would you call it of your environment. But we had no streets, we had no street lights, you had no sewer. The only thing we had was running water. You had enough electricity, 100 amps to have lights in the house. We had oil heat, we had a woodstove to begin with, and Copeland Lumber, so wood and coal which was right on 1<sup>st</sup> and Columbia, all the way up to 2<sup>nd</sup> and Columbia there in Pasco now. That was Copeland Lumber Company. My dad would buy wood and of course my mom was accustomed to cooking on a woodstove anyways because in Texas that’s what she had. Then about, I don’t know when it was exactly, my dad bought her an electric stove and he had to have a guy come out and update the electricity in the house in order to be able to have enough kilowatts for that stove. And she got the electric stove, she got a Maytag dishwasher with the old hand wringer on it--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Not dishwasher, clothes washer.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Clothes washer, I’m trying to say, not dishwasher. And those were the two modern appliances that she had for a long time. And eventually, because we had an icebox even, if you know what an icebox is.</p>
<p>Franklin: I do!</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Okay. And a guy named Junior Philips, that’s we what called him, Junior.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: No, we called him Iceboy Junior.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Iceboy Junior, I remember that. But he would go out to the icehouse, there, right down form City View Cemetery there on the railroad and they made ice down there.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Hobo jungle. [LAUGHTER] That’s what it was called.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: And he went down there and get ice and he delivered ice all around to the people in the neighborhood. And he would come every day if you needed ice, you—I think it was probably a half a cent a pound or something like that. He made a living doing that at first. And when he died, he had retired from Burlington Northern as a diesel mechanic. But it was just one of those things where you lived with the hand you were dealt is about what it amounts to.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Think of the progress we’ve made. You probably don’t know anything about it anyway.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: She don’t.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Like the milkman coming around, have you ever seen a milk man?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: You haven’t? </p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: What about the guy who come—see, we had people who would come around and sell ice cream, popsicles and stuff like that. You could get a popsicle for a nickel and the popsicle popped in two, I think they still have them around.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: They do.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah, but that was five cent. I don’t know what they are now.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Pop was a nickel.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I remember when pop went up to ten cent. Everything just went up all of a sudden. I always tell people, when I was a kid a ten-cent candy bar, I’d put it in my back pocket and I’d eat it, it would stick all the way up. We have seen so much and I’ve seen so much in my lifetime of just progress. I tell people about my grandkids now. When the computers came in, we was working then, the secretary came down she said, Edmon, say, you want a typewriter? She said, I got a new one and we’re getting rid of all of them. She gave me a new typewriter, and I took it home. A few years ago, my grandkids, we were sitting in there and we went into the garage. And he said, granddaddy, what’s that? [LAUGHTER] They knew it looks sort of like a computer but they couldn’t figure out what was that thing and who it was just a typewriter!</p>
<p>Franklin: Where’s the screen?! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I said, man, I have seen so much in my lifetime, you know, just changing. I remember in high school, I took typing and most of them was standard. We had a couple electrical typewriters, but most of them were just standard typewriters.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s actually pretty progressive. For taking typewriting when you guys would’ve went to school.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yeah. It’s just, I can say I’ve seen so much. I remember, everyone had one phone, well, not everyone had a phone, either.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: That’s true.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: But we had a phone and I know the neighbors sometime would come over to call a cab if he wanted to go someplace. If you could put five people in a cab, and my sister sometimes would catch a cab to go downtown and I think it was like fifty cents--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: That’s all it was, fifty cents.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: And if you could ten people in there, it was still fifty cents. And I just look at the progress of things that I have seen. I can just, because my grandkids they just look and they say, boy. I know working at Hanford we had some of the first of everything like the pagers. We had pagers out there before anyone else had pagers. These phones here. We had phones out there. I was walking around with a phone a long time ago. You could make the local calls because if—I worked days, graves and swing, and on graveyard, I always had—because going out into the outer areas, you may run into something and you need to—so I could just call patrol. I just look and I say, man, I have seen so much in my lifetime that I always wonder what will my grandkids see in their lifetime? What all will change? It’s a great thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Especially since, Vanis, you had mentioned that when you guys got here, there were no sewers, right, in east Pasco. They had them—and you only had enough electricity to power lights at first. And you said your mom was cooking on a woodstove and heating with oil. How long did she have the woodstove for?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: If I’m trying to remember--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: It wasn’t that long.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: it wasn’t that long, but it was—in the ‘50s, because the guy that upgraded the house as far as electricity go, my mom and all of the women in the neighborhood, including me, worked in the grape fields, the mint fields, the bean fields, and all that stuff. That’s what the black women—and they would take me with them--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The kids with them.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: --and they would allow me to work with them because the women were there. Miss Anna B. Beasley, I never will forget it, we was right here where the bridge come across Richland here, I-82, was a mint field and I went to work with them that morning. I could drive, see, so I drove everybody to work. And they say, well, what are you going to do after you drop us off? I said, well, I don’t know. She say, you want to work? I said, yes. So we got out and we talked to—what’s the family name that lived there, Edmon? Their last name?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Harris.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The Harrises. They still there now, the descendants are. She talked to him and asked him if I could work with them. He looked at me, he said, no, he said, he’s too young. He can’t keep up with you. And Ms. Anna B. Beasley told him, said, if you let him go to work, we’ll make sure he keep up with us. She said, because if he don’t work with us then he have to go all the way back and then come back and get us. He says, okay, he can work with you, but he better keep up. So we go out and we are hoeing mint. Ms. Anna B. was on this side of me and my aunt was on this side. And they’d be walking along, they’d be talking, and every once in a while, they’d reach over on my row, in order for me to keep up. [LAUGHTER] I was making a whole dollar an hour, and with that dollar an hour, I was able to buy all my school clothes, from socks, shoes, underwear—because you could go to JC Penny’s and you could buy jeans for $2.98 or $3.98 a pair.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: No, it wasn’t $3.98, because--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: It wasn’t very much.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I bought them for less than that when I--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: And a shirt was for a $1.98 and some cheaper than that. And, man, I could dress as good as I wanted to, going to school.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I know, because I could go down to Penny’s as a little kid, and for five dollars I could get me a pair of jeans and a shirt and get some change back. Like I say, everything was—it was the way it was. Like, I had three or four pair of jeans, and shirts and everything, underwear. Things had to be cheap, because wasn’t nobody making the big bucks. The big bucks. But I can remember when my parents had the electricity upgraded. A black guy lived down the street from us, he was an electrician. He came and did all of the work, but then they had to come out and inspect it. And the guy came, and he was there with him. I remember this very well. And the inspector asked who did it and he said, I did. And the inspector said, well, it won’t pass. He said someone will have to come and do it. So he left and the guy said, I know why it won’t pass. He says, because I’m a colored guy, he said I’ll get my friend, who was a white guy, to come. I remember this, I don’t know why it sticks to my head so, he went and got his friend, I don’t remember if the next day or a couple of days passed, but his friend came. He looked at it, and they had been in the service together, he said everything is perfect. He say, I’ll just tell him that I did it. The inspector come out later and the guy’s there. He hadn’t touched a thing, and he said, oh yeah, it’s okay. And it passed. That was one of my first inklings about, okay, you’re limited to what you could do, although you do it the same way this guy does. But all of a sudden it passed, and he didn’t do anything to it at all. He just came and say, everything look okay. Just the appearance. Thank goodness we’re over that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your family attend church?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What church did you attend?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: St. James CME Methodist.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yep, Christian Methodist.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did the church play in the community?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: You mean--?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, I can remember that most of the ministers, they were just ordinary people, but they were sort of—ministers were sort of like here. Because I know at the church, when I was a little kid, I would go to Sunday school, and all of the older women, they would have us sit down and be quiet. I didn’t want to be quiet, I didn’t want to sit there. And I know this one lady, she would make you sit down and be quiet. Because kids were supposed to be seen and not heard. What they would be talking about a lot of times, I had a different idea about what was what. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know if I was right or wrong. But we had a minister who, he never went to school, he couldn’t read or write, but he was a minister, he was the associate minister. I always wondered, he can’t read the Bible, but someone had told him all about it. And on first Sunday you have communion, and I did not like taking communion, because the minister, he was up preaching and [COUGHING] And then communion come around and he’d come and bless and then he’d pick up and he wanted to put it in your mouth when he has coughed his hand and everything. Then as soon as—I would take off and get there. And pretty soon, she would grab me. You got to stay here! It was called bread and wine. It was grape juice, I guess; it wasn’t wine. Man, I just did not like that because I figured, god, the guy has been coughing on his hand and he’s going to pick up this bread and put it in my mouth. I don’t think I’m being blessed. [LAUGHTER] I just had a different view of what was what at that time. It was lots of older people and lots of these people were born right after slavery, really. I mean, they was 80 or something like that.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The deal of it was, most of them were from the South. In the South, you either was able to own your own land or you sharecrop. One of the two. Most of it was farming, and you worked six days a week, five-and-a-half at least, and the Sundays was the only time that they had to socialize. The transition from there here didn’t change there. Right to this day, they still go to church on Sunday, because everybody works during the week, and that’s the time that they do a lot of socializing. If you look at the world around you, right today, the most segregation there is in this country right now is the churches.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Sunday morning, Sundays.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: You still got black church here, white church there. I belong to the St. James CME Methodist Church; there’s a United Methodist Church right here on Road 34, 36 and Court Street. Now, we are all affiliated together; there is no difference in our doctrine. But I go to St. James; whites go to United Methodist. I mean, I don’t know the reason other than--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: They say the most segregated time in the U.S. right now is Sunday morning.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Well, that’s the truth. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Because everyone go this way. And if you think about it, it is. It is Sunday morning. Now, Sunday afternoon they might all meet and watch a football game or something. They all yelling for the Seahawks. It’s just a different way of life. Still, we still have some hang-ups and everything.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yup, we have lots of hang-ups.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including sports and food, that people brought from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, I really—my father was baseball player. And in Texas, he was sort of like an idol. Everyone knew my father was a baseball player. I remember, I went to Texas once and this guy, he came up to me and he said, hello, he said, you’re Vanis’ son! I said, yes, I am. He say, I remember you when you was a little baby. I said, oh. He said, you play baseball? I said, yes. He say, are you good? I said, yes, I’m good. He said, you’re not as good as your father. I said, I’m not as good as my--? He said, if you was as good as your father, you would be in the majors. He said, he couldn’t play in the majors because of his color. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>But you go down, and most of the people now are passed away, but they would all talk about my father playing baseball. And my father had black baseball teams here in the ‘40s before they integrated baseball—he had black baseball team out at Hanford there. But I guess, I don’t remember anything about the game, but he was in Pasco, and he was an old man then, and I remember him and my uncle suiting up for the game. But I don’t remember anything about the game. But everyone used to tell me about how great he was. And the only reason why he wasn’t playing in the majors was the color issue. And I said, okay, I guess he must’ve been pretty good. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: He was. He was good. I know, because I saw him play. And anytime he came to the bat, there were people in the stand bet that he would get a hit. They would make bets that he would get a hit.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Like I said, things have changed so much, and it’s all for the better. All for the better.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What about food traditions? Since so many folks are from the South, I assume that Southern cooking came up North with folks, right? What kinds of foods would be pretty typical in your house growing up?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Well, let’s see. My dad was the type of a person that he say, when he was growing up, they ate what they had or could get. He did not buy meat with bones in it. He wanted all meat. He wanted no bones. He said, I ate enough of that. Chicken feet, which you see in the store now, which is a delicacy anymore, he didn’t want any of that. He didn’t want the inside of any animal.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The guts.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: None of that. He said, I had enough of that when I was a kid. I didn’t like then; my kids are not going to eat it. But we would do ribs, we would have roast, we’d have pork chops, we’d have steak occasionally. And fried chicken. My mom mostly would fix a roast, some kind of pot roast, or something like that. Because I didn’t eat chicken. And that’s another thing: we were spoiled. After five girls, I’m the oldest boy, and then him, and then we had a younger brother that passed away in ’68. But the girls was all gone, so there wasn’t anybody else home but us. And we were spoiled, because my mom would fix what I wanted to eat. She would also fix what he wanted to eat, and then my dad he ate whatever she fixed for us. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: No, there was a lots of—because I know, chitlins—you know what chitlins are?</p>
<p>Franklin: Why don’t you tell me.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: They are pig innards, intestines.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, right.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: They are called chitlins and sweet potato pie. Chitlins—I don’t like chitlins. But we would have a soul food dinner every year. And we’d cook chitlins and more whites would eat up more of the chitlins than other people would. I know they would be eating and say, man, what is this? And I would tell them what it was, ooh, these are good. How come you’re not—I said, I don’t like them. I had some friends over one time for dinner, me and my brother and my wife and a couple of others. My wife cooked a sweet potato pie. And after the dinner, Jim, a white guy, said, man, that’s the best pumpkin pie I ever had, and we started laughing. That’s not pumpkin pie! He said, well, what is it then? She said, potato pie. He said, well, bring me another slice. He said, ooh, that is good, he said, I’ve never had any of that. So my wife made him a couple of those. And I had some friends over once and she made them some. One time—we always had Thanksgiving dinner and everything out at work—and I took, my mother cooked some potato pies, and I took them out, and they just felt in love with them. After that, every time, they would say, hey, are you going to bring some of that? I guess southern cooking, like you said, the greens and things—I don’t eat green I don’t--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: He’s not a vegetable eater at all.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I love steaks and baked potatoes. [LAUGHTER] It’s just—well, they cooked back then, they cooked what was there. A lots of the meats and things—I guess my dad would go out, like, rabbits, squirrels, raccoons and stuff like that, they would kill them and cook it. That’s what all the people did like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your dad kind of wanted a different standard, right? Obviously, it sounds like he grew up really poor, kind of eating, scavenging what was available. But with you guys, it was—because he was making better money, so he could choose—and you guys kind of benefited from that.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: I can remember being a little boy during Second World War. They would send me to the store. Beef was something hard to get ahold of. The man at the store would tell me to tell my mom that he had beef coming in on a certain date and to let him know what part of the beef she wanted and he would hold it for her. And that’s the way we got beef most of the time. Pork was easy to get, you know what I mean.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Everybody had pigs.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: You could—black people, well, in the South, I’ll just put it—because everybody knew how to do it. They killed hogs, we called them—pigs—in the fall of the year. Then they cured the meat and you don’t see any of it here anymore because they’ve gotten fancy with it. But in the South, if you go back there now, you can go in the smokehouse, take your knife with you, and slice you off a slice of ham. You don’t need to heat it, you don’t need to cook it, you don’t need to do anything except eat it. It’s just cured just that good. And that smell, the aroma, oh man, it’s something else. So pigs was easy; beef was a little different. So you just got beef occasionally, and you had to buy it and cook it within a day or so after you got it. And chickens, well, that’s easy, too, because they ran around on the yard.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Chicken and eggs.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did Juneteenth start here? Because that was brought up by—that’s primarily a Texas event. When did that start here?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I started in ’78, I think.</p>
<p>Franklin: You started it?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: At first I called it a Fun Day, because—I don’t know. I was at a funeral one of my parents’ friends. I remember all of the older people were just sitting around crying and talking about it, hugging each other. And I was said, man, I’d like my parents to have a happy time, get together with all these people without looking down at one of their friends. I told my wife, I said, I’m going to have us something, I said, at the park. We’ll just sit around and let these people come and enjoy themself, smiling, laughing and everything.</p>
<p>I talked to my brother, my wife and my sister and a couple of other people. I went to the churches first, and they said, they didn’t think they wanted to do it, because they didn’t think no one would come, because I was going to have the kids play softball and everything. I went ahead with my wife. And I got some teams—it was girls’ teams—and I went and I rented all—let’s see, think I had cotton candy, popcorn, I rented all that stuff—hot dog machine.</p>
<p>I tell him, I think everybody in town was there, most out of curiosity. Because they was wondering what was going on. And everyone enjoyed themself. I remember one guy came up a couple of years later and said, you should do this two or three times a year, he said. I just enjoy—I get to see all the people and everything and everyone’s happy and having fun. Mostly, we was giving the stuff away. I think cotton candy might’ve been 25 cents, well, everything was just cheap. We still made lots of money and everyone was there. I had just started the Little League program in Pasco, so I had the little boys play. I remember my father was behind the backstop and another man, Mr. Johnson. I remember them saying, look at these little kids. They all got baseball uniforms. And I remember Mr. Johnson saying he was 20-something years old before he had a uniform, and my dad said, yep, I had one a little earlier because I started playing sooner. And they were—just seeing kids in uniform, they were happy as could be. And it’s still going on now and we have people coming over from Seattle to Spokane and all over. It’s not as big as Cinco de Mayo, but people show up and we have a good time and you get to see a lot of people.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. When did it become Juneteenth? When did you decide to kind of bring those two together?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I think I was talking with my uncles and cousins and they said, why don’t you just call it Juneteenth? My uncle was telling me about—he was educated man, school teacher—about what Juneteenth was all about. You know, in my head it seemed like I can remember something about Juneteenth in Texas, but I know I can’t. It’s just that people have talked about it because they said my father and his baseball teams always played baseball on Juneteenth and they would barbecue and everything and just have a big get-together.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Ice-cream, barbecue.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I can imagine that people back then enjoyed those things more, because if you were a man, you worked five, six days a week. And that’s what you did. There wasn’t very much time for fun.</p>
<p>Franklin: You also worked longer hours back then, too.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Sunrise to sunset, they said. They said, from can to can’t. From the moment you can see to the moment you can’t, you worked. [LAUGHTER] So to get those days off and be able to enjoy yourself was a rarity. Where I worked eight hours a day and I tell people, I say, I never went home tired, I never went home dirty and yet I never missed a payday. My father never got a paid vacation in his life, and all of my vacations were paid for. And I came up just different from my parents.</p>
<p>My wife—I remember when my wife went to work and people was telling me—the older people—she doesn’t need to work; she needs to stay home. You make enough money. I said, well, we could use some more. I worked all holidays. Because I worked five days a week, no matter what. Like, if I was off on a Monday and Tuesday or Tuesday and Wednesday—if I was off Tuesday and Wednesday, I worked Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Seven days you would work, but two of those days would be for the next week. I remember, I was going to work for Thanksgiving and we would always have a big Thanksgiving dinner, the family, and I had to work. We had this guy living with us named Grover. He said, why do you have to go to work today? You shouldn’t have to work today; today is a holiday. You need to be home. I said, Grover, you know how much money I make today? And I told him. And my dad said, you make more money today than I ever made in a whole week. [LAUGHTER] I said, that’s why I’m going to work.</p>
<p>You know, just compare to people my parents’ age and us growing up, things progressed so much that you wouldn’t believe it. That’s why I am so thankful to be born when I was born. I always say, man, I wish I was three years old now, just to see what the future is going to bring. [LAUGHTER] Yep.</p>
<p>Franklin: We talked a bit about some of the opportunities that were available here that weren’t where your parents came from, like wages. I assume the housing—was the housing better here than where your parents came from, or was that a better opportunity for them?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Well, housing was better there at first than it was here. Because people lived in anything from cardboard shacks to shack-shacks or whatever you want to call them. It was a lady named Mrs. Haney, she owned a whole block right there on Oregon Street. She had little cabins on there, she had--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Trailers.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Trailers, and all that stuff on there. She and her oldest son would go around on the first of the month and collect the rent from those trailers and things.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about educational opportunities? Were there educational opportunities available here that weren’t available in Texas?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: No. It was better back there as far as education go. Because once you got out of school back there, they expected you to go to some type of college. There was Wiley College, Bishop College—you may have heard of Bishop, because Wiley and Bishop eventually went together.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were those HBUs or HBCs? Historically black?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Right. A few went to Grambling—you’ve heard of Grambling in Louisiana. I’m trying to think; there’s another one—Prairie View. You were expected to go to college. Most of the blacks went into education. In fact, one of my cousins and best friends still is there in Texas. He taught school all the way from the time he got out of college, he retired then he went back and taught some more and he retired again, and he’s still there. That was the primary deal for them back there, education.</p>
<p>Here, when we were in school, I know several girls, I don’t know no boys, but several girls that were straight-A students. Never got on the honor roll, they never had an offer for any college or anything. The opportunity was not there here like it was back there.</p>
<p>One of my friends that passed away last year, I did an interview with her and her dad and she said that when she was in school—because she’s an underclassman under me—that the teacher told her that the best she could hope for was to be like a nurse’s aid or something like that. She say, I resent that lady ‘til this day. I don’t know what teacher it was, but it was over here in Pasco High they told her that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who was that?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Her name was Bessie May Williams-Fields. When she died last year, she was a doctor—don’t ask me of what—but in California. So she proved the lady wrong.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Things was just different. I remember I went to Texas with my parents when my grandfather passed. My dad and I went to a little store and we were knocking—it was afterhours. And the guy came to the door and he said, Vanis, it’s good to see you. I’m sorry to hear about—my grandfather’s name was Tucker. So he said, I’m sorry to hear about Tuck. He said, it’s good to see you, but I hate to see you in this occasion. We were sitting there talking and he looks down and says, who’s that, Vanis? My dad says, that’s my son. He says, oh, that’s your son. And he just said, Vanis, I hear the colored kids and white kids go to school together up there. Dad say, yeah. He say, how do they get along? And I remember, my dad said, ask him. He play with them all day long! And the guy says, how do you guys get along? And I’m sitting up there thinking, what kind of a question is this? I said, we get along okay. And I remember him saying, Vanis, I don’t think that’ll ever happen here. I just don’t never think that coloreds and whites will go to school together, I just don’t think it’ll ever happen.</p>
<p>Next time I go down there, my cousin is the principal of the high school. And we go up to see him, he said, you know, we didn’t have any problems integrating the school here. Because it’s a little community; everybody knew everybody. He said, everything went smooth. And I said, oh. He said, we didn’t have any problems. And here he was the principal; years before, the guy didn’t even think they would ever go to school together. He was the principal of this big school. I said, man, how times have changed. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Life is funny.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Hanford was the biggest employee around here and I can’t remember the man name that started Hanford right at the moment, but anyway, he said that blacks could help build, but they couldn’t work in operations. And that stuck around until, I think, ‘52 or ’53, somewhere in there was the first blacks that I knew of to work out here. And they were very few until ‘66 or so, somewhere around--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The ‘60s.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: In the ‘60s anyway, before they would ever hire any into operations. I went to work out there in June of ‘66 and the lady that trained me in metallurgy had an eighth grade education. I had a cousin to go out there, and they put him in metallurgy. He didn’t want to listen to the lady, because he had a high school education and she only had an eighth grade education. He say, she can’t tell me nothing. [LAUGHTER] And he quit because he did not want her telling him what to do. Well, the lady had been working in metallurgy for like 25 years. Why can’t she tell you what to do?</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. She does know a lot about metal. You’d hope, after--</p>
<p>Vanis: Me myself, when I went to work out there, I went to work as a janitor. The whole 300 Area was mostly black janitors, very few whites. One day, I was working in 325, and I was going down the hall and I saw this black guy. He was coming up the hallway, he met me, he spoke and he kept on going. Well, I noticed him in the weeks afterwards. He never did fraternize with any of the workers at all; he would just be coming through and he was observing. When I found out what was going on—I had a supervisor named Ralph, and he said you take care of the office while I’m gone, talking to me, he say, you take the phone calls if anybody call for a job you give them an estimate on what we can do the job for. He say, I’m going upstairs for a meeting. He said, I’ll be back, when I get back I’ll tell you about it. He say, because some heads are going to roll up there today. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he left and went to the meeting and it was all of our supervisors. There were the supervisors of the janitors, of power operators and what else, Edmon?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Probably RCT--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah, electricians anyway, they had a big meeting upstairs in the building. This guy was from Washington, D.C. He had gone around the area there and he had observed, and he got up in the meeting. Well, everybody was surprised because they didn’t know what he was there for, either. He says, I’m from the government from Washington, D.C. and I’ve been observing what’s going on around here. He say, you cannot tell me that you got this many black people and the only thing they could do is janitorial work. He says starting today, not tomorrow, today, you’re going to get some of those people out of janitorial and put them in other jobs, because I know they can handle it as well of some of the others I’ve seen here. That day they started transferring people out of janitorial into different jobs. Because up until that time, I think, Edmon was working in air balance at the time, wasn’t you?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I think I was in operations.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Operations. We had a guy named Roy Howard that was one of the managers in inhalation toxicology. That’s about—well, it was a couple more but I can’t remember all of them, but other than that everyone was janitorial, including--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Joe Jackson, he was in--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah, he was a draftsman. And they promoted me from janitorial to decommission, decontamination is what it was. We cleaned all of the radioactive material and handled all the waste radioactive material in the 300 Area, including the hot water, we called it. They had the sinks and where they did experiments and washed everything up it went down and it came down to 340, which was great big swimming pools and it was four of them. Only they was much bigger than swimming pools. We had four basins. You started with number one basin and when it filled, you took samples of it, took it up to 326 and they analyzed it. If it was clean enough, it was let out into the cooling ponds and then it would leech from the cooling ponds back into the Columbia River. If it was hot, contamination-wise, then you held it, you called in the teamsters—we had a big shed with about six tanker trucks in it, and you started pumping that liquid out of the ponds into those tanker trucks and the tanker trucks took that out to Hanford right where they were having problems with some of those tanks now. It went out there and it went into those tanks. Meanwhile, by us being decontamination we had to get in that basin and clean it where you could use it again. You didn’t stop the water from coming, you didn’t shut anything down, you just, if it was basin number two you just skipped from one to three and kept on receiving water. But now you did more sampling in basin three because basin two was hot. So you had to sample basin three every 30 minutes and they would analyze it until they got back down to a level where you could run it out. The trenches was called the 318 trenches. And then it leached back into the Columbia River. We did everything when they opened the sodium reactor up out at the 300 Area.</p>
<p>Franklin: The FFTF?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Mm-hmm. They didn’t know how sodium would react in water. And as long as, when you put the sodium in and the reactor’s running, it’s liquid. So you don’t have any problems. But when it’s shut down, it gels. Now you got to figure out, how are you going to get that back out of those pipes and get them going again. We took sodium anywhere from a gallon container to a 55-gallon-drum-full, and we took them out to those cooling ponds. DOE and everybody was there and we had a zip line, something like that, and you hook it up here and you run it out and once you got over the water you have a tripwire and you’d let it fall into the pond. Then you had to stand back, because you had no idea which way it was going to go. [LAUGHTER] But we did all of that and we started with a gallon container and we went all the way up to a 55-gallon drum. Whenever that sodium hit the water it’s like, oh, man—and you don’t know which way it’s going. One of the guys from DOE, because we were behind shields on top of that, and one of the guys from DOE in one of the five-gallon containers, it came out of the container and landed on shore. We’re trying to tell him not to go down and get it. He goes down there, well, when he tries to pick it up it’s just slippery. Because he was going to pick it up and throw it back in the pond, he thought. When he picked it up, he picked it up and it slipped out of his hand and it landed right in the edge of the water. Well, it just so happened--</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>[camera operator] We’re rolling.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wanted to ask, what do you know about your parents’ reaction to learning that their work had contributed to the development of the atomic bomb?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I never heard—they didn’t talk about it.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: They were surprised, because at the time that they were doing the construction out there, like I said, they did construction. They may have suspected something if they had been in operations or something like that. But everything was so hush-hush that even the construction workers could not talk about what they did. And I can remember, like Edmon is talking about, going down there to the tavern on Lee Boulevard. I can remember when they would put guys in there before the people got off work and they had beer in front of them, I don’t know whether they drank it or not. But anyway, when the guys come in after they got off work for beer or something, their job was to engage them in conversation to try to find out just what they would tell about their jobs.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: You wasn’t supposed to talk about--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Your wasn’t supposed about--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Even the minor little things of what you did at all.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Anything you did--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Because I know at one time, guys would keep their badges on all the time, you went to Battelle you go and they would have badges. They said when you walk out the 300 gate to get into your car, you take your badge off, you put it back on when you come back. Because they said there was always someone, somewhere around who wanted to know what was going on. There were people right here in the Tri-Cities who would tell you, ain’t no way in hell I would work out there, you don’t know what’s out there, which we didn’t. But I said, well, I’m still here, everything is still working. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: That leads me to my next question, because you two worked on the Hanford Site after World War II and so I’m wondering, how did you feel at the time about working on or allied with the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Well, you know, at the time, I guess I never really gave it a lot of thought. One of the things I was appreciative was the fact that I had a job, a steady job, I got a paycheck 52 weeks out of the year, I got a vacation every year, paid, and I was allowed to raise my kids and do things with my kids that my mom and dad was never able to do with me.</p>
<p>It’s a funny story, but my son was probably four years old, and we were in Kansas. We were heading to Alabama because my first wife was from Alabama and we were headed to Alabama. We stopped in the restaurant for breakfast. We were sitting there and they kind of put us in the middle of the room. The place was crowded. And we were there and we had ordered breakfast they brought it to us and everything. We were eating and my daughter says, Daddy? I said, what is it? She said there’s something wrong with my bacon. I looked, I said, oh, there’s nothing wrong with your bacon. She said, yes it is, I keep hearing something. And she took a fork and she raises the bacon up; great, big old fly in her bacon.</p>
<p>With the place being crowded as it was, I didn’t want to alarm the whole restaurant. It was a young man that waited on us. And I got his attention, I called him over and I showed it to him. I said, we can’t eat this like that. He says, oh, I’m sorry, I’ll take it. He took it away and brought some more bacon. Well, my son is four years old and he’s sitting and looking at that. And just as loud as he could, I don’t know what you’re worried about but it’s only more meat! I said, boy! [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Fly and bacon.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah, see, I was able to take them. Every other year, we’d go back to visit her parents and grandparents and stuff. And we’d go to California, we’d go to Disneyland, we’d go to Reno. I was able to take them and they could see things and do things. When they were able to walk and talk, then I taught them how to read a menu and all that, so when we went to a restaurant they ordered their own food. I didn’t order it for them; they ordered what they wanted to eat. And stuff like that. That was one of the advantages I was able to do for them that my parents weren’t able to do for me. Because like my brother and I were talking here the other day, and I don’t think until after my dad was retired--or anyway, we was grown up; he may not have been retired—but we were all grown up. We took them to dinner and to lunch and to breakfast and to stuff like that, but I don’t think before then they ever went out to eat.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: No. It just wasn’t something most people didn’t do. Like you go to downtown Pasco, they didn’t go to the Top Hat or any of those places and say, come on, let’s go to dinner. Their vacation was they’d go back to Texas, because that’s where my father’s fathers was and all of them.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Aunts and—</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: That’s where they were. Their vacation was sort of like going to Texas. They went back on deaths and stuff like that, but that’s mostly—But as far as vacation, they didn’t do it. I tell people, I say, I took my parents to—my wife and I had been in Reno. And I came back and was telling everyone about Reno, how much fun we had. I said I want to take mom and dad down there. My mother was a lady who—straight-laced. And I was telling them about it because none of them had been to Reno and they said, no, my mother wouldn’t like that. Momma not going to like that, people gambling and everything. At that time you could be outside drinking in Reno.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Oh yeah, all up and down the street.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: But I said, I think they would enjoy it. We put the money together and we took them. It used to be you walked down the street and there’d be people with rolls of nickels or dimes. They’d give you dimes to go into the casino, because they gave you three dollars in nickels you were going to spend $15 or $20. They had a ball, we went to see a couple of shows, and then we went to see Sammy Davis, Jr. And that’s a treat right there, this is someone you’ve seen on TV, that’s all you’ve ever done. We went to see him and he came over to our table. He shook hands with my dad, he kissed my wife, he hugged my mother and gave her some candy and everything; that’s when he we had “Candy Man.” That made their whole trip because we’d come back and my dad would see Sammy Davis, Jr. on TV and say, I met Sammy Davis, Jr., I shook his hand. Well, that’s not to many people who can say I met Sammy Davis, Jr. and shook his hand an all these other people, you know, that they--</p>
<p>They appreciated us, because we appreciated what they did for us. Like I said, when most kids were doing things working and everything—the only thing I did, I had a paper route. He had a paper route first and I would go with him. That’s the only job I had until I went to work at—well, I worked at the grocery store it was more fun than working there. But otherwise like my dad said all his jobs was work. Work, work, work.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Boorish work.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: And my mother, like I said, when she was out there, all the ladies did was clean and cook, which is what most ladies did back in those days anyway. Like I said, they had to go to the high school to find someone who could type. I’m just happy we made their lives so much easier later on in their lives. We was able to do that.</p>
<p>Vanes Daniels: My mom babysat three kids for $15 a week and that was in ‘54.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Right there in Old Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you--?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: But—oh I said, but out of that deal, one of the guys, the grandfather, he owned a sport shop there in Pasco. So I would get tennis shoes and gloves and things for like two or three bucks. He said at least send that boy down here so I can give him some shoes. I always had nice baseball shoes and gloves. [LAUGHTER] Didn’t cost very much.</p>
<p>Franklin: Another question about Hanford. What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Oh, boy.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The bomb, but eventually it will be the cleanup.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Another thing, they discovered a lots of stuff out there. I mean, there were things out there that you never even think about that we have now. Baby monitors. Where I’m in here, I can put a monitor in the baby’s room and you can tell—Battelle. That was Battelle. And there are just so many things that they invented.</p>
<p>There was something else. Because I went to—there was a guy there over at the math department, he finished college when he was thirteen, so he really didn’t have any childhood. But he loved—baseball to him was just something magic. I was a baseball player. And he found out that I had a baseball and he would call me down. He’d say, Ed, come down here. Well, I’m not supposed to be down there. He had a TV in his room and he’d say, come on in. And we’d watch the game and I would be telling him about the game. Just little things that we take for granted.</p>
<p>Some of those people out there who was—the calculator, and you could do the calculator and he could do a math problem in his head faster than you could do it on the calculator. He was smart, but he was an A-Okay guy. And just little things, like I said, baseball, baseball season would come, I spent a lots of time down there with him just watching baseball. He had his TV. And I remember one Saturday we were out at work and he was out there, he said, come on in, Ed. All the other guys were working, he and I was watching the World Series. This was just magic to him. And you run into people like this, like I said lots of geniuses out there and you’d run into people like this who didn’t have a normal childhood and just little things that we take for granted. It’s just fascinating to him, just amazing because they never did anything like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Number one I think for most of them it was housing.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Mm-hmm. Streets.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Yup, housing more than anything else. Because there were—just buying a house and I remember in Richland there, all the blacks lived down there on the south end. Most of us were my relatives, they were all together. The Mitchells--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The Rockamores.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The Rockamores, all of them, they were all just right in the same spot.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: The Wallaces. They were almost like next door to each other.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: They moved—when they—the trailer camp out here, remember the trailer camp? No, you wouldn’t.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: No, he wouldn’t remember.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The trailer camp was right up here, where it was. When they moved the trailer camp, all of the blacks that was living in the trailer camps, except, whatcha call him, Brown, they sent them to Seattle—I mean they sent them to Pasco, because there were no housing here for them. They kept the Browns here because they were such good basketball players. You know, Norris was all-American basketball player. So they kept him and CW and they found a house for them.</p>
<p>And just little things like that, you think about it, out of all those houses, and they’re not big, fancy houses, they wasn’t houses that—I know my cousin lived in a house about form here to there, that’s about the size of those little houses. You walk in the living room, you take a couple of steps, you’re in another room. That was the way it was. Where we lived, everyone called it the big house. Like I said and he said it had lots of bedrooms and everything, and when people would come here, they would come and stay with us. But I just thought it was a house. We had the big yard and whole works.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of actions were being taken to address those issues? Housing and streets, and things.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Let’s see. You had Bill Wilkins and Magee, Katie Barton. All those, Bill Wilkins and Katie Barton were councilmen. Magee was a civil rights worker and they complained to the city, had meetings, and Magee would organize marches first thing and another. Finally, we got streets, sidewalk, sewer, and all that stuff. But like my brother say, when we were kids growing up, we rode bicycles all the time. We would race from our house to A street and back on the bikes. And he say, I don’t ever remember my momma saying, boy get out of that street! A car might hit you! Because there wasn’t any cars.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The car went to work with the man. The man went to work the car. And most of the ladies did not work. They didn’t have jobs. So you’d be at home with your mother and everybody on that street that was there, that was your mother. We knew everybody, you knew every kid there. Like if I went down the street, didn’t nobody worry if some girl had to go to the store because all the men was at work and everybody knew who she belongs to. [LAUGHTER] It was just a big--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Community.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Community like that. They looked after each other, and they looked after us.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the challenges for civil rights in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I think one of the biggest things was getting people jobs, like lots of other people, it was just getting jobs. Because most of the older people, they worked construction and that was it. In reality, when they first started working out at Hanford, like for me, we wasn’t making very much money, wasn’t anyone making very much. If you worked construction, like my dad, like I say, he’d been here all those years, most people that was hiring knew him. So he probably worked as much as anyone did. There were a lot of people who would come here and they would go to work, and a lot of them had never made the money that they were making. I know a couple of Dad’s friends, they came to work and they worked for a while, and they went back to Texas or wherever. They had made enough money to go back and whatever they were doing back there, I don’t know. But my dad, he just stayed here. He thought this was a better place for his kids.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were either of you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I don’t remember.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah, in a way we were. It was like, see, we didn’t even have a park. And when the park was built, the city didn’t build the park.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’re talking about Kurtzman Park, right?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah, mm-hmm. The community built the park.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The mens of the community.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: And we got the man that owned that land, which was old man Kurtzman, to donate the land to the city. He donated six acres for a park and it’s down there. Most of the people at City Hall don’t know it, but if it ever cease being a park, it goes back into his estate.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: But, Kurtzman, it was funny—</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: But it’ll always be a park, so you don’t have to worry about that, I don’t think.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: It was funny, because my brother and I went to City Hall to see who owned the land. And it was Mr. Kurtzman, a letter was written and we signed the letter. He wrote back and said he would donate the land to the city if they would build the park and name the park after him. When the park, like I said, my father, uncles, cousins, just mens of the community, put the park in. I remember one Sunday, the ladies, they got together and cooked up some food and got a big picnic for all the guys that was working. I remember when the park was finished and the city put up the sign, and it said Candy Cane Park. I always tell them, I say, Mr. Kurtzman wrote back and told them my name is Kurtzman not candy cane. That was supposed to be—[LAUGHTER] It stayed up there for about three weeks or maybe a little longer, they finally put Kurtzman. But at first they called it Candy Cane Park.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: That’s right. Then they had the teeter-totter, they had the monkey bars, we called them, all that stuff, swings, all that stuff there and everything was like a peppermint stick. It was painted red and white stripe.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ooh, cool.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: All the stuff they don’t have anymore.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Well, it broke down barriers. Like for instance, blacks were able to work in operations, blacks can live anywhere they wanted now--</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: If they could afford it.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: If you can afford to buy the house, you can afford to live in it. Right down here, right over here on Spring Street, my cousin—when did CJ pass away? Three years ago?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: ’16. He passed away January of ‘16, a couple years.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: He bought a house down there on Spring.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Right over there.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah. He had problems buying the house in the first place, they didn’t want to sell him the house. And then he had problems with his neighbors after he bought the house. But then, as time passed, I think the neighborhood probably diversed more, people moved out, other people moved in; then they welcomed him there. And they kept the house plumb up until he and his wife passed away. But it was just areas that you could not live if you were black. Like in Kennewick, for instance. You couldn’t live in Kennewick, period, if you were black. On some of the old homes and things, unless they have changed them in the last 20 years, on the deeds and the ordinances, and all that stuff, it says that you cannot sell your house to people of color, I’ll put it. Because not only blacks couldn’t buy them, Spanish people couldn’t buy them, I don’t remember any Orientals of any kind living in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: They lived in Pasco.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: You lived in Pasco, and you lived east--</p>
<p>Franklin: In East Pasco.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective and experience what was different about civil rights efforts here?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, for one thing they made it better, they made it a lot better, I think for the whole community.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: It wasn’t violent as the South, for one thing.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: It was smaller.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: It was a smaller community and, although there were protests and stuff that went on, it was done differently than the marches and things in the South. Like for, with Martin Luther King and all those people trying to get across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Alabama, that type of stuff, and the policemen standing up there water-hosing you and beating you, and running over you with horses. You had none of that here.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: I think it was because people was getting smarter. Especially younger people that was coming up. And the more you interact with people, the more you find out that’s not much more difference in people. I may like baked potato and you may like stewed potatoes, but, hell, it’s still a potato. [LAUGHTER] You find out that you like the same things and there’s no difference in people.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, like baseball is a great example, right? For a time there were segregated teams, but now everyone loves baseball and everyone can play together.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: That’s the great American pastime, eating hot dogs. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: The more you just stop and think…</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Now, I think people realize that if, when you bleed, you bleed red just like everybody else does. I don’t think there’s anyone that don’t have a prejudice of some kind, but it does not restrict itself to race. You may be prejudiced against red potatoes over white potatoes, but that’s a prejudice. But it’s not one of those things where you are trying to hinder someone from advancing or being the best that they can be. You see?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Well, if everyone—it just makes it a better world. Because you just feel that, okay, I see this young man over here, young man over here. It’s something about all three of us, we like something. I feel, if you love yourself, you can love someone else. I’m going to love myself more than I love you. If a guy come in here right now and say, I’m going to shoot someone, I’m going to go that way and say shoot them. [LAUGHTER] Because I love me. Love can overcome all the hate and everything else. That’s what has happened, people have grown and it’s just a better world altogether. We still have a lot of work to do and it may never be—and it has never been. Remember the guy that killed his brother? A long, long, long time ago. There was only two or three people on the earth, a long time ago. There’s a lot of things and now there’s a whole lots more of us. I don’t know. It’s just weird. But we can get along. We can get along. And we are getting—things are getting better all the time.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: It’s just like, what’s his name out of Los Angeles?</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: Who?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: That the police beat up.</p>
<p>Franklin: Rodney King?</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Rodney King, yeah, he said, why can’t we just get along? That was a profound statement that he didn’t realize he was making at the time.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: We just need to learn that everyone has done something good, even right here in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: There is good in everyone.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: There is a man in the Tri-Cities, when I was a kid, we called him Peanuts. He was an Oriental man. And right now in Pasco there is Peanuts Park. But most people don’t know who Peanuts were, and I was on the Parks and Rec Board and they were talking about they were going to redo Peanuts Park I said we need to put up a--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Mural.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: A mural of Peanuts. When most people say, peanuts they think about—and they said peanuts? I said yes, he was a guy named Peanuts, he was an Oriental guy. When I was a kid, he gave me candy; my daughter came up, he gave her candy. We would go down there and Peanuts would fix our bikes and he’d say, give me a nickel. Well, I know it was worth way more than that. [LAUGHTER] But that’s who Peanuts was, and I said, we need to put a mural up there so people will know Peanuts, who he is. Most people saying Peanuts Park, they are not thinking of some guy. I said he was a Oriental guy. He had gold fish down there, had a big gold fish pond, big gold fish, and we would go down there--</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: Most likely koi.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: We just need to know that there are good in everybody and there’s some good people and it doesn’t matter what you look like or whatever, you can be a great person.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well great, that’s a great place to end.</p>
<p>Vanis Daniels: All right.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think that’s a great sentiment. So thank you both for coming and taking the time to interview, and talk about your lives and the community, and your work.</p>
<p>Edmon Daniels: No problem.</p>
<p> </p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
B Reactor
Battelle
300 Area
325 Building
326 Building
340 Building
318 Trenches
FFTF
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Vanis and Edmon Daniels
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Segregation
School integration
African American universities and colleges
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Nuclear weapons plants
Baseball
Description
An account of the resource
Vanis and Edmon Daniels moved to Pasco, Washington in 1951 and both worked on the Hanford Site.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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05/07/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff82a477e980b5eab6aa549537f73593c.JPG
07eedabeb7b7f69b254d9337858f7a73
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
C.W. Brown
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with CW Brown on June 12, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with CW about his experiences living in Richland and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>CW Brown: C, W, B-R-O-W-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Does the C and the W stand for--?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, yeah, but I don’t go by it that much, but I could tell you what they stand for.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Brown: I don’t want too many people to know it, but I will. Because when I went into the military I had to have it. It’s Claude. C-L-A-U-D-E B-R-O-W-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. So, CW, your family came to the area to work for Hanford, right? And what year did they come?</p>
<p>Brown: I came in ’48, so they were here about three years before that. 1948, when I came out. And they must’ve been here at least two or three years before that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and what—oh, sorry.</p>
<p>Brown: That was during when they were, the atomic bomb, they were making out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brown: And they were on line doing all that stuff, so, a lot of them was doing that. And I know my father worked on the railroad out here when that came about, and my mom worked in the cafeteria.</p>
<p>Franklin: Out at the Hanford Camp.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, exactly, exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: And where were your parents from, where were you from, where you were born?</p>
<p>Brown: Texas. Texas, Kildare, Texas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kildare, Texas.</p>
<p>Brown: I think you can find about most of Tri-City people, you’ll say, Kildare, that’s where I was born! Or where my family—where their roots were started, that’s where most all of them started, a lot of them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. It seems like the whole, most of the population of the town ended up moving. Do you know how your father or mother found out about the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Brown: Yes, this was through—they had contact with a family which is a well-known, close to the Mitchells, was the Daniels, was the Daniels. And my father was kind of connected with them in a relationship, and one of them came out this way, they’d heard about the work, and sure enough, the information got back, which by being relatives and close partners, like, my dad was on the railroad and they had a lot of that going on. They said, this is how we got started out. And eventually, my mom came out and then we stayed with our grandfolks in Texas. And they came out—during that time, the wives and the husbands couldn’t live together. They had barracks for each one. That was back in those days, yup. So that’s how we came out here, was through Vanis Daniels. And that was the one that, like I say, close relatives. And that’s how it got started with us. And then as we went, our relatives, we got involved and just kept going, and that’s the way it started, yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ lives before they came to work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Brown: Before they came to Hanford, we worked at—my dad worked on the railroad there, also in Kildare, and my mom was mostly like a housewife. In Texas, most of the time, we did a little farming, and we did a lot of that. Of course, I can remember back when my brother and I, we was young, we started working—in them days, when you’re 10, 11 or 12, you could work and take care of everything. Because we used to have our own little mule, little wagon, go haul little stuff to people for wood and stuff like that. That’s what we did, mostly farming. Like I said, my dad worked on the railroad for many years, which was good, but we did our own farming, living off the land.</p>
<p>Franklin: When were you born?</p>
<p>Brown: 1938.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1938, okay. So you were about seven or eight—</p>
<p>Brown: Exactly, exactly. In those days, when you’re young, when you’re seven and eight, you could do just about everything everybody else did. Because you had to work. You know? You had to work. There wasn’t no playing around. That’s what you had to do. Survivor. On your own.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ initial experience of coming to work at Hanford and finding a place to live?</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, that was a very difficult situation as a family. Individual, it wasn’t too bad. But family-wise, you had to—to get a house, you had to work for General Electric to get into the homes. And to get into the trailer court was difficult because it was so crowded and you couldn’t hardly find any place. And that was the difficulty of getting us here any earlier. Because you find a space and then you could buy a trailer and then you can have your family. But the husband and wife could not live together. They didn’t have—they had to live in separate barracks, because if you wasn’t working for GE, most the time, you couldn’t get a place to live for a family. And that was the way that it was, especially in the Tri-Cities in Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so, during the Manhattan Project, your parents lived in separate—</p>
<p>Brown: Yes, exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: --dorms, because they were segregated, right? Men’s and women’s.</p>
<p>Brown: Men’s and women’s.</p>
<p>Franklin: And also, white and black dorms?</p>
<p>Brown: No, no, no, no, no, no.</p>
<p>Franklin: No.</p>
<p>Brown: That was mixed of whatever. That was a mixed situation there. You could find it mixed. Definitely, because they had to have had a place to stay. And that was very difficult. If you didn’t care what color or whatever you were. Same way in the cafeterias and whatever where my mom worked. They worked together.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that—segregation was literally the law of the land in the South.</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your—what were your parents’ experiences here where segregation was more informal or kind of—</p>
<p>Brown: Segregation was—in Richland, Pasco, Kennewick, all of them had part of segregation, as you know. But some of them were worse than others. That’s life, where you go through that. And that’s what you had to put up with, situation like that. And I think Kennewick had not been segregated. To tell you, my wife’s brother was the first black that lived in Kennewick. Walter Howard.</p>
<p>Franklin: Walter Howard?</p>
<p>Brown: Mm-hm. Because he got a cross on his lawn, his house got burnt, he went through all of that. He was the first black at CBC college, when it was over there by the airport, if you recall any information on that. Yeah. But you know, you run into those situations, no matter where you go. But see, that’s why you had to bypass a lot of that. Which we did. We went through it, but this is what we have to do with that situation when people are listening to me and talking to passersby and look forward. And that’s what a lot of our people has to do for that. Because it’s going to happen, don’t matter where you go. We went through it. We went through it in school, we went through it when we go to play basketball in different towns, we went through some of that. But you know, you have to overcome that. And you have to make a commitment on those situations which carries you through. Because it could be riots, it could be this, it could be that. But you got to be smart. And a lot of times, you have to have trust in God. The Christian way. And that’s what it takes. For nowadays, they forget that. And that’s what—my family was very Christian people. Like my wife now, I bless her heart that she took us through my family and now all my kids are in. And it takes you a long ways when you’re dealing with people. And that’s what you’re going to deal with in life, people. And learn to cooperate. And walk away from things when you see bad. But we don’t do that anymore, a lot of times. But you have to do that. But that’s what we did. And that’s why we got along with people. And my kids are the same way now. You get along with people. You’re going to have conflicts in life, but you got to bypass it and make a commitment to yourself on what you’re going to do, and do it. So simple, really. Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your parents ever talk about their first impressions when they arrived here during World War II?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, yes, yes. It was—see, when they arrived—during those days, they never knew what they were doing, see? Like when people were working on the whatever. Like they never knew exactly what they were doing and what was in their environments. Like they have nowadays the technology to find out what’s this or where you can’t go. But they never knew that. All they knew about was, because they grew up that way, work. I want to work. Work to make a living. I have a family. What do I have to do? I have to work. And that’s the way it was back in the South. They didn’t have contracts. I need your help tomorrow. I experienced it. Pick cotton, all of that. Chop cotton. Pull corn or whatever. All of this stuff. They did it. I need your help, Mr. Weaver, or Mr. Whoever. And that’s the way it was. Yup. That’s just the way life was. Living off the land.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were your first impressions when you first arrived in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, it was kind of a—I was young. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to accept it. But I’m going to tell you the truth on the situation is that we were athletes. Because we went among people, doing things, playing with people on the playground. Like I said, we used to go in back of the school play basketball, play football, play tag, play this. That’s the impression I got, was good. Because you’re among people, and people accepted you for who you were. We didn’t have a lot of that. Sure, it was around. But that’s kind of the way we worked it out, and it worked out good.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about like—what were your first impressions about the environment or the landscape of the Tri-Cities when you got out here?</p>
<p>Brown: It was—that’s hilarious. Because jackrabbits? Wherever you see. Fruit? All over. All type of fruit. And fishing? We used to go down to the Columbia River here and fish for fish, throw your line out there and all this. Activities for a family. Something to do, things to do. That was a good impression. Open. It was open, not closed-in. And that gave you more freedom, see? Amongst the people, and they treated you right, and you treat them right. And we got along well that way. But that’s the way we were raised. See? If you’re raised that way, you continue to do it, no matter where you go.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. Where was the first place that you stayed after you arrived?</p>
<p>Brown: In north Richland. In north Richland. What happened was, we couldn’t get out. We couldn’t stay anywhere, that’s why it took us a while to get here, until they bought a trailer and got him a spot. And that’s what it was. In fact, we were probably two blocks from John Ball. We were about two blocks from there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And did you go to John Ball School?</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe it?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, John Ball, it was made out of—you know how you see these bomb shelters, and it was how they made—</p>
<p>Franklin: Quonset huts.</p>
<p>Brown: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. That’s what it was. And that’s where they were, they were lined up, one, two, three, down here and in the back the same way. It’s just like that, exactly. That’s the way it was. Yup. Hard chairs inside, and cafeteria. Yeah, but anyway. That’s one thing they did. They always fed people in them cafeterias for the kids. That was the good old days.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe the trailer? How big was it and what—</p>
<p>Brown: Trailers was based on what you could afford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brown: That’s the way it was. Because during those days, you wasn’t making a lot of money. But the people that was making a little more money had better trailers. With situation. Some of them had it where you could go to have your water in them and whatever and all that. But most of them out there in those trailers, you had wash houses, they called them, where you do your washing and where you do your showering. Because the trailers we had, some of them was made out of wood, and some of them was made out of the regular trailer stuff, but not very many of them. But you could see the difference of how, whatever you could afford, that’s what you could get.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of trailer was yours?</p>
<p>Brown: It was made out of kind of a wood-ish. Like these little one-bedroom houses, as you see on the TV, where they show those little one-bedroom houses, similar to that, exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how many were in your family?</p>
<p>Brown: One, two, three, four.</p>
<p>Franklin: So it’s you and your brother and your mother and father.</p>
<p>Brown: Mm-hmm. In fact, I remember exactly, the trailer was small, and we—[LAUGHTER] It was hilarious, but when we first came here and he had set it up, it was only one-bedroom, but we took the front where the kitchen was and made a bed so we could sleep at night. That’s the way it started. That’s how we were at the beginning, until we could afford to get a better—and that’s what we did. It was quite interesting, but we made it. We made it that way. Survive, that’s what it takes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. And your neighbors in the trailer camp, where were they from? Were they from all over?</p>
<p>Brown: All over, all over. All over. Exactly. But in a way, the black community was kind of separate—some of them were separated. In fact, we were right up from John Ball, but we were spread out quite a bit. Because I knew—we had a white family—I know the Hecksons, all of the Heckson Brothers, that was a big family who lived down on the corner by the school, and there was a few more lived in-between, but it was mostly kind of segregated, be honest, with the blacks in this area, and a few over here. Because you had to get what you could get because it was so crowded. And if something come available and you on the list, you go. And that’s the way it was, what color you were, whatever, that’s the way it had to be.</p>
<p>Franklin: And who did your father work for at this time, when you were in the trailer camp?</p>
<p>Brown: Bronat? Bonat? In fact I did a search on that. He worked for the railroad. I think it was called Bonat, something like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: And he was working out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, yeah, he worked on the railroad going out to Hanford and all that. And my mom worked at the cafeteria. They had a big cafeteria.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where?</p>
<p>Brown: Here, out at north Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, in the trailer camp.</p>
<p>Brown: Well, it was where they, like—I can almost visualize it, give you an idea of where it was, it was the men’s barracks and this was the big cafeteria where everybody could come to the cafeteria, and there was a movie theater right off from the cafeteria, and there was a fire station, up here above, and there was Dawson Richards down here in the little town where the food store, Mr. Dietrich. In fact I used to do a little work for Mr. Dietrich when I was a little kid. Go pick up things and take them and pick up bottles and take them down and sell them. That’s kind of the way the situation was. And then you had the big—as you going up, there was a big house where ice—you had to your buy ice—and that was the trailer court. And it comes right down from by the ice place, right down toward Dawson Richard, little store for clothes, and over there with the food store. It’s kind of—I can visualize it all and see what’s going on. That was major.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did your family move—how long did you stay in the trailer court?</p>
<p>Brown: Let’s see. We did it twice. First when we came out, we stayed there until all the work had stopped. Then we moved to the other area in Hermiston. We went to Hermiston, where the McNary Dam started. That’s how the people started accumulating over there in Hermiston, because of the McNary Dam. Same contact with the family. Some more came. There was my cousin, my aunt, my uncles, which was the Miles. They came, and several others came. The Rambos. I can remember that. And they came to Hermiston, probably a few more of them I might miss, but that’s where that started. As soon as the McNary Dam finished, they shot back to Hanford. That’s where we came back to Hanford. The trailer court had went down, but it started booming again in Hanford. That’s why we bought another trailer, which was a better trailer this time. And lived almost in the same spot from John Ball up there, where we had the other trailer. In fact, I can visualize it now. The trailer we had here, the new one we just bought, and we lived right over from it in the other one. And we could walk right on down from—it was amazing. It was amazing. And that’s where my uncle, which are Wallaces, was my mom—his wife and my mom was sisters. And they lived next to us. And you had the Allens, all of those people were at the trailer court, too. That’s when it was booming again back in this area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that the early ‘50s?</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah! Exactly, ’53, ’50-something, because I was in Chief Jo then.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brown: That’s when I went to Chief Jo. Yup, exactly right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And then where did you move after that? Did you get more of a permanent residence?</p>
<p>Brown: Permanent resident, exactly. We didn’t go anyplace else.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where’d you move to?</p>
<p>Brown: We moved in—well, we were going to—when the trailer court disappeared and everything was going away, that’s when the Army was out, and everything was going away, people had to move out. Because they were moving it. Okay. Prediction was that we were going to Pasco. We already had had our plans. But my dad had to get a job. And fortunately enough, he got a job for GE, for General Electric. That way, we could get a house.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did your father do for General Electric?</p>
<p>Brown: He worked on the railroad also, out at Hanford. But it was through General Electric, doing things. And also they got him another job, he was working kind of as a sevice, somewhere out, I don’t know wherever it was. But I used to take him there, get him on the bus, and he used to go there. That’s how that started. And to be honest with you, athletic ability, they didn’t want us to go to Pasco. Because we had Chief Jo, where we started out athletic ability with Mr. People, which was a great athletic coach, and luckily enough, like I say, before we got ready to move, in fact we were all ready to go, he got a job in GE and that way we stayed. And we got a house right behind the high school, Richland High, in a two-bedroom.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember the address?</p>
<p>Brown: One’s 805 Smith; this must’ve been 803 Smith. Because we moved from this two-bedroom to the three-bedroom, and it was next-door. So it must’ve been something. But 805 Smith is where we stayed, but we were there until we got our bigger house.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how long were you there in those two hosues?</p>
<p>Brown: The rest of 19—from when we moved there, we stayed there, in fact, most of our lives.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Brown: We didn’t live anyplace else.</p>
<p>Franklin: I used to live right in that neighborhood.</p>
<p>Brown: Did you?</p>
<p>Franklin: When I first lived here, yeah, Stanton. 804 Stanton.</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, Stanton. Oh, okay, 804. Oh really? That’s amazing! Yup, so it was easy for us to go to school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet.</p>
<p>Brown: And it was perfect. I mean, you could go to school, go home and eat if you want to. That’s where the rest of my life was, right there. Because we went through Chief Jo, went to high school, and went all.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Earlier you’d mentioned church and God, and so I assume your family attended church.</p>
<p>Brown; Oh, absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what church did you go to?</p>
<p>Brown: New Hope Baptist Church.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that was in Pasco.</p>
<p>Brown: That was in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Or, is in Pasco.</p>
<p>Brown: It is in Pasco. We started out in those little—we started out with the church—it’s amazing how things are in life and you meet people. But we started out in them little crib, whatever you call them out there John Ball. They let us have one, and Reverend Wilkins, which is Senior, and Brother Green and Brother Upton came out to teach us Sunday school. That’s how that started back in those days. That was in ’52, ’53, whatever. That’s how it started accumulating for Reverend Wilkins got a church in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that’s Morning Star.</p>
<p>Brown: No, no, that’s New Hope. New Hope Baptist Church, which is by Reverend Dr. Wayne Jenkins now. Which is—but they’re close, still so close together and they kind of associate. But that’s where we went to church. In fact, that’s where my mom was going to church, that’s where I went to church, my brother and all. It’s changed a lot now than then, because during those days, we had one of the best choirs that was around. We had, when the Army was here, a professional singer, and music: incredible—was our teacher. We used to sing all over the place. There was the Tates family, there was Carrie Anne, she’s close to the Daniels family and whatever, myself, and Shep Tate, which is a preacher now, all of that. Miss Owens, Robert Owens and Mary Harrison. We had a heck of a choir. And preachers. It was just fantastic, we’d just sing all over. It was just wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful.</p>
<p>And like I say, right now, see, Reverend Jenkins, he works at the hospital now. He is, like God sent him there to do whatever, as the shepherds do. He is excellent. He takes care of people, he takes care—if anybody ever want to know anything about the Bible, which he calls the Bible is a library, and that’s where you can find everything. And he knows it from head to toe. We have Bible studies on Wednesday and it’s amazing. I used to not go as much, but now I go. My wife goes all the time. And it’s amazing how things in the Bible you wouldn’t believe that it’s true. And it’s wonderful. I mean, you say you don’t like—but you get in those classes with him talking and explaining, and it’s incredible. And it’s true life. And that’s what makes it nice that you can—you have faith and trust in somebody like that. And it’s proven. And it’s wonderful. And that’s where we—my daughters are in the choir, they sing. Every one of my kids are in church.</p>
<p>Franklin: And is it still New Hope that you go to?</p>
<p>Brown: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, they’re in the choir, beautiful sing, they—it’s just wonderful.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how come your family went to a—because I know there were Baptist churches in Richland, how come you went to Pasco?</p>
<p>Brown: To Pasco? There wasn’t any church—black churches in Richland at that time. There’s a few now. But that’s where most of the black accumulated for the churches. And when we came out, when we were in the trailer court, they’re the ones that came and we got the tent, I mean, inside the school where we started the Sunday school, and that’s how that started. Yup. They came out, gave us Sunday school lessons and whatever.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role does church play in the black community?</p>
<p>Brown: Major roles. Because in the black community, it’s one of the out-going-est things there is in the community. Because that’s the way they were raised from their environments, early in the years. That’s how they sung. Togetherness. As you can see in some of the movies they make, how they sing and they praise the Lord, and they work together with each other. See, that’s the thing we need to do more now with everybody, don’t care what race or whatever you are. You need to do that. That’s how we got along, you know? Church has a convention, they go up there, they go, oh man, and coming up, seeing that, get in their wagons, they go and accumulate food, and oh my gosh, it’s just amazing. And that’s the way it should be all over. And that makes you feel good when you go and you see that. That makes you, as a whole, work together as everything in life itself. It makes it easier. It makes it easier. If I cut, you bleed, if you cut, you bleed same blood. So you know? And that’s the way it should be.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe life in the community in Richland?</p>
<p>Brown: It’s wonderful. Especially to have a family. That’s the only place to be in a place like this, with a family. Not—we’re fortunate. And people don’t realize it, how fortunate you are to be in the cities where you can’t go out and run and have a good time. It’s just a fortune-to-be. And that’s what’s happening now, so many people are coming here because of that. Family people. What they have? Activities. Incredible.</p>
<p>Franklin: Speaking of activities, what did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Brown: Most of the time in the spare time, on age-wise, most of the time we played sports. That’s a lot. And what we did is work. We always had a job when we were out of school. That was our main thing, work. Chores, you had to do. It ain’t like nowadays, you tell them to do something, you come, they aren’t done. We didn’t have to—if it wasn’t done, you know what happened back here. That was a true story. You’d get—and people don’t realize, if you obey your parents and do things, life is a lot easier. We used to get up if we had to make our bed and do whatever and get it done, you’re free to go. Just stay out of trouble. And that’s what we did.</p>
<p>And that’s growing up here, you have everything in between you. If you want to go to Seattle big city, if you want to go to Spokane, want to go to Portland, everything’s here. It’s wide open. It’s beautiful for family. It’s just wonderful! That’s why you find a family with five or six people, they don’t worry about it. See? It’s a lot of activities for them. Something to do. And it’s not as good as it used to be where you could leave your house open, leave the kids playing, they know they aren’t going to do anything wrong in your house. And that’s the way it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any particular community events?</p>
<p>Brown: Yes. In regards to which? Good or bad?</p>
<p>Franklin: Good and bad.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah. We had a few, like a few in sports, and you’re the only black, you’re going to have conflicts. That’s just obvious with people. It’s over—almost over now, but we had it—I had it in Sunnyside once. We played, we had a little name-calling and whichever. Of course, we beat them pretty bad, but that’s part of the thing. Coming up in school, I can say, we didn’t have as much, because we were athletes, and that makes a difference.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why?</p>
<p>Brown: I don’t know. The people gets to know you, and they gets to meet you, and you become part of them, I would say. You become part of everybody’s—and they get the wrong impression before they know you of what it is until you—geez, that’s a nice guy, why do they always talk about da, da, da, da? And this is what happens with a lot. They become your best friends. And that’s what happens. A lot of times, if some people let go and let the kids work it out themselves, it’s a lot better. And I had another conflict in school where I was a prince, and we went over to Kennewick to a dance. They wouldn’t let us in.</p>
<p>Franklin: They wouldn’t let who in?</p>
<p>Brown: Wouldn’t let me and my escort in. We both were black. And they hadn’t segregated that. Over there, it was a teenager house, where we just had had our deal and we all were going dancing. So they wouldn’t let us go in. That’s where that situation—but it got straightened. But it takes, sometimes, something like that happening to start things rolling. So that was a great event. There was myself, Carrie Anne Barton, she was involved in it. It was a big write-up. You probably could go back into history, back in those days, when I graduated in ’58 and around in that area in ’57 you could find it in the <em>Tri-Cities</em>.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think I’ve seen that.</p>
<p>Brown: Have you?</p>
<p>Franklin: I think I’ve seen what you’re talking about in the paper.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were—it was a public place, it was a public dance, and you had been refused entry.</p>
<p>Brown: Exactly. Those things happened. I think it happens for the good in some respects, just like everything else, like when Martin Luther King marched and sang “We Will Overcome.” Things happen for a purpose: to make it better for other people. And that what it takes sometimes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about more positive community events? Do you remember like the annual Atomic Frontier Days celebration?</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, gosh, yes. All of that. All the different incredible, incredible things on all events and situations like that. A lot of entertainment, and like I say, in the community, they didn’t accumulate as much as black and other races together like they do now on other events, like bringing in stars in and doing this and stuff like that. But I can’t think of too many other incidents like they have now, the boat races and all of this stuff, as a community. They didn’t have a lot of that then-days.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Franklin: We were talking about events.</p>
<p>Brown: Exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any accommodations or events that you were unwelcome at or refused because of your race—</p>
<p>Brown: Race, nah.</p>
<p>Franklin: --besides the event in Kennewick?</p>
<p>Brown: No, no, no, no.</p>
<p>Franklin: How many—blacks were pretty much a minority in Richland, right?</p>
<p>Brown: Exactly.</p>
<p>Franklin: How many black families were there that you can—</p>
<p>Brown: Well, give you an example, I think there was only five black in Richland High School. I think it was myself, and I think it was about five that I know of. I think we were close to one or two coming here. In fact, it wasn’t that very many, because not very many worked for General Electric, see? And the ones that worked out there mostly lived in Pasco, especially in the black community. Pasco was the main area.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any divisions between the blacks that lived in Richland and the blacks that lived in Pasco?</p>
<p>Brown: [LAUGHTER] You had to ask that question.</p>
<p>Franklin: I did, yeah.</p>
<p>Brown: You had to ask. It’s hilarious! To me, it is. Because people would get on our case. Oh, you guys lived out in the rich part of town. You know how they go. You live in Richland. We live in Pasco. And they thought—that, oh, it used to just ache, especially my mom, my wife. The kids, when we used to go, when I was married and had kids and all, oh, you guys think you’re so good, because you lived in Richland. It wasn’t—we did have that little conflict there with the blacks. Because we lived in Richland, and we were fortunate enough to live in Richland. And it happens. People think you’re more high-class, that’s what they think. Even so, we dressed the kids nice and when they go to church, people get inferiority complex or something along that. Like, hmm. How can they afford to dress them like that or do this? We had comments like that, seriously. It happened. It happened to a lot of the families that’s coming from Richland and living in Richland. And like we say, you can live anywhere you want, if you want to. You can buy any kind of car you want, if you want to. If you determine to do it, and made a commitment, you can do it. And it was jealousy, that’s all it was. Thought we were high-class, but we wasn’t. We just living the life the way God had blessed us to be.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events, or traditions that people brought from the places they came from, basically, that blacks had brought from Texas up here?</p>
<p>Brown: I can’t recall. Events in church, I know they have those. That’s norm for there and here. They had all kind of events there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like what?</p>
<p>Brown: Like we just had a—the church been there 60 years—I’m just saying events like that situation. And like they have a pastors’ anniversaries. They have all these anniversaries. They do that now, here. And—go ahead, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was going to ask, what about food, for example?</p>
<p>Brown: Food! They don’t have a feast, but they do it on anniversaries. We just had one this past week where it was the 65 years and they—not just a feast. They do have June 16<sup>th</sup> or 18<sup>th</sup> or whatever.</p>
<p>Franklin: Juneteenth?</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah. They do that. Which is a big event together where they have all the different soul foods and whatever. That don’t come about every year.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about with the family, did people bring their food traditions with them? Up here? Like did your parents bring the foods of the South, the soul food up with them?</p>
<p>Brown: Absolutely, absolutely. How they cook it and how they make it and all that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of foods in particular do you remember?</p>
<p>Brown: Particular? Barbecue, sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, okra, cabbages, greens, good old long onions, where you just take a good old bite. Squash. This is what they lived off the land. Tomatoes. They lived off the land with all of this type of food. Iced potatoes. That kind of stuff, they lived off the land to survive. And that’s what, when you go—we just had a feast in church and they had all the, oh my gosh, corn bread, make they own, used to make they own butter—milk the cow. I used to churn it myself.</p>
<p>Franklin: Back in Texas?</p>
<p>Brown: Back in Texas, absolutely. I used to do that. Kill they own. That’s why I say, as a family, they got together and they did all this stuff together. And they’d feast, oh my gosh, it’s incredible, incredible food. Good stuff, too. Have all this organic stuff and this. Oh, it’s unreal, unreal.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you or your parents came from?</p>
<p>Brown: Absolutely. Your opportunity to go to a store, transportation, that was a major thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you mean, opportunity to go to the store?</p>
<p>Brown: I mean, the store you had to go to there, you had to go miles, or you had to buy all you need here because you had to go 10 or 12 or 13 miles to get to a store to get the other type of groceries. So you were way out here and farming and wherever, they had it in one little central area, so everybody’d come like this. And like now you could get on a trolley or bus or these things and go or walk to it easily—no, no. That’s a difficult thing. And you’d see a lot of them take their wagon, get the mule hooked up, take off to the store, get all they sugar and all this stuff and flour in big sacks, so they didn’t have to go. So you can see, it’s a great difference, great difference.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about education?</p>
<p>Brown: Education. Education was good, but not as good, because of the work status. It’d been many times you had to pull out—my uncles—when I lived with my grandmother, there was 14 in my family with my mom—and had to stay, chop cotton, pick cotton.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mean they had to be pulled out of school—</p>
<p>Brown: Exactly, exactly. And you had to do that to survive on living.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Brown: And that’s what made it—oh! That’s what made it so—experience to see that and what happened and how they doing it nowadays and what they have, and how they don’t take advantage of what they have nowadays. Like what they had to do back in those days. I experienced that and got to see it. Living off the land. Living off the land. No—how you get irrigation? There wasn’t no irrigation! What is irrigation? God has a way of doing it. And that stuff grow incredibly. It’s hard to believe. It’s hard to believe.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brown: It really is. To think about that. But I got to experience it and see it. That’s what makes it nice. And you see now, water? What’s that? Hot? I mean, hot-hot. But it grows.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, it’s hard to say. You’re not limited anymore, I don’t think, too much. I think it’s mostly—you don’t find that anymore as much as it used to be. Because it’s changed in the South. And that’s where it used to be, you go to the backdoor, he go to the front. We experienced that. I experienced that. But you don’t have that anymore. Which is good, which is good.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about here? Were there opportunities that were limited when you were a child or coming up?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, in certain areas it was; like I say, Kennewick was that way. But other than that, I didn’t experience too much of other places. Like I say, by being small group of people in the area, it wasn’t too bad. Because they got along well. But it could still be there, which it’s going to be every place; don’t matter where you go. But you don’t see it as much. Because it was a small community of black in the area. That’s where you—the most of those people was Christians. That makes a difference on a family, you come from Christian families, you’re going to find a cooperation that’s great. That’s what it takes. You treat me well, I’ll treat you well.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did segregation and racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Brown: Say that again?</p>
<p>Franklin: Did segregation or racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Brown: Did it lure it?</p>
<p>Franklin: Did it affect it? Your education.</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, no. That was up to me, to do whatever you have to do in your classwork. And to prove the point is that, whatever you did, you didn’t know whether you doing it right or wrong, whether they did that, but you assume you were, because they did pass you, give you a grade, give you whatever. And by that time, you would compare other people, you could tell. You could tell by other people whatever they’re doing in the class or whatever and whatever what you’re doing. And you can tell the smart one and the one that’s not smart.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were some of the people that influenced you as a child?</p>
<p>Brown: As a where?</p>
<p>Franklin: As a child.</p>
<p>Brown: As a child? As a child. I think my parents influenced me by work. I think as teachers, coaches, how to discipline and what you can do with your life. You look at some of the coaching staff and some of the teachers, that they could take more time with you when they know that you’re struggling. That was a blessing. I can go back—because you can look at some of the teachers would take you in and say, you need help in this and help in that. Because like a lot of our people are slow learners because they were taken away from a lot as they grew up, coming from the different environments. But it got where you make a commitment for something, you do it. And that’s what it took.</p>
<p>A lot of people—I can use that as an educational with CJ Mitchell, that’s a good example. He was almost—what was he? 35, 40, before he got his degree in something. But he kept going. Still have a job and going, but he wanted to get better. And that’s what he did. And that’s what you have to do when you lose out on a lot of that. You look at your coaches, you look at how they treat you and try to help you and do things for you. That’s a motivator. And I had a lot of it. I had a lot of it in my lifetime. Because I got missed out on school in certain ways when I was younger. Like they normally tutor people, you know, when they can’t—we were moving around here, moving around there. It affects you. It really does.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You graduated in ’58?</p>
<p>Brown: ’58.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did you do afterwards?</p>
<p>Brown: Afterwards, I went to school, I went to CBC for two years. Played sports there, had a scholarship. I went there two years, my brother and I both. And after I left CBC, I went up to Cheney. Got a scholarship in Cheney.</p>
<p>Franklin: For Eastern Washington?</p>
<p>Brown: Eastern Washington, yeah, up at Cheney. And I had a scholarship in basketball there, but it didn’t work out. So during that year, I dropped out. And I shouldn’t have. But I did! That’s the year they was drafting people into the service. And I got drafted into the Army. 24<sup>th</sup> Division Germany, I went. And on a story, as you talk about that, I met my wife at CBC, she was from California. That was her brother that I was telling you about in Kennewick. And I went and got married. She was from Bakersfield, California, my wonderful wife. And I got to Bakersfield, California, took my mom and took all. And my brother didn’t call me and tell me I had my papers for the military. And he finally told us and my wife says, tell them I’m pregnant! Tell I’m this! You don’t need to go.</p>
<p>But I went into the service, and went over in Germany, and I stayed in Germany four years. Special duties. I was in the 24<sup>th</sup> Division. Went all over Europe as basketball divisions. I got to travel all over Europe: Italy, France, Germany, Austria, all over, for four years. I was a basic trainer for physical education, bayonet training, hand-to-hand combat training. I did that for four years over in Germany. And that’s when I was in AIT in California. My wife got pregnant and she says, it’s time for you to come home. And I didn’t come home, because I extended for a year. And that’s when she called the Red Cross. And they said, yeah, he’s extended. And so I didn’t—I wasn’t able to see my daughter when she was born. And that’s where my life started. Right there. But I grew up over there in the military. I would tell anybody, go to the service, whatever you have. It grows you up. It makes a man out of you. Because I knew I had responsibilities. It just was the wonderful thing I could’ve ever done. And I stayed in there four years and got out, went to reserves and I started working for GE. That’s where I started again.</p>
<p>Franklin: Out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Brown: Out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: What year was that?</p>
<p>Brown: ’64, ’65.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you do for GE?</p>
<p>Brown: GE? I worked in the mailroom. That’s where a lot of us started, in the mailroom. That’s where I started, in the mailroom. And as they—because when I first left and went into the military, I had started to work for GE, but I had got drafted. And so Mr. Wood, out here the Woods Nursery—he worked for GE in hiring people. And I’ll never forget him. He says, don’t worry about it. He said, when you get back—he worked for GE—he said, we’ll get you a job. And sure enough they did. So when I got out of the military, boom, they got me a job. It was wonderful. That’s kind of the way it happened on that.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how long did you work out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Brown: About all my—most until I retired here in—of course, they changed companies. As they changed companies, like I went from GE to Westinghouse, from Westinghouse to Bechtel, from Bechtel back to Westinghouse. I’ll never forget when I was working for GE, me and one of my friends, I forget his name, we had to change the lights in the whole fixtures of the lights they had up in downtown in the 703 Building. 703 Building, still there that one. That’s where I started out, him and I. Taking the lights down, cleaning them. And then as the thing go, I started working for GE and then I went to Battelle, and I went to Westinghouse, and that’s where I started most of my work, working on FFTF.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you do at FFTF?</p>
<p>Brown: I was a manager—a supervisor.</p>
<p>Franklin: Supervisor for--?</p>
<p>Brown: Of mailroom, duplicating, reproduction, and all the satellites for the projects. I had, what, 12 women and one guy [LAUGHTER] working for me. I worked there, and I’ll never forget, I worked for a guy named Laurence Smith. He was a go-getter. When I first started working out there in the Area. When we started to put the project number two, I was in charge of all of reproduction, duplicating, buying equipment, buying all that.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you say project number two, do you mean the Washington Public—</p>
<p>Brown: Northwest Energy, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, Energy Northwest.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, they used to call it Whups! [WPPSS].</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, we had five—</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, they like to get away from that acronym now.</p>
<p>Brown: Exactly. We had five projects going at the same time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, but only one of them—</p>
<p>Brown: One of them made it. All of them was—oh, what a mess.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes.</p>
<p>Brown: What a mess. I mean, I had equipment going back to people, just—oh, it’s so much—oh! That was a disaster. But we made it through. But the one project going is still going. That was a good experience. I used to have my group have to work litigations and—oh, my gosh. In fact, my kids worked out there, a couple of them. Laquida and Chrissie and one of my others, too, Carolyn, the one’s in Vegas. But it was quite a deal, though, to see all that stuff just go to—ah. With all the money that people—oh. Sad sap, all of that. But anyway, that was my experience working. I worked there and retired out of there. I’ve been retired 23 years. I took the early retirement. My wife worked for Battelle. She put 30 years in. We both retired at the same time, 1994, I think it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. What did your wife do at Battelle?</p>
<p>Brown: She was in charge of the library.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Brown: She worked in the library. She used to go to Washington, DC to do things and everything. She had a good—it was a good job for her. She loved it. She’s dedicated anyway, because that’s the way she is in the church. She’s on the treasury and this and that. But she loved the library. Mr. Wayne Snyder was her boss. Quite a guy, yep, yep. Wayne Snyder. Never forget it. She always would talk about him now. But anyway, she worked there 30 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. The whole time for Battelle?</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, Battelle.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, she worked all the time for Battelle. She was in photography for a while, and then she went on to the library and she worked her way up through that. Been married 57 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Brown: [LAUGHTER] I know it. I need a trophy. I keep telling her that, when we talk to people in the church. And she says, you guys been married, what? 57 years and I need a trophy. [LAUGHTER] But it’s been wonderful. It really has.</p>
<p>Franklin: Good.</p>
<p>Brown: To be able to do that, travel, and the time go by so fast. And that’s why she says—in fact, the pastor just told her the other day, we was having Bible study and we were on a subject like that, and she says, Leda, how long did you work for Battelle? She says, 30 years. That’s what I want to tell you. You made a commitment to what you wanted to do. And that’s what Christians should do, he said. Make a commitment of what you want to do. And you did it, and look at you now! See? You make that commitment in life what you want to do, and you can do it. But you got to make a commitment and do it and stick to it. Yup, yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors at Hanford?</p>
<p>Brown: At Hanford? Wonderful. Because whatever they wanted, I did it. And to say it so, they used to call me No Problem Brown. Go see him, he’ll take care of you. That’s what they used to call me. The litigation, the lawyers used to need stuff. I didn’t care what it cost, overtime or whatever. My relation with them was good. It had to be, because I was in a service department. And you got to learn when you’re in something like that, do whatever they want you to do. Not say, I can’t. I’ll try and do it. Whatever it takes. And get it done. Too many people criti—oh, we don’t need to do this; that ain’t right; this ain’t what you need to do. Do it if they want it. And that’s what happened. That’s what made my job so easy. And I’d tell the people, can you work overtime tonight or whatever? Yes, I’ll do it. Can you get this out? What do we need to do? Need to take it downtown, commercial? Do it. I didn’t have any problem with any of them because I did my job of what they wanted. And they was managers and whatever. Let them fight the problem, not me. I didn’t have any problem. That’s why I was successful at retiring in the same place, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Brown: Outside of work? I can’t recall any outside of work. You saying, people outside of work, or just supervisors or—how do you want to--?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, the people you worked with and your supervisors. Because I imagine even in the ‘60s and ‘70s, right, blacks would’ve been a minority, a real minority—</p>
<p>Brown: Well, I really didn’t have any problem with that. Honestly. Because I was raised to do your job if you’re working for somebody. And do a good job, no matter what you’re doing. Do a good job, and you ain’t got to worry about who you are or what you doing here or there. Do your job like it’s supposed to be and you won’t have a lot of problem.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways did the security and secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Brown: Security?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brown: Not really. Because you knew the security violations of whatever you had to do. No. Security was good for the people, good for you, because you had to provide by the rules and regulations. That’s self-explanatory. If you do something you aren’t supposed to do in regards to the rules and regulations, you get punished for it. Simply. You know? It’s just like driving a car. If you are supposed to go 25, and you’re going 40, that’s you. Rules and regulations doesn’t say that you can do that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about your parents’ reactions to learning that the work they had done contributed to the development of the atomic bomb?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, they didn’t know what they were doing until the fact came out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What do you remember about that?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, I don’t remember too much about it, until I—I was so young during that time—until I found out why and what they were doing later. Kind of frightening about it, because some of the things that came out into the parents’ situation by radiation—which my mom went through it. Yeah. My dad was exposed to it, but not as bad. But other than that, I can’t recall, because I was kind of young when that happened. Until I found out later that the people didn’t know what they were doing; they were just working. And that’s tough. But that’s the way life was, and you had to accept it the way it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Brown: The most important is work. Nuclear. Electricity. Environments, keeping it clean for other generations. That’s one of the most important because the danger that they set here on Hanford. Soon as you say the word Hanford, people think about radiation this and that. That’s just the way life is. So, that’s—</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m going to move on to talk about civil rights now.</p>
<p>Brown: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Brown: I can’t recall too much. In the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. And at Hanford.</p>
<p>Brown: Let’s see what you—how can you put that in another way?</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of civil rights issues was the black community in the Tri-Cities struggling with? What were the main areas of concern?</p>
<p>Brown: Okay, okay. I think work. Jobs. You can see a lot of that. I’m making—I’m giving an example. Ten dollars, they’re getting 12. But I’m doing more than they are. I’m a specialist. I’m a service worker. You see a lot of that. That was really a tough situation. In fact, that go on now. It goes on. Politics, situation of people, you know people and they do this and do this and whatever. That’s the only thing I can see. But actually a lot of people don’t know that, unless they communicate with people and find out. Otherwise it goes on that I’m making a good living and doing good and whatever. But sometimes they could say, well, we’re only getting so-and-so. You getting what? I’m not even getting that. Communication through things, it happens that way. Segregation situation. And I think a lot of time, to be honest, we do it ourselves. We’re afraid to take a chance on situations. Like going in and asking for a job or getting an application or do things like that. We’re frightened and say, aw, they ain’t going to hire me because of my—but that’s not really true. You never know until you do. You got a good background and you have a trace of a good background, somebody’ll see you. But never give up. Keep moving forward.</p>
<p>Franklin: Any other issues besides employment that the black community struggled with in the Tri-Cities? What about housing?</p>
<p>Brown: Housing?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brown: No, I don’t think so. No. Because I can go with my family, where I live—I live in all the area with the Mormons. They become as a family. It was wonderful. I had a house built in 1972 over there. I’m still there. And just like now, my daughter lived out in West Richland where the new houses Hayden put up. They bought one there right in the middle of everybody. It’s money counts now.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about historically? You mentioned that your wife’s brother—</p>
<p>Brown: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: --had tried to live in—</p>
<p>Brown: And he did live in Kennewick.</p>
<p>Franklin: So, historically, was housing a concern for the African American community in the Tri-Cities? Quality housing?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, because if they could afford it. They could live in Kennewick or Richland. Not Kennewick. But in Pasco or Richland. But over there, you found very few people would live over there in Kennewick because of the surrounding of where you would be. They were mostly on the east side. Now, be honest, it moved. They started moving on up—you know how people, generation to generation, get involved in it. But in Richland, if you could afford it, because it was so—it was expensive more in Richland, in the areas. Different, new areas. The old areas wasn’t too bad where the old, what do you say, during-the-war-houses—</p>
<p>Franklin: The Alphabet Houses?</p>
<p>Brown: Prefabs and precuts and situation. But they were something like a dime a dollar in those days. But if you had the job to be able to afford it, you could do it. And that was the basic there.</p>
<p>Franklin: That kind of goes back to your first point, though, where jobs were a concern because at times jobs may have been there but at the time African Americans were being paid less for the same job or there were classes of jobs that just weren’t really allowed—</p>
<p>Brown: Right, exactly. You analyzed it perfectly. That’s exactly--</p>
<p>Franklin: So that kind of influences the quality of housing.</p>
<p>Brown: Quality, absolutely. You’re right. Absolutely. I’m only making this, and they making that, and how can they afford it? Situations. That happened.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because that happened to CJ Mitchell, right?</p>
<p>Brown: Absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: That he had been—people thought maybe because he bought a nice house, maybe they were paying him too much.</p>
<p>Brown: Mm-hmm, exactly! You’re exactly right. And that’s the same way with us. That when we moved over there, and the people at work were worse than the people where we lived. They says, where you live? I live in Westview Acres. What?! And she says she saw a supervisor drive by her place. And says, that’s where you live? And she drove—we had a Mercedes. I drove a Mercedes. 1978 Mercedes. She drove it to work. She didn’t drive it no more. How can you afford a Mercedes?! You know, those kinds of things, how can you do this and how can you do that? She couldn’t stand it. We parked it. [LAUGHTER] We still got it, though. It’s a good car. Still restored. Yeah, it was her baby. Anyway, you’re right. You run into those situation. Yup. You’re paying them too much.</p>
<p>Franklin: What action was taken to address the disparity in jobs and housing?</p>
<p>Brown: In regards to buying, selling or getting?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brown: Well, like I said again, I’ll go back to if you could afford to do it, there was no problem. But to get into certain neighborhood, you couldn’t. You know, it was limited to a certain thing because of that. And to tell you the truth, on something else in regards to what you’re talking about, in selling a house or buying a house, people would want to know who’s moving next-door. We just went through that with my daughter. They were selling a house, but the people seeing the pictures and they couldn’t sell it. Soon they took the pictures down and done, showing that was black, it sold right away. That’s amazing. You follow what I’m saying?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I follow what you’re saying.</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah? So you can see. It just happened, too, recently, to this house that he got ready to sell out in Richland because his upstairs is five-bedroom and the kids are all mostly gone. He said, I will not leave any pictures or anything here. And it sold pretty fast.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mean pictures of the family?</p>
<p>Brown: Yes. Knowing that they were black, see what I’m saying? That happens. People don’t realize it, but it happens. And you can see what I’m referring to.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, yes, very much. Who were the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Brown: In the area? Hmm. I’d have to go way back on that. I think, mostly it was, I’ve seen CJ had a lot to do with some of that. And you have the pastors. Reverend Wilkins, he was a strong man as a pastor through all this. He worked down—I think he worked for GE or some of them people. But Reverend Wilkins was a very strong believer in that. And Reverend—I can go all the reverends really. Reverend Jackson, he was quite a leader. Reverend Upton.</p>
<p>Franklin: Reverend who?</p>
<p>Brown: Upton?</p>
<p>Franklin: Upton?</p>
<p>Brown: U-P—I guess that’s the way you spell it, Upton. I’m trying to—well, you had like Reverend—I know he was. I’m trying to figure out his—gosh. Who else was that? Some of those names will come to me later but won’t come to me now. Reverend Allen. Reverend Allen, that’s who I wanted to say. He was a real strong believer in that. Because he—Reverend Allen, he was quite a guy.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why were the reverends so much at the forefront of civil rights?</p>
<p>Brown: Because of the Christian-type. You know, just like, Martin Luther King situation, Christian. And that’s what they believe in the Bible and believe that all people are created equally and that’s the way it was taught. That’s one of the main things in the church, as a pastor. And like they say, the dictionary is here in the Bible. If you follow that, you can’t go wrong. So that’s kind of the way things were with the people back there. Reverend Allen was a plumb believer in—he was with the missionary through all the big churches. He was in charge of all that through Seattle and whatever and pushed all that stuff. He was one of the head top nachos in that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the notable successes of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, god. Non-believers? Did you say non-believers?</p>
<p>Franklin: No. What were some of the notable successes?</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, the successes! Oh, okay. I follow you, what you’re referring to. Well, I’m trying to recall some of the situation with that, successful. Okay. People used to not vote. That was one of the main things. People would not sit back so they aren’t going to—but every vote counted. They publicize that very well in the churches. That was the main thing. To get us better, to get us where we at, we need to go and vote. That was one of the main things in their life that they would publicize of what you need to do. They would bring that up in church; in fact, they do now. And that was the main thing. So you have to get out and support the things that you want to have done. If you don’t, they’re just going to continue to do them. That was the main issue. One of the main, main issue on that. Get out and vote on the stuff. You’re a citizen and you have the rights. But lot of them just, ah, they don’t listen to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges? Civil rights challenges?</p>
<p>Brown: Of having your right to go places, having your right to buy things, not because of your color. And having the rights to be able to live where you wanted to live. That was some of the big issues, I think. In regards—</p>
<p>Franklin: Were those issues here?</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, you’re always going to have those kind of issues. You have them, don’t matter where you go. You’re going to have them. And you’re going to find people that—it’s fading away. Because we’re moving forward instead of staying down where it’s bad. We want to move forward in regards to what’s going on. Yeah, you’re going to run into the issues. You got to ignore them and go on and try to make things right. Because that’s the way life is. You look at the past; you got to let the past go and look at the things going forward. We got to move forward. Because we can’t think about the past of how—and that’s why our ancestors set our paths for us. And come up with these situations, like you say, the Martin Luther King going for the march and this and that, and vote and getting out the vote. These are the things you need to do to make it better.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Brown: No, not really. Not really.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brown: Nope, nope. Nope, I just stayed mostly in sports. Mostly in sports, coaching and—</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you think sports was a special kind of path to acceptance for African Americans? Did it offer you something special in terms of acceptance?</p>
<p>Brown: Yes. Sports was—like, I coached for 28 years. I did at Hanford and I did at Kamiakin. Me and Emmett Jackson. You know Emmett.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yup.</p>
<p>Brown: And the people accepted us as who we were and what we did. We didn’t do it as politics-wise. We did it as a person who wanted to make a commitment to do what they had to do. The discipline that they had. And this is the way we coached. People love that. We used to have people say, well, what’s wrong with him? How come you aren’t playing him? How come you aren’t doing this? The simple answer is, come to our practices. He came to the practice and he left. Next day, he say, I see what you’re saying. See? You bring people in to see what’s going on, when you’re trying to help them and they don’t cooperate or do what they’re supposed to do, let them see it themselves. And that made a difference. Because we treated them as human. As if they were my kids or whatever. And we tell the parents, give them to us for an hour, and then you can have them back. Leave them alone. And we have nowadays guys saying, hey, Coach Brown! You can tell how you treated the people to give you that respect that you did it right.</p>
<p>Franklin: You and your brother were kind of sports stars in Richland.</p>
<p>Brown: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, Richland High School. I forget who I interviewed earlier, but someone said that it seemed to them that high school was harder for black women because they didn’t have the sports outlet; whereas, if you could play sports, there was a degree of acceptance. Could you—what are your thoughts on that?</p>
<p>Brown: Well, could be negative and could be positive in some respect. It’s how that other person and you react to the environments of the people. See, I might take it a different way, because they treat me in a different way for what I do than compared to what I do. So there’d be a difference in that situation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there ever any social or sporting events when you were in high school where your race was an issue?</p>
<p>Brown: Yes. There was especially when we were playing. That’s what you’re referring to. Like, Sunnyside, we had a problem. Break out. You probably have heard about that one. Emmett probably told you about that, too. That’s when we was in high school. They didn’t see very many blacks. And when we do go play out, we dominate. And when you dominate somebody in they own place, you get criticized. Don’t matter where. And that was the outbreak. They had to call the police, they had to do this and whatever.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really? They had to call the police?</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, yeah. They had to call the police and everything. Escorted us out of there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were the police called on? What was the—</p>
<p>Brown: Security, they called them on, because the coaches called them, too. Art Dawald, he was the coach.</p>
<p>Franklin: Of Richland?</p>
<p>Brown: Of Richland on that situation. Never forget it. Yup, an outburst. Because we beat them so bad. Oh, them so-and-sos and so-and-so—it was bad. It was really bad. It was in the paper. I’m sure if you go back in those days, you could probably easily find it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did they use—</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: --racially-charged language?</p>
<p>Brown: Oh, yeah. It was out. Yup, yup. They don’t belong here, these… But yeah, I’ll never forget that. That was the only most disaster thing that ever happened. That was in high school. I think you’ll go back and find the paper, it’ll be in the paper.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember what year that was?</p>
<p>Brown: Let’s see. It had to be in my high school year. Because my brother and I both was playing together. So that had to be in ’57, ’55, ’56, ’57. In that area. Because we both was playing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is Norris older or younger?</p>
<p>Brown: Older. One year.</p>
<p>Franklin: One year, okay.</p>
<p>Brown: Yup, he was a year ahead of me. A year ahead of me. That was only the big outburst we had.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you ever—how do I ask this question—what was dating like? Were you ever—you know, because I’m sure you may have had friends—lots of white friends—</p>
<p>Brown: I got you. I got you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there any strict requirement—</p>
<p>Brown: Gotcha, gotcha.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brown: Dating was very interesting. Because of sport athletic ability that you have, you aren’t going to have much problem. I had a white girlfriend. Dated her. Lived out in north Richland here. And we were in school together. You know how you go down and you go to the locker with them and this and that, okay? They had an outburst. Somebody did. And they found out who was doing the outburst. Our vice president, I’ll never forget him, Solly? Solly, have you heard the name Solly? Okay, he was our president. Him and Mulligan, George Mulligan, called the guy in and said, we aren’t going to have this. And they called us and apologized to me.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you say “incident” and “guy,” what do you—</p>
<p>Brown: What they did is, they didn’t want us to date the white girls. And they was prejudiced against it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was this other students or parents?</p>
<p>Brown: Students. Students. They even had an assembly on it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Had assembly about what?</p>
<p>Brown: About this situation. To the people. And told them, said, we aren’t going to have it. Honestly, I’ll never forget that. We used to have assemblies all the time before basketball and things and any activities. The president brought it up.</p>
<p>Franklin: So there weren’t a lot of African Americans at Richland High School.</p>
<p>Brown: No, no.</p>
<p>Franklin: So did you feel like this was—I mean, you and your brother must—this was targeted about your situation.</p>
<p>Brown: Right, right. Because that happened in junior high in Chief Jo. As that led on, we didn’t have any problem after that. They showed the support through the faculty, of the president and all of that. Boy, it went away. Never did have any other problem. Never did have any other problem. They treated us just like whatever. And I could say a lot of it probably was our athletic ability of what we did for the school and for the community. Got well-known, and that carries us through it. And like I say, I can only count little ones, not a lot of them. Same way, going to the sock hop, they used to call it. They call your name and call your girlfriend up to start out. I can remember that. It showed how closely you were with the facilities of the people. And that made you feel good, to show you have that support.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brown: Yup. I went through it, experienced it. Yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: I just have two kind of open-ended questions left. First was, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Brown: During that time? During the Cold War? That’s many years, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>Franklin: It was, about 45.</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Brown: I know it, that’s what I’m saying! Well, I tell you—</p>
<p>Franklin: I guess maybe the high point of the Cold War, you know?</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, I know. Of living in that environment? You know, it doesn’t affect you as much as you’d think about it until afterwards. Because you can’t see exactly what’s going on. You can hear about it. Until it happens or what done happened in the Cold War of what your parents went through. Because you can’t see it. All you are is trying to have a good time, go to school and do things like that and enjoy life. Where they were doing things incredibly. So the experience did not change in regards to being a young person or whatever. We still had activities. But in those days, we made our own activity situation where we would be happy. As long as our parents was working and bringing in something for food, we were happy. Because we was not informed with the other situation. They didn’t publicize it like they publicize now. Because they got all this stuff now, they know what’s going on, what’s this and whatever going on, and people know. All we was concerned about: going to school, parents was working, making a living, and getting some food in our old stomach. And having a good time. That’s what we were concerned about, back in those days.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Brown: Yup, that was it. And that’s how we met a lot of friends, too, by that situation. Making our own playground, making our own things together. And communicating together. And that’s what made it nice. And made it nice and—wherever you—it just, it’s not like that anymore. Gosh. It just aches you to see it. But that was the good days. Good days. Like now, I see Hecksons—I don’t know if you know them or not—Jerry Heckson and Roger was the old—we used to play together. They’re white, and we just had a good time. We made our own fun. And that’s—they don’t do that anymore. It just—ugh. That’s why you have so many problems with segregation, people and this and that. But Christians, that means a lot, when you have faith and trust in God and those situations, and your family. It carries you a long way through life. Makes you think twice. Instead of blowing up. And that’s what it is. Communicate, you listen. I learned that in, when I was working, when I used to go to seminars. The guy used to get up, after he’d go through everything, he’d say, I’m going to leave this with you people. Learn these two things in your life. Learn to listen. And communicate. And you got it. It’s amazing. Yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life at Hanford and Richland?</p>
<p>Brown: Yeah, I think growing up, as you can single out a person in my life, where I grew up with a lot of black or whatever, I think it was a good experience to be able to communicate with a different race. When you knew you were down, lower race, which they considered, but you didn’t have to be. You proved yourself that you could go higher. That’s what I’m saying to people. Prove yourself. Soon as you prove yourself, bam, you got it. Same way they say, you’re living in an area with the Mormons. They’re human. Treat them right. We used to go to the—my son, we used to take to father days. You do all of that. Human beings. And that’s what I say about Richland. So great with a family. Family people. And that’s what it is. It’s just great. And that’s what we should have all over. Makes it easier for everybody. My neighbors, they have potatoes, they bring potatoes to me. They have this, they bring some to me. Vice versa, they need help, I’ll help you. It’s wonderful. Makes you feel good. And you bring your kids up the same way, and they doing the same thing. That’s all it takes. Now I see some of the kids of his and all my neighbors, hey, Mr. Brown! Hey! You know? It’s wonderful. Makes you feel good. Makes you feel good when the environment that you live in that you can have trust and faith in people. God is good, all the time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yup. Well, CW, thanks so much for coming and interviewing with me today.</p>
<p>Brown: No problem.</p>
<p>Franklin: I really appreciate it.</p>
<p>Brown: No problem. My pleasure.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/1UtyTpP6R6g">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
General Electric
Westinghouse
703 Building
WPPS
Battelle
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1948-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1964-1994
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with C.W. Brown
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
McNary Lock and Dam (Or.)
Nuclear industry
Nuclear energy
Civil rights
Racism
Description
An account of the resource
C.W. Brown moved to Richland, Washington in 1948, and worked at the Hanford Site from 1964-1994.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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05/12/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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6a7419488f76a1d3bbfc9a8c7fd15bcb
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F97397042f47cc130681ecc409d66e9ea.mp4
fe7a6e3d08e2d3da7a6602b0a2e3a7b4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Donald Bell, Sr.
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Donald Bell, Senior on April 4, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking to Donald about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Donald Bell, Senior: Donald Bell, Senior. D-O-N-A-L-D, B-E-L-L, S-R.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thanks Donald. So, where did your parents move to the area from?</p>
<p>Bell: My parents moved to the area probably form Mississippi.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Why?</p>
<p>Bell: Well, they grew up in Mississippi. My mom was born in ‘33. Just hard times in Mississippi. I think when most males got a chance or got old enough to get out of Mississippi, they got out. So whether it was the military, or finding a job somewhere, just getting away.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. When did they come to the Hanford area?</p>
<p>Bell: I’m thinking that my dad came here in the ‘50s, I’m thinking.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Bell: And my mom, probably a little bit later. She followed her brothers out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were your parents married before they moved to the area or did they meet here?</p>
<p>Bell: No, they weren’t married before they moved here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did they know each other before?</p>
<p>Bell: No, I think just living in Pasco is how they met. They were from two different parts from Mississippi. I think my uncles ended up knowing my dad and his brother, you know those two brothers met these two brothers type deal, so I think that’s how.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What do you know about their lives before they came to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t know a lot, but I’ve been doing, I’ve done a family—I didn’t know a lot about my dad’s family, so I started doing a family tree. Oh, I finished it in 2012, so I probably started by 2010. Just trying to gather—because I didn’t know a lot, so just trying to find cousins and stuff that knew a little bit about where they lived at and how their lives was, basically if they were farmers or share croppers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what drew your parents to the Tri-Cities area?</p>
<p>Bell: I think the work drew them here, just trying to find something better where you could come. It was hard to find a job back in Mississippi for no pay. Here you could actually make money where you could actually take care of your family, so I mean, something that was decent. They weren’t used to making this type of money that they were paying out here. I think that had a lot to do with it.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned earlier that your parents had come to the West Coast earlier, right? They--</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah, I think they went to, I think, originally, both of them—both sides of my family on my dad’s side and my mom’s side went to the shipyards in the Oregon/Vancouver area is where it seemed like all of them started there and then they shifted to Washington.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Do you know what specifically brought them out here? Was there a specific project, or-- was it Hanford or something--?</p>
<p>Bell: I think it was cause of Hanford, because I’m sure that they’d already heard over there being on the shipyards that they were working here, they had dam work started, they had Hanford work, and a lot of those worked out here on these projects.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about their initial experience of coming to the Tri-Cities, working at Hanford and finding a place to live initially?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t know a lot, but I’ve heard stories that, like, I know when they came to work here, they had camps out here. So basically they had it set up where the women were in one camp and the men were in one camp. They didn’t let them go together, even though some of those were married, they couldn’t—they had women in one barracks. And I think mainly just Afro Americans that were segregated in that type of environment. But I don’t know a lot about it, just barely hearing little bit and pieces about it when I was growing up. And I confirmed it later on after I got a little bit older. Because I had some of the other people tell me that their parents were married, but they couldn’t stay together. They couldn’t have housing together. They just roomed them like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Did your parents ever talk about adjusting to the way of life here or their kind of experiences of what was different about this place and Mississippi?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t think they had a big adjustment as far as they were just treated a lot better, so I mean, you would actually be able to be a man and be able to work. I think to me—I’m just thinking at myself being so much younger, but I would think just being able to have the freedom to go out and work and choose what you can do, instead of somebody telling you what you can do or being limited of what you can and can’t do. You can’t buy land, or you can’t do this, or you can’t do that; where they had the freedom to—the doors were open to them a lot more by coming, getting out of the South and coming West.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of jobs did your father’s—did the men of your father’s family have when they came out here?</p>
<p>Bell: They were mainly farmers, sharecroppers. None of them really had—maybe bus driver.</p>
<p>Franklin: I mean when they came out here; what kinds of jobs did they--</p>
<p>Bell: Like I said, they worked in the shipyards so I know they welded or learned how to weld. They probably were pretty adept at picking up what to do, so they probably done those little jobs on the shipyards, whether they worked on the ship or whether they was fortunate enough to be able to weld. I know my dad and my uncle both done tack welding and stuff, they had to have learned that somewhere I’m sure they didn’t get that in Mississippi. They didn’t learn it when they were there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your dad and your uncle both work at Hanford at one point?</p>
<p>Bell: Yes, my mom’s two brothers, and my dad, and my uncle worked at Hanford, yeah, at the same time. And they all worked in Portland, so at some point they all must have decided, it’s going to be a little bit better to come over here, and they decided to make their move to come this way. Most of them was here the whole time, never went anywhere else.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of jobs did they do out on the Site?</p>
<p>Bell: Well, my uncle was a laborer. So most of them—the most money you were making at that time was if you was on the concrete crew. So probably whatever took to get to the concrete crew. They done miscellaneous things; digging ditches, doing whatever. But it seemed like the concrete was—if you could do concrete, any aspect of that concrete, being on that crew was the more money, seemed like.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm. And your father did the same?</p>
<p>Bell: My father, my uncle, both my uncles, my dad’s brother and my mom’s brother, both of them. They all just, they done concrete.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about your mother? Do you know what she did when she got here?</p>
<p>Bell: My mom, when she got here, she worked. She didn’t come until a lot later. But she worked mainly in Pasco; she didn’t work in the Area. She worked in the potato sheds. And she went to CBC, got her degree over there. But she mainly worked at processing plants around here.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did she get here degree in?</p>
<p>Bell: I just think she took some general—she had eleven kids, so she just wanted to get some type of degree. So I don’t think it was specialized. I don’t know if it was childcare or something. She didn’t get it like in mathematics or accounting or nothing like that. I just think that she wanted to go to school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Well, let’s talk about your experiences. When were you born?</p>
<p>Bell: I was born on June 24, 1958.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where were you born?</p>
<p>Bell: In Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Lourdes?</p>
<p>Bell: Lourdes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Our Lady of Lourdes. What was the housing like where you lived, where you grew up? </p>
<p>Bell: Well, I grew up—we grew up in what they called Navy Homes, which is off of 4<sup>th</sup> Street between 4<sup>th</sup> and 1<sup>st</sup>. It must’ve been a big navy base back there at some point, because that housing was originally the naval base housing. That’s where I grew up.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of houses were they?</p>
<p>Bell: They were more like apartment set up type, but I think it would be a typical military base-type setup where they had long rows of houses that, I don’t know if they were two-bedroom, or one-and-a-half bedroom. I can’t really remember how big they were then, but I noticed everybody stayed in them. And it was probably cheaper to stay there, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where they in east Pasco or in west Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: No, they were from west Pasco, this side, right next to the tracks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right next to east Pasco.</p>
<p>Bell: So basically, right next to—yeah, if you went across the tracks, you were in east Pasco, basically. It’s that side. If you go down Court Street all the way ‘til you have to make that turn, everything on that side--all those things down there. They are a lot better now, that’s Navy Homes, what used to be Navy Homes to us and they still call it Navy Homes. But those aren’t the same houses. They tore those housing down; it’s a lot modernized now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, so that’s where, if you go down like you’re going to the railroad station, the Amtrak station.</p>
<p>Bell: Mm-hmm. You got to make that turn to get down to that, but that curve and everything to the left used to be the old naval bases. They tore all that down and started building it better now. So it’s a lot better than what it was in the ‘50s, early ‘60s.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did your parents stay there? You said you had a big family.</p>
<p>Bell: They weren’t all that big then, but, yeah, we stayed there, probably—we moved to east Pasco, I want to say, moved to east Pasco, maybe ‘65, ‘66, something like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What made your family move over to East Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t know, maybe wanting to get out of the Navy Homes. At some point, all these families lived in the Navy Homes and they were just trying to get out and form their own style away from Navy Homes, I think.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were Navy Homes predominantly African American? Yeah?</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there kind of a community in the Navy Homes that you remember?</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah, well, it was big enough to be a community. I don’t remember there being a store or nothing inside, but right on the corner of Lewis and 4<sup>th</sup> Street, you had a stores right there and stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mmkay. Where there many families with children or extended families such as grandparents?</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah, I didn’t have no grandparents here, but there were families that had grandparents there, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe life in the Navy Homes in east Pasco? What did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Bell: We just played, rode our bikes, ventured into—you had a lot of trains coming through there, so you had a lot of transients, so you had to watch out. But we never really worried about much. I guess we never had a real problem, even though we didn’t have a lot. But my mom would always put out stuff for the transient, which they called them hobos back then when we were little. But living that close to the tracks was pretty dangerous, too, though. Like I said, you had trains coming in all the time. I think the train thing was a big deal here, too. Eventually people, they went to Hanford for a little while but if they could work their way in, and some of the families ended up working for the railroad, too, which was another big job in this area, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your parents mention the danger of the trains to you or were they worried about--</p>
<p>Bell: Oh yeah. My mom was pretty strict, so, I mean, you had to stay in a certain area. You better not cross that line and get across that fence to get over to the tracks. Yeah, we didn’t get a chance to—Some kids, just like any kids, somebody going to go across that line and try to venture to see if they’re the first or the second people that can get over the tracks and not get in trouble. But so many people would see you, so I don’t know how you really would get away with it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. Do you remember any particular community events in the African American community in Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: I can’t remember when the first time I saw Juneteenth, but they would always have—and then I didn’t know what Juneteenth—they probably had it then, saying it, but I didn’t really realize what it was. Because so many being from the South, that Juneteenth there was a big thing. But I don’t think it was a big thing for Pasco or for the people that lived in this community, even stretching to Richland, they just didn’t. It was just some from the South and eventually they ended up incorporating that to here. So I remember being at Kurtzman Park, every year there was some type of celebration going on down there.</p>
<p>Franklin: That was a pretty important celebration for the black community?</p>
<p>Bell: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did you attend church?</p>
<p>Bell: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What church did you attend?</p>
<p>Bell: I attended the Church of God.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Bell: Which is not there no more, the original one—that’s what I was telling—it’s not there but it used to be off of Wehe.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: East Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so your family made the trek over for--?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t think we really started going—I don’t remember going there when I was younger, but I’m sure we probably did. But then after we moved to east Pasco, it was right down the street from where we lived at.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did church play in the community?</p>
<p>Bell: I think it kept everybody together and kept them updated on what was happening. Probably was one of the better areas to help people understand and how to get along with what was happening in this area too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including food, that people brought with them from the places that they migrated from?</p>
<p>Bell: I’m thinking, my mom and my aunt did chitlins and they came here, I know they grew their own black eyed peas and okra and stuff. All that stuff came from the South. It’s here now, but I don’t think it was here 70 years ago. I mean, maybe. I take that back. It could’ve been, because some of the Caucasian families are also from the South, from Alabama, or from Texas, or Mississippi, so it could’ve been, but I know that a lot of the families grew their own stuff; they still incorporated some of the stuff probably that they knew from when they were in the South.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you grow up eating what would be called comfort food or soul food?</p>
<p>Bell: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What kinds of meals would your mom make?</p>
<p>Bell: My mom would cook collard greens, she’d cook mustard greens, she would cook black eyed peas, okra, a lot of fish, hot water cornbread, which nobody does that anymore.</p>
<p>Franklin: What is that?</p>
<p>Bell: Basically, its cornmeal that’s made up a little bit thicker. If you’re making cornbread it’ll be kind of runny, you pour it in the pan and then just cook it. But this would be a little thicker and they would pat it up into balls, would be about like that, and they were fried cornmeal, basically, but they called it hot water cornbread. My mom would make the hog’s head and make hog’s head cheese and make different stuff. Sweet potatoes was a big thing. My mom would make sweet potato pie and candied yams. She’s a good cook.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Yeah, it sounds like it. Were there any opportunities here that were not available where your parents came from?</p>
<p>Bell: I think it was. The biggest thing is education. I mean, it starts with education.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Did your parents talk about that ever?</p>
<p>Bell: No, they didn’t really talk about it but when I’d done my research on our family reunion, I was able to realize that where my dad lived at, that school was there from—I mean, everybody went to that school, just one, Marion School. Just basically looked like a school on stilts and it seemed like a hundred years that same school and that’s where all the kids went to school at.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Mississippi?</p>
<p>Bell: This is was in Columbia Mississippi, Hood Mississippi.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bell: Just looking at that and then you look at the school—and I talked to some of my cousins that went to school down there and stuff. Just being able to get education was huge.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about your own education? Did your parents impress the importance of education on you? Did they talk to you about it?</p>
<p>Bell: Oh, yeah. My mom stressed it a lot, because I guess when you’re deprived of something; now, my mom went to school, but some of her brothers never did really get the chance to go because they worked in the field. They didn’t get that opportunity. The more kids you had, that’s more workers you had in the South, so they just didn’t. They was working all the time. They didn’t have time to go to school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you know what grade levels your parents made it to?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t know about my dad. I don’t think my dad made it through school. But I know my mom, she might have got to high school, I’m not sure. I know she went through junior high; she might have went to high school, I never really got a chance to break that out. But I knew she went to school; I just don’t know how high she went.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did they ever talk about the housing that they’d grown up in back in Mississippi and how housing was different here?</p>
<p>Bell: No, they didn’t talk about it a lot, but, like I said, once I started researching and going in and looking, I could see that there wasn’t running water in the house, there was outhouses, there weren’t bathrooms in the house.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you or your parents ever go back to visit family in Mississippi?</p>
<p>Bell: My mom went. But it’s astonishing how all my family members, everybody’s been in Mississippi. I haven’t been yet. They got a family reunion coming up in August and my sister, my oldest sister is 65. She lives in St. Louis and she wants to go there and my aunt just turned—my mom’s oldest sister that’s living. There was sixteen kids in my mom’s family, so the oldest sister that’s living, she just turned 93. Sunday or Monday. I’m going to surprise her and take her down.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, she lives here?</p>
<p>Bell: No, she lives in St. Louis.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, in St. Louis.</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah, they live in St. Louis.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, wow, that’s a big family.</p>
<p>Bell: All of my siblings have all been to Mississippi. I’m the only one that hasn’t, but--</p>
<p>Franklin: But you’re going?</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah, I’ll be going, because I’ve been doing some research stuff. I got all this stuff on paper and pen and put it—made a CD of it, but I haven’t actually been there. So I need to go down there just so I can meet some of those people before they pass away or before I’m not here. But just to say that I did go to where my parents were born and grew up at.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, that’s great. Any notable interactions that your parents had with other people from the Tri-Cities area, from Richland or Kennewick? Did your parents go outside of Pasco much?</p>
<p>Bell: I think they went outside, but most of their friends, most of them lived here unless they moved into Kennewick or into Richland. There wasn’t a lot of—when I was growing up, I don’t remember a lot of—there was very few black families in Kennewick or in Richland. There were some, but the predominant area was Pasco, was east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about you, when you were growing up as a kid or young adult, any notable interactions with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah, I’m a people’s person anyways, so, yeah, I had friends that lived in Richland or from playing ball or in school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Where’d you go to school?</p>
<p>Bell: I started out at Captain Gray. Which is--they called it Captain Gray again, but the original place, they took it and made it into a—what do you want to call it?—a kindergarten center. And then Pasco High had all of that for a while and they made a new school, Rowena Chess, which is the old Captain Gray. Then after the high school got back, they turned that back into Captain Gray. So I went to Captain Gray for about a year. The second year, I went to Robert Frost. But Robert Frost didn’t have any black kids going there. At the time we went there, they started a little charter program. So they took four kids: me and my twin brother, and Sandra Allen and her brother. We were the first blacks to go to Robert Frost.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were kind of a force of integration.</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah, basically. And then the next year, they opened up every class. They brought in sixth graders, fifth graders, fourth graders, all the way down to first grade. But when we came there, we were the first.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was there any resistance to your—any uncomfortable moments?</p>
<p>Bell: I’m sure, yeah, there were. There were.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did segregation or racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Bell: It didn’t really affect mine, but I’m sure some Afro American kids, it did. My twin brother was totally different from me. I mean, he’d fight on the drop of a dime if anybody said something to him. You go to a school that is predominantly white, they’re going to test you and see what they can get you to do. My mom basically had to come live at that school pretty much because he was in so much trouble. Wasn’t totally his fault. Where me, I’m a duck. I let stuff—I listened to some of the stuff that my uncles had to go through and I said, this wasn’t nothing, really. I endured, it didn’t bother me. I knew who I was. So I could have gotten into a couple of fights, but I’ll never remember; I just would never let it instigate into fight for words. You had to almost put your hands on me for me to fight you.</p>
<p>Franklin: But there was something there?</p>
<p>Bell: Oh, yeah. It was something there; it was just how you had to adjust to it. And once they saw that you weren’t going to be rattled by that, I think they started—but then, once they integrated and brought it in, then it seemed like there were more fights then. Because then you got other people that didn’t want to tolerate somebody saying something to them that they didn’t like.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because maybe they felt that now there were more blacks at the school, that they deserved more—they didn’t deserve that kind of treatment.</p>
<p>Bell: The teachers started getting to the point that they had to change the attitude of some of those kids, too. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have—these kids are going to be in here, and you’re going to have to get along with them.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the people that influenced you as a child? This could include family members, friends, teachers…?</p>
<p>Bell: As a youngster coming up, I always looked at my uncles, because they were all workers. Maybe not well educated, but they were able to take care of their families. I thought that they’d done pretty well for themselves.</p>
<p>Franklin: From working out at Hanford—they were laborers--</p>
<p>Bell: From working out at Hanford and I didn’t even—at the time, I was young, I didn’t even understand that side of it, I looked at my uncles, them going to work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Providing for their families.</p>
<p>Bell: Providing for their families. That’s what I looked at, I didn’t realize that Hanford was the big influence on it until I got a little bit older. But when I was younger, I idolized my uncles, my mom’s brothers.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about when you were going through middle school, high school, I imagine that would’ve been—that’s coming off of a pretty tumultuous time in our nation’s history as far as civil rights were concerned. Where there any notable things that stand out to you, good or bad, from those times, the late ‘60s or early ‘70s?</p>
<p>Bell: Well, I don’t remember totally, but I know at one point there was a big, big riot in east Pasco. I don’t remember the year. I know that riot was between the Black Panthers and some of the members that was and the Pasco Police Department. And that was right at Kurtzman Park, was where that riot was at.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did the Panthers have an office in Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t know an office here, but I’m sure some of the guys were part of it. I think that’s what elevated that area. But I don’t know if they actually had an office here or if it was in Seattle or Portland. But I’m sure they had guys come from out of town that were influencers to try to get the black families the protection and the right they needed.</p>
<p>Franklin: There were some pretty tumultuous times that—did you go to Pasco High. There were some pretty tumultuous times at Pasco High in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Were you aware of any of that, or were you aware of that?</p>
<p>Bell: I was probably too young. Because I didn’t go to Pasco High my first year. I went to Pasco High, wasn’t until ’76. So it was probably over by then.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Let’s talk about, you graduated in high school and did you go to college?</p>
<p>Bell: I didn’t go to college. I had scholarship opportunities, but I went to trade school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, you mentioned that before we got the interview. Talk about your uncles—you were telling me about how your uncles asked you to be a laborer, but you got the opportunity to be a pipefitter. I’m wondering if you could retell that story.</p>
<p>Bell: Okay. Well, most of the males, the black males, were laborers: my twin brother is a laborer, all of my cousins are laborers. So all of them went that route. But when I was in eight grade I already knew I wanted to be a pipefitter then.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why?</p>
<p>Bell: I’d done some research on it, and it was just something I liked. So when I was in school, I knew I had to know enough math. I liked math anyway, so it would work right into my—I set myself to be a pipefitter, basically. I got out of high school I was an insulator for the summer. Which they paid great. I had a summer job making $1.75 cleaning the marble in the court house. One of the guys, one of the vans that was a pipefitter, he was the one who told me his going to help get in to the Pipefitter’s. But he helped me get as an insulator that summer.</p>
<p>Franklin: Out where?</p>
<p>Bell: I worked at 100 N. But I went from making $1.75 to making $11.25 an hour.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, that’s a big, that’s like a tenfold increase.</p>
<p>Bell: Within a week we got a $1.25 raise. But that was a good job and they wanted to keep me because they didn’t have many blacks in Insulators’. But I had already had my mind made up to what I wanted to do. They’d tell me they’d give me every opportunity to be an insulator if I would take it. I mean, I was already in. But I wanted to be a pipefitter, so that’s what I wanted to stick with.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of work, can you describe that job, insulator, what kind--</p>
<p>Bell: They were tearing down stuff and redoing, putting different types of insulation applications on beams and stuff. I think I was nineteen when I was doing that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, wow. When did you join the Pipefitters’ or how did that happen?</p>
<p>Bell: I joined the Pipefitters’—I got into the Pipefitters’ a year later. And actually I didn’t get in, they took me in as a pre-apprentice.</p>
<p>Franklin: What does that mean?</p>
<p>Bell: Pipefitters’ is one of the biggest unions around here, and what they wanted to do is stop people that weren’t in the union from touching their pipe. But they didn’t want to take their apprentices to do it. So, I wasn’t apprentice, but I still was in the union. If we’re working on the job and they need to touch the pipe or roll the pipe, they don’t want those guys to roll the pipe or do anything. As a pre-apprentice I could touch the pipes. So if an engineer needed to see the number off the pipe or whatever, I was the one to get that number for them instead. Because they were really strict on possession of touching their pipe or moving their pipe. The union was really huge around here, and Pipefitters’ is one of the strongest unions there was around here, actually, in the whole United States.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where did you work as a pipefitter?</p>
<p>Bell: As a pipefitter, actually I worked all over the country. But out here, I worked--I started out working, they were building the power plants out there, the WPPSS Plants. I started building them from scratch.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. 1 and 2?</p>
<p>Bell: 2 was already—I worked on 2, too. 2 was the first one, but 1 and 4, those are the three we have out here. 1 and 4, and 2; and 3 and 5 was out by Satsop, by Tacoma. Those are the five nuclear powerhouses.</p>
<p>Franklin: You worked on 1 and 4 until the project shut down?</p>
<p>Bell: I worked on 1 and 4 until they were just about getting ready to come off the ground, and then I was moved over to number 2 and then I stayed in number 2 until they went online.</p>
<p>Franklin: Cool. What kind of on-the-job training did you receive for pipefitting?</p>
<p>Bell: Pipefitting, the way it’s set up, you worked on a day, 40 hours, and you had a journeyman showing you what to do. But at night, we went to school at night.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Where did you go to school?</p>
<p>Bell: Pipefitters are right here, right off the highway, right off of 28<sup>th</sup> Street.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of training—like, what kind of school was it? Could you describe that?</p>
<p>Bell: It was top-of-the-line, they had blueprint reading, they had welding, they had tube bending, they had plumbing code. It was actually top-of-the-line school.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’d mentioned earlier, before the interview, that your uncles had said, oh, you can come be a laborer, but they told you that, when you got the offer for the Pipefitters’, they told you to take that. I’m wondering if you could describe that? How come you—</p>
<p>Bell: My uncle was smart. He knew that type of work doing as a laborer was really, really strenuous work. But he also knew that the Pipefitters’ paid more, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: So he pushed you to--</p>
<p>Bell: He knew that I already wanted to be, but I hadn’t got in yet. So that’s the other deal. If I hadn’t got in, he’d say, well, you know what? You can be a laborer and then later on if you still get in there, you’d have two trades.</p>
<p>Franklin: Cool. Could you describe a typical workday as a pipefitter? </p>
<p>Bell: A typical workday, depending on where you was, you were probably working out somewhere where there wasn’t a bathroom and everything was pretty much outhouses, because we built these buildings and once they were built then maintenance took over and we were gone. You’d be out in the Area, out working somewhere. It’s 100 in the summertime out here. Back then it’d hit 130, 140 out in the areas, so that’d one work day. But then if your—typical day when you’re working out on the WPPSS Plant, you’d be out there building this plant or building two plants. Get probably there by 7:30; the work’s done by 3:30, 4:00 at the latest. You’re working with a journeyman is showing you how to put in pipes, put in hangers. You’re working anywhere from 30-inch pipe to half-inch pipe, quarter-inch pipe, depending on what you’re working on. Piping—in pipefitting, you can’t do anything, you can’t have a building or anything without pipefitting because all your hydraulics for your heating and cooling, your water, you got to have a bathroom for every facility. You really can’t get away with—there’s just so much work for pipefitters.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you acquire any skills or experience on the job that helped you later in life?</p>
<p>Bell: I’d say yes. Again, you learn to adjust to people, because—I told you when we were younger, when we went to Robert Frost, I was egged on with name calling to see how you would react. Well, being a pipefitter, there wasn’t that many blacks in the pipefitting around here. Trying to get in and get yourself in, a lot of people didn’t really want to show you anything, so you had to show them why you was worthy of them showing you how to be the person you could show. It took, it was education going through there, because that was a new testing ground, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and with your supervisors?</p>
<p>Bell: I got along real well. I just had a few incidents where I ran into problems, but it was just because, as an apprentice, it’s a pushy business. If you’re the journeyman, you can do all these little tricks to the lower person. Where, when I turned to be a journeyman, I said, no, I’m stopping it. Anything that’s done wrong or a cycle that’s bad, at some point somebody has to step in and break that cycle. When I went through all that different stuff that people done to me, different tricks; when I got to be out, I didn’t want to teach, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to change that. Because you’ve got people coming in that’s first-year, second-year apprentice, they’re 30, 25 years old, they have a wife and kids. Even though I’m younger and I’m a journeyman, you got people coming in that’s already grown men. You can’t treat them like that, or at least that’s how I saw it. A lot of those guys, well, they did it to me; I’ma do it to y’all. That mentality. I said, no, just--</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry. What kinds of tricks and things?</p>
<p>Bell: Oh, sending you out for crazy stuff, where they’d send a guy for a bucket of tack welds. A tack weld is something you start a weld with. But if you don’t know and you’re inexperienced, you’re going out and you go all these different places telling them you need the stuff and everybody know that they’re playing a joke on you. But you don’t know it yet. So you’re walking around asking. I say, you got to be smarter than that, kid. You can’t let nobody just do you like that. So I’d fill them in on, just think about it. What is a tack weld? Well, the welder. Well, then, how you think they’re going to get you a bucket of tack weld? Don’t go asking something crazy like that, because everybody is laughing at you. But once you prove yourself then those guys actually help you a lot. But it’s like initiation, I guess, it would be like if you were in college, it’s initiation. They would play tricks on you or play different pranks on you and make you do stupid stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: How were you treated on the job? You mentioned there weren’t many African Americans in the Pipefitters’. So I’m wondering if you think race ever played a role in any treatment.</p>
<p>Bell: It could have played some in it, but there was enough there that anytime you’re dealing with starting out new or trying to get a venture to go, the best you can be is going to let the ground work. So my whole thing is, I need to be the best I can be. I have to be better than what I could be, because I need somebody to follow behind me to be pipefitters to be younger black pipefitters that follow behind me. So I wanted to blaze a trail and I think that’s what I’ve done, because I ended up being an instructor for thirteen years. So I took it serious. I didn’t take no time off to mess around. Everything I’ve done from day one was totally serious and to be the best that I could be every day.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Bell: I’d say a lot of my friends are still best friends, still do stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe the working conditions?</p>
<p>Bell: Depending on what job you were on, sometimes they were bad, sometimes it’s like anything else. They want to cut corners on not doing certain stuff right. There’s certain times where you should have your safety glasses on, have your safety equipment where they say tell you, oh, go ahead. We don’t have that; we’ll get it later on. In construction, there’s a lot of deaths in construction, but one thing that people got to really look at is your safety. People say, get your safety glasses on and there’s people walking around with no safety glasses on. If something hits you in the eye and puts your eye out, it’s not going to hurt your supervisor. It’s not going to hurt the owner of the job.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Bell: Put your hardhat on. That hardhat, if something falls down, I’m a construction guy. A lot of them say, well, he making us do all these things that, they’re not making you do anything; actually, all those things will save your life. That’s how I looked at it. If you had to have safety glasses, wear your safety glasses, they’re for a reason. But so many of the guys wanted to rebel and not wear—well, I don’t need a hardhat, the hardhat is too heavy, it hurts my neck, it does this, it does that. But there’s so many accidents and deaths on a construction job, too. A lot of injuries.</p>
<p>Franklin: A lot of preventable injuries?</p>
<p>Bell: A lot of them were preventable, some of them not preventable. You can get hurt on a construction job and do everything right. Working on the shipyards or something like that, somebody drops something. You don’t have to do nothing wrong. Somebody drops something from 40 feet up, it bounces around and hits you and kills you or maims you. Some stuff, it’s a construction job. There’s so much danger involved in it. But if it’s done right it don’t have to be.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. What were the most difficult aspects of the job?</p>
<p>Bell: I think the biggest deterrent was working with people that really didn’t want to work. It just put too much pressure on the other people that have to work double to make the deadlines, make stuff happen. Most of the jobs were great and paid great, but there was so much of a turn around because those people didn’t want to pull their—they wanted the money but they really didn’t want to put in to make the money.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you recall about working at any of the reactors or any of the other buildings that are still on the Site today?</p>
<p>Bell: Well, most of them are pretty much gone. I worked at 100 N. I was sort of petrified when I went out there because you heard all those stories about radiation and I thought I’d stepped into this little area and I’m in this, like, this warped time zone and you stepped in the zone and there’s radiation everywhere. But it wasn’t like that; it was like being out there, being in one of this rooms, you might have a source that has radiation, but it’s not everywhere. And it’s pretty much contained, too.</p>
<p>But not going out there, you have fear and you hear all those horror stories. And I hear people talk today, oh, can you take your shoe off? Is your foot green? Or, we’ve heard after you work out there so long you’re going to turn glowing. You hear all these different stories, but once you work out there, you realize it’s just a myth.</p>
<p>There is stuff that you can get into if you don’t do it right or don’t put your protective stuff on. You’re in radiation, yeah, you can get hurt bad. But there is safety measures that’ll take care of you, if you use what’s set up.</p>
<p>Franklin: Besides N and the WPPSS reactors, what other buildings did you work at?</p>
<p>Bell: I worked at all these Battelle buildings out here, too, which is a little bit different because it is a maintenance program. It’s a national laboratory, so they have different jobs, different projects, they work on different stuff. Battelle is an amazing place, some of the stuff that those guys come up is just ingenious. </p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, they have a lot of different contracts and projects going on. Anything else out on Site that you remember? Maybe anything like the 300 or 200 Areas?</p>
<p>Bell: I was based out of 350, so. But working maintenance for Battelle, they had me go in the Area. I worked the weather station for them, all those buildings. Battelle is the only building out here that the Hanford Fire Department don’t do all the fire systems, the suppression systems, they do all their own. When I started at Battelle in ’96, they sent me to Oklahoma City to get certified to do these systems. Battelle do their own systems. Everybody else out there, the Hanford Fire Department does all of the systems. In our buildings that we needed our inspections or that we had to go and do stuff for them, the fire department would show up, but actually Battelle Pipefitters’ done all the work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, interesting. How did your racial background fit into your work experience? And experiences on the job?</p>
<p>Bell: It didn’t really, it didn’t really. Most people, once they met me, I didn’t really have a problem. There was some people that might’ve had a racial deal towards me, but once they saw my work ethics and what I’d done and how I didn’t let nothing bother me, they just went away. I never really had a problem on the job, racial problem on the job. If there was some saying, somebody else would get upset about it, and they’d say, well—they’d bring me in the office—they’d say, hey, you want to make a complaint about this person? I’d say, for what? Well, they say somebody said this. I said, listen I’m old enough to take care of myself, if I have a problem with somebody, I’ll take it. I don’t need somebody else to step in and say, somebody said this or somebody said this, or this guy ought to be fired. It’s just, you need to take care of your own stuff. So a lot of people get politically stuck on that, and that’s where you run into a big problem. I’m not there to be a divider; I’m trying to always get along and do our job to the best we could do.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways did the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Bell: It really didn’t. A lot of that stuff was secret for a reason. If you’re working on something for the military, because when you’re working out there, you’re working on different projects, even at Battelle. Most of my stuff I could go home and say stuff about, but some of the stuff I worked at as a pipefitter, they were working on sensitive stuff here. So when I went in you had a guard with you all the time. Not that—but they were just protecting stuff that they had. Because some of this guys are working on military stuff out there, too. A lot highly sensitive that I didn’t have a clearance for, see, that’s the other deal. I had a clearance, but I didn’t have the top clearance to be able to be here, what if I open this drawer here and I’m into already top secret stuff or I got into his computer over here, I’m already on top secret stuff that I’m not supposed to be.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you feel at the time when you were out on Site about working on the development of nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t think I ever really thought about it. I just thought about it, I was one player with a team doing a job. I never thought about it as making weapons for this or that.</p>
<p>Franklin: How do you feel now about those experiences?</p>
<p>Bell: It still don’t change me a lot, just because a lot of that stuff was necessary to protect most people in the United States. I don’t think it really fazed me that much.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you think was the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Bell: I think being able to protect the United States. Because Hanford was just one—a lot of people think that all this stuff was all only Hanford. When you think about it the Manhattan Project, a lot of people don’t understand there was more than one place, because—I think the smartness of that, if Hanford was the only place they could’ve just attacked Hanford at one time. But being that they were in New York, they were in Los Alamos. They were separated four or five different spots to make all this stuff come together; it wasn’t one spot.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Bell: Only from my family and different people, I just, growing up in Pasco I knew there was a lot of Afro Americans that worked out here. What jobs they did, I wasn’t sure, but I think a lot of them were laborers. I think the basic job was laborer. You did have some skilled workers, some electricians, some pipefitters, very few insulators, maybe one or two boilermakers. But predominantly laborers, I believe. And then later on, different—you started getting educated people coming out here from the South and different stuff, coming up to Battelle as interns, coming out to be engineers or different things.</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective, what were their most important contributions in the area work, community life and civil rights?</p>
<p>Bell: Whose?</p>
<p>Franklin: The African Americans, the prior African American workers form the Manhattan Project on to when you started?</p>
<p>Bell: I just think lot of those turned out to be pillars of the community, lived to be in their 80s and 90s, that worked out there and still able to pass that on to the younger generations some of the stuff that had happened out there, specially to family members. I think what was shared most. I don’t think we shared a lot just openly with everybody, but they let their families know. And there was enough of them working in the same area that most our uncles or dads or stuff worked out there, or grandads, or great-grandfathers worked out there in some cases.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were they major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during the time here?</p>
<p>Bell: I think just trying to get equality was the biggest thing. And even though you weren’t in the South, they had problems here too, because I just think a lot of the stuff was hid a lot more than it was in the South. I think in the South they were just straight out front; wasn’t none of it hid. But you still have problems here with racism, too. It just--</p>
<p>Franklin: How did those problems manifest themselves? What kind of specific problems did you know that the community was facing here?</p>
<p>Bell: Just not being treated totally equal through the police department. It took a while to get some changes to make stuff change around here. Just to be stopped for no reason or pulled over for no reason or if you got a new car, how did you get a new car? Are you a drug dealer? That stereotype, if you got something good you couldn’t have worked for it. Which, in some case they might’ve been right, but probably 90% of the perception was wrong.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about housing issues? Do you remember hearing much about that?</p>
<p>Bell: Yeah. It’s the same thing when you start dealing with housing. You weren’t offered a house if you were just a normal person in Richland or Kennewick. But if they knew you had a good job and you had the money, like me, I was a pipefitter. I wanted a house in Pasco and they were telling me, there’s no good houses in Pasco. Or the realtor would take you to a bad house in Pasco, something that nobody would want to live in. That’s why you need to get a house in Richland, Kennewick. I go, I don’t need to get a house in Richland, Kennewick. I want a house in Pasco and if you can’t find me one, I’ll build one. It was just trying to push you out of Pasco to try to get over. Because basically they wanted your money is what I thought. You’re making money you should be where all the people that make money at. But I grew up right here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you know much about the segregation of east Pasco from the west, or the prohibitions of blacks living in Kennewick?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t know when the first blacks lived in Pasco, but I mean, for a long time when I was a youngster you couldn’t be caught. That bridge over here, the blue, new, bridge now, but it used to be a green bridge and there was a sign over there for many years. I don’t remember what year they took it out, but it basically said, you better not be caught after sundown. So Kennewick was a hard place to be at. Didn’t hear a lot about Richland, but Richland had their sides about them too. They didn’t put up any signs or nothing like that, but when you came through, you definitely get pulled over, or if you was in the wrong area, for some reason the police would show up and want to know why you’re over here, do you have a reason for being over here? You didn’t have the leeway of going wherever you wanted to go. You’re out of place, it looked like, so someone would call the police and say, we have these kids in the area, what are they doing over here? Even though we were there to visit a friend.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did that happen?</p>
<p>Bell: It did happen.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did that happen?</p>
<p>Bell: I had that happen to me probably when I was in junior high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Really? Do you remember who you were visiting?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t remember at the time who I was visiting, but like I said, even today, even today if I was in an area, a big area, just driving around looking at houses, I might want to buy one, somebody might make a phone call.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe that situation, the event? Like, how large was your group and were you just visiting someone?</p>
<p>Bell: Yes. I don’t know who was going over to play ball or what, but I remember that we had got over there and all of a sudden a police officer came up. And some of the guys were wanting to get mouthy. And I said, no, no, just let me talk to them, okay? Let me talk to them. You don’t want to get into an argument because then you are escalating the situation, so then the police officers say something to you and somebody says something back and leads to something else. Somebody’s pushed so you push an officer, and now we are all going to jail. I said listen, do we have the right to be in Richland? Because if we don’t, you guys need to tell us that we can’t come to Richland. Well, no one said you can’t; we’re just trying to figure out what you’re doing in this area. Well, we’re visiting somebody. I’m a diplomatic person, I try to get them say why I can’t be there. Try to get them to say, well, somebody called and you don’t fit in this area, why are you in this area?</p>
<p>Franklin: What was the resolution of that incident? What happened?</p>
<p>Bell: He let it go. Because I talked to him calm enough. Now, if I’d have argued with him, what’s your business? Why you asking me where I’m going? Do you ask everyone else that comes? See, if I say something to him like that then he has the reason to say that we have no reason being over there. Or we just had someone broke in over here; was you guys are involved in? So even if it wasn’t nothing, that’s the scenario you would get hit with, so you just keep yourself out of those positions.</p>
<p>That’s how I teach my kids, too. Stay out of those confrontational deals if you don’t have to be. You be the bigger person. You can intelligently say something to him to let him know. Did I do anything wrong, officer? This road did come into this town and these streets go to these different houses. If there’s certain stuff we shouldn’t be, or we’re not allowed to go into this town, then y’all need to post that. Then he takes it form there and says, no, these guys aren’t doing anything there. I gave them enough stuff to put him in a position that he’s either going to tell me I can’t be in this town or—so he just let us go.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right on. With the civil right issues that we just talked about, what actions were being taken to address those issues?</p>
<p>Bell: I think they were trying to do stuff through the city council. But with us, we weren’t doing it in Richland or Kennewick because we didn’t live there. There wasn’t enough there to be done in their towns.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about in Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: In Pasco, I know they had problems, but I know through the city council and through different church groups they got a lot of that turned around.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were some of the important leaders of civil rights efforts and that in Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: I think, Reverend Allen was one of them. There were a couple of them back then, I don’t remember who all of their names were. But a lot of them were from, preachers from the church. Reverend Bond. Most of them were probably church clergy, because they were at a point where they could handle both sides without—getting them to come in, they were from the clergy, so pretty much they had to talk to them. That always seemed like, even if you look at, today is 50 years ago that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, a minister. Through the black communities, through civil rights, no matter Pasco or wherever in the United States, it’s been pretty much the clergy that’s been the backbone of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the notable successes in civil rights efforts in Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: Oh, I just think that getting jobs, getting different people into positions on the police department. Back then, I don’t think they had no blacks. I can’t remember the first year they had a black police officer. And you have seen that evolution over the years happen. I think a lot of that has changed a lot of stuff. As a matter of fact, even with the Hispanic in the police department is--because I remember when I was growing up there was no color at all in the police department, that I can remember.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges for civil rights efforts in Pasco?</p>
<p>Bell: I think just trying to get a foothold. Doing civil rights when you don’t have that many people. I don’t know what the breakdown on population, but as the years that went on that numbers got closer and closer. When you only have a small group and then everybody don’t think the same. If you got a small group, you got to pretty much be tightknit group to stay together and make everything going, but if you got half believing it and half not, you’re already divided, so it’s easy for them to conquer you. But that would probably be the big deal.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?</p>
<p>Bell: I’d say probably not. I mean, I think my contribution now would be the work I do now. I started a mentor program at Stevens. I’m just trying to get some of these youngsters to understand how to get along in America today.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of challenges are kids facing these days?</p>
<p>Bell: Well, our kids, some of them just don’t understand. Well, education has got to be that big thing. It just seems like it’s dropping off of our kids and I don’t know why, because you can’t do nothing without education. And just trying to make them understand that if you don’t have education you’re not going to be able to do anything. You ain’t going to be able to take care of your family, you’re not going to be able to take care of your parents. That job, when I started out working, I didn’t have any kids or wife, so I was able to help my mom out. And a lot of kids don’t have that, they don’t have that sense of family. My mom they worked, they helped. My wife’s family—my wife’s full-blooded Mexican—her dad worked here and sent money home to his mom in Mexico. That type of family knit. Some of these kids they just don’t have it, they don’t understand what their grandparents, great-grandparents went through, the trailblazers for them to do and now it just seems like it’s easier, they don’t care what—I cared about that. I’m a history buff, so I cared about all that stuff. And just trying to get these kids to understand that if you don’t understand where you came from, how do you know where you going? A lot of them, they just don’t care, or don’t want to know. Your grandmother worked all these hours to put stuff on your back, help your mom. They just don’t care. It’s like there is no appreciation for it these days. I think that’s the big downside for us. No appreciation of what was done before to get you where you at. I mean, we shouldn’t be going backwards. We should be going forward. And I think it’s too much going backwards, on our part, now. On other parts, too, but I can’t—we can’t worry about other parts. You only can only worry about what you do and we should be progressing.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you say we, do you mean the black community?</p>
<p>Bell: The black community. Not the ones that was out there. I’m talking about the youngsters that’s coming up. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the future. I’m 60, so I’m looking at these kids that, first graders that—start having a sense of what you want to do, start understanding what history was about, start understanding art history, too. That’s the big part. I didn’t grow up in Mississippi. I didn’t have to endure none of that. But from my parents and my grandparents, I have learned that was something I didn’t want to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. You feel your quality of life was better because your parents had left that system--</p>
<p>Bell: My quality of life was great because of what they went through.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. When did your work at Hanford come to an end, and what did you do afterwards?</p>
<p>Bell: My Hanford work stopped about nine years ago. I left Hanford on a medical disability nine years ago, on the 22<sup>nd</sup> of this month.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay. What did you do afterwards?</p>
<p>Bell: I haven’t done much, really, other than I do some mentoring, I’m on the School Board Builders in Pasco for looking at schools out—they call it the Pasco Builders. Just doing stuff in the community over there. I’m working in east Pasco with the three elementary schools and the junior high over there, trying to get the voting for the Hispanic families that’s over there, trying to get them to get more of a weigh-in on voting over there. Most of the stuff I’m doing over there, even though east Pasco doesn’t have that many Afro-American families over there, I’m still a product of east Pasco, so I’m still trying to do everything I can to make east Pasco part of Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wanted to ask you about that, because it seems like you’re kind of in an interesting transitional place, where you had grown up—when you grew up, East Pasco was primarily African American. And now Pasco has changed—Franklin County itself has changed, to be majority-Hispanic. And you mentioned earlier you’re married to a full-blooded Hispanic woman. It seems like your family is kind of emblematic of that transition. How has east Pasco changed since you were a kid and is it still facing some of the same issues?</p>
<p>Bell: It’s still facing some of the same issues just because east Pasco is left out, I feel. Until Pasco can pull east Pasco into Pasco—because you still have that dividing line. The underpass and the railroad tracks is a dividing line; until they can ever just pull that together—I don’t know how much success they can have if they have ever done that. Because then you’re including everybody, not just part of the people. When we were there, that’s what it was then, too. So it never did change. And now we’re 60 years later from when I was born, you still have the same transition. I mean, it’s a little bit better, because there’s four schools over there. When I was growing up there was only one school over there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Which school it that?</p>
<p>Bell: Whittier. But it’s burnt down. The original Whittier, the one that was built in 1911.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. How has the community changed in east Pasco? What’s the makeup of the community now?</p>
<p>Bell: In east Pasco?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bell: It’s predominantly Hispanic. I’d say 85%, 90%. There’s still some black families over there in the same area where I grew up at. That corner over there probably has the majority of African Americans around Kurtzman Park.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where do you live now?</p>
<p>Bell: I live off of Road 50.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so kind of in west.</p>
<p>Bell: West, yeah. That used to be the country, but now—because Pasco stopped at 395. And then, as they kept moving it back, now Pasco is all the way to Road 100. You still have cows and little farms where they can still have animals because they’re grandfathered in. Road 32 was the country when I was growing up. That’s how far Pasco’s grown, and how big it’s gotten.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it really has pushed out, sprawled out. You mentioned that you had not just worked at Hanford when you were a pipefitter; you had moved, you had worked around a lot of different places.</p>
<p>Bell: Because I was a construction pipefitter.</p>
<p>Franklin: What other kinds of places did you work?</p>
<p>Bell: I left here when the work stopped. In construction, usually, there’s a ten-year phase, West Coast/East Coast. Well, when we graduated, before the WPPSS project got into problems—if they would have stayed online and done what they were supposed to do, we were supposed to have 50 years of work out here. I was supposed to never ever left here. I just barely graduated and all the work went away in construction. I went to New Jersey and worked. Worked on an ore refinery in New Jersey.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. How were your experiences in other places different from the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Bell: Oh, I wouldn’t say truly different. It’s just adjustments. When you go to the city, or you go to the country—amazingly, a lot of my friends that’s here, they worked in South Carolina and stuff in the South, they just picked those spots. I never worked in the South. Philadelphia might’ve been as far south as I—and that’s not the South. I worked in Philadelphia, I worked in New Jersey, I worked in Ohio, I worked in New York, in different projects.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mid-Atlantic area? But pretty significant African American communities in a lot of those places.</p>
<p>Bell: Oh yeah. If you get in those places there, you’re—yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of work and housing, and social opportunities were available to you when you were working in the East Coast?</p>
<p>Bell: It was easy for me because I had the money. When you got the resources of money, but you’re living in Philadelphia and in those inner-cities where the money level is not real high for the minorities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What surprised you about when you left Tri-Cities and you were working in the Mid-Atlantic area, what surprised you about the African American experience there?</p>
<p>Bell: Well, I guess the biggest thing would be the way of life. A lot of them lived in which would be projects. I guess if you compare their projects to us, it probably would’ve been when we lived in the Navy Homes, type of deal. But just, there’s so many families running that same cycle. Nobody getting out or breaking out. I think if I lived there for a long time, I’d have to break out, even if I didn’t know what I was doing, or didn’t know what was ahead of me. But just staying in the area doing the same routine. The grandparent to the kids to the grandkids, everybody—nobody leaves, they’re all in the same area, for the most part. So just getting out and doing something different. I’ve always been the person to want to do my own thing, not I follow what somebody else done.</p>
<p>Franklin: What challenges did you encounter, if any, working out there?</p>
<p>Bell: Working away from Hanford?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bell: Not really a lot of challenges. I guess a lot of people were amazed at my skill level. But I wasn’t, because I was trained at one of the best facilities in the world. People say—you’re working on a job and say they’re laying off this person, this black electrician, or this black pipefitter got laid off, why didn’t they lay you off? I go, I don’t know. I’m here every day, I know what I’m doing, I’m on the job a half an hour before the job starts. I don’t know what kind of answer to give you to that. I’m 3,000 miles away from home; I have to be my best. I can’t come in here be off today, miss tomorrow. They looking for somebody to be here every day and that’s all I’ve been used to, is going to work every day. So no matter where I go that challenge never hits me. When you’re working in the city and stuff, you have people missing three days a week or coming in late every day. If I was a boss, I wouldn’t allow that. That’s why I always flip to them, if you were the boss, would you allow somebody to come into your job late every day or miss two or three days? You got a deadline to get this project done.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. In what ways did your experience at Hanford affect your outlook on issues of racial discrimination and civil rights in the United States at that time?</p>
<p>Bell: I don’t think I really looked at it that way. It was enough people still working out there that got a chance to—and the ones that didn’t stay is because of something they’d done. I didn’t see none of those jobs lost on a racial bias. I thought most of them was done because of something what the person had done. They either had a bad enough accident that got them in trouble or they kept compoundly doing stuff that they were told not to do. It wasn’t—I didn’t look at this being that they just got fired for the color of their skin. They were just as good, but they got fired for the color of their skin, I never saw that out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you involved in any civil rights activities after leaving Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Bell: No.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Bell: For me living, like I said, I’ve lived all over the country, but I love this area. It’s a great area, you have four seasons, we can grow anything we want here, we have actual summertime. I lived in New York and, I mean, if they got 40 degrees, that was their summer, 40 degrees. That was hot to them. They all probably couldn’t make it from where I’m from. To me, it’s a great area to grow your kids up in, you don’t have to worry about a lot of stuff. It’s almost a perfect setting to live in the Tri-Cities, even opposed to Seattle. This area is just—and you had the work here, you have the education here, you got this WSU campus here, the big campus isn’t that far away. I just think it’s the ideal area and there’s nowhere else in the United States I’d rather live. And I‘ve moved around and stayed other places, but I always kept Pasco as my base. Even when I lived in New York and New Jersey and Philadelphia for two years, I still had Pasco as my base. I was just working a job, just because I couldn’t work here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Is there anything else you wanted to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and civil rights, and how they impacted your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Bell: No, I just think with my uncles coming out here and my dad coming out here and paving that way for me, gave me—if they never came out here, I wouldn’t have got a chance to probably be the person I am. I probably would’ve changed in some other way if I had to grow up in Mississippi. I thank God that they had the fortitude of when they got to the age that they could leave, they left, and open this opportunity for me and my other siblings to do some of the stuff we wanted to do in life. Get that equal opportunity. That’s all you ever ask for, is an equal opportunity and I think them making that move gave me the opportunity to be the man I am today.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, well, Donald, thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us.</p>
<p>Bell: Thank you for having me.</p>
<p>Franklin: All right.</p>
<p>Bell: All right.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
100-N
WPPS
Battelle
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1958-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1976-2009
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Donald Bell, Sr.
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Segregation
School integration
Civil rights movements
Racism
Description
An account of the resource
Donald Bell, Sr. was born in 1958 in Pasco, Washington and worked on the Hanford Site from 1976-2009.
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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04/04/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0f7a1080ceb3d6a90723c7f13a36df81.JPG
634281ef42eea2eb7cad255a0ba79ae7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Marion Keith Barton
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: Hi, my name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Marion Keith Barton on May 1<sup>st</sup> 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We’ll be talking with Keith about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full legal name for us?</p>
<p>Marion Keith Barton: Marion Keith Barton. M-A-R-I-O-N, K-E-I-T-H, B-A-R-T-O-N</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thanks, Keith. Let’s start by talking about your life before Hanford. Where and when were you born?</p>
<p>Barton: I was born in Pasco. August 21<sup>st</sup>, 1951, at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital at Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so you’re local from the area.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. So I guess let’s back up a little further and talk about your parents. When did they come here and why?</p>
<p>Barton: The Hanford Area—the Project here brought my dad and mom out this way in 1948. They were seeking work. They both are from Texas. I think my dad may have come out first and then my mom followed along and that’s how they got started.</p>
<p>Franklin: Where in Texas were your parents from?</p>
<p>Barton: My dad was, I think, born in Kildare, and my mom was born in Gonzales. My dad worked at a refinery but I don’t think it was in Kildare; it was in another part of Texas. So he had to go there for work, when he got older. My mom, I think, grew up in Gonzales.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your parents hear about Hanford?</p>
<p>Barton: Through other relatives that had taken a—someone had come out here and started to work. A relative, I’m sure, because we’re related to a lot of people that were here at that time. They would phone back, or call back, whatever, and tell them, hey, there’s work out here at Hanford and you should come out. We’re making two dollars an hour or something, but it was a lot more than what they were making back in Texas, and so a lot of people just—another, another, another would come out and go to work.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the names of the folks that your parents were related to? Anybody stand out?</p>
<p>Barton: The Daniels family, the Mitchells and the Miles. My dad was married to the Miles family that was out here. He was married to Gladys Miles at the time, I think in Texas. And then they divorced and he married my mom. Some of the relatives of Miles, they would never tell me anything. And they would call my dad, hello. Uncle Cracker. Because his name was Crack and they would him Cracker and all that stuff, but that’s what they would call him. They would him Uncle Cracker and I’d go—what? I never knew why they would call him that. But then I found out later he was married to their aunt and stuff. [LAUGHTER] Okay, now I put two and two together. But there was a lot of stuff that they wouldn’t share with you about the family history, and we didn’t have that way of tracking it back then like we do know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You said your dad’s name was--?</p>
<p>Barton: Marion.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your dad’s name was Marion?</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah. But he had—I don’t know. I think he played baseball. A lot of people that—sometimes, like when they passed away, no one would know if they put “Marion” in the paper who was because they all went by their nickname. You wouldn’t know some of the people that even I grew up with. The only way thing you knew them was by their nickname.</p>
<p>Franklin: So your dad’s nickname was Cracker?</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, and they called him Crack. But my mom and dad were Mr. and Mrs. Barton to each other. That was pretty easy. [LAUGHTER] You would know it when they said it. But that was the way that it was, and they all had nicknames.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it seems like a lot of people came out of Kildare. That town, specifically—</p>
<p>Barton: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: --to come to work at Hanford. Was it just your dad that worked out there, or did your mom work out there as well?</p>
<p>Barton: It seemed like my mom worked out there briefly but I mostly know that my dad worked out there more.</p>
<p>Franklin: What else do you know about their lives before they came to work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Barton: Well, my mom, when she was in Texas as a young girl, I think, she would just work for other families in the Texas area. She did like cooking and cleaning houses, and stuff like that, when she was in Texas. My dad, he was at the refinery and so somehow they met up.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you know about their education? How far in school did they get?</p>
<p>Barton: My mom had maybe a year or so of college and my dad only had sixth grade education.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. What do you know about their initial experiences coming to work at Hanford and finding a place to live?</p>
<p>Barton: Well, when they came to the Tri-Cities and to Pasco area—I think Kennewick was pretty much off-limits—and all the family wanted to stick close to each other and be around each other. I don’t think you could live from where the tracks were in Pasco, like past 1<sup>st</sup> Street and the underpass. You had to live in the east Side of Pasco at the time; you couldn’t live on the other side. Once you got past 1<sup>st</sup> Street you could live there for a long time. I think Richland was pretty much off-limits, too, to the black folks who came out here.</p>
<p>I know my mom would ramble on sometimes, but my mom would say you couldn’t even get arrested in Kennewick; like, they wouldn’t even put you in jail if you were black. It was like 1<sup>st</sup> and Washington, I believe, a black guy, he was arrested. And she would tell me the story that they handcuffed him or tied him to a post and called Pasco and said, come get him. Come get your N-word. Yeah. That was pretty much the way it was.</p>
<p>A few things that I would hear them say, just sitting around as a kid. Because as a kid, when they would talk, back then, you couldn’t say anything as a kid, you would just listen. If they said something that they didn’t want you to hear about their life, you had to go outside and play. So you couldn’t hear—well, just bits and pieces of what was going on.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Where did your parents first move when they came to the Tri-Cities? Do you remember the first house they lived in?</p>
<p>Barton: Oh, yeah, I mean, they were on 610 South Owen Street in Pasco. That’s where I grew up.</p>
<p>Franklin: South what?</p>
<p>Barton: South Owen.</p>
<p>Franklin: Owen.</p>
<p>Barton: Owen, O-W-E-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: O-W-E-N.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, and I think the house was condemned. When I was in high school, it was condemned. It had to be torn down, because it had no foundation. He had—basically, had a trailer that was sitting on that property and he built the house and he knocked out a wall of the trailer and built the house. The kitchen, a bedroom and a living room on to the trailer at the house, with no foundation and with part of the trailer still being there. They had to move, and so then we moved about two blocks up to Elm Street in the early ‘60s, around maybe ‘65, ’66—maybe somewhere in there, we moved to Elm Street—525 South Elm. And that was only two places up that we lived.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Growing up, how would you describe life in the community?</p>
<p>Barton: It was fun. Just growing up as kids, you just go and have fun and a lot of people around just playing and having fun. It was pretty nice.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you stay mostly in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, pretty much, most of the time. We would go across, like when I got older and played Little League and baseball, we would go to Memorial Park and have games there. And then just kind of—we’d just walk back from there.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you do in your spare time?</p>
<p>Barton: Well, in the summer time, as was a young kid, we didn’t have jobs or anything, so I would just play and stuff like that. I had strict rules not to get in trouble. [LAUGHTER] So those rules were pretty tight at the Barton household.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember any particular community events?</p>
<p>Barton: As a youngster, my dad would always have white parties at the Fourth of July. But other community events when I was really young, I don’t remember. Then they would have, sometimes—my mom was a democrat, so they would have different deals like a dinner or something. My dad would never go, but my mom would take me along and we would go to certain events like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: You already talked about the house that you grew up in. Did you live by yourself or did you live with any other families? Was it a single family house or a multifamily situation?</p>
<p>Barton: No, just our family. I had a sister there but she was like ten years older than I was. So by the time I got eight, I think, she was gone and had moved out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you attend church?</p>
<p>Barton: All the time I had to attend church. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Church was big. You had to go to church. I don’t go much now, but--</p>
<p>Franklin: What church did you attend?</p>
<p>Barton: We attended New Hope Baptist Church.</p>
<p>Franklin: New Hope Baptist. And what role did church play in the community?</p>
<p>Barton: A big role. That’s where a lot of people got together. And I think that’s part of how they dealt with a lot of stuff and stresses: in church and the meeting and seeing other people. But Sunday was always church day. My dad didn’t go. No, he didn’t go. But my mom did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Just your mom and you?</p>
<p>Barton: My mom did, and I had to go.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned an older sister. How many siblings did you have?</p>
<p>Barton: Just my older sister.</p>
<p>Franklin: So your family’s just you and your older sister?</p>
<p>Barton: My sister. Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions that people brought from the places they came from?</p>
<p>Barton: Well, the Fourth of July was a big one. And baseball, I think was big. Before I got old enough, my dad was—how much older was he than I was? He was getting up in age when I started—I think he pretty much retired when I was in high school, so he wasn’t real active. But when they first moved here and were younger, they all played baseball. The Daniels, my dad, and several other guys in the community had a league that they played in. But I only know bits and pieces, because I was so young and I probably didn’t understand. But I know that they would always talk about playing baseball. That’s what they did for recreation and fun.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about food? Did your parents—did people bring food traditions with them from the South?</p>
<p>Barton: Oh, yeah, yeah. They would like—Fourth of July, like fish fry. There was a big fish fry on the Fourth of July. But they didn’t have—my mom and dad were pretty nice to a lot of people. People would come up and didn’t have much. Sometimes they would stay with us until they got on their feet and found a job and then they would move out. For the church, for fundraisers they would have on different Saturdays, they would sell fried chicken dinners and like that. They wouldn’t like—I think you could get a dinner for like—I don’t remember, something like three dollars, and you’d get fried chicken and a piece of pound cake and some other stuff like that. That’s how they would raise money for the church, the building fund, I guess it was—they were trying to help with.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh. Were there opportunities available here that were not available where your parents came from?</p>
<p>Barton: Oh, yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kind of opportunities?</p>
<p>Barton: Work, just general, just work. They could work, but the amount of money they made back in Texas was minimal. And I don’t think they had the opportunity—with my dad’s education, I don’t think he had an opportunity to move up the ladder very much as far as getting a real high-paying job. My mom, she had more education, so she came out, and later on she got a job at Ice Harbor Dam as a biological aide, which was a fish counter. And so we did pretty good when she started working.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow. In what ways were opportunities limited because of segregation or racism?</p>
<p>Barton: My mom, she was pretty active as far as for the community. She was on a lot of committees and stuff. We didn’t have sidewalks, so she tried to push to get sidewalks and stuff like that for the community. And I know she would work real hard for CAC, the Community Action Committee, I believe it was called. She was big on trying to get city hall to get provisions. Because on east side they wouldn’t do hardly anything with the roads, and I don’t think we ever did get to see sidewalks all around, but a few here and there. It was difficult. So it was a fight all the time to try and get improvements for the community.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe any interactions that you or parents had with people from other parts of the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Barton: Mostly just church folks and stuff like that, that I would see. Just relatives and stuff, mostly. And my dad, he had a few friends come by that—he liked to drink, and so he would have his drinking buddies come by. He had a pretty good relationship, I think, sometimes with the people that he worked with, and they would come by and see how he was doing, and bring him stuff like that. It was mostly just—they would work hard during the week, and the weekend they would go down to, I think, Jackson’s Tavern. He wasn’t a gambler or anything; he just liked to drink. But church was the big thing, how you had most of your interactions, it was just mostly with the church. That’s what they did. That was the big part of everything, was the church.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Where did you go to school?</p>
<p>Barton: Well, grade school I went to Whittier, which was on the east side. After Whittier, I did sixth grade at Whittier. And then I went to Isaac Stevens Junior High School. From there to Pasco High School. From there to CBC. And from CBC to Eastern Washington University. </p>
<p>Franklin: How did segregation or racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Barton: My mom always pushed for me to stay in school. Because I know one time she came home, she said—I think I was in the seventh grade, and my grades were not good. But the teacher—she would go to the meetings to see how I was doing. She came back and said that one of the teachers had told her, Mrs. Barton, we wouldn’t worry about your son, she says, because most of the black kids drop out of school in the seventh grade anyway.</p>
<p>And my mom was pretty feisty. She said—I think she had a few choice curse words for him. She told him, I don’t know how many other kids drop out of school, but this one is not dropping out of school. She made a point to them that I wasn’t going to drop out of school. That kind of upset her real bad and I would hear that a lot. She would tell that story at different times to a lot of different people. Yes, yes.</p>
<p>She was, like I say, pretty active as far as making sure that I stayed out of trouble. I had to stay out of trouble for one, and trying to make sure that she was up on what I was doing as far as education and stuff like that. But I had just kind of slacked off and I didn’t really try real hard. But I had to go to school and do something.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, thanks, that’s a great story. Who were some of the people that influenced you as a child?</p>
<p>Barton: My mom. My dad, he didn’t say a lot to me. I don’t think he ever—well, he couldn’t really tell me about my grades, because he didn’t know. But my mom, she would—like, they would sell encyclopedias, she made sure that she bought a set. And different things for me to learn and to do things. Then the Mitchells—WS Mitchell, he was Vanessa’s uncle, I believe, but he went to Whitman and he would come by and he would talk to me a lot, too, and encourage me to stay in school and to do good and stuff like that. She was big on getting an education. She tried hard and she wanted me to do something. She didn’t want me to—like I said, I couldn’t get in trouble. Bad deal.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Seems like that’s been really—that was drilled into you.</p>
<p>Barton: Yes, it was drilled into me a lot. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: What did your father do at Hanford?</p>
<p>Barton: He was a laborer most of the time. I think he worked with the concrete a little bit, but I think he was just—he worked out of Local 348 in Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Which one’s that? Is that just the laborers’ union?</p>
<p>Barton: Laborers’ Local, laborers’ Union. As I got older, I think he had a tough time at one while, because they had an election and my dad was behind this one guy that didn’t win. And the guy that won knew that, and so my dad was real limited on getting a good job after that.</p>
<p>He quit later on, and he went—this guy that used to be in the orchard business, Bob Guier, I think he had a lot to do in the laborers at one time, I think he was a supervisor. My dad worked a lot of the dams like Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, and a couple others that I remember, and so he just—the guy wouldn’t give him a lot of work and so it was kind of hard on him. So he went out to work in Finley for Bob Guier, he was like a supervisor or something. Well, he was like—people would come in to pick grapes, and my dad would be, okay, you’re in charge of making sure of getting all of these done. But my mom was really upset with that because he didn’t make—Bob didn’t pay him a lot of money.</p>
<p>And my dad wouldn’t go back and work out of the Hall anymore for some reason, whatever happened to him, it just set him back. It was kind of sad in a way, because he just wouldn’t go back and get his—and one guy tried to get him to come back so he would get his pension set, and he wouldn’t go back. It was a little bit difficult and whatever happened he wouldn’t talk about it, he would never sit down and tell me, hey, Son, this is what happened to me. So I didn’t know. But I know they tried to get him to go back; my mom said, you need to go back. There was one guy from the Hall, I think it was Paul Milsap. He got in later on, and he came to my dad and said, Mr. Barton—he called him Cracker—he said, you need to come back and go back out and get your pension set. And my dad just said, no. Because Bob had been nice to him and so he was kind of loyal to Bob. Bob needed his help, so he wouldn’t go back; he helped Bob. He just worked with him for—until he got to where he couldn’t get around so good.</p>
<p>Franklin: Let me see my sheet here. So the next set of questions, they’re about your work history and experiences at the Hanford site. What sort of work did you do out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Barton: Do you want to go to start or later on?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, let’s go through the whole thing.</p>
<p>Barton: I’ll do the best on my memory then to tell you. Back in high school, I think once I had gotten 18, I think, you could work out at the Area. So I got a job on the 300 Area, just a summer job. I would go out and wash windows and they would put me with someone and do—pick up trash. It was okay for a few years. I worked there for about two summers. Then they liked me out there, and I went to CBC and they said, well, you can work nice—they gave me an opportunity and said, if you’re going to the school in the day, you can come out and work at the 300 Area at night, because the summer job was ending. I said, oh, I think I better try to do some homework and stuff, because—[LAUGHTER] I don’t want to get in trouble. I told them I could not. That was a good opportunity, because they liked what I did and I got along okay. But I didn’t do that.</p>
<p>Then, let’s see. I went up to Eastern, then I came back and worked in the Area with Genie Carpet Cleaning. Then Carter ran that. I’d come home and work on the weekends sometimes, doing floors and cleaning the buildings and waxing floors and stuff like that. Then in ’73, I graduated Eastern and I worked at FFTF. And I got into a Laborers’ there and I worked about a couple years as a laborer out of Local 348.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s the same one your dad had been in.</p>
<p>Barton: Mm-hmm. And I worked at FFTF for—‘til ’75. Then my girlfriend sitting over there, she decided to leave and go to Australia [LAUGHTER] because I wasn’t trying to cut the cake soon enough. She says, well, I’m going to take off and go to Australia. I said, okay. So I said, well, this is kind of boring. I need to go do something different. So ‘75 I joined the military. I went to the military for three years in the Army. And I think Kathleen got back in ‘76 or so?</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: ’77.</p>
<p>Barton: ’77. And I was in the military ‘til ’78. Then I came back and I think I started working construction just for a little bit. I started working in construction, just for a little bit. But then in ’78, I got into the Apprenticeship Local 112. Because when I got back, they were looking for people for—Affirmative Action was helping some of the minorities get into the apprenticeships. At that time, they wanted blacks to get in, because it was pretty much you couldn’t just go down and get in just by applying. So there was pressure with—I think it was probably the CAC, or one of them—Affirmative Action Committee.</p>
<p>I think it was Perry Blackwell, whatever organization he was running at the time. He said, okay, we’re putting some kids into these programs. And, he said, since you don’t have a job and just got out of the military, let me see your DD214, honorable discharge. Okay, looks like you can probably get in. Then I got into the apprenticeship in ’78. And then I did four years, I got out in ‘82.</p>
<p>Then I worked a few jobs in the construction and then they were going to lay me off. I was—hard time finding a job and I said, I got to get something that’s more permanent, because she didn’t want me to travel. I got married in 1980. She didn’t want me to travel. She said, okay, if you’re traveling, I’m going, too. I said no, because she was teaching school. I said, no, you can’t go. I have to go. She said no, I’m not sitting here with these kids when you’re running all over the country. I said, I got to find a job locally, then. So I knew people. From growing up in the area, I knew people. C.W. Brown, he worked at Energy Northwest and our family knew their family—well, we knew pretty much all the black families that were here over time. But he worked at Energy Northwest, so he said, I’ll try put in a word for you. He said, well, they don’t have a lot; you can come out here as a laborer. I had already had my electrical apprenticeship. So I said, yeah, just when do I start? I need the work. I started as a laborer at Energy Northwest in ’84. I worked there until June 30<sup>th</sup> of 2015.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. What did you do the whole time that you were at Energy Northwest?</p>
<p>Barton: Electrical maintenance. First when I went in—I went into Energy Northwest as a laborer, just to get in. It took me about eight months and then an opening came in and they said, okay. I got into the electrical and they said, we are going to make you an apprentice again. I go, why? I said, why? Well, you don’t know this system. And I go, okay. So I had to do that for about, I think about eight months or so, after I got in. I got hired June 6<sup>th</sup> of ‘84 and I think I got into electrical until February of ’85. I had to do apprenticeship for a while. Then I got that and everything started to work out okay. I didn’t have to travel and look for work and just worked out there.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. Could you describe a typical work day?</p>
<p>Barton: Hmm. In the beginning, it was pretty easy, pretty laid back. I had to do a lot of—at one time, I think, it was one of the hottest plants, as far as radiation, in the country, as far as them controlling it the and places and things that you had to do at work. So typical work day, laid back day, they’d just come in and give you and assignment and you go out and just start checking batteries, changing lights and doing like that. When I started you could pretty much—you could work 16 hour days pretty much, if you wanted to. It was like that, because they were just starting up pretty much. You could just work pretty much all you wanted to work. They didn’t have any—like at the end when I left they had hours where—the fatigue rule—they passed some other stuff later, where people were making many mistakes at nuclear plants that they had to—only could work so many hours for a certain period. They had that in effect. But when I started they didn’t have that in effect; you could just work and do pretty much what you wanted.</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and supervisors?</p>
<p>Barton: [LAUGHTER] It was difficult at times. Yeah, a little bit difficult.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Barton: Well. You have to try to figure out what was going on at the time. And you knew that when I got into the electrical shop, I was the only black guy in there. So you weren’t told a lot of things. Some of the guys when I first got in the shop, they were letting them work all these hours, but they didn’t tell me I could work. So, I’d say, oh, okay. I think some of the guys would ask, why can’t he work, or something. And then they started letting me work a few other shifts.</p>
<p>But it seemed like I had to do a lot of rad work, more so than—they had somewhere to go that I couldn’t figure out, I had to go in and do it, I’d go, wow, my dose limit is way up there. At times, I would be exceeding mostly everybody on the crew, as far as my dose. It was crazy. But what could you do? I couldn’t really say anything, because it was what you had to do, I guess.</p>
<p>Some of the supervisors, they weren’t as nice. They just—but I knew that when you got out there and you started figuring it out, you didn’t have anybody really you knew to turn to for help, really. I knew I needed to work, so you just put up with a lot of stuff that—just to keep your job. The way I look at it is like this, if I go to another job, how do I know it’s going to be any different? So I just would put up with a lot of stuff sometimes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Barton: Outside of work? Sometimes we’d get in the electric shop, at times I would help coordinate a lot of stuff, so we would go and play softball and basketball after work and it was okay like that. You always knew who was who, and some of the guys that are around there that didn’t want to play or be doing that type-thing, they didn’t go. But we had interaction. It was okay. And we’d go down and have a beer or something and I made sure that I was there and to go and do it.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the most difficult aspects of the job?</p>
<p>Barton: As far as?</p>
<p>Franklin: Working conditions, but also, kind of like the work environment.</p>
<p>Barton: I think once—it seemed like, after I first got in, and later on when some of the old-timers left and then the new people came in and some of the things changed, it got a little bit more difficult, as far as the work environment.</p>
<p>Franklin: How so?</p>
<p>Barton: We had this—I don’t know if I should mention names—but we had a few supervisors that didn’t want to see me in the shop, I’m sure. And then he would push other—say, for one instance, this one supervisor I had for a long time, they wanted to get rid of one of the workers and he was a white guy. The guy used the N-word. They came to me and said, this—they told me—we can’t have this, this guy is here using the N-word. And they said, this can’t happen and we need you to help us and we’re going to straighten this out. I said, why would I go after him? I’d have to go after half the shop. [LAUGHTER] I said, I’m not going to do that. I think I upset him. So it was a bad deal for me with him after that.</p>
<p>You know, they would come up with little nitpicking stuff, like, one day I would get a work assignment and we go and get the job done. I was working with this other guy, Tony Galovese, and we fixed a gate for security. The security said, man, you guys did a great job. He said, we got some treats over in our shop. He said, you guys go have some. I told Tony, I said, Tony, I can’t go over there. I said, these guys are going to get me if I go. He said, so? I’m going. I said, okay. He went over and came back. The supervisor came and we walked into the shop and he said, where have you guys been? I said, well, we were on the gate. He said, I was out at the gate and you guys weren’t there. Tony said, well, I went over and had a piece of cake. The supervisor said, I need you both to go home. He said, you guys are out of your work area, and you should be reporting back to the shop. Just go home. I said, wow. With pay. So we got paid to go home. Okay.</p>
<p>So, we came back and we had this big meeting and they said, well—and our steward, Tom McMahon, he came in and we talked to him, and he talked to the supervisor. Before I went home, I had to go talk to Bob Morris, who was our supervisor at the time, and he had the other guy, Bill Laternal(?) send me home. I talked to Bob, and he said, your situation is just like this. He said, you’re riding in a car with a guy and he stops and he’s going to rob the bank. And you’re in the car and you leave, you’re just as guilty as the other person. And I said, wow, okay. He said, so that’s the situation we have here.</p>
<p>So I went home and then we went to a higher meeting, we had several other meetings and they said, we don’t see that they really did anything wrong--[LAUGHTER]—by going, you know, and reporting back to the shop to warrant sending then home for something like that. We don’t see that that should’ve happened. They said, Mr. Barton, what would you like to do with these—right now since this has happened? We don’t see that you’re at fault; what would you like to do? I said, nothing. I said, I would just like to do my job and be left alone. I don’t want to go after them, I said. I’m not after them; they’re after me.</p>
<p>They put me in a different crew and it was a little bit different, but not a lot different, because you knew you couldn’t do anything. It’s like, you would be working, so what they would do is, okay, we’re giving out awards, people who are doing a great job around here, we are going to give out awards. So all of the people who got awards were his friends, the people that he liked. I’m still the only black guy in the shop, so I’m not going to get the award. I’m not going to base it on that, but the fact that he didn’t like me and that I didn’t follow suit and get rid of a guy that he wanted to get rid of and used me to do it was like, okay. We are going to punish you as long as we can.</p>
<p>It was crazy at times. And then one time, I was working with this guy named Johnny Lane. Kathleen may remember this story. They were trying to put the blame on me, I think for this—I think it was about in ’93, somewhere in there, that was—we had a shutdown. And during the shutdown we had all these electrical enclosures, these cabinets that supplied power to different equipment, I’ll try to shorten the story because I do kind of carry on, I know. But when they shut the power down, sometimes they shut the feeder breaker off that’s feeding the whole cabinet. And some of them were like that, but this particular one wasn’t.</p>
<p>We had Johnny Lane, he was working with me and we had to go clean this cabinet. I assumed Johnny knew that the cabinet was hot—or we always had to test before we touch and all that stuff. So we were cleaning down below and this cabinet blew up and Johnny got hurt. It was like, it was all my fault. How come you weren’t protecting Johnny? I go, well, I had been called away to answer a question to a guy, and I didn’t know Johnny was going to go into the top of the cabinet to clean. And then soon as I walked away, that’s when the explosion happened and Johnny got severely injured. He didn’t die, but he was injured.</p>
<p>When it blew up, Johnny was on the ground and he was yelling and screaming and he said, Keith! Keith! And I ran back and Johnny was on fire, his clothes were on fire. I had a jacket on—it was kind of cool that day, and we were in the turbine building. So I took my jacket off and put the flames out and I grabbed Johnny because the thing was still exploding and I pulled him to the side. And then he never hardly said anything about it, there.</p>
<p>But there was one guy in the mechanics shop, Jeff Rau. He said, Keith—and he was a steward—not our steward, but over in the mechanics. And he said, tell me about what happened. And I told him, and I didn’t know what he was doing. He said, tell me what happened up there with you and Johnny. I told him the story that I just told you.</p>
<p>I said, well, Johnny and I were working and the cabinet blew up and Johnny was on fire, and when I grabbed him, I grabbed him by his heels, because he was just on the ground screaming. And I pulled him out of the line, because that thing was all blowing up, and got him safe. They were doing a drill that day so everybody was suited up to respond to the drill. So they reported and they came over and grabbed Johnny and flew him over to Harbor View.</p>
<p>But Jeff said, well, Keith, I’m going to put you in for something here, because I think what you did was a heroic act, because you shouldn’t—the guy that I went to answer the question with, he was yelling at me, Keith, don’t go over there! Don’t go over there! Stay away from there! I said, I can’t, man. I don’t even think I said I can’t, I just turned and looked at him and I just ran and grabbed Johnny and pulled him out.</p>
<p>When Johnny got out of the hospital, they had this big deal and my wife and I went up to Spokane. It was like a lifesaving award they gave me for going back and getting Johnny out of the fire.</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: But it was the union, not the company.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, it was the union, but the company never said anything. Yeah, they didn’t even acknowledge anything. They were just like, why did you—</p>
<p>And then I would go to class, and we were in the classroom, and someone posted all these pictures on the wall of where the fire and all that stuff was, right? You’re sitting there trying to study in this room and you have to look at that while you’re trying. I know what I went through and I wouldn’t talk about it with them. I just would look at it and say, why would they do that?</p>
<p>Then what they did—Johnny’s daughter worked out there as a laborer. They sent her up there to clean up the stuff where her dad had gotten hurt. She had to go up there and clean up all of the debris and stuff that was on the floor and her dad almost died. I said, what kind of company is this? It was really sad.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah. It was like, wow. We have a picture of Johnny and my wife and I back then that they took up there at the award thing. And guys are saying, you need to bring that award out and put it at work. I said no, it’s not something that I’m proud of. It was something that happened, but Johnny got hurt. I’m not going to say, hey, look what I got! Because it wasn’t about me it was about—it was a sad deal. They just viewed it different. It’s like, man, why weren’t you over there? I just don’t know how to answer those questions. Because Johnny had been an electrician longer than I had. We would ride to work together sometimes. He was one of the nice guys.</p>
<p>And Johnny had been a steward in the Local 77 at one time also. And we got along great, didn’t we, babe? Johnny and I. People probably—and Johnny didn’t pay attention—Johnny probably should have retired. I think he was about ‘67 when the accident happened. And he was still working. He probably should’ve retired. Back then, I don’t know if he had a drink that day or not that morning, when I picked him up for work. A lot of times—you know, before we had drug testing and all that stuff and breathalyzer that they got later on, some of the guys would have a sip or even smoke a joint or something before they went to work. And then Johnny—I don’t know if he had, but I don’t think they even tested him for that. I don’t think he had, anyway; it was just a mistake. So they had some changes after that. But the guys were telling me, oh, I would quit if I was you. I don’t know. I said, well, why? I mean, I don’t think I did anything wrong. It was kind of sad like that.</p>
<p>Then a lot of stuff would happen that—you know, we would have to go into these real—we had to go into the reactor one time and it was really hot, and they didn’t know who to send in. Oh, hey, we’re going to send these guys in. And they’d prep them all and stuff and they would cancel it. This went on for about three days. I said, well, who’s going to go in? We don’t know. Then I came back to work—I was off, and I came back to work—and they said, oh, this is the night we’re going to do it. Oh, really? So I had to get a neutron and all this other gamma exposure to go do this job. And then you had to go do a body scan to see what you picked up. Probably a reason for my cancer that I had later on. But it was out there; they don’t do anything.</p>
<p>It was difficult at times later on. The first part of it we used to play and everybody would have fun. I would, out in the shop, Frank Buono and I, we would organize a lot of feeds and stuff. Like, hey, we’re going to have this electric shop deal; we want to have everybody participate. And why not have fun like that? Later on we didn’t do that, because the rules changed and it got more serious. You couldn’t have—you had to be out on the job doing stuff.</p>
<p>You couldn’t make—if you made a couple of mistakes you probably would not be doing the job, because they would say, okay, we’re going to pull your qual. You’re not qualified if you messed up something that—It was kind of—it was difficult. You could get blamed for stuff you didn’t do sometimes. It’s almost like, it’s like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: in what ways did the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Barton: Security?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, or secrecy.</p>
<p>Barton: Well, I think I was in pretty good with some of them, because sometimes you’d catch a security guard asleep. I’d say, hey, wake up, man. You got to wake up, because you don’t want to get caught asleep. So I think I was in pretty good with a lot of them. Because I wasn’t one to go and turn someone in. Even the guys—some of the guys that I worked with, if they made a mistake, or if I saw something, like if you leave something in the cabinet, I would let them know. I wouldn’t turn them in.</p>
<p>I found a badge one time. It was in the men’s room. I said, who is this person? We need to get the badge back to them. If you went and turned—because he was a temporary guy, if I had gone to the security and turned the badge in, that guy would’ve been fired, because he was a temporary employee. A regular employee probably would’ve gotten a couple days off. Temporary? You’re gone. You left your badge. So I was the type of person to say, hey, find this guy and tell him his badge is here. So they’d get on the page and say, report to here. And he’d go over there and they’d say, here’s your badge and stuff like that. I would do stuff like that.</p>
<p>But NRC, you really had to be careful, because I think they kind of felt that they weren’t doing their job if they didn’t find something. So they were looking all the time. They were looking for something—they were looking for something wrong—something you do wrong. We had these guys, observers who would come out and watch you work. Okay, are you—we got some service here. We want to check you out. They’d say, okay, we’re going to break; we’ll be back in 15 minutes, and so would try to go to break. But then they’d come back and watch and then see what you did.</p>
<p>And then they would critique you and say, well, you did this well. But the thought was, you could never get 100—just like on an evaluation. You could never get 100%, depending on who you were. Because they always had to find something wrong. The supervisor would tell you, you can’t get a 100%. We will get gagged if we say that you did everything right. So you’d say, okay, well, give me that, and that’s fine. [LAUGHTER] Then if you got them really mad, on certain supervisors, you could go talk to them and tell them—and they’d say, well, you want me to change it? Yeah, you need to change it. Okay, we’ll change it.</p>
<p>But security—NRC—you had to be real careful. If they saw you do—NRC in particular, they would come out at different times at night to check you and just to walk around. And a lot of times they were looking for security, because they’re at 12-hour shifts, and they’re night shift. The guy would come at one or two in the morning. They’d walk up and if they catch you asleep, you’re pretty much toast. And that’s what their job was, to catch you doing stuff.</p>
<p>Everybody kind of hated NRC, and they knew what guy would come out. They would never want to interact—they would never interact with you. And I know there was one black guy that would come out, you would say, hi and he’d just walk, like—He would never have a conversation with you. Because he’s looking and we know that.</p>
<p>Franklin: NRC just has jurisdiction over civilian energy power, right?</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah. Well, they have—that guy would go to control room and look at stuff. If the procedure—see where you’re at in the procedure and see how they’re doing stuff, and watch their—Because you had three-way communication, as they say, and if you didn’t use the phonetic alphabet to discuss what you’re doing, your next move, and if you did something wrong—If you did something wrong in the control room, if you were an operator, you don’t work in the control room anymore. You lose your stipend, you lose your pay pretty much. They just send you out and you just go kick rocks until you can find something else to do. Or either quit. Depending on the severity of what you did, NRC would say, okay, that guy couldn’t come back. But they had to have punishment for wrongdoing because—to show that they corrected it. So it was difficult it was stressful, very, very stressful at times.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your reaction—or what do you know about your parents’ reaction to learning that the work that your father had done contributed to the development of atomic weapons?</p>
<p>Barton: I don’t know. They didn’t really discuss it too much. They just said he worked out there, they built it, made a pretty good wage and they were pretty much happy, I think. So they don’t know that you did anything. Because everything was so secret. You would be working on something and I don’t think they knew. If they were actually working on something related to a bomb or something, I don’t think they knew it, because they wouldn’t tell you anything. And I knew that, that I would never hear them discuss like, oh yeah, I was in this one cell—they wouldn’t say anything that I ever heard.</p>
<p>Franklin: It sounds like most of your work out there was not related to the plutonium production?</p>
<p>Barton: No, not mine.</p>
<p>Franklin: But I’m wondering, what do you think about that larger enterprise, having worked so close to it?</p>
<p>Barton: I think they were doing stuff to try to get it right and you would see some stuff that happened that went wrong. But I wasn’t a whistle blower, so I don’t say anything, because I wanted to work. Because I knew what the repercussions were going be if you said something. You’re not going to be—[LAUGHTER] You’re not going to be working, probably, for long. And then you just kept your mouth shut about some things. I worked at 100-N and there was a big water spill and the Columbia River is right there. And I said, that’s not good! But I didn’t say anything. [LAUGHTER] That’s bad! Somebody needs to shut the water off. That water’s contaminated and it’s headed for the river! It sure is. You just kept your mouth shut.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Barton: The fact that they made the bomb and helped contribute to changing things. And that’s, I think, the big legacy: that they participated in that. </p>
<p>Franklin: Switching away from work, and towards civil rights activities at Hanford and Tri-Cities, what were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Barton: Well, I know some of the times—like, you know, the money was good. I would hear the talk of—let me know if I’m not saying the right thing, though—but I would hear some of the guys talking like, if they saw that you were living well—if you were working and you were doing pretty good, and if you drove a newer car to work, you probably won’t be working very long. Because people would think that you were doing too good and that you need to have a step back. So you didn’t want to look like you were doing too good by showing that you were living a pretty good lifestyle. You just kind of had to keep it low-key. What I would see as a kid, those guys worked hard, but they drank hard, too, on the weekends. It was like—phew. But I don’t know if I told you that my mom was on the city council at one time. So she was an activist, I think, in trying to make sure that things got done.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yes, you mentioned that she had campaigned for sidewalks.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, and at the time that she was on the city council, they were pushing for the Cable Bridge. She was instrumental—or on the committee and the city council at the time that they were voting to get that cable bridge done. Yeah.</p>
<p>And some other things, huh, babe? She was pretty outspoken, wouldn’t you say?</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, a lot outspoken. So she kind of kept—pretty much ran things around the house. And then she—pretty active in the church. You tried to make sure that people that needed help would get the help that they needed and if it had to come out of her pockets, sometimes she would do that, too.</p>
<p>Franklin: Who were the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Barton: Back then I think Wally Webster was a big one. I think Art Fletcher came through there one time and I think he was on the city council. He was kind of a big shot. And I think my mom was in there, too, Katie Barton.</p>
<p>Franklin: Katie Barton?</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah. She was in there, because she knew all these people and she would go out and give talks and stuff at different things. Let me think. That’s just a few of the names. I know there’s more names, but that’s just—</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: Joe Jackson?</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, Joe Jackson, I think he was on the city council, too. He was more of the quiet type, like, I don’t know what he pushed for. Katherine, who was Katherine? She wanted to run, what was it? Senator or something?</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: Yes, she was.</p>
<p>Barton: Katherine Smith.</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: [INAUDIBLE]</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, she was big in pushing my mom. Mom knew some people from WSU. There was a professor--</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: Dallas Barnes.</p>
<p>Barton: Dallas Barnes was a big one.</p>
<p>Franklin: We talked to Dallas.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah. He was big. He probably knew a lot more, because he had a business on the east side of fish market and he was into a lot of things.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, we interviewed Dallas a couple, about a month ago now. We’re hoping to interview Wally. But those are some other good names. Any other names you can think of?</p>
<p>Barton: Wayne Jackson, did you interview him? He knew a lot, because he was my mom’s campaign manager when she was for city council when she had to run at-large. He could tell you a lot about the activity and what my mom did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you have contact information for him?</p>
<p>Barton: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Okay. Maybe I can get it from you after the interview.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, I can give it to you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, what were some of the noticeable successes of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Barton: I think at the time before they did away with the Affirmative Action and stuff, they were instrumental in getting a lot of kids into building tradecrafts and stuff like that. Because otherwise, like now, you can’t get in, because they just—there’s nobody there to push sometimes and it makes it a lot harder. And people get overlooked and stuff like that. At the time when they had to take you in—because I would hear it, too, because I’d go to work back then, and guys would say, you got my job. I’d say, how did I get your job? Why would it just be me? Because he figured I’m the only black there, and he could’ve had that job because all the guys are white. So I took his job. Just like, really? So I would never react or say anything, I’d just usually kind of walk away and say, well, I’m sorry man. You got to be a little early next time. Stuff like that. You couldn’t be pushed to where you’re going to have a confrontation, because it’s probably not going to be good for either one of you. You just got to walk away and just deal with it.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges in the civil rights movement here?</p>
<p>Barton: The biggest challenges, I think, was just the day-to-day grind, trying to get stuff done. Just trying to get people to realize that, hey, we need sidewalks, we need this and we need that. I know—I think my mom—I know Katherine, I think one time they went to a meeting, and they told the people at the meeting, said, if you’re not going to get certain provisions for the east side or do something for east side improvement, we will never pass another school levy. [LAUGHTER] So it was like a threat that we were going to get all the people not to vote for a levy. So count us out if you’re not going to make some improvements or any kind of thing like that for the city.</p>
<p>I think it helped some people get jobs, like I said, that ordinarily wouldn’t have gotten jobs. They fought for people, you know, we have no blacks in certain areas and stuff and so let’s do something. Because it was hard getting hired for certain things.</p>
<p>I was pretty fortunate, I would say. Like in the sixth grade, when I got out, Mr. Luke, he came and said, we need two guys that you would select to work at the Jumbo Restaurant. It was on the Lewis Street on the east side. He picked myself and Bill Skinner.</p>
<p>Bill Skinner was—I don’t know what condition he’s in now, but he ran a few committees on the east side and he was—he would be a good one to talk to. I think his mind is still pretty good. He’s got a lot of physical issues, but he ran a—he could tell you a lot if you could get ahold of him. I don’t have his number.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s okay, we could try.</p>
<p>Barton: I’m sure I can look it up. But I got your number and I could always call and let you know if I could get it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, great. Let’s see here. I just have a couple more questions, actually.</p>
<p>Barton: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I think we’re almost done here. Was there anything different about the civil rights efforts here, compared to the larger civil rights—like national civil rights movement?</p>
<p>Barton: I don’t think we had as many people out to—other than just the committees and stuff to go after things, unless—I think the fact that we didn’t have a lot of people pushing for movement or whatever. But in a way, I don’t think we had the same challenges they had in some of the larger places, either. Like I said, for a while, I don’t think I really had it all that bad. I knew that you couldn’t do a lot of stuff. But I don’t think I had it as bad as people in Seattle—maybe Seattle or even down South that they had, because it was—so I don’t know of lynchings here or anything like that. You just didn’t—maybe not get served or treated bad, but you didn’t have--</p>
<p>Franklin: Did that ever happen to you or your family? Did you ever get refused service?</p>
<p>Barton: Do you remember?</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: I remember you and I got—remember the guy at Denny’s that got mad at us?</p>
<p>Barton: Oh, yeah, yeah. But I don’t remember. Sometimes it’s not that you don’t get served, but it’s almost like you go to a place and we sit down and everybody else is eating, and you’ve been there a lot longer. And you say, this is not too good. So you kind pick up on little things like that. It’s pretty subtle at times, but if you experience some of the things, you can see it right away.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, you can put two and two together.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, you can put two and two together real fast.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were you directly involved in civil rights efforts? I know your mom was, but did you ever get involved in anything in the late ‘60s or ‘70s?</p>
<p>Barton: No, I just watched her. I wouldn’t—I just watched her go to stuff. We might have a dinner or something, or there’d maybe be a pageant or something. But all of the other stuff that she did with her constituents, like Wayne or Katherine Smith and people like that. And you had a lot of blacks that pretty much just weren’t really interested. They had a job. They didn’t even participate to go to that stuff. My mom was busy and she was out there. But I know a lot of the people they didn’t—if it benefited them, okay, they said, oh, yeah, this is great. But they didn’t go and push that. It was only like a handful of people usually doing it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why do you think there wasn’t a broader involvement?</p>
<p>Barton: I think most of the guys that were doing that, they had a lot of education. And some of the other people I’m talking about, they were just content to have what they had and not to worry about what someone else didn’t have.</p>
<p>My mom, she wanted to see equal rights for the community, not just for herself. And I think that’s why she fought. So it just took that kind of a person to do it. Because a lot of people, they had a job, they didn’t want to rock the boat and be out canvassing for someone else to—hey, sidewalks, oh, I haven’t ever had sidewalks! What am I going to do with sidewalks? I don’t care! My mom thought that was not right, because she saw the world different. And they were just content.</p>
<p>And I think Mom could’ve been content. But she didn’t take a lot of stuff. Didn’t like talking down. She would stand up for my dad, because my dad was like that. He didn’t have a lot of education, but she was with him. I think when he retired he went down social security office and my dad said, well, where do I need to sign? She said, you sign right here, boy. And my mom said, what? And a few curse words came out. She let the person know that my dad was not a boy. She said, I don’t know where you’re from, but we don’t have any boys in our neighborhood that’s 65 years old. So he is no blank-blank boy. We got that straight. Someone else was like, whoa! Okay, wrong person to pick on here. But she stood up for what she felt was right, and then she didn’t want to take anything less.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you think that—you kind of said earlier that it seemed like those were the most educated were kind of those that were more willing to push. Did you see a correlation between education level and the involvement in civil rights and equal rights?</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah. And equal rights?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, civil rights and equal rights—like pushing for equal rights.</p>
<p>Barton: Oh. I was going to say, no. Education level doesn’t mean that you’re going to be treated any better.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right.</p>
<p>Barton: No, that didn’t mean that. But I mean, the more educated they were, the more they were more likely to speak out. Because some of the guys are probably not too good at expressing themselves when they’re limited on—Because I mean, like my dad—I don’t read a lot myself—or hardly any—but I think I’m a little bit in a different level than he was. But not being able to read at all and express himself, he could probably tell you how he felt about things but I never heard him say anything. Other than the fact that he knew he couldn’t get a job because he voted for the wrong person that got in—or that didn’t get in. My mom, she saw the world a little bit different, because with her life experiences and things I think that—like I said, she had some college and she saw what could happen. She just didn’t put up with a lot of stuff. She would go and fight for better conditions.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Barton: Like I tell my kids, I said, getting an education is big for us. We wanted want our kids to get a good education. And I said, the more education you get, I said, you’ll make more and you might get treated better, because you’re at that level, and you just always try to be the best. Am I answering that correctly? Did I get off a tangent again, I have to be careful.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, no, no. It’s one of those questions that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer.</p>
<p>Barton: But I just think that if you get an education, then your life’s going to be a whole lot better. Because the challenges that you meet and face, you can deal with a lot more, sometimes, that you’re not struggling just trying to make a day-to-day to live and eat and stuff like that. So, it is a better life for you. You can get out and say, okay, if I can’t work here, I know I can go here, because I got credentials that say I can do it, or I can move somewhere else and get in and do that. That’s what we taught our kids to make sure that they got a good start by getting an education—I think that’s the big thing—and staying out of trouble.</p>
<p>It’s like, if you wanted to—out of Hanford where they pay you well for this area, you don’t want to have anything on your record. If you get arrested and you go out there and it shows up on your record, you’re not going to even get hired. You can forget it. Because you have to have the clearance. I think it’s even more so, because it’s not only the record, but they—</p>
<p>When I left, they would come in and say, okay, we’re going to run your credit score. I go, what? The guy ran mine and he said, yours is better than mine! I said, well, I guess that’s a good thing, huh? [LAUGHTER] Probably you shouldn’t run mine anymore then.</p>
<p>But they look at stuff like that, what kind of person you might be, would you be willing to accept a bribe or something like that, or would you give a secret up because you’re struggling? They want to just know all your background, we would get fingerprinted, we would get all of that done. If we get in trouble, you got to call them and let them know if you got arrested, and depending on the severity of your crime whether you’re going to be working or not.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah, so, you just keep your nose clean and work hard if you want to move up the ladder. It’s not that way in every case, but it’s a little bit harder because some of the things—like in the trades, you just can’t go out there and say, okay, I’m going to move into this job without going to school for it. You have to go to school. But once you get out there and you know what’s going on, it’s likely if you just do your job and do it well and stay out of trouble, you can do okay. That’s kind of—I don’t know. I don’t know if I knew my job very well, but I knew how to play the system enough to stay out there. [LAUGHTER] I figured it out. Yeah, I figured it out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, segregation, civil rights and how they impacted your life?</p>
<p>Barton: Help me, babe.</p>
<p>Kathleen Barton: [LAUGHTER] I think if it hadn’t been for the things that were done when you were a child, you would never have gone to college and you and I would never have met, and you wouldn’t have your kids today. Your life would have been considerably different because they stopped school segregation when you were young.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah. Whittier was pretty much, I think probably 98% black. And then in high school, there was a bunch of fights all the time. The black and white kids—there was a lot of fights. But I didn’t get into any. I had a lot of fights, but I was fighting with the black kids. I don’t know how that worked out. [LAUGHTER] That’s who I was fighting with, all those guys I grew up with. I would see that a lot, people getting skirmishes.</p>
<p>Like in my—like I took some shop classes, like I took automotive class. And the guy said, okay, we’re going to make you the guy that they got to. We’re going to make you the lead in my shop class. So I didn’t see a lot of that. I struggled with my other grades a little bit, but my shop classes, it was kind of a relief because I could pick up on that stuff pretty good and do okay and just have fun.</p>
<p>I didn’t get in any fights—one—a couple at my school, but like I said it was with black kids, but I never had fight with any of the white kids. But I would see the struggle. Then the drugs came along and that made it a lot bad—pretty bad in the ‘60s and stuff when the drugs came in and a lot of people just went downhill after that. I’d see a lot of guys, just—it was terrible. Arrests and deaths and it just took a toll on a lot of people. I think that was the big thing that happened. It was kind of sad. So that made struggles a lot worse, because some were not being able to work. So my mom always said, if you’re not going to work, you’re going to steal. So it’s what they did a lot of times. I could count a lot of guys that just took to doing bad things to survive.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Well, Keith, thank you so much for coming in and taking the time to interview with us today.</p>
<p>Barton: Yeah.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/p3iRUDRiS88">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
FFTF
Energy Northwest
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1969-1975 1979-2015
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Marion Keith Barton
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
School integration
Affirmative Action
Nuclear industry
Nuclear energy
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Description
An account of the resource
Keith Barton was born in Pasco, Washington in 1951 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1969-1975 and 1978-2015.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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05/01/2018
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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e505b5a0d33ff5467de00ab9299817f6
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1d549236d7131465cdccfda6dfdcff75.mp4
c97c0371a3e7620cabaaa2104cade5da
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Dallas Barnes
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: Hi. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an interview with Dallas Barnes on March 22, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking about Dallas and his experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record can you state and spell your full legal name for us?</p>
<p>Dallas Barnes: Dallas Barnes; D-A-L-L-A-S B-A-R-N-E-S</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thanks, Dallas. Let’s talk about your life before you came; are you from the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Barnes: I’ve been around the Tri-Cities for about 60 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: 60 years? Okay.</p>
<p>Barnes: Quite a while.</p>
<p>Franklin: When and where were you born?</p>
<p>Barnes: I was born in Arkansas.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, and what year?</p>
<p>Barnes: 1940.</p>
<p>Franklin: 1940, okay. When did you first come to the Tri-Cities area?</p>
<p>Barnes: In 1952.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why did you come?</p>
<p>Barnes: I came because my mother came up here to be with her sister because Hanford was going and employment was supposed to be good.</p>
<p>Franklin: Her sister would be your aunt?</p>
<p>Barnes: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did your aunt work out at Hanford?</p>
<p>Barnes: No, she actually had a house and was actually providing some of the meal services to people who needed a lunch to go to work and a place to stay after they got off work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your mother came for job reasons then?</p>
<p>Barnes: She did, she did. We didn’t come from Arkansas; we actually came from Saint Louis to Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. What was life like in St. Louis?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, certainly it was segregated. I came when I was at age twelve and didn’t necessarily know about segregation at that point. I lived in an all-segregated community, went to segregated schools, and didn’t necessarily know any different other than just the urban life. Street cars, busses, sidewalks and a little grass, those type of things in the city.</p>
<p>Franklin: But you were certainly aware that you lived in a segregated society. Did you--</p>
<p>Barnes: In St. Louis not nearly as much as I did when I moved to Pasco from St. Louis. We had all of the things—we had teachers, principals, doctors, schools, things like that in our local neighborhood, as well as the gangs and the churches and all of the things that go along with urban living.</p>
<p>Franklin: How was Pasco different?</p>
<p>Barnes: Pasco, when I came we had tumble weeds and horny toads, and people were scattered about. There wasn’t necessarily a community where we lived—a community in the sense of congested neighborhoods—but moreover, a very loose semi-rural community. So it was different.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were your first impressions when you arrived in Pasco?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, wasn’t quite sure. I got off of the train and the place I was going to live in was next to the train tracks. It was a little bit windy and I saw a tumbleweed run down the road and I didn’t quite know what that was. But all was well, because I was greeted by family and that was a good thing. My first impression was fine: I was meeting with family. And as far as the rural community, there was a lot of open space. And so my very first impression was, you know, just—my goodness, here is a real difference.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I imagine a real difference from St. Louis. Where was the first place you stayed after you arrived?</p>
<p>Barnes: With my aunt. In her house apartment if-you-will type-thing. She had rooms that she rented to some of the workers at Hanford, and we stayed in one of the rooms there when we first got here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you get to know any of the workers—the people that worked out of Hanford?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, yes, but they were transient in a sense. They would get up, they come get their lunch and they go work and I would go to school and so we didn’t necessarily have a relationship if you are talking about a community-type regular involvement—we didn’t have that. Moreover, the business at the time that I came was people that was working and supposedly making money.</p>
<p>Franklin: That was the main reason why they were there?</p>
<p>Barnes: Pretty much.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your aunt’s house was in east Pasco?</p>
<p>Barnes: No, it actually was in west Pasco but so close to east Pasco because the difference between east and west Pasco was the train tracks. And we lived in west Pasco next to the train tracks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Kind of as far east as west Pasco went?</p>
<p>Barnes: As far east as west Pasco went.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Barnes: That’s right.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did you—how long did you stay with your aunt, and when did you move into your own place?</p>
<p>Barnes: Oh, I’d imagine we moved in there may be within a few months, no more than a year. I don’t recall exactly, but it wasn’t that long, because there were other apartments across the street and we moved from her house to an apartment right across the street.</p>
<p>Franklin: Still in west Pasco?</p>
<p>Barnes: Yes, still in west Pasco still next to the train tracks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was it just you and your mother? Did you have any siblings?</p>
<p>Barnes: I had siblings; all of them were left in St. Louis, and it was just me and my mom who came up.</p>
<p>Franklin: How come just you came? Are you the oldest?</p>
<p>Barnes: No, I am actually the youngest.</p>
<p>Franllin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Barnes: I am the youngest and I came because some family issues there and we needed a break and so that break was out in Washington.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, that’s wild. What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to when you first got here?</p>
<p>Barnes: When I first got here, it wasn’t that difficult. The difference between living on the west side of Pasco and the east side of Pasco is that I went to an all-white school. If I lived in east side, I went to an all—or predominantly, I should say—black school which was Whittier Elementary School at that time. But I went to Longfellow School which was predominantly white, and that’s for people who lived in west Pasco at that time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there ever any issues where you were ever made to feel unwelcome in all-white school, being that there was a majority-black school nearby?</p>
<p>Barnes: Not necessarily in the early days. When I came at twelve, I was received fairly well. You know, I certainly knew my minority status, because everybody looked differently. But I wasn’t treated extremely different. I can look back and see some things that was different, but at the time that I came I didn’t notice anything other than me being one of one or two blacks that was there in that school while all of the other blacks were at a different school. And my affiliation with those other blacks was quite simple—all you had to do was walk across the track, and we all attended the same church. So I did have a black connection after schools as well as a white connection after school, to tell you the truth.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were kind of in both--</p>
<p>Barnes: I was in both worlds.</p>
<p>Franklin: You were in both worlds. What do you know about your mother’s life before she came out here to—kind of drawn in by Hanford?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, she had an interesting life. We came from Arkansas because there were opportunities in St. Louis. Things was not good in Arkansas for people of color, black ones in particular. My father at that time worked in a packing company—a meat packing company—and jobs were plentiful. He was a military service person and so were all my brothers were. And jobs were plentiful there in the factories, and shoe factories, and garment factories there in St. Louis, as well as domestic work for the ladies who want to put on their aprons and go out and be of domestic help for the white folks who wanted to have people do some house work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, very fairly common job for African American women.</p>
<p>Barnes: Especially during that time, oh, absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned that early on there were not real issues with going to a predominantly white school, but you kind of alluded that maybe later on there was a conflict?</p>
<p>Barnes: Later on, after elementary school, then there was only one junior high school.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, for every—for white and black.</p>
<p>Barnes: For white and blacks. As I went into junior high school—we’re still talking about the early ‘50s—‘52, ‘53 or ’54—whatever the time was in there. There wasn’t many, many blacks in there, but those who were there they had jobs and there wasn’t a poverty line per se if you will; people working at Hanford and doing the domestic thing. But in junior high school, I did notice that people tend to cluster together: the blacks who were from the east side of Pasco had their friends there and in junior high school they maintain those friendships. And because I was part of the church community and the other community, I could fit in with that as well and my classmates from Longfellow Grade School as well, still again I was in both communities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there ever any incidences that pulled at you to one side or the other? Did you find yourself in an awkward position?</p>
<p>Barnes: In junior high school?</p>
<p>Franklin: Or in high school.</p>
<p>Barnes: Oh, certainly, as I got out of high school and as I got older, certainly, oh, absolutely. But I am not sure where you want me to go from my junior high school experience into high school or college or adulthood. I’m not sure where you want me to jump this at this particular point. We were traveling from grade school to junior high there for a minute.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s true. Let’s keep, I guess, going by—chronologically.</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, the sort of chronological thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Then we’ll return. I wonder if you can describe life in the community when you first arrived here and in junior high, what did you do in your spare time and were there any important community events?</p>
<p>Barnes: Mostly there was the baseball, horned toads, there was fishing on the river. I would say that there was a quite robust community life for the black kids. We were living in a segregated community there on the east side—not totally segregated; there were some white folks that were involved in that. But during the junior high days, it was the same. We had representation and in many of the classrooms; maybe two or three blacks in the classroom with one or two or three Asian folks. Still again in the junior high years, there wasn’t that much notice on my part of me being treated that much differently on the basis of race during my junior high years. Oh, there was an occasional comment—but this is looking back as opposed as experience with a teacher or two who might have had—looking back here again, maybe an attitude towards blacks as opposed to whites. But not so much that I want to say that it was a major problem for me. The one or two people there could be easily avoided, and everything else was okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: In what ways was the segregation in Pasco different or similar to the segregation in the South in St. Louis and in Arkansas that you would’ve grown up in?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, the difference in Pasco is that you knew that you were being discriminated against. Here looking back at it for you to be on the east side—and as you study and know this stuff—that that was part of the plan, for settling the Tri-Cities, is for blacks to be located on the east side of Pasco. And that would be a looking-back.</p>
<p>I can remember—I’m not sure if I was in junior high school; I think it might have been in early high school—of segregated lunch counters there in Pasco. Where, if you were to go into the drugstore where the lunch counters were, then there was the little corner were blacks would normally sit at and maybe two or three stools while the rest of the counter was white. So that was noticeable to me; I do recall those incidents.</p>
<p>I recall sometimes when you go into clothing stores that you seem to be awful careful that some of the merchants didn’t want you to try on your product before you buy it. You bought it. You assume it will fit. I guess they didn’t want you to contaminate a shoe or a dress, in case somebody white might be interested in putting it on afterwards. I don’t know, but that’s what I think. Because that’s the way it was in some stores.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. There’s a pretty famous case of discrimination where a lunch counter was sued in Pasco. This would have been before you got there, but I was wondering if you ever heard of the Hazel Scott case?</p>
<p>Barnes: I did hear of the Hazel Scott case. I think she came in and was refused service somewhere, but I think that was in a restaurant close to the railroad tracks, because I’m not sure if she came in by rail or whatever it was, and that service was refused. I don’t know a lot of detail about it, but I did hear about it and I know about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, let’s see here. Running down my questions. You mentioned that you attended church.</p>
<p>Barnes: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Which church did you attend?</p>
<p>Barnes: I attended the church—the Morning Star Baptist Church.</p>
<p>Franklin: That was a—to my understanding, that’s a pretty prominent fixture in the African American community then and--</p>
<p>Barnes: And now, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: What role did the church play in the community then?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, it was the gathering place, pretty much like it was in the South. I understand it was founded by some people who would meet in their homes and then as the home gathering grew, then they started a church. From those churches then we had some other churches over time to split off and get a couple of other Baptist churches in the east Pasco community or in the community. But it was quite central: it was the place that people meet, it’s the place we buried our dead, it’s the place that we married each other, it was the place where you could go and get your spirits lifted.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions, including food, that people brought from the places that they came from?</p>
<p>Barnes: No, a lot of laughter, if you want to go that route, and a lot of comfort and feeling in being accepted among your own community. There was always a release, because I always sensed the tension when you go into the other communities. There’s a difference between being invited somewhere and feeling welcomed. Well, in the black community, you are actually welcome; in the white community you might have been invited to spend your money, but just don’t stay too long. And don’t seek to be a part of that community.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s an excellent analysis.</p>
<p>Lori Larson: I have a question; is that possible?</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Larson: You mentioned that elementary and junior high that you were a part of the—outside the school you were part of the white community. What did that entail?</p>
<p>Barnes: That entailed me riding my bicycle up and down the streets and chasing horned toads with my schoolmates and some of them owned shops there in town. And certainly as I was riding my bike with them and playing with them I was always welcome in their shops and I was treated very nicely by their folks. I was one of the Longfellow folks or the McLoughlin High School folks and felt that way—sincerely felt that way—by the people that I associated with.</p>
<p>Franklin: Awesome, thank you. What opportunities, or were there opportunities, available here that were not available where you or your parents came from?</p>
<p>Barnes: Opportunities such as?</p>
<p>Franklin: Such as—this could include education, work, housing or social or recreational activities.</p>
<p>Barnes: No, we were pretty much—as I still look at it, I think about it, the blacks who were not working at Hanford—and there’s a thing about Hanford and I’ll tell you about that in just a second. But most of the blacks who were not working for Hanford either worked weeding beans and picking grapes and doing some of the field work as migrants. I did that myself. Also—or as domestics. You either go out and go to Richland or Kennewick, clean houses for somebody or cut their grass or something like that. And then you go home and if you were in good shape you would take home a half a chicken or something like that they didn’t eat from the day, you know what I’m saying, that type of thing. It was an acceptable kind of a lifestyle, and people tend to be all right with that because you could still go and pick grapes, there was jobs or pull weeds, be a domestic if you are not working at Hanford.</p>
<p>If you were working at Hanford, then you were in a little better shape, because your paycheck was regular and you had a little bit more status in the community. Although you might be absent a lot, but when you did come around, you were in good shape and made sure that the community was in good shape by spending your money in the community or paying your tithes or whatever you did in church and representing the young people of working hard and getting ahead.</p>
<p>Franklin: I want to jump ahead for just a second, because this question is in my mind and you had mentioned how things were different for people who worked at Hanford than others. One of the things in this project that we are trying to find is what was the relationship between the African American community and Hanford, and was it different than the relationship between Hanford and the white community.</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, it depends on how you look at it. If we were to take a look at the times, if we look at the times, Hanford got started at about ‘43, ‘44, ’45—somewhere during the war time. At that time, things were very well segregated in our country—even the military was segregated at that particular time. Most of the people who migrated up here to work for Hanford were from the South, I think at that time, and maybe even now you find a lot of people from Arkansas from all places—that’s where we were born at—and some of the other places. And they brought that particular attitude and culture with them to the Hanford Site. And so we do know that Hanford was very much segregated: blacks and whites. As time went on maybe down in the ‘60s—this is before Affirmative Action came along and Art Fletcher there in the ‘60s—I’m not sure if people talk to you about that in some of your other interviews. But prior to that, it was a prize for a black to work inside a building. You see, if you had a job at Hanford, you were going to be working outside, either as a laborer or something like that, but inside as a clerk or something like that—I don’t know what the cooks and all those folks experienced. But I did hear talk among the men folks about just simply having a job and getting some overtime and things like that. And I did hear talk, as time went on, about having a job were you would work inside a building. Even as a janitor, that was supposed to be a prize kind of a job for a black man.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, because it signified a space that they had been excluded from--</p>
<p>Barnes: Yes, absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: --out on Site. It may have not been a highly skilled job, but it would have been one that maybe would’ve been looked on as more permanent or more status than--</p>
<p>Barnes: It was more status because if a black—and during the times—had a position that a white person could fill—not during those times; during these times, but that’s further on in the discussion, I guess. But the fact of it is, if a white person could fill that job and be advanced more than a black, then the white person got that job. If it was janitor and it was on the inside, out of the elements, then that’s a white man’s job. If you’re going to have to put on a rain suit and get out there in the elements, then that’s a black man’s job. And you found that in the military and everywhere else. During those times, the whites had the privilege—that’s the little comment that they make these days—and blacks did not.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, yup. There seems to be—I’ve done several of these interviews—there seems to be somewhat of a sense of betrayal by members of the black community that they felt that their family that worked at Hanford may not have been fully informed about the dangers that had been out there or they had not been properly compensated for some of the dangers that they experienced. I’m wondering if you could speak to that.</p>
<p>Barnes: I don’t have any firsthand experience with that, but from what I would think about that, that would be the case because that would be consistent with everything else that went along during those times. They used to make funny comments about who was your N-word last year? Which means, who picked up the worst end of the stick. So if people knew that the radiation was high in a certain area, they certainly did not—it’s like in the military: who on earth do you think went up there on the front line to deliver the ammo? My brother got shot doing that, but he didn’t get killed, but he got wounded doing that. If you were to explore the military history, who do you think delivered the bombs and got blown up on the ships and all of that? So it wouldn’t surprise me a bit although I don’t have no firsthand experience on that, and knowing that the more dangerous situation is, the more expendable black people are.</p>
<p>Franklin: Thank you. In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation and racism?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well—are you talking about now or then? [LAUGHTER] I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter, because if you’re last hired, you’re first fired—you’ve heard that; I’m sure somebody maybe in your interviews may have talked about that. If you have to have a special law called Equal Employment Opportunity, that in and of itself tells you how things are structured, and that if you’re a person of color, that you’re on the short end of the stick. Not too many white folks had to go to school or get a job because of an Equal Opportunity Employment. You don’t have to worry about getting a house because you’re a Fair Housing Community or an Equal Educational Opportunity product. Everywhere a black person tried to find—wherever they found themselves, there was always a special legal permission or allowance for them to be there. And it had a different name to go with it. You want to go to school? Well, yeah, we got Title IV so that you can come on in. You want black people here? Give us some Title IV money and we’ll welcome them in. And if you are familiar with all that, for women it was Title IX, and so forth and so on. And that’s the way it was: very deliberate, very meticulous and certainly very clear as to who the targets of the special consideration was for. Black people, at that time—now we’re talking about that time. Now it may be immigrants or somebody else, but at that time, it was blacks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. In attempt to change the imbalance, but certainly those that had the privilege may not have seen it that way.</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, don’t get us wrong. We are talking about me coming to the Tri-Cities in 1952, but don’t forget during the struggle between 1952 and 19—well, it’s really in the ‘70s—well, it’s really continuing—but the Civil Rights Act didn’t pass until 1964. We had all of that time of struggling before you even got to where you were legally eligible for equal opportunity. So it’s just obvious, during those times, it was hell. I mean, I could use some other polite word, but that’s what it was. In my mind it’s just crystal clear as that light you have shining here. To me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and certainly after the Civil Rights Act of ‘64--</p>
<p>Barnes: ‘68, ‘54. You know in ’54, <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em>—come on, all of that. Supreme Court action that broke up segregation and all of this, and so the people who lived before 1964, which was much of Hanford, especially the building of Hanford, it was just common practice to segregate blacks out, give them the short end of the stick. And that was common practice because most of the people who settled or came to Hanford or to the Tri-Cities came from the South. They came from the South where segregation and Jim Crow—we’re still in Jim Crow. That’s how come you can’t even serve a celebrity. We’re still in Jim Crow, you can’t live where you want.</p>
<p>Franklin: Similar to Hazel Scott.</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, that’s right; you see what I mean.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, it’s not like civil law passes and magically--laws also don’t—they provide a mechanism for change, but they don’t initiate the change.</p>
<p>Barnes: That’s right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. This is a very vague question, but maybe you can think of a specific example. Could you describe any interactions you or your parents had with other people from other parts of the Tri-Cities area? Anything that comes to your mind.</p>
<p>Barnes: Not necessarily, I’m not sure if you are talking about other people of color or just other people in general?</p>
<p>Franklin: In general.</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, during those particular times, don’t forget it was much of any of the work at Hanford was based on a need-to-know. You could hardly ask another person if it was daylight outside without them asking you, what is your need to know, because security was just that tight based upon the work they were doing in Hanford. I did work in Hanford when I was—in the ‘60s—in the early ‘60s—and even then, it was a need-to-know. You had your badges, and your badges allowed you to certain places, and you could go to work in a suit and put your jumpsuit or whatever you’re going to do behind those walls and no one would know what you did.</p>
<p>That was an interesting kind of observation that was made later on, because regardless of your position was at Hanford, when you went to work you could have one presentation; while you were at work you could have another presentation. You know, your status may not be as high when you walk through the gates, because you had to un-robe and dress up and put on various outfits and so forth and so on. But the point I was making by saying that is that the interaction with people all over, if they worked for Hanford, you didn’t talk about it. You talked about fertilizers, lawnmowers and upkeep, and whether or not you drove a Ford or a Chevy or something like that.</p>
<p>Franklin: And the weather, as long as it’s not out at Hanford.</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah. Don’t talk about the weather too much; some isotope might be falling out the sky. Because you don’t—seriously, incidentally. [LAUGHTER] But, no, everything was sort of superficial but we got along well because everybody did it; hello, how are you? Fine, church was great, yeah, sure enough—that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Thank you. Before high school—and I think after this couple questions we’ll switch, right, because it sounds like kind of more a time of change in your life. But before then, did segregation and racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Barnes: In high school?</p>
<p>Franklin: Before then.</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, let’s see. Coming from St. Louis I didn’t necessarily know, coming from St. Louis and the urban living where, during my days in the classroom, I recall girls sitting in one side of the classroom and boys sitting on the other, and during recess the girls played on one side of the playground and the boys on the other, and that little strip between the two was just a hill as they competed for the top dog in the minds of the ladies or whatever. And then as far as—you were talking about competition, I’m sorry I--</p>
<p>Franklin: How did segregation and racism affect your education?</p>
<p>Barnes: During high school, there were some teachers—white—in fact, all of my education in Pasco was without any black influence whatsoever. There was not a black teacher in the school district. I don’t even know if there was a black teacher in the Tri-Cities. But—I can’t speak for all the rest of them—but for me there was not a black teacher who influenced my education during my junior high and high school days, period. Okay.</p>
<p>Given that, there were some white folks who were interested in my future and asked me what I was going to do. And there was white folks who in high school was hoping that I could go and be a body fender man because vocations were good. That’s an acceptable trade. And was pretty much concerned about that, and there were some who might have thought that there may be something else like being a teacher that I should at least further my education there in high school.</p>
<p>So, I’m going to say that I had an exposure to vocational education and less exposure, but nonetheless exposure to maybe higher education which could have been just junior college. But still again, there was that interest, some of the teachers were interested in my future, educational future.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any other people that influenced you as a child?</p>
<p>Barnes: Influenced me as a child, like what?</p>
<p>Franklin: It could include family members, friends or other teachers. People that influenced you to kind of—positive influence--</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, there were community members who went to all-black colleges who were quite articulate and usually those people would go to the city council and petition the council for paved roads or water or whatever it was that wasn’t there in the east Pasco community. That was sort of impressive because you could tell that they were very fluent in the way that they presented their concerns to the city council. And actually had some backbones in doing so. That was one of the things that came out of the South, the same—like the people who came out of the South under segregation and was fighting for a better presence in the scheme of things in life actually had some commitment to it. So there was an influence there.</p>
<p>I remember there was a reverend in Lakey who was in the community and he was on this—I think it was called the Town Hall. In fact, he came through the community last year. There was that religious group, they call it the Town Hall Group or—I’ve forgotten what they called them—and he was a minister at the Methodist church—a young man—and people used to just gather around him and just listen him to talk about not only religious-type things but moving ahead in life, and just good role modeling on his part. There was him and there was some other men, the brick masons in town, other people here were other people who certainly would—there were other men folks who had an interest in the community development that was impressive, I thought. That I know, I should say, I didn’t think, I know—and that was an influence on me, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. When you were going into high school—I guess we’re getting into the later part of the ‘50s—did things begin to change locally for you in regard to race relations or the change between the white and black communities?</p>
<p>Barnes: Right. Now, we were immune here in the Tri-Cities to all of the noise that was going on down in the South. You know, in 1954 we’re talking about <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em>; we’re talking about 1957, we’re talking about George Wallace and standing up there and taking the strongest military force on earth to get little kids to go to high school. Strongest military force on earth. Imagine that. [LAUGHTER] To a get a few kids. All of that sort of—not sort of—it did have an impact on me, because I was not a part of that.</p>
<p>Now, part of my junior high days and playing baseball on the sandlots and all of that, I was sort of athletic, and it just seemed to me that the folks that looked like me was taking a beating and I wasn’t doing too much about it. Probably like the veterans did where Pearl Harbor got bombed and people went to join the drafts so that they could be part of the action to defend the country. Well, all that civil rights noise was going on back south in the Midwest and I’m sitting out here chasing horny toads and playing basketball, and doing pretty good but not affected by it. But it did affect me. The national crisis for black people was a calling for me to play my part in doing whatever I could to fight the battle that was going to benefit me or my kids or whoever else was coming along.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you see as action that you could have in that?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, one of the things that we were doing—and I have to give credit to the white folks who were more sensitive to this than I was—the ones who actually came in to the black community and educated us on what was happening to us. And I also want to give a recognition to the white folks that came into the community to educate the black kids the tutorial services. Sometimes—I understand that other white folks didn’t like other white folks coming over educating black kids to help them understand their school work and all that other stuff, but they did it.</p>
<p>What did we do? I participated in marches up and down the street. I think that was about the size of it. There were other things going on there, too. I may as well just mention it, because it is true. At that particular time the LDS Church—the Latter Day Saints Church—had this particular belief about blacks and their worthiness of priesthood, things like that. So I got into a discussion with friends and things like that, and when you put it all in perspective, if you got—during those times, if you got laws that are going to segregate against you on housing and employment and everything else and then you got a whole religious institution with millions of folks heavily representing the area that believe that your soul isn’t quite ready for heavenly matters. Now you’re really in a bind.</p>
<p>Now I’m also going to say this, but it was members of the LDS Church that were some of my biggest supporters on moving forward, too. I want to throw that out there. I’ll tell you, if you want to know what a strain was, it’s to look of person face-to-face and have that person tell you that you are not ready yet to receive blessings that they have. Now that is a sensation. And they were sincere about it, and good people, too. I don’t want to say that there were a big, humungous explosion, but it did require to do some deep thinking about it; there’s an apparent contradiction, at least in my mind.</p>
<p>Franklin: That is quite a contradiction.</p>
<p>Barnes: It was. Because, I have to tell you, my relationship with my LDS friends was first-rate. But to look at them face-to-face and they’d tell me I’m just quite not ready yet. [LAUGHTER] That actually will make your blood corpuscles turn different shapes.</p>
<p>Franklin: I would imagine so.</p>
<p>Barnes: They were serious about it; they were dead serious about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, it was part of their doctrine.</p>
<p>Barnes: That’s what I’m talking about. And you’re living in a community that is the case. You got all these people from the South thinking one way, you come out here and you discover—because nobody talks about this; you have to talk it out however you find it out. Then you have millions of people over here thinking another way. And in both ways, you lose.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, that’s what it’s like—that’s what it was to me growing up here.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mentioned marches earlier. I’m wondering if you could talk about those—some details, where they were and what your role was there.</p>
<p>Barnes: My role as a young person was just to be a participant; I wasn’t necessarily a leader. In my high school day it was, who’s going to stand up on this side of the issue? Whose parents are going to lose their job because you’re standing on this side of the issue? Or are you going to lose any stand in the community, because here you are standing up, marching and then your friends are standing on the side, they’re not marching with you, looking at you march and all of this because some kid got bombed down in Louisiana, Birmingham; or Martin Luther King has gotten shot; or none of the black are being employed in the grocery stores, or any of that.</p>
<p>There was two marches I remember. I remember marching in Pasco and I remember marching in Kennewick. I’m not exactly sure; I think it was the NAACP who sponsored those marches and sometimes they had to have people come in—because the leader may have been in Yakima, Spokane or Seattle. They would come to the Tri-Cities to help the people who didn’t have organizational skills to organize and let it be known that we are concerned, too, about the condition of black people and their wellbeing in the community.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember the years of those marches?</p>
<p>Barnes: They had to be in the ‘50s, and I’m trying to think if they were in the ‘60s. I think they may have been in maybe the ‘50s or ‘60s—somewhere there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Was there any outcome of those marches?</p>
<p>Barnes: No, because they were pretty much all involved with the same kind of—it was all plugged into the national concerns: better jobs, better educational opportunities, better job opportunities, type thing. The regular things that people was concerned about—equal employment, equal housing, equal educational opportunities.</p>
<p>Franklin: When did you graduate high school?</p>
<p>Barnes: ‘59.</p>
<p>Franklin: ’59. And you said that in the early ‘60s you went out to work at Hanford.</p>
<p>Barnes: I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that your first job after high school?</p>
<p>Barnes: It was. It was, except for when I went to junior college, I had a job changing sprinklers and working at the golf course, because I was an athlete and part of your scholarship was that they would loan you the money to go to school and you worked to pay off the loan. So I had that job before I went to work at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you go to CBC?</p>
<p>Barnes: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you graduate from CBC?</p>
<p>Barnes: I did.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was your degree on?</p>
<p>Barnes: It was—what was it? I’m trying to think. I think it may have been in the sciences, but I know it was just the liberal arts, AA degree.</p>
<p>Franklin: What sorts of work did you do at Hanford?</p>
<p>Barnes: Believe it or not, I was one of the guys that worked on the inside.</p>
<p>Franklin: On the inside?</p>
<p>Barnes: I worked on the inside.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Barnes: I worked on the inside and my job was to—actually to change samples in the sodium iodide crystal which would determine what isotopes was in whatever the sample was. Like testing the rain water that we talked about earlier, or testing the river to see how much contamination may had been in there, and testing anything else they brought in that need to be tested for various isotopes. </p>
<p>Franklin: Was this in the 300 Area?</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, it was 300.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you remember what building you were in?</p>
<p>Barnes: 326.</p>
<p>Franklin: 326, yeah that sounds about right. What on-the-job training did you receive, if any?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, I think I had my six months’ probation or whatever that they normally do. And it wasn’t necessarily that challenging. They would pay me to go to school and I took advantage of that. And, oh yeah, I went to school, and that’s where the little scientific effort came, because they was paying for me to be better at what I was doing. So I learned a couple, two to three formulas there, to learn to calculate the half-life of various kinds of isotopes and how to calibrate the machines and things like that. That was about it, there was some schooling and on-the-job training type thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you require any skills or experience on the job that helped you later in life?</p>
<p>Barnes: I actually quit that job—well, I went to work for General Electric and when they diversified or got out of the picture, then I went to work to a company called US Testing. Because the US Testing got that part of analyzing certain isotopes from certain environmental areas. Your question was, did that help me in life?</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you require any skills or experience that helped you--</p>
<p>Barnes: Oh yeah, that helped me, yeah. I mean, I learned experience, I can talk a little of that talk. I’m surprised I’m able to recall that right now. But it did, it gave me a lot of confidence. The thing about the scientific community, either you’re right or wrong, and if you want your job, you’d better be right, if not all the time, so close to it that you can have the confidence that your calculations are right and that everything is going on. It was a good confidence-builder, the collegiality that I had in my job was great. It was great. I actually quit that job after Kennedy got killed and some other things went on to join the War on Poverty.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh! Oh, okay Johnson—Lyndon Johnson.</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah. To join the War on Poverty, and the Community Action Committee and things like that was just getting started here in the community. I quit that job to take a position there so that I, again, I could make my contribution to what going on in society instead of taking care of their—you know, doing a pipette and a beaker and a Bunsen burner and that type of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that pretty much what a typical day was like at Hanford for you?</p>
<p>Barnes: It was. And I recall a conversation that I had with my boss who was first-rate—first-rate—and he called me in one day and we were talking about where am I going from here, because you could get pretty much stuck in there. It’s a small company so everyone else is going to stay there for 40 years like you, or whatever it is, if you wanted to. He was talking about moving up and if I had any type of talent or been able to converse with people get along and whatever my athletic talents allowed me to do in terms of being competitive and this and that and so forth. He made a point, he said, Dallas, you would be very good at sales, but we can’t do that. Because white folks won’t buy from you, he said that.</p>
<p>Franklin: He said that to you?</p>
<p>Barnes: Oh, very--his and our relationship was first-rate, first-rate. First-rate. He said, I would love to do it but I can’t do it, because they won’t buy from you. He was just acknowledging that our society is prejudiced and they will not buy from a black person. And he said why don’t you go back and finish your degree in chemistry or whatever the science might be, and be the first-rate scientist that you can be. That way you can work in the lab, make a whole lot of money, but don’t nobody know who you are, you see what I mean? It’s just your product is marketable. In essence he’s saying your product is marketable; you’re not. You see what I mean?</p>
<p>And it made sense, don’t get me wrong. I had to digest all of that, and it made sense, especially as I got older and understood it better. But we did have that conversation and he was trying to move me forward so that I could make some money and have a decent life. But he was telling me to stay away from sales because those white folks would not buy from black folks. So be a scientist. Let your product be the best that it can be and people would never know that you did it and your company would pay you well and all of that, and you could do all the things that money would allow you to do.</p>
<p>Franklin: But you obviously didn’t go that route.</p>
<p>Barnes: No, I didn’t. Because the calling for social involvement was a much louder call, much louder call. You can’t have kids out there taking a beating while you’re sitting in a lab titrating some damn sample. You just can’t do it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Your conscience wouldn’t let you do it?</p>
<p>Barnes: It wouldn’t let me do it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Before you move on to that I just had a couple other questions about your job at Hanford, some of these you already answered. How were you treated on the job, were you treated--?</p>
<p>Barnes: I was treated well; I was treated like everyone else. Like I say, if you make mistakes you’re not going to be there too long. [LAUGHTER] If you’re good at what you do—and very few people knew what that was because there was a need-to-know, I had a little small work group and I carried my share of the load in an acceptable manner and I was treated well on all of the jobs that I had at Hanford.</p>
<p>Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with your coworkers and supervisors outside of work?</p>
<p>Barnes: Outside of work? Well, we had a bowling team, me and my other—there were a lot of spaces. I went hunting, bird hunting, deer hunting with my colleagues and we talked a lot about tractors and whether or not you’re going to have a Toro as opposed to a Craftsman.</p>
<p>Franklin: You weren’t making that up earlier? You were really serious.</p>
<p>Barnes: I’m not kidding about that. That is the truth.</p>
<p>Franklin: I guess a safe conversation?</p>
<p>Barnes: It was safe conversation. We had a bowling team there at work and every now and then they would throw a little social at work and we’ll socialize and all that and the company’s profit—that’s after we started working privately as opposed to working for the government. It was great, it really was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Could you describe the working conditions?</p>
<p>Barnes: You showed up on time because it’s almost—it wasn’t quite a conveyor belt, but the people would run in with their urine samples or whatever it is that you have to test that day, and before the half-life got away, you better chase it down and all of that. The working conditions was pretty straight 8:00 to 5:00 and usually samples come in at a certain, particular time. If you’re working at a lab, you had to treat it and after they treat it then you count it and so forth and so on. My job was pretty much regular routine; the variety came in the samples that I was going to work with. And incidentally, I had some chance to work with some moonrocks during that time. Or at least it was in the lab there and I got to see that. There was some variety, but it was routine and we all had it. You do your part, you pass it to John Doe and they do their part. And I’m sure that all of that had to deal with the security because that’s they way that Hanford worked. You never did get to know too much. You always get to know how to do your part and you do it very well.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the most difficult aspects of the job?</p>
<p>Barnes: My job at Hanford?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Barnes: I don’t know if I had any, because they moved you along as you were able to move along. In other words, I thought Hanford, when I worked there, you master this particular part then you qualify to go to the next. Like school, you pass the first grade, you can go to the second. That’s the way that it bounced along.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were conditions like in terms of health and safety?</p>
<p>Barnes: In my case, we had our badges there that it would tell us that we were exposed and we had to take a whole body count every so often. As I look back on it, I thought it was great. Because we had our badges there, if we got exposed it would show up. And part of our job—part of the job with the company that I worked with was to analyze the exposure that came on those badges for people who were out in the Area. So looking back at it, I felt pretty safe.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did your racial background figure into your work experience?</p>
<p>Barnes: My racial background figure into my work experience?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Barnes: I think that if I went to work in 1962, I’m not exactly sure when Affirmative Action came along because I know that it may have been a little bit after that.</p>
<p>Franklin: I believe so.</p>
<p>Barnes: Or maybe during that time, because I know that Hanford had to have so many--you know, they want to call it quotas and things like that—I don’t think I was affected by that. I think it came after I was out there in Hanford. And I think—I’m not exactly sure how—I got to Hanford, I applied for a position, got it however all of that was, and they get the background check, they check with your neighbors, they check with your school, they take your blood count; whatever they do to make sure that you are going to work out there real nice. But in terms of my racial—factored into this I don’t think I considered myself an Affirmative Action employee, if you know what I mean.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Barnes: I don’t think that I was that—at least I didn’t feel that I was that.</p>
<p>Franklin: We already talked about this a bit but I wanted to ask and see if anything else comes up. In what ways did security and/or secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?</p>
<p>Barnes: No more than it did to anyone else. There was nothing—if you don’t know anything, you can’t see anything. I think that Hanford made sure that no one knew too much.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gotcha.</p>
<p>Barnes: Certainly separation between work and play—being at work and being off work.</p>
<p>Franklin: What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?</p>
<p>Barnes: What I know about them?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, when I came, I knew that there were a lot of people that worked at Hanford that was back in 1952, ’53, and knew at the time that they were building Hanford and people were working there. I knew something about when Affirmative Action came along, and it was required that they do a better job in distributing minorities and women in the various levels of employment. They could be employed, but women don’t necessarily need to be in the kitchen all the time. They may want to be clerks or supervisors or chemist or whatever else, and with the other minorities too. I do remember that coming along and I do remember an effort of contractors trying to meet those obligations so that they can qualify to renew those contracts. There was efforts out to recruit minorities and historical black schools, and other communities, and make publications, and black newspapers and things like that—put ads in black newspapers, and I’m sure there were other publications, so that they would know that there were opportunities at Hanford for employment.</p>
<p>Franklin: From your perspective what were their—and “their” being African Americans that worked in Hanford—what was their most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, they were pretty much the stability of that. If you have a long-term job that’s going to pay you well then you can buy your house, and you can be a member of the community and you can send your kids to school with some decent clothes, if that was it. It was stable. It was pretty much that way for everybody here in the Tri-Cities as far as I’m concerned. That if you worked for Hanford, if you didn’t work for Hanford, then you worked for the school district, if you didn’t work for the school district, I don’t know where you worked then. But anyway any of those supporting type, trucking and foreman, pulling weeds or beans or whatever you’re doing. So, I don’t think it was much more different than regular flow of life in the Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hm, okay. I want to switch now to kind of talking about civil rights activities, Hanford and the Tri-Cities, and then by extension some of your work in the War on Poverty. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford in the Tri-Cities during your time here?</p>
<p>Barnes: Still again, getting more people to be at the various levels of employment out at Hanford was a big issue. When Affirmative Action came along, we wanted better representation on the jobs in different fields. We wanted some professional blacks working at Hanford, some chemists, some physicists, some business people, some clerks and secretaries or whatever it was. We didn’t necessarily want to be relegated to the cleaning crew out there at Hanford, whether it would be outside or inside. I do recall that there was an effort to get more professional people there and the same was true in the school districts too.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about any living conditions issues? Did that play into the civil rights efforts here?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, there is always—and I still think and hear rumors that there are certain communities that you’re not welcomed; people don’t even advertise some homes because they want to be selective to who is going to come into that neighborhood, especially those by the rivers in some places. Other than that, I hear rumors that realtors are still steering professional peoples away from Pasco and especially they may tell people that don’t want to live in east Pasco and something like that. But east Pasco as you probably have heard from others that had a bad reputation at one time, and it may still have that. But I doubt if you’ve heard very much that was all by design, by the officials who wanted east Pasco to be just that. Just, where do you want to put your homeless? Well, you certainly don’t want to put them out, down there where the boat basin is.</p>
<p>Franklin: That also reflects, too, on things like redlining and the Fair Housing Authority and things like that--</p>
<p>Barnes: All of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: --that created segregation in all of our major cities.</p>
<p>Barnes: We were concerned at one time about having police representation—I mean some minority representation, black in particular, on the police force there Pasco since blacks represented a good sizeable portion of the police business, since they put all the vice over in east Pasco. They’re located over there and then they go harvest that for whatever money they can get out of that.</p>
<p>But even then when people would qualify coming from the other places with police backgrounds and military backgrounds, there is talk that if you became a member of the police force, then they don’t want you to go police in the white communities. If you’re black, you go police in the black communities, but the white can police in the black and white community. I guess there was just a problem with having a black police officer come to a white household to settle a domestic dispute. Couldn’t handle it. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>And if you think of the times—and we’re not too far from those times. We’re talking about my lifetime and here I sit, you know what I mean? The point of it is, you still have those at the highest level—at the highest level of enforcement in all of this, saying, you can be a police officer but not in my community. So you go over and arrest the black folks there, but don’t come to the white folks and knock on somebody’s door and talk about you’re going to settle a domestic dispute. Are you kidding? They just lay it out there, some of them, and I think I may be simplifying it but that’s the way it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, I think you’re saying it really well. And you’re right about how that history’s not that old and what is happening right now around the US that speaks directly--</p>
<p>Barnes: Absolutely, absolutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: What actions were being taken to address these civil rights issues at Hanford and the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Barnes: If it wasn’t protest, we had one person who came through, Art Fletcher. Art Fletcher. He came through, he started a credit union in east Pasco. If you look up his history, I think he was one of the first blacks to play for the Los Angeles Rams. There was other programs, all kinds of—OIC, occupation old industry—something or another where you had on-the-job training and placement for underprivileged for low income or minority kids, so forth and so on. And he started the coop.</p>
<p>What else did we do? Place people in grocery stores and if they didn’t hire black we were going to boycott the stores. Boycott was going to be one of the tools we used some black representation in some of the markets. Things like that. And the thing about east Pasco at the time, we actually had a little community where there were black businesses, cafes and service stations, and things like that; whereas today I don’t think you have a one. And if you did have one, it’s just one.</p>
<p>Franklin: Were there any other important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area?</p>
<p>Barnes: Oh, yeah. There was some local people. We had a person named E.M. Magee who was a one-man demonstration—I remember that. He was an inspiration, too. E.M. Magee was a one man-demonstration. I remember picking up at the labor hall and because a lot of people I think it was a little bit fearful of the consequences if you get out there and it may make some of the white folks mad at them. They don’t want to be seen. They’d be supportive, but they didn’t want to be seen supporting people, sort of like the silent contributor. That we have today, you know other people—psst—say, I support you but don’t let nobody know.</p>
<p>Franklin: Probably—they could’ve been afraid for their job, or recrimination or retribution.</p>
<p>Barnes: Absolutely, absolutely. And then you have those people who would quit their job to get out and fight that battle. Because it’s sort of pitiful, you know what I mean? That a person would let their morals—I guess I can call it that; maybe there’s a better word for that—that a few dollars would get in the way of that. And it’s not uncommon. Please, believe me, and I’m sure you do, that money makes people do crazy stuff and compromise morals and everything else. They do it in marriages; they do it certainly for civil rights and things like that.</p>
<p>But our heroes were the ones who went against that. And we did have people, we had East Pasco Improvement Association where we would always go and petition the city council to provide better roads, to oil the roads or to put in a sewer pipe so we don’t have to have a cesspool out there in the community, or to fill the holes so the kids won’t hurt themselves or something like that, you know, to put up a stoplight.</p>
<p>Franklin: Things that were lacking in east Pasco compared to the other communities?</p>
<p>Barnes: Oh, absolutely, and in fact so lacking that we actually had an urban renewal program to come through east Pasco.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Barnes: To get rid of the blight and all of that particular kind of thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Those have such a long and storied history in America. I wanted to ask you, were you living in the Tri-Cities during that urban renewal program?</p>
<p>Barnes: Right, in fact I worked for the Urban Renewal.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, so it has—then I’m sure you’re aware of this kind of long and kind of complicated history of Urban Renewal, how often it seemed to move the problem around, or in some cases it would demolish older neighborhoods that may have had problems, but it would often result in—there were a lot of failures in public housing or in pushing people farther away from their jobs. I wondering if you could reflect on Pasco’s urban renewal and whether or not it was a success.</p>
<p>Barnes: Pasco’s urban renewal—and, in fact, I served as the relocation officer there for a while—you would come in and you demolished the houses and then you would either find them another place to stay or to help them build a house or something like that after they were compensated for that. And at that time Fair Housing and all of that was at play as well. Certainly, the east Pasco community got broken up with urban renewal, people left the area, people moved to the west side of Pasco. I guess they considered that an upgrade—and it would be, the streets were paved and everything else.</p>
<p>But Urban Renewal came through east Pasco and paved some of the streets; they had a rehab program where they actually would take some of the houses that were structurally sound and give people either grants or loan to fix them up. So we had some improvement there, then we had some builders to come in and build some low income housing and things like that. In Pasco, I think that the urban renewal had its advantages for that one little section that they did, but when blacks moved out then white flight begin.</p>
<p>Franklin: One of the other legacies of Urban Renewal.</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, you see, because as soon as black people move in—you know, they could always have one, but then there is a critical mass. And I forgot the ratio, but it’s out there in the literature somewhere, that if you get too many then the property values are expected to go down. You had—if you recall Lewis Street, south of Lewis is where the renewal took place the most, and some of the people wanted to move into the north side of that. And then you have the white flight to move out and blacks took over some of that at that particular time. And then there was an occasional one close to the tracks. Not farther west, but closer to the tracks, a little bit further than it was when I first moved to Pasco. </p>
<p>Franklin: Thank you. What were some notable successes of the civil rights efforts in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Barnes: Certainly, we saw an influx during that one time of more professional black people coming in. Because I think once Hanford and GE, and DuPont, and—I forgot them—ARCO, or some of those large contractors got out of the picture and we did more diversification. Companies made an effort to go and get people of color—blacks that I’m making reference to—and did a lot of recruiting. So we actually brought more black people to the community to work at Hanford and that built the community, too, because that built integration in the communities. You still had your need-to-know and things like that and if you really wanted to sit down, laugh out loud, you’d get the hush-hush. If you really wanted to get down and laugh loud, then you had to find a little cluster minority folks where you can do that. So one of those successes was that we brought more people into the area as supposed to laborers like we did when we were building Hanford.</p>
<p>The second part of that is that when it was required and Title IV, and all of that, where school districts and other entities got money for hiring people of color, we actually had a black superintendent in Pasco named Dave Hill—superintendent of schools—and we had principals, and teachers. The people of color—predominantly black during the time that I’m talking about, as opposed to Hispanics, which is predominantly now—they had more role models. You actually can say that I actually had a black person to contribute to my formal education. I don’t even think too many white folks these days can say that, because I don’t see that many blacks present in our school districts now as I did at that one time, if you see what I’m saying.</p>
<p>Franklin: I do. As a direct result of these civil rights laws, you’re saying that in the ‘60s and ‘70s--</p>
<p>Barnes: You actually had and affirmative effort on the parts of school districts and contractors to go and get people so that they can meet what you may call—I don’t want to call them quotas--but anyway, so you could show there is a good faith effort to make your workforce reflect the society that’s paying the bills, like tax payers.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Barnes: That type of thing. So we saw that. You don’t see that now—I don’t see that now and I’m not looking closely as I did at one time. But I don’t see representation of black teachers in the school districts. And it’s problematic, because we’ve got a whole bunch of problems as a result of no role models in the community. And I don’t see the commitment on the part of school districts to do that as I did at that one time that they actually made an effort to do it.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s really interesting. I don’t want to get too off-topic, but I’ve done some research into this area, and it seems schools now schools are more segregated than they were in the ‘70s or ‘80s because of the ongoing white flight. But it seems like the attention has shifted from that—it seems like maybe many had thought we had done enough effort or kind of structurally solved this problem, and it’s really faded. But things are worse now than they were then and that’s only getting worse as suburbanization and white flight continues.</p>
<p>Barnes: That’s right and I’m going to say that it is based on a conscientious efforts on the part of the people who is doing the flighting to do it. Because once the problem has come to their attention—it’s almost like the Civil Rights Movement itself--all of these advances or gains that I just got through talking about is with the white community being caught off guard. And so there was a pacification period that resulted in Title IX, title this, that, and so on, until, like a chess game, you organize your pieces and then you get what we got right now.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. That’s a really poignant way of looking at it.</p>
<p>Barnes: Well—[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: You just call ‘em the way you see ‘em, right</p>
<p>Barnes: You asked me to call it as I see it—</p>
<p>Franklin: I want you to.</p>
<p>Barnes: --and that’s the way I see it. And, you know, we are advanced we got all kinds of techniques to get the message out and we also got all kind of techniques to subvert efforts that we don’t want around and people.</p>
<p>Franklin: What were some of these challenges in civil rights efforts in this area?</p>
<p>Barnes: In this area?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Barnes: Mainly to get people to—well, number one to recognize we have a problem because a lot of people live in a state of denial. They say if you work hard and all that kind of stuff that you’ll get ahead and be rewarded your due. That’s not true in my experience, and in my exploration of looking for it to be true. It is not true. Hard work don’t necessarily get that. I think we are—we talk in terms of political correctness—but I think politics have contaminated honest efforts on the part of good people. I think there’s a lot of good people that got cast to the side. If you talk a lot of civil rights talk and equality talk, I don’t think that that’s a popular conversation this days.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, I would I agree with you. It seems to be very divisive in our political climate and there’s a group of—a large constellation of people who are opposed—I think opposed to that and want things to be merit-based.</p>
<p>Barnes: They call it merit-based, but as we--</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m going to use that with quotes, right—“merit-based.”</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, please. Because I think as we look at the whole history of race relations in the country, there was nothing meritorious about it. You don’t redline something on the base of merit, unless we’re talking about white privilege. You don’t necessarily pass people up in cabs when they’re ready to pay the toll. You’ve seen the little studies that do that and all of that, you don’t do that. No, no, no, no. It is not a basis of merit. During my day, there was old sayings that used to fly all the time, say, I’m white, free and 21. I’m not sure if you heard that.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, I haven’t. Can you repeat that?</p>
<p>Barnes: White, free and 21. They said that a lot when I was growing up. I’m white, free and 21, suggesting that you could do whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want. White, free and 21. I’m sure that if you google it, it probably will pop up there somewhere. And that type of thing; and who was your N last year, N-word, you know. Which means who did all that stuff--</p>
<p>Franklin: I just heard that on a podcast this morning.</p>
<p>Barnes: Oh, you see what I mean. So, it was part of the culture to make sure—and everybody wants to talk about, I’m not privileged and all this, but they just need to review a little bit more history and go sit down or something. But you know the reality of it is there unless we want to deny history there and say that the Holocaust didn’t exist or something. We got people who do that kind of crazy stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: We sure do.</p>
<p>Barnes: That’s the way it is, and it’s almost taboo to talk about it these days, and we can see that we are moving back to where we once were. The have-nots are the have-nots again, and they’re very well-complected. And the haves are pretty much white.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. How did the larger, national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts in Hanford and the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Barnes: How did the larger Civil Rights did it? People came here with different attitudes, and people don’t want necessarily to bring the problems—the national problems to this locality—and they don’t want to bring them by keeping the people of color out of this locality, that’s the way I see it.</p>
<p>This is fine, and I’m sure that as you explore the literature, you’ll find that the Northwest is supposed to be where the white folks are supposed to take over this part of the country. So you got all of your posse groups up in north Idaho and Western Washington, up there close to the Canadian Border and all that other kind of stuff. You know, we’re pretty heavily represented from Portland here, with white supremacists or whatever you want to call these people with, now, it’s-all-right-to-be-white publications floating around in the community and that type of thing.</p>
<p>The national scene—that’s what the national scene is now as I see it. I actually would say that we actually had a better time in history, where people got along a heck of a lot better than we do right now. The question is why is that so? And I’m saying it’s because the people of ill will have maneuvered the pieces like you do on a chess board to make it that way.</p>
<p>Franklin: Hmm. What was different about the civil rights effort here, if anything, than compared to the national civil rights effort?</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, the civil rights effort here was that it had its heyday and then people let that fade away. There is no replacement; there’s no recruitment; there’s not even hardly a discussion. If you take a look at it, we have gone from Black History Month, Native American, women this, to this thing that we call diversity. Diversity dilutes any particular concentrated effort. That’s why we use it.</p>
<p>Because in a diluted state, you have no power—or you have less power, less impetus. You know, we’re going to have one day and we are going to have spaghetti for the Italian and, you know what I mean, some chicken for blacks, some Spanish food for the Hispanics and something like that and we’re going to do it all in one day. Well, that’s not what that’s all about. We have that particular thing every day.</p>
<p>What we want to do is review where we have been, where we are coming from and how to make it better so we can keep our eyes on the prize. We’ve been taken away from that. You don’t find that in schools anymore. You don’t find people talking about Black History Month. You don’t see that—you don’t. And that was a deliberate effort, because people are now asking, where is the white history month? They’ve been asking that for ages. As if a lot of people don’t know—and some of them don’t, maybe. That’s where the emphasis is now is that we want to put the emphasis up on white folks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Just last week—earlier this week in Franklin County, the coroner posted something on his social media page saying exactly that—a meme from a white power organization. This is an elected person in our own community who was—in the most positive way you can spin it is blissful, maybe, ignorant of that, or perhaps a more cynical eye would say he is more than ignorant.</p>
<p>Barnes: You would expect that at one time—and kudos to Columbia Basin College—but you would normally expect that universities would sort of lead the pack in at least keeping contemporary issues alive, somehow or another. We don’t see that—no, I don’t see that. I don’t see their intellectual institutions taking alive—I don’t see enough of that. In the old days, you used to see a lot of that, you used to see a lot more. You used to have controversial or at least high-profile figures coming and speaking on campuses, things like that, just to invite the public out to hear different points of views. We used to—I remember Julian Bond coming into the community, I remember--</p>
<p>Franklin: Who’s that?</p>
<p>Barnes: Julian Bond was a very prominent civil rights leader during the day.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, very much. One of the first blacks legislators I think in Georgia, the—it’s escaping me—the NAACP, I think he was the head of that. But anyways, his name was Julian Bond, but he came to the Tri-Cities. And there was another one: the guy that integrated the University of Mississippi, he came through and spoke. I was going to call him Julius Lester, but that’s not him; Julius Lester is an author of a book that’s very interesting. But they came through the community and yet even some of the Hispanic people that would come through and give the community an opportunity to hear diverse opinions or to just listen to somebody who knew what they were talking about talk about pretty pertinent issues just to stay focused.</p>
<p>But I don’t see much of that going on at any of our institutions of higher learning as I once did. And you have to ask the question why. Not only that, I don’t see many people of color even in our institutions of higher learning so that people of color can contribute—can contribute—to the education of the younger generations coming along. In the olden days if you were going to hire somebody, they used to say, if you are going to hire a black person make sure that it’s in the sciences or in P.E. so you’re not a threat there. Just don’t put him in the social sciences where there’s variance and opinions can be changed. If you’re going to see a black employee usually in higher education or something like that, he might be a scientist. You might have a language teacher or something like that in a non-threatening situation. But not in sociology or political science, maybe, or things like that. Something to observe. I haven’t taken a look recently, but I know that was the case in the past.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. You mentioned that you had done—went to do War on Poverty work and then did part of the east Pasco redevelopment. Were there any other civil rights activities in the Tri-Cities that you were involved in?</p>
<p>Barnes: Not really. Not anything that made a mark upon any institutions or things like that. I belonged to certain community groups, and if the opportunity presented itself—like this opportunity did—and they get to hear me say comments similar to the ones that I’m making to you, or whatever I’m able to say. But in terms of—no, because in a lot of cases it wouldn’t be allowed. It wouldn’t be allowed.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be allowed for certain reasons. If I were to go into the classroom, for example, and just talk simply about the history as I am talking to you, I would offend somebody, because their religious orientation would say, oh no, you can’t say that. Incidentally, I’m not guessing at this; this is a fact, in my life. I’ve been in situations where I’ve had people to stand up in chairs, to tell you the truth, to point their fingers on issues.</p>
<p>But I understood it, because they’re committed to that, and heavily invested into their religious beliefs. Whether it would be a Jewish person think that blacks ran them out of New York or an LDS person that thinks blacks don’t know what they are talking about, or whoever it is. It doesn’t matter. That’s just the nature of the beast. Sometimes institutions want to cut out the speaker and let the problem exist because it’s easier to do that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you have a specific example?</p>
<p>Barnes: I have some, but I’ll reserve those.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, that’s fair. You left your job at Hanford to come work on War on Poverty issues and civil rights. And then what was the rest of your career like? What did you go on later to do?</p>
<p>Barnes: Okay. Later on then, I went to work on the civil rights and I worked for Urban Renewal as I mentioned there. Right in 1968 when things were getting really hot, when Martin Luther King was shot and Lyndon Johnson was trying to pass civil rights bills and all of this other kind of stuff, and I participated in this and that and was junior college this and so forth and so on. I went on—I was recruited by WSU in 1968, because they were rioting and protesting up there on the main campus. Some of the people from the Tri-Cities had gone up to WSU. And there was a couple of sociologists that came down to study the Tri-Cities gangs and poverty and all of these. Because I was there in Urban Renewal and I had grown up in the community, I was able to provide some guidance as to where they may look for some of the answers that they may be seeking.</p>
<p>Long and the short of the story is, I was recruited to go up to WSU to help them formulate, or to get them this new thing—because they were recruiting minority students and there was no program or anything up there to deal with them coming out of Los Angeles and all over the place with the attitudes that they had and especially being indoctrinated—and I don’t want to use that, because that sounds a little bit suspicious—but anyway, being seasoned by the civil rights problems—Martin Luther King had gotten shot, Malcom X had gotten killed, the literature was pretty heavy into how bad we were treated, and all of that. Not only that, there was some other people that got killed, the kids got blown up in Birmingham and all of this.</p>
<p>WSU was up there with the community that was fighting with the fraternities and blacks and all of this. So I was recruited at WSU to be part of a program that was going to advise at-risk students coming to WSU. I went up there in 1969. Left my Urban Renewal job and went up to WSU to become a counselor for that group of students. And to advise the administration to how we might move forward.</p>
<p>Franklin: To better serve minority students?</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, and at-risk students. Because the program that I was involved in had them all: Native Americans, Hispanics, Blacks, prisoners, it was all right. Now, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t go there in a lead capacity, I went there in a support capacity, to add with the people that were taken a lead. And some of the people that were taken a lead took a beating. Because there was always—at that particular time, you’re bringing in kids who don’t belong here, they don’t have wherewithal to be college students and you’re going to have this help programs and all of that, when we want the cream of the crop.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. But how do you help kids that have a poor education because of their race, because of where they live? How do you help them get into a serious higher education institution when they haven’t had the opportunity to get that kind of education to help them thrive?</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, but the thing about that is the kids that were recruited did have the wherewithal, see?</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, they have the wherewithal.</p>
<p>Barnes: They had the wherewithal and their opportunities to express that was hampered by the low expectations that some faculty members had about their presence there.</p>
<p>Franklin: I also imagine that they would’ve, just by nature, faced different pressures than the average college student at that time.</p>
<p>Barnes: Oh, absolutely. There’s no doubt about it, they actually had a mission to represent well.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Barnes: Pretty much like the kids in 1957 down there at Little Rock, you see. You didn’t just send anybody out there, to impress the white folks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. They were ambassadors of a sort?</p>
<p>Barnes: They were ambassadors of sort. Some of them had issues because a lot of them were athletes and the coaches exploited them. That was during the time you could graduate a black college athlete and they were reading at a third, fourth grade level with the college degree. All of that kind of problems and I went up there to help deal with some of that kind of stuff.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did you stay at WSU?</p>
<p>Barnes: I stayed up at WSU up in Pullman for—doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo—at least 30 years.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh wow. Did you live in Pullman the whole time?</p>
<p>Barnes: Yeah, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you do similar types of jobs the entire time?</p>
<p>Barnes: I did and became—the truth of the matter is—I will just say this—I got myself in hot water because somebody claimed that I had too high of an expectation for minority students.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Barnes: Did you understand what I just said?</p>
<p>Franklin: I did understand.</p>
<p>Barnes: Can you imagine that?</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s hard to imagine that.</p>
<p>Barnes: That’s right. And as a result of that I had to take my proper place—hadn’t been seasoned, like I told you, prior to going up there—to stand up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves—inspired by persons like E.M. Magee—if I had to stand up by myself. But I didn’t have to stand by myself. But that actually did happen.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. What led you coming back to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Barnes: That.</p>
<p>Franklin: That. [LAUGHTER] Yup. Is there anything else that you wanted to say about civil rights in the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p>Barnes: No. You know, there is a lot that could be said. I guess we could get into detail, but I think you would have to drag that out in as much that there’s so much. I have nothing to volunteer other than to say that I personally, even as we speak, feel a similar calling. Although I don’t have the energy as I did when I quit my job at Hanford. Because look at the country. You look at the country, it’s almost worse than it was back then.</p>
<p>Franklin: I agree.</p>
<p>Barnes: And then you ask yourself—there is no more Martin Luther King around—don’t get me wrong, I’m not even in the vicinity of that. But the point of it is that if you look at the state of the nation as it is in the condition of people of color—and blacks is what we’re talking about now and Hanford Project an all of that—I don’t see that much representation in our schools, in our institutions of higher learning. When I go to stores and shop at Costco, WinCo, ShopKo and any other Co, I don’t see black faces there behind the counters. If I go get me a McDonald’s hamburger, I don’t see people, black, that much. And, if that is the case now, and we are going to build a future on that, then what are we saying that the future’s going to look like for the people who look like me? I mean, it is so obvious that I don’t think people see it. You walk across your parking lot—I don’t know what your status is here on the campus—but anyway, you look around the halls—and I’m not talking about a black; I’m talking about an American, Afro-American black. And you’re going to say, where are they? And I’m going to say—I haven’t taken a look—but my best guess is, they’re not there.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’ll tell you, in my classes, it’s been few and far between. Pullman was a little bit—well, no, even in Pullman, too.</p>
<p>Barnes: And what classes were you teaching?</p>
<p>Franklin: History class.</p>
<p>Barnes: See? And don’t get me wrong—you’re a modern day scholar.</p>
<p>Franklin: My last two questions are pretty broad and reflective questions for you. First is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Barnes: Certainly, if they put it in context, they can’t miss it. Because if we’re talking about Hanford, and the reason that black people came here in the first place was for job opportunities, but Hanford was a segregated place. The communities that supported Hanford were segregated. And all of this took place before we even integrated the military of all places—before then. And then this was a struggle in the ‘50s trying to integrate the schools, trying to get people to upgrade east Pasco where the cities had gotten together and decided that’s where we’re going to put all the blacks at that particular point and time, in terms of living conditions; they had the segregated barracks out there. Then if they were to trace it down to where we got some civil rights laws and some Affirmative Action things and we had this little bulging of black presence in the communities where we had the superintendent of schools, we had blacks in the classroom and we had students going off to college, we had a community, we had a representation in some of the stores as sales people, students and teachers and all of that. Then we are not that anymore. We are heavily represented in the prisons and the foster homes and things like that. And we can account for with a little bit more study. We’ll see how that all happened. We had a program where blacks were thriving before we had Initiative 200. You might recall Initiative 200.</p>
<p>Franklin: I don’t.</p>
<p>Barnes: Initiative 200 is where we had a certain—the Affirmative Action Program. Some states still have it; the federal government still has it; but the State of Washington doesn’t have it—where the contracts with the State of Washington to require that a certain percentage of that would go to women and minority businesses. And then there was an initiative that came along and said that that’s discriminatory and they cut it out. And minority businesses and all of that didn’t fade off; it dropped off. It didn’t fade off; it dropped off, and you can almost see that we don’t have—in terms of state procurement—minority and women business. The women are doing all right, because they are heavily represented by white women. But all of that in the state has curtailed the efforts of the people that put forward.</p>
<p>Incidentally, there is an effort ongoing right now where they’re trying to repeal that initiative and get back to where we can have some state agencies procuring for minority businesses and all that, as a little side point.</p>
<p>But anyway, so that they would see that. See, Hanford isn’t doing—I don’t think of Hanford as Hanford because everything is so diversified right now—is doing anything. I don’t even think that you can point to a minority community as such—a black community. I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think you can say that there is an east Pasco anymore that’s predominantly black. In fact, I know you can’t. You can’t do that.</p>
<p>If you’re going to say the black have been absorbed in the community, then you can’t say that’s the case, because we can’t see their physical presence in your classroom, or on this campus, or distributed through the mainstream or business community that you would expect, having them come through all of that. In terms of what Hanford did, I think Hanford made an effort during this day. But I think Hanford’s efforts with blacks, just like their efforts with the reactors out there: they’re decommissioned. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Man, you’re giving me so many quotable lines in this interview.</p>
<p>Barnes: So we’re starting to lose our significance, just like some of those reactors have out there on the Project. Our time has come and gone. That’s what it looks like.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is there anything else that you’d like to mention about migration, work experience, segregation, and civil rights and how they impacted your life?</p>
<p>Barnes: No, I—say that last part again?</p>
<p>Franklin: Related to migration, work experience, segregation, and civil rights and how they impacted your life at Hanford and Tri-Cities.</p>
<p>Barnes: Certainly everything that I am in terms of being an adult and all of that, for me personally, I think I’ve had a good experience in the Tri Cities, for me personally. At Hanford, it was fine. And my position in the Tri-Cities or in Pasco, that’s fine. I qualify with some of the good old boys with those of us that are still left from my time there in the community. As I look at the future, I don’t necessarily see much of a legacy that’s being left by those blacks who were here, and who have done things. There is no visible presence. If I had to make a guess—I’m going to make this guess, and you can tell me or edit it out or whatever you want to do—I might be the only black you saw all day.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, no, but in an average day, probably.</p>
<p>Barnes: That’s the point that I’m making. Because I drove all the way over here and I haven’t seen anyone yet, except when I went to the restroom and looked at myself. The point that I’m making is, that’s how absent we are in the scheme of things.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, things are very different in the three cities, that’s certainly true. And in general.</p>
<p>Barnes: And in general.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Well, Dallas, thank you for such an honest and powerful interview. I think you really spoke truth to power, and I really appreciate you laying out your experiences, and how you see things. It was just a wonderful interview.</p>
<p>Barnes: You’re welcome.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m the richer for having you interviewed today.</p>
<p>Barnes: Well, then the banner has been passed on to you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, we’ll see, but thank you so much.</p>
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
326 Building
General Electric
US Testing
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1952-1969
1999-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1962-1969
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Dallas Barnes
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pullman (Wash.)
Migration
Segregation
School integration
Race relations
Affirmative action
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
Description
An account of the resource
Dallas Barnes moved to Pasco, Washington in 1952 as a child.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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03/22/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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2299ac49014cf0639a7ca8caa7aa3d1c
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe1bbc2468804125f13a953e4d99240e7.mp4
8881b49dab96f97ca7b17982ffb2d902
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Dallas Barnes, Webster Jackson and Albert Wilkins
Location
The location of the interview
Morningstar Baptist Church Pasco, Washington
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dallas Barnes, Pastor Albert Wilkins and Webster Jackson on May 31st, 2018. The interview is being conducted at Morning Star Baptist Church in East Pasco. I’ll be talking with Dallas, Pasto Albert and Webster about their experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full names for us, starting with Dallas?
Dallas Barnes: Dallas Barnes, D-A-L-L-A-S, E, and Barnes, B-A-R-N-E-S.
Albert Wilkins: Mm-hmm, yes, and I’m Albert Wilkins, A-L-B-E-R-T, capital-T, W-I-L-K-I-N-S.
Webster Jackson: Mine, I am Webster Jackson. Webster, W-E-B-S-T-E-R, the letter U, J-A-C-K-S-O-N.
Franklin: Great, thank you. So we’re at Morning Star Baptist Church. Tell me about the church, how it was founded, and the role that it plays in the community—played in the community.
Wilkins: Mm-kay. Well, the church was founded in 1946. It began in the homes of several of the older members. I don’t remember all their names, but Brother Luzell Johnson, who was a major deacon in the church for many years, his wife, Etta B. Johnson, his sister—
Jackson: Velma.
Wilkins: Velma, Velma Williams, and several others. It was later—it established in a building in downtown Pasco off of Lewis Street in the early ‘40s, ’46? Yeah, around ’46, ’47. It was later moved to the corner of Butte and Wehe, I think in 1940--?
Barnes: Eight, I believe.
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, ’48. Where—it stayed there until 1956, when this particular building was built and established. This is where it’s been ever since.
Franklin: I’d like to ask each of you three what your first memories are of the church. I’ll start with Dallas.
Barnes: Well, I was involved with the church. We moved from St. Louis to Pasco in 1952. And I remember being taken to church, of course, by my mom, here to Morning Star. And I was in, I guess, junior high school or early—sophomore or somewhere around there. And became a member, did all the things that youth did in the church, and was baptized then in the Morning Star Baptist Church when it was on Butte and Wehe.
Wilkins: Yeah. We also moved here in 1952. I was two years old at the time, so my recollection of the move is non-existent. However, I do remember living next-door to the church in ’53, ’54, ’55, and I was baptized in Morning Star Baptist Church and I believe it was indeed here in this particular building around 1956, ’57.
Jackson: My folks, we came out to visit my mother’s sister and their families in 1948. And we stayed out here for about a month. We came from Texarkana, Texas. And we went back. My dad was a principal in the high school back in Texas. Actually it was in Arkansas. Texarkana, Texas and Arkansas, where the state line goes right through the center of that city. And we stayed out here for about a month visiting and then we went back to Texarkana. And my dad decided basically that we really needed to go back to Pasco. So we packed up and came back to Pasco. My brother, he enlisted in the US Navy out of Texarkana, and me and my mother and dad came out here. And he went to work at Hanford. And me and my cousins and so forth, the only thing we did was rode all the way around the city limits of Pasco, which was not that great. It was not that expansive in—
Wilkins: That time.
Jackson: In 1950 and so forth. I also—my dad, he joined St. James Methodist Church, and me and my mother joined Morning Star. That was also down on the corner of Butte and Wehe Street. And I was baptized in Morning Star Church.
Franklin: Webster, could I ask you what your first impressions were? Because you were in your teens when you came here, right?
Jackson: Correct.
Franklin: What were your first impressions of Pasco when you came here in ’48?
Jackson: Oh, it was the place to be for us youngsters, for us kids. Like I said, I had several cousins here, family—extended family here. We just had a good time as far as that’s concerned. At that age, I mean, in high school, in Pasco High—I graduated from Pasco High School, and it was not that many African American kids in there. I would guess at this time, I would say it was less than ten. We all got along. We had our ups and downs in school, as far as that’s concerned. But, like I said, we really rode our bicycles every day and we just had a good time.
Franklin: Great. I would—so you came from Texarkana, and Dallas you came from—?
Barnes: St. Louis.
Franklin: St. Louis. And, Albert, where did your family move from?
Wilkins: We came here from Louisiana. My father was a preacher as well.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Wilkins: And so he came up here to work on the dams. He came up in ’50, and we followed, then, in ’52.
Franklin: Right on. I guess, what role did the church play in the black community? Both historically and here in Pasco.
Wilkins: Hmm. I don’t know. The church was the central piece of the community. At that time, the vast majority of African Americans lived in east Pasco. The church was the center of the community, so the role they played was—it maintained, or set the standard for moral behavior in the community. The pastor of the church really was the voice of the community and issues concerning civil rights or some injustices or any relationships with the authorities, the pastor of the church was the voice.
You have to remember, at that time, this was a very segregated area. In fact, I think I was seven years old before I ever saw another white person, you know? Really.
Franklin: Really?
Wilkins: I’m serious. Because it was that isolated. And so everything that we did, like Webster was saying, was done right here in east Pasco, riding our bicycles or walking out to Sacajawea Park or going out to James Johnson’s ranch and riding horses. Everything was done right here for a long time. For a very long time, in fact.
As I recall, probably around 1964, they had built Isaac Stevens Junior High School, and I was attending there, and I remember being in class, I was the only African American in the class. And that’s when they first started putting TVs in the classroom. And they were showing the civil rights movement in the South. It was really a traumatic experience for me, because they had this lady on the television, they were interviewing and asking her what she thought about segregation. And she looked directly into the camera—and you have to remember I’m the only African American in this room—she looked directly into the camera and she said, well, niggers can’t learn! [LAUGHTER]
I was mortified! I’m sitting there, going, huh. So what I had was a retreat to east Pasco where I could feel safe. I could feel safe. And that’s kind of the role the church played in my life: it gave me a safe haven where I could always come to. But yeah, it played a central role in the community for a very long time. When there was a physical community of African Americans, mm-hmm.
Barnes: And we did have a real community. You know, service stations that was owned and operated by black people, taverns, JD’s Store, and a community. We would, in many cases, because the workforce was intransient, a lot of folks, and a lot of folks came from the military base in Othello to Pasco to make it a little more robust, and from other places, too, like Hermiston. And just for the region, Pasco was the center for the weekend recreation and things like that. So in many ways, we could say that Pasco, for a lot of the people who were here and visited here, partied fairly well on the weekend and went to the church on the Sundays to get ready for that Monday morning work experience, be it back on the military base or out at Hanford and things like that. So if you’re talking about back in that period of time, yeah, segregation was really, really real, and we did have a refuge in east Pasco. And the church very much was the moral center place for keeping us all together as a community.
Wilkins: Yeah.
Jackson: And also, we talk about, yes, east Pasco was the dominant residential section for the African Americans as far as that’s concerned, but on the underpass, the railroad tracks underpass is what divided east Pasco from west Pasco. And 1st Street, you go underneath the underpass and you go on 1st Street, there were African Americans between 1st Street and the railroad track, which is only one block. And these people, they had—in fact, their names was Coleman.
Barnes: In fact, that’s where we lived, on that first street off of Wehe—on the side of the railroad tracks.
Jackson: And when we came to Pasco, we lived on Tacoma Street. But it’s right next to the railroad track. And I can’t recall any African Americans or black people living past that first street.
Wilkins: What about Navy Homes, that was all the way down the end of 1st Street?
Jackson: Navy Homes was at the end of that, and Parkside Homes was just to the west side of 1st Street.
Wilkins: Yeah, I remember—
Jackson: When we moved from Tacoma Street, in that building, there was me and my mother and father, like I said, my brother was in the US Navy, and my aunt and uncle—had two aunts and uncles, we all lived in the same—it was kind of like a little shack of a triplex, I guess you would call it. It wasn’t no triplex, it was—because there was only just one room and a bathroom.
Barnes: Are you talking about Navy Homes or Parkside?
Jackson: No, I’m speaking about on Tacoma Street.
Barnes: Oh, I see.
Jackson: Tacoma and Sylvester. And not very long after that, then we moved to Parkside Homes. That led moving into the ward off.
Wilkins: I know, that was as close to the west side as you gonna get.
[LAUGHTER]
Jackson: Exactly.
Barnes: Parkside and Navy Homes was part of the—well, even CBC had some of those particular—started out at the Air—
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, Naval—
Barnes: Yeah, at the Naval place out there where they had their station out there. As well as Port of Pasco had some military attachments to the Pasco community. So, Navy Homes and—Parkside was Army, Navy Homes was Navy and so forth. And we had down here an intern camp for some of the—I’m not sure if they were German or Italian prisoners, but one of the two.
Jackson: Yeah, there was no African Americans living in the Navy Home—I mean, yeah, Navy Home—other than, you know, military attachments, as far as that’s concerned. Later on, African Americans was able to live in Navy Homes.
Wilkins: Yeah, it became your first low-rent place. Those were just tentacles, because everything ended up being sucked back into east Pasco for any kind of community stuff.
Barnes: Right. That’s right.
Wilkins: And again, the church was the centerpiece. Morning Star is indeed the oldest African American church that was established back in the early ‘50s. Two other churches came out of Morning Star, because it had gotten so crowded. And so New Hope Baptist Church up the street came out of it, and then Greater Faith Baptist Church came out of it, as well as St. James, actually, the Methodist Church, because all of it was in one place at one point.
Franklin: Were those—you mentioned because it had got so big—were those pretty peaceful splits of the congregation, or was there any kind of disagreement that led to the foundation of the separate churches? And did it fragment the community as well, or was everyone—
Barnes: I don’t necessarily think that the community itself was fragmented.
Wilkins: No.
Barnes: And it probably could have been a combination of reasons. But certainly, growth would have been one of them and maybe—I’m just thinking about the dynamics of any large group, you know. That could happen. But I would say, it could’ve been a combination, and I’m not sure what percentage of the causes would be. But the community stayed intact. These churches get along very well even right as we speak, and from the time of their origin, they got along well.
Wilkins: And you have to hold in mind that during that time, there was a significant influx of African Americans continually coming in—
Barnes: This is what I’m saying.
Wilkins: --but were concentrated—had to be concentrated in this area. So of course the church swoled--swelled up real good. And so the splits—I wouldn’t even really call them splits, so much. Yeah, I guess they were, because you got a new church name and everything.
Barnes: New church name and all of that. We maintained the Baptist piece on all of it. And still again, if there’s a death, for example, or a wedding, or any other kind of celebration, then all these congregations come together wherever we go and whosever church we’re at, as one community family, one family. One church family.
Wilkins: Yeah, in fact, what we have in the works now—and I haven’t really announced this completely—but on the fifth Sunday in July, all three of those churches are going to come together for a unified worship service, which I think should be a real historic event since we haven’t done that. Yeah, for years and years. I don’t know that we’ve ever done that.
Jackson: I don’t think it’s ever happened.
Wilkins: But we’re gonna do it the fifth Sunday.
Barnes: Something other than a funeral or a wedding or something like that.
Wilkins: Something other than a funeral!
[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Where is that going to take place?
Wilkins: Right here at Morning Star. Right here at Morning Star, it’ll be an 11:00 service like we normally do, only the other two churches are going to put signs on their doors saying, come to Morning Star. So any visitors will—hopefully, we’ll be able to fill it up in here.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great. What were—in the early days, the ‘40s and ‘50s, what were the conditions like in east Pasco compared to west Pasco?
Wilkins: Mm.
Barnes: ‘40s and ‘50s?
Franklin: Yeah.
Barnes: I’d have to start off in the ‘50s. Jackson, you were here in the ‘40s.
Franklin: Yeah, maybe we can start of with Webster. Kind of you can tell us, when you came, what was the comparison?
Jackson: In 1948, compared to the present?
Franklin: Yeah. Or compared to west Pasco. How was east Pasco different from west Pasco? Were there any services or conditions that were unequal?
Wilkins: We didn’t have sidewalks or—
Jackson: No!
Wilkins: Paved streets.
Jackson: There was no pavement.
Barnes: You didn’t even have sewer over there at that time.
Jackson: Let’s see, what was it, the Pasco—your organization?
Barnes: East Pasco Improvement Association?
Jackson: East Pasco Improvement Association. And my dad was part of that. And Luzell—
Barnes: Johnson, Thelma—not Thelma.
Jackson: Vanis Daniels, Thelma Hawkins.
Barnes: Hawkins, yeah.
Jackson: In fact, Thelma Hawkins was the lead in building that building that’s up there in Kurtzman Park right now. But the conditions, I mean, the difference is like day and night. Because there were certain places that black people could not go after a certain time. Like Kennewick, after 6:00 in the evening, when the stores close, you couldn’t—there were none allowed in Kennewick. And I’m not speaking about what I heard, or what Pastor Wilkins or Dallas Barnes is saying. I didn’t hear it from them.
Wilkins: We know that.
Jackson: I myself was—and two other friends. We were only youngsters, 16, 17 years old. But was turned around by the police in Kennewick. There used to be a green bridge across the Columbia River from Pasco to Kennewick. If we dropped off the Kennewick side of the bridge, the police turned the red light on, followed us around the curve there and pulled us over and said, the stores are closed. You have no business in Kennewick, so turn around and go right back across that bridge. And naturally, we obeyed his commands. But I must say that we didn’t stay in Pasco very long, because we turned around and went right back to Kennewick.
[LAUGHTER]
Wilkins: Yeah, but would you say that in terms of just things like street lights and paved roads, that there was a distinct difference between east Pasco and west Pasco?
Jackson: Correct, correct.
Wilkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parks. Didn’t really have any until we—
Barnes: We didn’t have until we built Kurtzman Park.
Wilkins: Until we built Kurtzman Park.
Franklin: Right, and the community built that park.
Wilkins: The community built.
Barnes: Right, the community built. Kurtzman donated the land, and the community helped go seed it and so forth and so on.
Wilkins: Yeah, so when you asked the question, what was the difference between east Pasco and west Pasco, on the landscape side, you know, there were very few amenities in east Pasco.
Barnes: Right. There was no sewer here. I think if you look at the Urban Renewal record of the kinds of buildings that was being demolished and the kind of relocation that took place, you’ll find that we had trailers that had little attachments to them to make them two-bedrooms, those travel trailers. You had outhouses, water faucets on the outside of buildings and things like that—on some of the buildings, not all of them of course. But you did have a blighted area. And east Pasco was totally, totally neglected. And it was set aside like that. Now, we talked about the cows over there, that I had forgotten it was over there, but you got that toxic dump right over on the other side.
Wilkins: Oh, yeah! The dump was on the other—
[LAUGHTER]
Barnes: So I don’t want to put it in the harshest terms, but if we’re pressed for time, all of the debris and the trash in the minds of some city officials and whoever else the planners were, put the people who they considered a little less valuable as well as the livestock and the toxic trash all in the same category, and we called that east Pasco.
Now, on the other side of town, when I lived over there? We had paved roads, we had segregated lunch counters over there, and many of the people who worked there, they weren’t working at Hanford; they worked as domestic or field hands. Like picking potatoes and weeding beans. I’m talking about, there were black work crews in those days that would get up early in the morning and go out and weed farmers’ beans or—I remember Charles, you know, he drove that tractor for I don’t know how long, and did all kinds of farm work before it became more mechanized and things like that. So that’s what east Pasco was back in the early ‘50s as I recall. And mid-‘50s and even later than that. Even the late ‘50s. And ‘60s.
Wilkins: Early ‘60s.
Barnes: And the ‘60s. Everything that Pasco got was a product of advocacy on the part of his dad, his dad, and other people who came from the South with education. The ministers of the church played an active role; they always were the voice for the community. And if they were not, they certainly was a very, very close second of someone who was more articulate or had expertise on that issue. But the pastor of the church rallied the members, who was the community, to go down and to petition the city for paved roads, running water, better policing if it took that, better employment consideration over there, and that type of thing.
Wilkins: Yeah. The church played a pretty central role in that.
Barnes; Very, very, very much.
Wilkins: Because I recall my father, Reverend Bill Wilkins, was—I think he was the first African American city councilman? I think he was the first.
Barnes: I think, he may—yeah.
Wilkins: Advocated quite a bit for the community in a lot of different ways. But, yes, the church has been around for a good long time, and it’s only had five pastors. I’m the fifth, actually. Which is a testament to something. You know. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but when we look around and see how pastors go through various churches and you see the longevity that they have here. That speaks of some kind of unity. But yeah.
Franklin: Dallas, you mentioned Albert and Webster’s fathers. I’d like to ask each of you about your dads, or your parents and their experiences before coming here. I’ll start with Albert. Because, Dallas, you said that they were educated.
Barnes: Well, they were the spokespeople. I remember them very well facing the, if you will, powers to be. But they were men who stood tall in the community during those days.
Franklin: Great. So, Albert, you said your family came from Louisiana.
Wilkins: They did, they did. My father, like I said, was a Baptist preacher. The reason he came, I said, was because he went to work on the dams, which was true. But the real reason he came to Washington was because he had married a black man to a white woman. And the woman was the sheriff’s daughter, and they were going to hang my dad.
Franklin: He had done this in Louisiana?
Wilkins: He had done that in Louisiana. So, late in the midnight hour, everybody put money together and sent him to Washington.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Wilkins: To save his life.
Franklin: Was that against the law in Louisiana at that time?
Wilkins: Absolutely.
Barnes: It was the law in America.
Wilkins: Absolutely. And so that was the reason he came, and then we came up a few years later.
Franklin: Okay. Wow, that’s quite a story.
Wilkins: But he was an Army veteran. He’d fought in World War II. He was—my father was a man of many different talents. And he was a very outspoken man.
Barnes: Yes, he was.
Jackson: Yes, he was.
Wilkins: So yes.
Franklin: What do you know about his initial experience in coming to work at Hanford and finding a place to live here?
Wilkins: Well, my father never actually worked at Hanford until later in his life. His major work was on the dams.
Franklin: Oh, right, right.
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, was on the dams. That’s what I recall. But my father was also a mortician and he would help sometimes with the mortician work here at Greenlee Funeral Home back then. Yes. And he was a carpenter as well. But mostly, he was a preacher.
Jackson: And he—in fact, Reverend Bill Wilkins, we worked at—I was working at Hanford and my office was in downtown Pasco. Actually, we were in the Federal Building. And Reverend Wilkins, he worked there at the same time.
Wilkins: And they carpooled there.
Jackson: He was in charge of the carpool.
Franklin: In Richland? The Federal Building in Richland.
Jackson: The Federal Building, you know, where people come to check out—visitors come in from other states and so forth, and they would check the cars out from the carpool. There was one right there at the west side of the Federal Building.
Franklin: Right. And, Webster, you mentioned that your family came from Texarkana.
Jackson: We came to Pasco from Texarkana. Texas, over on the Texas side.
Franklin: Right. What do you know about your parents’ lives before they came here?
Jackson: Oh, everything. Well, like I said, my dad was a principal of a school down there. Also, he did what people do in the South. He cut logs and this type of thing—I think they called billets, little short—harvest logs and this type of thing to make ends meet. Farmed. Just did everything. Pretty well-rounded as far as the South. I mean, that’s what African Americans did down there.
Barnes: You got to realize that Jim Crow didn’t end until ’64 now, so, we’re talking about back in the ‘40s, you walked on your side of the sidewalk, you said, yes, ma’am to little girls and all that kind of stuff, and you ran from the Ku Klux Klan like you had better do if you want to—
Wilkins: Live. [LAUGHTER]
Barnes: --Survive, yeah. And so you had that kind of thing and the people who came to Washington came with that same kind of ideology and that’s how come we had to had an east Pasco and you couldn’t go to Kennewick over here or Pasco over there or whatever you have, because the culture came here and is still with us, the remnants of it.
Franklin: Yeah. How did your father hear about Pasco and why did he choose to move the family up?
Jackson: Like I said, my mother’s sister—she had two sisters here on the west coast. They lived in Portland and they worked and they lived in Vanport in Portland, and they worked in the shipyards. They left the shipyards and moved to Pasco in order to work at Hanford. That’s where we visited them here in Pasco. Like I said, we stayed out here for about a month. Him talking to my folks, mom and dad, and talking with their mom’s sister and their husbands and this type of thing, and they were working at Hanford, so it seemed to be a better deal. We wasn’t getting anything and getting it aware down South. So we moved out here, and my dad went to work for, I believe it was JA Jones.
Franklin: JA Jones Construction?
Jackson: Right, but at Hanford. And my mother worked in—and her sisters, all three of them, they worked in, oh, heck, downtown, what was that Chinese restaurant down there?
Barnes: Chinese Gardens. Chinese Gardens.
Jackson: Chinese Gardens? It was Frank’s.
Wilkins: There was another one down there on Lewis Street.
Jackson: No, it was Frank’s Grill.
Barnes: Frank’s Grill, oh, okay, okay.
Wilkins: You remember Frank’s?
Barnes: Yeah, I remember Frank’s Grill, yeah, I remember that.
[LAUGHTER]
Jackson: That’s where they worked.
Wilkins: Frank Ng, Frank Ng.
Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: Frank Ng?
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, right. Right there on Lewis Street.
Barnes: And he’s still around, too.
Wilkins: Is he?
Barnes: His son is.
Wilkins: His son is, yeah.
Jackson: Oh, yeah, Frankie. Little Frankie, right.
Franklin: Oh, wait, is this—was it a Chinese restaurant or was it a—
Wilkins: It was a Chinese restaurant.
Barnes: Chinese/American restaurant.
Franklin: Okay. It was called Frank’s Grill?
Jackson: Yeah.
Wilkins: Frank’s Grill, yeah.
Franklin: Oh, that’s interesting.
Wilkins: There were only two at the time: Frank’s Grill and Chinese Gardens.
Jackson: I think so.
Wilkins: On opposite ends.
Franklin: And were these in east Pasco?
Wilkins: No.
Barnes: No.
Franklin: West Pasco.
Jackson: I can’t think—later on, the Eastside Market was the big store in east Pasco. In fact, the owners of the East Side Market gave this church, Morning Star, a house on Wehe.
Wilkins: Yeah, it was donated—I can’t remember.
Jackson: I can’t think. Gene, Gene, the first name? Gene Wright.
Wilkins: That’s right. Yeah, yeah. That was the only other—I mean, it was that place and George’s place were the only white establishments in east Pasco. If I’m right.
Barnes: Yeah. The other thing you want to do is, there’s the north side of east Pasco and there’s the south side of east Pasco. And white folks lived on the north side of east Pasco, and there was a few—like the Wilkins—folks who would move on the north side of—
Wilkins: Of Lewis Street.
Barnes: --of Lewis Street until White Flight took over, and
I’m not sure when that was, and they all moved to the west side of Pasco.
Wilkins: That was between ’68 and ’72.
Barnes: Somewhere in there. But for the longest, it was divided that way, too, in east Pasco, where the whites lived on the north side. And that’s where you see the nicer houses, back in those days, when Urban Renewal came in and wiped out the south side of east Pasco.
Jackson: The Urban Renewal project consisted of thirteen blocks in east Pasco. And like I said, it was mixed—
Barnes: Commercial and residential.
Jackson: A residential house would be right there and next-door would be a trucking company and this type of thing. And Wehe, Wehe Street is the one that divided them. And the fence and the tree grove is still there right now. So the city’s project, the purpose of the project was to separate those. And we did that. Under the Urban Renewal project, we had three phases of it. It was called—
Barnes: Demolition—
Jackson: Rehabilitation, relocation—
Barnes: And demolition.
Jackson: And demolition, right.
Franklin: You two worked on—Dallas and—Webster, you were in charge of the Urban Renewal, right?
Jackson: Right, right.
Franklin: Dallas, you worked on the Urban Renewal.
Barnes: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: So I guess since it’s been brought up, I guess, what was the impetus to start the Urban Renewal project? Where did that come from?
Barnes: Well, that was—the city got their contract to—well, you had model cities in some of the—you remember the Model Cities program, a federal program. Urban Renewal was a federal program, and then you had these zones that they had for development, so there was a lot of federal money running around. I forgot the person who—the city manager was pretty progressive—
Jackson: Mar Winegar.
Barnes: Winegar was pretty progressive in there, and Art Fletcher was pretty progressive—folks who helped to move Pasco forward. And so those folks were with it at all, put some of this activity in motion and they were successful in getting the Urban Renewal grant. I left the Community Action Program to join Urban Renewal as their relocation officer before I took another job at Pullman. But that’s where it came from, and the intent was those three aspects: demolition, relocation and rehabilitate—rehab. So we had all phases of that. And Webster can speak about all three of those phases; I just came in as the relocation officer--
Wilkins: Do you think—
Barnes: --finding people places to move before their houses got destroyed and—
Wilkins: Do you think that that was like a precursor to gentrification?
Barnes: I could say—well, it was. But I’m not so sure that the thinking was there at that time. Because at the time, we still had—we still was fighting segregation. Right at the moment I’m thinking about, 1968. ’68, Martin Luther King got shot; ’68, Bobby Kennedy got shot; ’68, the laws came in where we’re talking about no discrimination and things like that. So, at least that’s when I went into the Urban Renewal domain. And before that, we had the War on Poverty under Johnson. So all of those things, all of those avenues sort of opened up. And, even to this day, even to this very day, you’ll find that much of Pasco’s growth is based upon money trying to do something for the low income. We got CBC out there who is a Hispanic service institution. And part of that—we had all those Title I, IX, VII, IV and all that other stuff that built a lot of gyms up and down the valley.
You know, I’m not saying that people of color got their fair share—well, let me take that back. It’s worthy of investigating whether or not they got their fair share of the money that was intended for them in service. But being on the War on Poverty, I had a chance to see some of that at work, and certainly being in the vicinity of some of the politics of all of that, I know that that was a concern of a lot of the people in the valley. But we’re speaking about Pasco specifically.
So, what am I saying? I’m saying that all of those federal programs—Model Cities, Urban Renewal, Title I, Title IV, Title IX, and all of that—that Pasco itself has benefited greatly from that. And Urban Renewal was a part of that. That’s a long way of answering your question, but you asked where did it come from. It came from the federal government. I’m not sure that our city government did anything until Fletcher and Winegar came along and tapped into the federal funds to get some activity on this side of those railroad tracks. Because if you’re wondering where our city money went from our tax dollars, maybe you’re wondering where the state money went—I think the state may have done something—but if you’re talking about our tax dollars and the services we got from it like paved roads and streets like that? No.
Jackson: Well, there were the—like I said, and I think I mentioned it—the Urban Renewal project was a $4 million project. When they started running out of money to do things, there was 26 states across the United States, we all got together and went to Washington, DC. We met with a representative. We had lunch with him. Senator Warren G. Magnuson was the representative from the State of Washington. All 26 of us made our presentation to our representative from our states. There was money that had not—federal money that had not been released. And I distinctly remember, during my presentation there in the meeting—in fact, I said—I was telling about the poverty, the percentage of poverty here in Pasco and this type of thing, and to be honest, Senator Magnuson knew more about it than I did.
[LAUGHTER]
Jackson: Because he chimed in and helped clarify some of the things that I had said and this type of thing. And when we got back, he came back and there was x number of dollars relegated for Pasco that had not been released the same way. And I remember—I can’t recall his name, but a couple other states, Kentucky is one that I distinctly remember—but we all made our presentation and got that money released.
Franklin: Webster, how did you become involved in the Urban Renewal project?
Jackson: I was perfectly satisfied at Hanford.
Franklin: And what were you doing at Hanford?
Jackson: I was a draftsman. I was a draftsman at Hanford. For, what, Rockwell? Rockwell—I knew it was Rockwell.
Barnes: Rockwell-Westinghouse, I think.
Jackson: Yup.
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, Rockwell.
Jackson: Right, Rockwell. Now, the people in the community, they could not—they was not getting any place. There was relocations, there was—like you said, there were shacks and this type of thing, here in east Pasco people were living in. They did not trust the—
Wilkins: Establishment.
Jackson: --director of Urban Renewal. He was a white gentleman. And he just couldn’t communicate with the people. And Mar Winegar, the city manager, opened it up for recruitment for a new director. And many, many, many people in the community asked me, Webster, why don’t you—we would like for you to apply for that position and this type of thing. I applied the last day. The last day it stopped, like I came in from work. I would get off work at 4:13 at Hanford. And I stopped by city hall on the last—on the closing date to help with the city manager. And he said, Webster, if you drop your resume off—the police department was attached to city hall down on Clark Street here—you drop your resume off at the police department where I’ll get it the first thing in the morning and I will go up—I will consider your resume.
And I think there was a—it was like, I think they selected about six applicants, and I was one of those. Lo and behold, I’m the one that was selected. But I did not come to the city under any pressure, because my department director at Hanford told me, he said, Webster, if anything go wrong with that City of Pasco, you just give me a call and you can come right back here. So I just come in and they gave me two inventories about that thick. In those days, I could do a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of understanding and ask a whole lot of questions and this type of thing. The original—Dallas, what was that? In Seattle, yeah.
Barnes: You’re talking about the main office there?
Jackson: The main office.
Barnes: Yeah, HUD.
Jackson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the HUD.
Barnes: Health and Urban Development.
Jackson: Yeah, the HUD office in Seattle. I got to be—we got on first name basis with all kinds of people in there that had responsibilities for the Urban Renewal projects. We got a lot of things done. We got everything—we got all of the relocations done except two, two houses. That was—I don’t know if I should call the names or not.
[LAUGHTER]
Wilkins: It’s all right.
Jackson: But we were able to address all of the houses in the 13-block area, except two, the people that still would not budge. And one of them is still sitting there today.
They’re both sitting there today.
Franklin: Wow.
[LAUGHTER]
Jackson: One is next to—a couple of houses from this church. And the other one is down across from Kurtzman’s Park. The people that just would not sell. And although under the Urban Renewal rules and regulations and this type of thing, we had the power of imminent domain, we could’ve taken those houses and forced the people to move. But Mar Winegar, the city manager said no, he didn’t want to force anybody out of their homes, and we did not.
Franklin: What was the effect of Urban Renewal on the east Pasco community?
Barnes: Well, we had a relocation program. A lot of people—it was fairly good, certainly from a home improvement situations, it was great. And at that time, we had some Fair Housing laws in place and we were right in the thick of the civil rights movement, the 2008 civil rights, no discrimination in housing and all that. And a number of people was able to move, if you will, to some of the places on the west side. We got all 1st Street so we might’ve moved out to 6th or 8th or something like that. We didn’t get out to Road 68 or anything like that.
[LAUGHTER]
Barnes: For two reasons: number one, I don’t think they money would allow it, and certainly the pressure of the neighbors who might not have been friendly wouldn’t encourage it. But that was one thing. We certainly improved the housing situation, we got some streets in, we got some curbing in, that people did not have to pay for. Jackson can talk more about the final product, but in terms of—and on the downside of it, we destroyed the community. On the downside of it, we destroyed the community. We got the housing project right there that the labor union put in, right next to Kurtzman Park. I don’t think that was part of Urban Renewal—
Jackson: No.
Barnes: --but it took place during that time. And we had a lot of black people move into that low-income housing, which was better than those trailers that was—
Wilkins: Terrible.
Barnes: And outhouses and things like that. So that was a product of it. And by and large, we still had residents over in east Pasco. Some people rehabbed the homes, as opposed to moving out, or they had some homes built and whatever it is. But in terms of the whole community and such, we got better streets, got some streetlights, got the paved road up here, and that type of thing. And you can talk about the other physical part. But I know that that part with the relocation and people taking the money that they got from selling their houses and buying another house that was up to code, which was a requirement, and moving on.
They still came to Morning Star Church, though. Whatever church was around at the time, and I think it was just Morning Star still at that point. But that’s what it did to the community at the time that I was there and that I observed. It broke up the community, it improved people’s homes physically, substantially.
Jackson: And it dispersed people.
Barnes: Well, that’s what I’m saying.
Jackson: In fact, the pastor of this church lived next-door here, okay? He was relocated over on 14th.
Wilkins: Across from the high school.
Jackson: Across from Pasco High. In other words, the people, they was free to move to wherever they could afford at that time, out of east Pasco.
Wilkins: Which essentially destroyed the community. It was no longer—the church was no longer the center of a physical community. It moved—Urban Renewal’s a good thing on many fronts, but what it ended up doing was causing a stand-up in a psychological community rather than a physical one. So that diminished—in my view, anyway—the power and the influence of the church, because it was no longer the center of a physical community.
Jackson: I might say right here, you gonna edit this interview anyway. And Vanis Daniels just walked in.
Franklin: Yes, Vanis Daniels did just walk in.
Jackson: And I can just see him smiling and this type of thing.
Wilkins: He’s remembering.
Jackson: He’s got some additions that he could do if you could get another chair up here or something like that.
Wilkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[VIDEO CUTS]
Jackson: We mentioned Art Fletcher. But when Art came to town—he was the emphasis on the East Pasco Neighborhood—East Pasco Co-op.
Barnes: Yeah, it was a co-op, mm-hmm. And we had OIC up there that he was involved in, at least a part of.
Jackson: Right. But Art was very instrumental. In fact, he had a daycare here—
Barnes: That was at St. James, wasn’t it?
Jackson: No, downstairs here, in this church.
Barnes: Oh, okay.
Jackson: But he was very instrumental in the community. I recall him getting a little upset because he said he had a $5,000 bill when he came to Pasco, and at that particular time, he didn’t have anything left. I bet he put—
Wilkins: All of his money into it.
Jackson: --all the resources into—
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Jackson: --this and that.
Barnes: The co-op.
Jackson: And then when he was here is when he got the position over in the Nixon administration as Assistant Secretary of Labor.
Barnes: In charge of domestic affairs. And what’s key about that, is that oftentimes when blacks get appointment over there, they’re the ambassador to Ghana, to Kenya, to Dominican Republic or something like that, and don’t have opportunities to influence things—
Wilkins: Nationally.
Barnes: Nationally. He was. And so we get Affirmative Action, the Philadelphia Plan, and all of that had his fingerprints on it.
Franklin: Oh, wow. And he was—
Barnes: He was part of this community.
Franklin: He was part of this community. Did he grow up here?
Barnes: Oh, no.
Wilkins: No, he was an import.
Franklin: Oh, okay. And what did Art Fletcher do here before he went to the Nixon administration?
Wilkins: He was a councilmember.
Franklin: Pasco City councilmember?
Barnes: Yeah, but I think there was some other—I don’t recall what brought him to Pasco; it wasn’t to be a councilmember.
Jackson: No, no, no, what was it?
Wilkins: I cannot remember.
Barnes: I don’t recall, but I know that—
Jackson: Something—
Barnes: It seems like to me, he was associated with, I’m not sure if it was state or federal, but he had some involvement. But he certainly made his mark in the east Pasco community organizing a cooperative for east Pasco. We had a credit union under Art Fletcher, and some consciousness about how to go about community organization and self-help programs, that type of thing.
Jackson: Yeah, that was one of the greatest assets that he had, was to get people together.
Wilkins: He could organize.
Jackson: And he could speak, I mean, he could tell one of those benches over there to come alive, and it would start moving.
Barnes: And you do know that he ran for lieutenant governor, too.
Franklin: Of the State of Washington?
Barnes: Of the State of Washington, as a republican. And I don’t think he lost by very much, either.
Jackson: No, he didn’t. Right.
Wilkins: Yeah.
Franklin: I wanted to ask about opportunities. Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you or your parents came from?
Barnes: You talking to any of us? Well, I don’t know which one of us wanted to say yes or no first. But I mean, you know. If you want to start with—well, I’ll just wait and let you go. Well, there were some opportunities here and I think that was the attraction here, and that opportunity was Hanford.
We came up here because money was flowing freely—more freely than it was in St. Louis. And there were some other incentives: we had relatives here to come here, and the job opportunities even as a domestic—domestic going as people who worked for Hanford, and clean their houses while they were out making real money, you’d get to bring home half a chicken or whatever they had leftover plus one or two dollars an hour. Seriously. Where you were getting 50 cents in the South for an hour, washing dishes through the back window with the segregation things in people’s houses and all that.
So, from that particular point of view, the things out here was better. I don’t think the Ku Klux Klan was riding as freely, and I don’t think—I think the economics were such in this community that we didn’t have the kind of competition or need to exploit, as you would in the South. I’ll just stop that piece right there by saying the bottom line is yes.
Wilkins: Is yes. Yes. You know, my father was a World War II veteran. What he got in the South in terms of respect for his service was minimal to nothing. Plus, being a preacher, and I told you the circumstances surrounding his coming here, it was definitely a better advantage to be here than there. And as Dallas pointed out, there was much better work opportunities here, not just at Hanford, but you had Ice Harbor Dam, you had McNary Dam. You had all these dams being built, and a lot of—a good number of African Americans worked on them and made good money.
Jackson: Including me.
Wilkins: Yeah, that’s right. You worked on it as well.
Jackson: Yeah, I worked on Priest Rapids and—Priest Rapids up in Mattawa and the one up in—
Barnes: Ice Harbor?
Jackson: --on the side of Wenatchee.
Barnes: Oh, mm-hmm.
Wilkins: Yeah, so—
Jackson: Rocky Reach. Rocky Reach Dam.
Wilkins: I think in answer to your question, it’s a pretty resounding yes. Definitely.
Franklin: Kind of the flip side of the question, what ways were opportunities limited because of segregation or racism?
Barnes: What was that question again?
Franklin: In what ways were opportunities limited because of segregation and racism?
Barnes: Well, you still had your place. Even when Art Fletcher made a big dent in the Hanford Project out there, as well; his advocacy reached the Hanford Project with the Affirmative Action and some of those other kinds of things. I think in an earlier interview, there were certain jobs even at Hanford reserved for blacks. And those usually were the ones where you worked outside. They were black laborers. We didn’t bring in many or any professional people. I think Webster and his brother probably, because they had drafting positions or whatever positions that put them inside. You know, I had an inside position, a little bit better than washing pipettes and test tubes, but not that much hard.
The point that I’m making is, we had to have—there was segregation out there at the plant, as there is today, according to the information that I got yesterday. So, the point that I’m making is that you’re still limited. You’re still limited; you oftentimes are in a come-and-go. I understand now that there are—you’re employed as long as the contract lasts and then you get to go, and there’s no continuity of employment. But back in those days—
Wilkins: It was very limited.
Barnes: It was very limited. There was plenty of jobs there because they were still building everything there. We were still in the war deal, making plutonium. You know, there was building bombs, there was the Cold War.
Wilkins: But you didn’t have any nuclear operators, you didn’t have any engineers, you didn’t have any technicians, really. You had laborers, janitors, that sort of thing. So in terms of limits, that was it, okay? Still, that was better than sharecropping.
Barnes: Yeah, even if you’re thinking in terms of when they desegregated the military, even the concerns they had there during the ‘40s, same time they building these bombs, you know, blacks was limited to cleaning out latrines, being kitchen aides on military ships. And so those people brought all of that particular kind of thinking to Hanford, and that’s what we got, and it was better than what we had at that particular time. And so, because money was not a huge issue, relatively speaking, situations for blacks were a little bit better.
But if you’re talking about what was the obstacles? There was a lack of opportunity. The reason that we have a law of equal educational opportunity—that’s the law. Without that law, uh-unh. Equal employment opportunity. That’s the law. Without that law? No. You know. And so forth and so on and so on. Without those laws, then you imagine—and you, generally, not just you two folks here interviewing—what it would be without it. We would be in bad shape as far as I’m concerned as black people. We’re already in bad shape. And without those laws, we’d be in worse shape.
Wilkins: That’s a great point.
Jackson: Well, I—I mean, opportunities really opened up after 1952. Because I graduated from high school in 1952, and I think I might have mentioned this to you in previous interviews as far as I’m concerned, but my ambition was to be a pipefitter. The last six weeks or two months or whatever, to seniors in high school, they take an aptitude test in school, and mine came out to be plumber and pipefitter. And that’s what I wanted to be.
My high school teacher in that department in high school sent me down to plumbers and steamfitters union hall here in Pasco. And I go down there and fill out the application. When I filled it out, took it back to the desk, gave it to the secretary, the lady that was sitting there, and that was up there, Tony Osborne Chevrolet is where it was. And when I turned my application in and walked out the window—walked out, and I just happened to look at the window there, and she took my application and put it in the trash can.
And I went back to Pasco High and told it to my teacher what happened, and he went, well, Webster, was there any other building and trades—that’s what I wanted—did you have a desire for or this type of thing. Well, I like to build things. I would like to build things. So he suggested that I go to the carpenter’s local and I did and that’s what my career—I’m the first black person that completed a four-year apprenticeship program in carpentry. And it was—it did me a whole lot of good. Get me to the point where I put this floor here, I put this floor in this church. And I worked that trade for eight years. And then I decided to get my degree from Eastern Washington University. In fact, me and my brother both got one. And my brother, he worked at Hanford as a supervisor for, I don’t know, 35, 36, 37 years before he retired.
But that’s one of the things that, with this happening, and Dallas mentioning, you know, the laws that said equal, or civil rights law or this type of thing, but at that time, the only place I knew to go to was back to Pasco High and tell what happened. But I very seriously doubt if that type of thing would happen now.
Wilkins: Mm. Okay.
Jackson: Those kinds of things is devastating. They were and are and still is, if it exists. And I’m sure some of exists now.
Barnes: It still exists.
Jackson: But things a whole lot better now.
Barnes: Okay.
Jackson: Go.
Barnes: No, the only thing that I’m saying is, there’s a new reality for black people right now. I’m not sure that that’s where you want this interview to go, but our presence in public employment is noticeably absent in key positions. We don’t have a Webster Jackson at city hall anymore if you take a place like Pasco, where we have some evidence that black people used to be here. We only have, I think, only two employees for the whole city that’s black. And this is not a minority interview; this is one dealing with African Americans. And so speaking for African Americans, our presence in public places is conspicuously absent.
Jackson: That’s a point that I’ll touch on, also. I went to work for the City of Pasco in 1971, finished here at the Urban Renewal project in four years. And the city manager didn’t want me to leave, and I didn’t want to leave. So he made me his assistant to the city manager. Under that hat, I was the personnel—I was in charge of personnel. During my time with the City of Pasco in that position, we had 13 black employees. And just like Dallas just stated, to my knowledge there is only two now.
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, yeah, but you have to hold in mind also that in that period of time, you watched the African American community in Pasco disperse throughout the rest of the Tri-Cities. So you really didn’t have—what happened is now what was a black community is a Hispanic community. You look at their representation in the city, it’s commensurate.
Barnes: The thing that I know is we didn’t have—when I came through high school, there was not one black that contributed to my education. Not one. Going through the Pasco school system and Columbia Basin and—you know, we had a visitor come through, somebody like Art Fletcher or somebody from—a guest speaker here or there to come there. But in terms of a teacher or such, we didn’t have it, during—when I graduated in ’59.
Now, when the laws came along, War on Poverty and some of all of that, there was a special effort to go and recruit. We actually brought in a number of black teachers from some of the schools down South and from back east and so forth and so on, and our kids in the community had an opportunity to see role models that looked like them. This is not to say that the white teachers were not supportive and good teachers for black folks; they just wasn’t necessary the visible role models that a lot of other people benefited from. And so the lack of our presence was overcome with that mandate: if you want some federal dollars, you better make sure that your workforce looks like your taxpayers, and they went out and recruited.
Now, we got that term “minority,” that diminishes—I think deliberately, I mean, but that’s another subject matter—the significance of blacks’ contribution to the whole civil rights struggle and the laws that we currently enjoy, or employ at least, and that particular kind of thing. And all the other folks: immigrants, women. And all we have to do is just look at the record. I don’t necessarily have to do anything but remind you to look at the record, and you can see who the real beneficiaries from that civil rights struggle or black struggle or whatever you want to call it, but I’m talking about where black people actually paid the price to get in the record, those books that supposed to uplift people, and other people are benefiting except for the blacks.
Wilkins: And, you know, I’m a product of—see, these guys came along decades before me.
Barnes: Just one.
Wilkins: One decade, one decade. Maybe two.
[LAUGHTER]
Barnes: Oh yeah, you got him over there.
Wilkins: So they were my role models, actually. I mean, he graduated in ’59, I graduated in ’69, he graduated in ’52.
So you can see—
Barnes: The progression.
Wilkins: --incrementally, how things improved. I mean, because of these guys, I got the opportunity to be the first one in my family to attend a major university and graduate from it. And it was because of these guys that went before me and stood up and fought for these various rights and things that mostly—and Dallas I think accurately points out—mostly is underreported and underappreciated. I appreciate it, because it wouldn’t have happened without that. You know, I got a football scholarship from Pasco High School to go to University of Washington, which might not have happened if there hadn’t been some folks before me, you know?
Barnes: Let me point this out. There’s a graduate named Duke Washington who is a Pasco-ite, and he just recently died. But they almost—WSU almost didn’t play at the Texas stadium because of segregation. They didn’t want to play a football game if he was going to play in it. And I’m not sure if you followed that in your studies about the history of Pasco.
Franklin: Uh, yeah.
Barnes: You have followed Duke Washington?
Franklin: Yes, yeah.
Barnes: Okay, well, then I need not go down that trail. But that may give you an example of just how deep this situation is. Like I’m a product of his and Webster’s, just like you say, that progression is there. And as we sit down when we get a chance to talk to each other about that, we realize—and then your fathers before us—that we’re their children. You see?
Wilkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barnes: We have a duty.
Wilkins: Interesting journey. Interesting journey.
Franklin: All three of you had kind of mentioned education before. I wanted to ask how—we kind of spoke about the lack of visible role models, especially for Dallas and Webster. But who were some of the people who influenced you as a child, during your education here?
Wilkins: I can think of one right off the top of my bat that wasn’t a black person. It was my history teacher at Pasco High School. Name was Bernie Hancock. He’s passed.
Jackson: Yeah, I went to school with Bernie.
Barnes: Yeah, I remember Bernie.
Wilkins: Yeah, he’s passed. But Bernie Hancock, I think, grew up in east Pasco a lot.
Jackson: I think he did.
Wilkins: He was a history teacher, and I remember going into his class, I must’ve been a sophomore at the time, and he pulled me aside and he said, you know, Albert, I want you to remember one thing. And that is that the first person to die in the Revolutionary War was a fellow by the name of Crispus Attucks, and he was a black man. Don’t forget that. That was the only piece of black history I got in my whole high school education. And that was revolutionary. Because you just didn’t hear anything.
Barnes: You didn’t hear anything.
Wilkins: About black people in history.
Barnes: In my case, there was a family of Catholics and an organization of Catholics, a group of Catholics that used to come to east Pasco and take us out to their ranch on Road 64.
Wilkins: 64! Way out there! [LAUGHTER]
Barnes: And make sure that we have some out-of-east-Pasco experience, it’s almost like some of the programs they have in the inner cities, where you have this concrete jungle and you get out and the person gets to know what it’s like to—
Wilkins: See some grass!
Barnes: Yeah! That type of thing. And they used to come over, and they would provide tutorial services. We actually went out there, and they sort of made sure—and there was several efforts like that with different folks from Richland, even from the Hanford Project: white folks, engineers, PhDs, that would come over and provide tutorial services in some of the churches to give some of the kids opportunities that they didn’t have when—I mean, just in the normal scheme of things. And all of them, at least the ones that I know, were Catholics, both in Pasco and both from Richland, and I’m sure there were some in Kennewick. I didn’t keep track of where all of them were from, but I do know that. And it was a concerted effort—they caught hell for that, too. You know, there’s a price. Even in your classroom at the college level, if you ask some people about race relations, a student, at least in my experience, had no problem saying, the only thing that people hate worse than an N-word is an N-word-lover.
Wilkins: Wow.
Barnes: Just as plain—I think I even kept the paper where he wrote it. But the point that I’m making is that they paid a price for helping black kids. And white people, I’ve heard tales, pay a price for hiring black people, you see what I mean? Why didn’t you hire a nice white kid? Or why didn’t you even marry a nice white girl or man or whatever it is. You hear that when you’re privileged enough, or close enough to someone who will tell you what the thinking is. And this is coming from some old timers that’s older than me.
Wilkins: Today, you just hear it in dog whistles, you know?
Barnes: Okay, but still again, you have that kind of thing. And thank goodness there’s pockets of support. And I know goodness will—and this isn’t just happening to me. This Catholic coterie of folks that were out to help people with less opportunity—and we had Mexicans and this type of thing. Native Americans was one of the other groups, then. And we were beneficiary. And they would come over here after work and put on tutorial programs. And they would take us to their homes, they made sure that we fed and played guitars. And we wasn’t always singing Kumbaya, either. The point that I’m making is, I know goodness will, in my case, that ranks high in how I moved forward with my education. Very high.
Jackson: Well, you know, just one comment here on way back when.
Barnes: And their name was Heidlebaugh, I want to put that in there.
Wilkins: Heidlebaugh, I remember.
Barnes: Just in case—
Jackson: George Heidlebaugh?
Barnes: George and Rebecca Heidlebaugh and their children.
Jackson: Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were—
Barnes: And I forgot the other’s name.
Jackson: Yeah, they were in the corners. You know, when I was growing up as a kid back South, and, like I said, we moved here. Came out to visit in ’48, moved here in ’50. You know, we didn’t—the black kids and so forth, like in Texas, we never did use the N-word. The N-word, I mean, you better be ready to fight. I mean, the black kids—the blacks didn’t use the N-word back there.
Wilkins: Back then. Mm-hmm.
Jackson: No. I mean, I was surprised when I got out here.
Wilkins: Yeah.
Jackson: No. We went to—and as far as me wanting to be a plumber and a pipefitter and this type of thing, you know, John Mitchell I believe, he’s the only one that I’m aware of that is a—no, he’s not. What’s his name? One of the—Bobby. Bobby Sparks, I believe it is. Isn’t he a--?
Wilkins: Electrician.
Jackson: He’s electrician. But John Mitchell is a pipefitter. He’s a pipefitter.
Wilkins: Yeah.
Jackson: Bona fide pipefitter.
Barnes: In other words, we don’t have many representatives in the various trades.
Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?
Barnes: What was the major civil rights issues at Hanford?
Franklin: And in the Tri-Cities.
Barnes: And in the Tri-Cities?
Franklin: Yeah.
Wilkins: Civil rights issues, huh?
Barnes: Civil rights issues? Well, it depends on which institution we want to start at. Education is always been one, employment has always been one. We’ve got a criminal justice system that has never been fair to—in the minds of a whole lot of folks, because of the sentencing situation. And every black that doesn’t have any money have to plea out and pick up a felony just to get reduced time because they don’t have the money to hire the good lawyer. You know, it’s always interesting to say, make sure you get a good lawyer, like there’s a whole pool of bad ones that you might select and pay your money to.
[LAUGHTER]
Barnes: But the point is—and that’s a true statement, too, you see. So the civil rights is front-end on all fronts: education, housing, employment, health—
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, criminal justice—
Barnes: Health, there’s some issues there with—I’m not sure how prominent it is in the Tri-Cities with abortion piece being more present in the black community than in other communities. We did criminal justice and that. And I’m sure there’s an add on this, but I can’t think of a single public institution, whether it be military, health, criminal justice, politics, any of that, that has a plus sign on it for blacks. That’s from my point of view. And maybe there’s somebody else who can say, well, you’ve got some athletes out there. I don’t even see them there.
Wilkins: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Barnes: I don’t know if we have any—I don’t want to say anything except that I do know they’re putting academic requirements on your eligibility for sports in college. And I don’t want to go there, because there’s a lot of stuff there, but if you’re talking about the impacts on black people, or the impacts on people with no opportunity, then the opportunities to use athletics as a way out of their economic situation is closing down when they don’t have the grades to get into college or some of those other kinds of things. So, I don’t want to just start there at the college; it starts way down there, you know?
Wilkins: So what was the question?
Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time?
Wilkins: I think Dallas covered just about everything.
Franklin: Okay.
Wilkins: Okay?
Barnes: Well, thank you.
Wilkins: I mean, if you had to tease out one single thing, I think you’d have a difficult time doing that, because it’s such a broad spectrum there. Yes. Certainly, economics.
Certainly economics.
Franklin: So, what actions were taken to address those issues?
Barnes: Protest was one. They have gutted, both at the state and federal levels, the civil rights laws and the budgets for civil rights agencies. At one time, the onus was on the employer to prove discrimination didn’t exist; now it’s on the poor, less-educated and less-legally-support complainant to prove that discrimination do exist. And the strategy is always to carry it out so far until you can’t afford to defend your own rights, see what I mean? So, that’s one.
Franklin: Who were the important leaders of civil rights efforts in the area? We talked about Art Fletcher.
Barnes: And we talked about Bill Wilkins.
Franklin: Art Fletcher and Bill Wilkins.
Jackson: What about E. M. Magee?
Barnes: We talking about E. M. Magee. We talking about
Tom Jackson. We’re talking about—
Jackson: All of those old-timers.
Barnes: --Wally Webster. Depends on how far you want to go back.
Jackson: Yeah, right. Wally Webster, he’s quite a ways back because he and I—
Barnes: But still again.
Jackson: He and I, we were running about even here as far as age-wise and this type of thing. But I mean, you know—
Barnes: You can take the ministers in the church. You can take Pastor Wilkins. You can take—if you want to know who’s in forefront, our ministers are still in the forefront.
Did you say in the Tri-Cities?
Franklin: Yeah.
Barnes: In the Tri-Cities? Have you talked to Dan Carter? Is Dan Carter on your list of interviewees?
Franklin: We have talked to Dan Carter, yes.
Barnes: Okay, well, put his name on there, you know because we’re--
Franklin: People are always less willing to nominate themselves.
Wilkins: Velma Jackson?
Barnes: Put Velma Jackson on there. And in fact, I’m not so sure who not to put on there.
[LAUGHTER]
Barnes: To tell you the truth. Although they may not have taken the lead. It’s like being in church. If you can’t clap, I mean if you can’t holler, just raise your hand.
Wilkins: Do you remember—
Barnes: So the point that I’m making is that—but the spokespeople are the ones who’s the most articulate and the ones who can afford to stand up then and say something.
Jackson: Well, there’s another one. I mean, as far as stepping up and taking up the lead and this type of thing, I can’t—
Barnes: Oh, yeah, Joe Jackson.
Jackson: Right. And—
Barnes: Katie Barton.
Jackson: Oh, Katie Barton was—
Wilkins: Definitely one.
Jackson: She was out there, and did not bite her tongue.
Barnes: No.
Jackson: And would talk to anybody. But Wayne Jackson was a—he was a teacher—
Barnes: Counselor at Pasco High.
Jackson: Counselor at Pasco High until—
Barnes: Put his name on there.
Jackson: --he retired. And he was one who wouldn’t bite his tongue, either.
Barnes: And Clarence Alford.
Franklin: Oh, yeah, I just talked to Clarence Alford a couple weeks ago.
Barnes: Okay, he has talked to Clarence Alford.
Wilkins: Pastor Ronnie White, who’s no longer here, of course.
Jackson: And Clarence is one that can talk without alienating whoever.
Franklin: He was one of the teachers that was brought in, right, from the South.
Barnes: Right, and Wayne Jackson was, too.
Franklin: Yeah, we talked to Wayne as well.
Barnes: Okay, and him and his wife.
Jackson: His wife, Katie.
Franklin: So, in the civil rights issues here, what were some of the notable successes?
Barnes: You know, we got—protests got Roland Andrews his job at Eastside Market, didn’t it? You know at that time, I think—
Jackson: Those was big pluses back in that day.
Barnes: I was just going to say, we’re sorta—just to get a job, that we have to put that up as a plus, that ought to show you how low—
[LAUGHTER]
Barnes: --things were. Because we had a lot of farm workers out there, weeding beans and all that to get a job
—
Wilkins: Picking grapes.
Barnes: All of that, yeah. And so one of the big successes—when a success has to be a job as a cashier, and we had a whole program up there training cashiers called OIC, when that came in, we were training cashiers so that you could go down and have a cashier job at the store. You know what I’m saying?
Wilkins: If I had to think about it on a personal level, I remember coming here back from college, we had what was called the Youth Involvement Program that was, I think, funded by some of the moneys you guys were talking about. And I was able, through that program, to get a couple people hired out at Boise-Cascade. I’m thinking of one young man right now that I helped to get hired out there who just recently retired from being out there all these years. So little things like that would not have otherwise happened, were it not for civil rights. So.
Jackson: Well, you know, it’s--
Barnes: What were the--
Jackson: Go—
Barnes: Excuse me. What were the name of the program that we used to have? I don’t want to call it a boys’ ranch, but they used to go and recruit kids and put them in a federal program. Yes, they came through here. I remember carrying a group out at Hanford.
Wilkins: I don’t know.
Barnes: It is a big one. A big one. Job Corps.
Wilkins: Job Corps, yeah, Job Corps, that’s what it was.
Barnes: Job Corps. Job Corps is what it was, for men and women. We have one up in Moses Lake and all of that. And people used to get a little money. We used to have some kind of little trainee thing, and you used to get a little presence of people of color, we’re talking about African Americans right at this point, because you would pay the employer half their salary, and people could pick up an employee you don’t have to pay, and soon as that little—you know, it’s mainly only job training to get them skills and all that. I think it was either OIC or Job Corps, one of them. Or maybe even both of them. But the point of it is, and then the employer would use up that extra money and get that extra service, and then you recycle them through again. You don’t get a job, you just sort of get recycled and they get a benefit, and that person get the opportunity to act like he had a job.
Wilkins: So some of these things came about because of civil rights, and so you could call those kind of pluses.
Barnes: Okay, we can put it in the plus column, because certainly without them, we wouldn’t even have that half of representation, you know what I mean? In the employment field.
Jackson: Well, you know, even like the federal programs, like Urban Renewal for instance, see, there was a requirement that the cities, where they spent their money and this type of thing, it had to resemble the makeup—
Barnes: Of the community.
Jackson: --of the community. For instance, for those four years that the Urban Renewal project was going, like I said, it’s not that they were not qualified or anything like that; they were qualified. But there were 13 African American employees with the city when I was in personnel, and each year, I had to send a report in to HUD. I don’t want to go—what happened quite a few times in recruitment. Because on the interview committee, it would always be myself, as the personnel manager, and the director of the department that the position was open in and so forth and this type of thing. And in those interviews, we started looking—getting ready to make that decision as who was going to offer the job to and this type of thing. It was not a walk-in in order to get these people. In other words, if there was a certain requirement for a position to do what this gentleman’s doing, and if there was a minority applicant that could do that, but then there was an un-minority applicant that could do that, and could do that, and could do that, many times, they wanted the person who could do all of these three things. And I’m sitting there saying, wait a minute, we’re not hiring anybody to do that and that and that, we just want somebody to do this right here. And fortunately, the city manager has the last say.
Wilkins: So you got it done.
Jackson: And he always went with my recommendation.
Barnes: I think—okay—I mean, I realize that, but—
Jackson: And the employee worked out great.
Barnes: Well, you hired him for the job that was advertised, that’s what you hired him for.
Jackson: Job-specific.
Wilkins: So, there were definite pluses, okay? Definite pluses. And I don’t know how much longer we’re going to do this interview, but I don’t want this interview to end without me saying emphatically and enthusiastically that the function of the church with respect to all of that was to continue to teach the principles of Christian development and growth. And to make sure that what we did with respect to Urban Renewal, what we did with respect to educational improvement, what we did with all of that was driven from Christian principles. That was the function of the church, and I think it did well over all of those decades in keeping that in the forefront. And is still doing that. Although we don’t have the numbers we used to have, we still teach Christian principles in the church. And we will.
Franklin: Awesome.
Barnes: I remember this church sending me off to college.
Wilkins: Oh, yeah.
Barnes: With a buffet kind of little thing that included some of the commodities that came from welfare recipients. That’s one of the reasons I’m back here this very day. Never will forget it. Wanted to say that.
Wilkins: Yeah, praise God.
Franklin: Yeah. Well, I think we are kind of getting close to the end. You guys have all been wonderful.
Jackson: Yeah, I’m beginning to look at the clock up here.
Franklin: Oh, yeah, no worries. I’ll just ask one wrap-up question but before I do I just want to thank all three of you. It’s been a really wide-ranging and really wonderful interview. You were right, Albert, you guys play off each other really well, and this is a real experience that I’m very happy for. So, well actually, I guess, you know what? I guess maybe that is a good place to end. I’ll just ask, is there anything else that any of you would like to mention in regards to the themes of this project, which are migration, segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities? You can take a moment to think about it.
Jackson: You sound like the Cash Cab there. “Take a moment to think about it.”
[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, I love that show so much. I just watched it last night.
Wilkins: I don’t know. I can’t think of anything we haven’t covered already.
Barnes: I think between the individuals in this group interview and the people that you got on your list, those 25 or 30, however many you’ve interviewed, I think anything I have to say have been covered. Unless you have some specific questions.
Franklin: We’ve covered a lot, I think. I think it was really—
Jackson: I think Herb and Renetta? Venetta?
Barnes: Rendetta Jones. Herb Jones, Rendetta Jones.
Jackson: Yeah, they’re the first blacks to live in—
Barnes: --Kennewick, that was the Slaughters, John Slaughter and Mary Slaughter. I think you got their interview.
Franklin: I did, we actually went to where John Slaughter’s living right now and interviewed him.
Barnes: Okay, you got John Slaughter over there.
Franklin: Yeah, it was a, that was a really great, really powerful interview.
Jackson: I don’t know if he could chip in a whole lot, but—recall his name. And I got him on my phone while you were—Wally Webster.
Franklin: Wally Webster, yeah, I’m still trying to get a hold of him in Washington—over on the west side at his home. We’ll get through.
Wilkins: I remember him. It was Jackson’s nephew.
Barnes: I’m trying to think of who else might be over there with. Did you—oh, I know who one is. Nat Jackson. Nat Jackson, he’s over in Lacey, Washington. And in fact, Nat Jackson just recently got the Affirmative Action initiative back on the ballot for the State of Washington. I mean, he was very central to that.
Franklin: Is he from--?
Barnes: He was here. He was here, yes, he was. He was here involved in Urban Renewal.
Franklin: Do you have contact info for him?
Barnes: I do.
Franklin: Maybe I can get it after—
Barnes: I can give you his number after we—
Franklin: Great, awesome. Well, I think that’s a really good place to end.
Wilkins: Okay.
Franklin: And again, I want to thank all three of you for taking the time to interview with us, here at Morning Star Church, such a central place for the community.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Dallas Barnes, Webster Jackson, Albert Wilkins at Morning Star Baptist Church, Pasco, WA.
Description
An account of the resource
Dallas Barnes, Webster Jackson and Albert Wilkins discuss life in Pasco since 1950 and the history of the Morningstar Baptist Church.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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05/31/2018
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Church
Segregation
Migration
School integration
Affirmative action
Civil rights
Civil rights movements
-
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9847fdca52aa3d6cfeb9de442e0bb5cb
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbc0ea9d7388e81ef7b211dcdbaa2b441.mp4
c657aa51f7cecbac79024634eabba201
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
The topic of the resource
African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Rose Allen
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Rose Allen on January 12th, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Rose about her experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Rose Allen: Rose Marie Allen, R-O-S-E, capital-M-A-R-I-E, capital-A-L-L-E-N.
Franklin: Great, thank you so much, Rose. And tell me, when and where were you born?
Allen: I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1931.
Franklin: Okay. And how old were you when you came to the Tri-Cities?
Allen: When I came to the Tri-Cities, I was 23.
Franklin: Okay. And why did you come to the Tri-Cities?
Allen: My cousin, Virgie Robinson, was here, and she sent for me to come and work in her diner. She had a diner.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Allen: So I came to work in her diner while she went on vacation.
Franklin: Where was the diner located?
Allen: On Queen Street. We had a little street over by the railroad tracks, and it was called Queen Street, and the diner was called the Queen Street Diner.
Franklin: Okay. Why did you choose to come to the Tri-Cities?
Allen: My cousin invited me, and I wanted to get out of Arkansas.
Franklin: Why did you want to get out of Arkansas?
Allen: I did not like Arkansas, because I was living out in the country, and I did not like it.
Franklin: Okay. And do you remember—that would have been the early ‘50s, then, right, when you moved out of—
Allen: Yeah.
Franklin: --Arkansas. What was it—I wonder if you could describe the difference between Arkansas and Pasco.
Allen: Well, I married at much too young, and there I was, out in the woods with my children. I had children much too young, but I was married. And I just didn’t like it. My cousin asked me—she came in to the city there, and she asked me if I wanted to leave, and I told her, yes. She said, if I send for you, will you come? I said, yes.
Franklin: Was your first husband out of the picture by the time—
Allen: Yes.
Franklin: Okay. So you were a single mother—
Allen: Well, I was still married.
Franklin: Okay.
Allen: But we weren’t together.
Franklin: Okay. So you were kind of effectively a single mother, then.
Allen: Yeah, yeah, technically.
Franklin: How were you supporting your children in Arkansas?
Allen: Oh, he would come and he would buy groceries, you know, and things at the little country store down the street and everything like that. So, we weren’t without things. I just didn’t like it.
Franklin: Right, oh, I understand. Do you remember what the diner was called?
Allen: Queen Street Diner.
Franklin: Queen Street Diner, okay, thanks. What were your first impressions of Pasco when you came?
Allen: Well, I started working for my cousin the first day I got here. I didn’t get a break. [LAUGHTER] So I really didn’t get a chance to see the Tri-Cities. So, I was basically, right there in her yard there; she had a big house and a rooming house, and her diner was a trailer. It was a trailer. I liked it. You know, I liked it when—I liked it a lot better than I did out there in the country. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Was Pasco an integrated city at that time, or was it segregated?
Allen: It was segregated. It was segregated, yeah.
Franklin: And where did African Americans predominantly live in Pasco?
Allen: On the east side.
Franklin: On the east side, and what was the divider?
Allen: The bridge.
Franklin: The bridge?
Allen: Mm-hmm, the Lewis Street Bridge.
Franklin: Okay. And what was the hardest aspect of life to adjust to when you moved to Pasco? Were there any challenges for you?
Allen: No, I was so glad to get out of Arkansas and so I—every challenge I had, I enjoyed.
Franklin: Oh, okay, So overall, it was just a much better—
Allen: Much better for me.
Franklin: Did any of your other family come to move here with you, or visit you in the Tri-Cities?
Allen: I didn’t bring my boys the first time I came. My mother kept them for me. Nobody came to see me; it was just me and my cousin and her children and everything like that. And then I met the gentleman that was going to be my second husband.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Allen: Right here. And we stayed there until the Lord called him home.
Franklin: How did you meet him?
Allen: I was working in our—her Queen Street Diner. And he was a customer. And we found out some things that we had in common, like our birthdays: mine was the last—mine was in February, and his was in January on the same day.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Allen: And that was just our little talking start there.
Franklin: Sure, like kind of like small talk and flirting.
Allen: Right.
Franklin: How would you describe life in the community of east Pasco when you moved here?
Allen: Well, my cousin, she had a rooming house that was attached to her little thing that she sold the food out of. So I had two rooms there in her rooming house. That’s how I lived. And then when she closed—when it closed down, then I got me a job two blocks down the street at Jack’s Tavern.
Franklin: Okay.
Allen: And then I worked there.
Franklin: Is that still there? No?
Allen: No.
Franklin: Okay. Do you remember any particular community events in—at that time, or after?
Allen: Well, it would’ve been mostly Christian—church activities. And you know, working in the tavern like I did, they’d turn on the jukebox and people danced or something like that. But I didn’t remember any other kinds of events, you know. Might have been something else going on, but that was the thing that had the most going for it.
Franklin: Sure.
Allen: Was the tavern at the time.
Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about the role of the church in the community there.
Allen: Yes, I think the church was very strong in the community. We had several outstanding churches that are still churches in the community. There was—did you want me to call off the names of them?
Franklin: Sure, yes, please.
Allen: St. James. St. James was a Methodist church, and that’s the church that we all went to until I decided to go Baptist. And then I went to Morning Star Baptist Church. So those were the two—St. James and Morning Star Baptist. And then, later on, New Hope Baptist came, and then Greater Faith. And those are the churches that are standing as we speak.
Franklin: Okay. And those are kind of like focal to the African American community—
Allen: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Franklin: --and east Pasco, right?
Allen: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: Did you end up—when did you end up getting your own place?
Allen: Well, when I married. [LAUGHTER] When I remarried. You know, we had to go through a period of time when you had to save up some money to get a divorce. So when we married, we rented a house at first. And then we saw the house that we bought, we purchased, over on Lewis Street. At the time before, it was a veteran’s hospital.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Allen: Right, and then they cleaned it up and everything, and it was a house, a regular house, right on Lewis Street. And that’s where we moved from going over to the west side.
Franklin: Okay. I’m wondering if—what can you tell me about the housing in east Pasco? Was it comparable with the housing in Kennewick and Richland?
Allen: Well, I think—to me, it was, because I really didn’t—I didn’t know any better. So we had this house, and it was on the corner directly across the street from the East Side Market and that was a store that we all enjoyed going to. And then across the street, the school—I can’t remember the name of the school—but it was a school directly across the street from my house that my children started from—the ones that were in that level.
Franklin: Hmm. I’ve read and done research that water and sanitation was sometimes lacking in east Pasco in the ‘50s; some houses didn’t have full utilities. Do you recall that at all?
Allen: No. Wherever—the two houses that I lived in over there besides my cousin’s place. No, we had water. Now, her place, she had a septic tank. She had septic, whatever it’s called. But when I moved away from her house, then we had regular—I guess it was city water. I never had any trouble with it.
Franklin: Okay.
Allen: Yeah, we never had any trouble with it. And then the house up on Lewis Street that we moved out of, we had what we needed in the line of water. It was city water, obviously.
Franklin: Right. What were your interactions with people from Richland, Pasco or Kennewick like?
Allen: Well, I’ve never been a person that had problems talking and laughing with other people. I didn’t try to hang on over there, because I was told that we wasn’t supposed to be over there after dark. So I wouldn’t go over there in the daylight, either.
Franklin: Was that kind of a formal law, or kind of like—because you said you were told you weren’t supposed to go over there after dark, and I’ve heard things about that. Was that a formal or kind of an informal prohibition?
Allen: I don’t know what that was all about, but I do know that my boyfriend that I married, he was over there, and it was dark, and they held him. He called me and said, if you don’t come get me, I’m going to have to spend the night.
Franklin: In jail?
Allen: Yeah.
Franklin: Oh, wow. And you said over there, you mean in—
Allen: In Kennewick.
Franklin: In Kennewick.
Allen: Yeah, over in Kennewick. It was dark, and they caught him over there. He hadn’t got to the Blue Bridge.
Franklin: Wow, was he driving, or was he—
Allen: He was driving.
Franklin: And they pulled him over?
Allen: Some—I don’t know what they did, but the next time I knew where he was, he was at the police station.
Franklin: Oh, wow. Did they charge him with anything?
Allen: I don’t think so. I don’t remember him—he probably had to pay a fine for being over there after dark. I don’t—we didn’t talk about it, because it was silly.
Franklin: Right. But you were made to feel unwelcome.
Allen: Oh, yeah. That was the main thing.
Franklin: When did that begin to change?
Allen: Well, I really can’t—because some of the stuff, it’s just kind of like changed when they put the highways in that we didn’t have before, you know. So we didn’t really have to go over the Blue Bridge to get to them; we could go different places. So as we—as time moved on, we got in with the rest of the world. [LAUGHTER] Things just, you know, started shaping up, because when they put out that the government wanted to buy up some houses over there on the east side, because they wanted to put a business district in there or something. I asked the man, the realtor, I told him—well, I had told him, can I be one of the first ones to move out? I said, so where am I going to move to? I said, can I go to the west side? And the man said—I said, will they sell me a house over on the west side? He said, if they want to sell that house, they better sell it to you. And so that was the thing that let me know that somebody was dealing with it, you know. So I didn’t—we didn’t have any trouble getting a house on the west side.
Franklin: Oh. Do you remember around what time that would have been?
Allen: You know, time—I told you that time—things like that escape me. But that would have been—hmm, let’s see. My baby girl was five. So that would have been 50 years ago.
Franklin: Okay, 50 years ago. So the late—mid-to-late ‘60s.
Allen: Probably so, yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Allen: Because I managed to buy me a house up off of 20th across from Robert Frost School. And they had the overpass where I—I liked it, because my children didn’t have to cross the street. There was a park and an overpass. So my children never had to cross the streets down there; they could just go over the overpass, and they’d be at Robert Frost School, or the high school right down about five blocks down the street. And they never had to get on the freeway. Because the highway was 20th Street at the time, until just about three years ago they took that thing down—the sign down—the crossing. They took it down. But I liked it, and my cousin lived across from Mark Twain School. She had a beautiful home right there, directly across. So we got some nice houses.
Franklin: That’s wonderful. But before then, you wouldn’t have been able—when you first moved here, people weren’t allowed—there was just, people wouldn’t sell a home in west Pasco to an African American, right?
Allen: No.
Franklin: No. The realtors wouldn’t and the—
Allen: I guess not.
Franklin: Did you hear of anybody trying early on?
Allen: No, I really didn’t, because I did a lot of working and taking care of my kids and everything. A new marriage, and more babies. I did it all—you know. But I do know that—I liked my location right there where I was, right there on Lewis Street, and like I said, directly across from a store, East Side Market—that was a nice big store—and directly across the street from the school. So that was really good.
Franklin: You had everything right there.
Allen: It was right there of course, yeah. And then when we went down under the underpass, they had a nice town section then. Very nice town section.
Franklin: Did your children, either the older or younger, did they experience any kind of segregation or racism in their education?
Allen: No, they did not. In fact, you know, I was telling the lady that I was with, I have the one son, he was going to Pasco High School, and everything that he would join, they made him the president. So he’s charmed, to this day. And Mr. Gregson, who was the principal at the time, requested that he go to West Point, which I had never heard tell of. I didn’t know what a west point was. But they told me, one of the finest colleges in the world. And so when they referred him there, then it was—I don’t know how he—what happened, but anyway he managed to get to go to West Point. And it made me cry, because, like I was saying, I never even heard tell of a west point. I didn’t know what it was. And then that’s when they told me it was one of the finest colleges in the nation. And my son got to go—he graduated from there, and his son graduated from there.
Franklin: Oh, wow, that’s great.
Allen: Yeah.
Franklin: What was your own education like? How far did you—
Allen: I went to the tenth grade, because I married much too young. And so, when I was in tenth grade, I married. But after I had raised all of my children, I went back to school.
Franklin: Okay.
Allen: Okay, and I got my GED and then I got my degree from Central Washington State College. I got a teaching certificate—I taught. So I taught for 20 years. Before then, I was a home visitor. I was a home visitor for seven years, and I taught for 20 years at—I taught at Mark Twain Elementary School and Ruth Livingston out on Road 100.
Franklin: What is a home visitor?
Allen: Well, you go and find out why children aren’t at school, or do they need something? Because, you know. So you were just a soldier for the children, to help to get them out, or find out why they’re not coming to school or what. And we had a card where we could take them over to Grigg’s if they didn’t have the clothes. Because a lot of time, the parents would be out in the fields working and they just couldn’t. And we could get them two pair of jeans and things to go with it.
Franklin: Oh, wow. Was that primarily African American children that you were working with?
Allen: Mm-mm.
Franklin: No, it was all—
Allen: Whoever needed it.
Franklin: Whoever need it.
Allen: Whoever needed it: we had white, Mexican, black, you know.
Franklin: That’s really amazing that you had to leave high school at tenth grade—or you made it through and then you later went back to get everything and teach.
Allen: Yeah, right out of here, CBC. This is not the same CBC I went to. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know where in the world these beautiful buildings and things came from, because the school I started looked like a big rooming house. [LAUGHTER] But it’s okay. It’s where I went to.
Franklin: Right, well, it seems to have done you pretty well.
Allen: I’m grateful for that. But I had a family to raise first before I could go back to school.
Franklin: Right.
Allen: So I went—at 45 is when I got my degree. I was 45. And that gave me my 20 years’ teaching. And I was already working while I was going to school; I was a home visitor.
Franklin: Wow, never too late, right? Never too late. That’s great. You also started working onsite—you worked at the Hanford Site.
Allen: Yes.
Franklin: At a point, too, right? What did you do at the Hanford Site?
Allen: When I got hired there, the man took me into the building, and I was in downtown Richland—Uptown Richland, I guess. I worked at a place called U.S. Testing. The gentleman took me and he introduced me to people. And then he took me and sat me down, he told me, he said, I want you to be able to replace whoever’s not here. He said, I want you to just kind of be a stand-in. He said, so I would like for you to spend some time with the various offices that we have in here, so that if somebody is missing and we need help, you can come. That went from being a secretary on down. So I—that’s what I did. I worked with various people in the dark room; I worked with them in the labs; you know, I worked—so I got an opportunity to work with everybody, and then I also drove in the truck that you go and pick up the buckets off the people’s porches. I would go from Pasco to Yakima, Pasco to Walla Walla—you know, various places.
Franklin: When you say bucket, do you mean the bioassay kits? The urine—
Allen: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: --and fecal matter—
Allen: Yes, whatever was in it.
Franklin: Right.
Allen: I didn’t know—I didn’t have to open it. I’d just take it off the porch and put it in the truck.
Franklin: And then place a clean one.
Allen: Mm-hmm, yeah, if it needed to be.
Franklin: And how long did you do that for?
Allen: For—I think I worked out there about six years. Because I got sick. I got sick. They had told me to—I don’t know what was in it, but they had told me to wear—they had a couple of us—to wear a certain outfit that they had for us to put on. I don’t know—I think I would have not done it now, because after I wore it, it wasn’t too long before I got sick. They told us to keep it on. So I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you what it was. But they insisted that we keep it on for that full day and night and wear it. So, I don’t know what happened. But I know I got sick, and I was in the bed for a year.
Franklin: And—for a year?
Allen: Yes, I had to go to the doctor. They—my boss met me up in Seattle as I got off the plane, and took me over to, I think it was Virginia Mason Clinic.
Franklin: Wow.
Allen: And I was there, and we went another someplace else. They was checking my whole body to find, I have no idea what. Nobody ever explained to me what that was. But I—that was the end of my working out at Hanford, because it was just too spooky for me, you know.
Franklin: Right.
Allen: And I caught a picture of myself of working in a chimney, where all the steam and stuff go up and I was in there scrubbing it. But I didn’t have on a mask or anything like that. So I wasn’t getting the right training for it, because they shouldn’t have let me in there. But anyway, I got sick and I was in the bed for one year, yeah. My husband had to put my bed in the living room so I could be with the family.
Franklin: Wow.
Allen: Mm-hmm. And I don’t know what that—the material was that those clothes were made of, or if it had anything to do with it. I just know that that’s the difference. I’d never seen anything like it before. It was a couple of us, and I don’t know who the others were, but it was a couple of us that did that. But other than that, I just kind of like worked around in that building. Whatever somebody else was doing and they weren’t there, then I would either learn how to do it or do it.
Franklin: What was the office environment there like? Did you face any kinds of discrimination?
Allen: Yeah, at first I did. When I first went there. But then for some reason, the lady that was in the darkroom, she didn’t want me there. And for some reason, she met me one day, and she was crying. And she hugged me. And she begged my pardon, you know, and everything like that. Because she was saying, she ain’t coming in here! And then something happened.
Franklin: Did she ever tell you what happened?
Allen: No, but she just was very nice to me. And she said, I’ll tell you what I know about the darkroom. And everybody ended up being just very, very nice to me. It was that first thing that they didn’t—I guess they didn’t know—maybe they thought I was mean. I don’t know.
Franklin: Did you—how many other African Americans were working onsite then? Was it pretty—still pretty uncommon? Or did you work with any other African Americans?
Allen: No, I worked downtown, Richland. I don’t know what is the downtown, Uptown, anyway, but right behind Safeway. I didn’t—no. There was no more in there. People would come and get their body counts and stuff on the other side, and I was in the lab side.
Franklin: Okay. How did the civil rights movement affect the Tri-Cities and your life?
Allen: In my lifetime? Well, you know, when you got eight children at home, you don’t get out of the house too much except to go where you’re going and get back home really quick. But I didn’t think it—I had been in segregation, down South, in Little Rock, Arkansas. I never saw a sign like the ones that I saw in the South. Because down in the South, they would say, blacks to the back, and all kinds of stuff like that. They had them signs. And waitress wanted, white only, or waitress wanted, black only. That’s how they—elevator operators, because that’s what we did at the time. Now you do your own elevator, but at that time, they wanted either a darker black or a lighter black. You know?
Franklin: Yeah.
Allen: Light-skinned. But everybody seemed to work. They did get jobs, but you just had to go past those signs. I have a picture of a girl, she sneaked and drank out of the white fountain, and she was saying, aaahh. And I was thinking, that water don’t taste any different.
Franklin: Yeah. Were you involved in the civil rights movement in any way?
Allen: I tried not to be.
Franklin: Why was that?
Allen: I didn’t—I don’t know what I could have done, because it’s a lot of people got killed, dragged behind cars, behind trucks and things. There was that one boy, they drowned him because he spoke to this white lady.
Franklin: Emmitt Till.
Allen: Emmitt Till, yeah. That’s the kind of stuff that was going on. So I didn’t really have a need to do any of that.
Franklin: Was there any local opposition from the white community towards civil rights? Did you—
Allen: No, I didn’t—nobody—oh. The one funny thing that happened after we moved up off of 20th Street. My husband was at the—you probably know what I’m going to say. My husband was out back cutting the lawn and trimming the bushes. And a guy walked up and asked him how much would he charge to trim his bushes? And so my husband told him, well, I get to sleep with the lady of the house. [LAUGHTER] And I guess that man, he didn’t like that answer. [LAUGHTER] But that’s exactly what happened. He told him, I get to sleep with the lady of the house. Because it was our front there. He was trimming hedges, that’s what he was doing. The man came wanting to know how much he charging him to cut his hedges.
Franklin: Right, because he thought he was—
Allen: Trying to be funny.
Franklin: --not the owner of the house, but a worker.
Allen: Ah, no, trying to be funny. Because I think by that time, it had rounded that people are moving into the various communities. Because by that time, a lot of people started moving over to the west side.
Franklin: Yeah.
Allen: Yeah, because when I asked—when my house went up, I asked the real estate person, can you get me a house over on the west side? Will they sell me a house? He said, if they don’t sell it to you, then they’re going to have to take it off the market. That’s how he explained it to me. He said, because it’s open. He let us know it was open. And people were starting to come all along the 2nd Street there, all that filled in with black people.
Franklin: Was the housing generally better on the west side?
Allen: Well, there wasn’t anything left on the east side. Yeah, there wasn’t anything else left on the east side. So that’s the reason that we were moving, because they were wanting to have some more business stuff. Like they got. They got a lot of business stuff over there.
Franklin: All the development and everything.
Allen: Mm-hmm, yeah. I see a couple of the buildings—the old hotel building is still over there, and it’s ugly, too. Well, it’s been there for—you know. I’ve been here 50, 60 years. It was there when I got there.
Franklin: Right.
Allen: In fact, there was all kinds of stuff over there when I first came here.
Franklin: Were your children active in the civil rights movement locally or anything? Do you remember them, were they involved or interested or invested in any way?
Allen: If they were, I didn’t know about it, because they helped me a lot with the smaller children, so there was always a couple of the boys at home around to help me out in case I needed to go to the store or whatever. I don’t remember them being involved in any—they were involved in school activities, like racing and ball—stuff, whatever at the school. They weren’t—it wasn’t the neighborhood stuff. But we did go to church. We did that, we went to church over there.
Franklin: [STOMACH GURGLING] Excuse me. Excuse me again. Any memories of, like, the social scene or politics or insights into Tri-Cities since—from when you moved here on?
Allen: I don’t understand.
Franklin: Sorry. Anything about the Tri-Cities stick out to you from when you moved here, or from living here in the past 60 years?
Allen: I don’t—not quite understanding.
Franklin: Oh, okay. Well, let me try a different question.
Allen: Okay.
Franklin: Let’s see here. Were there any—what are some of your memories of major events in the Tri-Cities? Do you remember President Kennedy visiting in 1963? Because you would have—I think you would have been working at Hanford at that time.
Allen: Yeah, I remember something about that. I didn’t get an opportunity to participate in anything like that. I do know, when—who was the—what President was that, that got killed? I was working out in Richland at Hanford and I was in the darkroom working. The man that oversees the buildings, he came and came in there where I was, and he was surprised to see me. He said, what are you doing here? I said, I work here. He said, but everybody else has gone home. I says, why? He said, President Kennedy got killed. That’s about what I remember. Everybody just—the cars were backed up as far as you could see them, because everybody was leaving, going home. And the guy found me and got me, ousted me out of the building to go home. But other than that—I mean, that’s—everybody took advantage of that. But—no.
Franklin: Were you ever worried about—Hanford played such an important role in the Cold War in producing plutonium. Were you ever worried about being so close to Hanford? Did it ever make you nervous or anxious?
Allen: Are you talking about living or working?
Franklin: Both.
Allen: Well, I didn’t even think about it in my living, because like I said, that was all the way out in Richland. We did have people out there living in mobile homes and things off the properties there. But I never did consider none of that, because I didn’t live in Richland. I lived in Pasco, and never the twain shall meet. People would come over sometime and go to church, over to Pasco. But, no, we did have quite a few people that lived over—quite a few black people that lived over there in trailers and different things like that. I did try to buy a house when they put all their houses up for sale, because it was so nice and cheap, but they said, no, you can’t buy if you didn’t work out—at the time. That’s before I did go to Hanford, I was trying to—no, that was after I had left Hanford. They were selling their houses, because they were so cheap. I would have loved to have bought them, but they said no.
Franklin: Oh, so you tried to buy a house in Richland?
Allen: Well, yeah, I wanted to, because they were selling them for $2,000 and $3,000. Nice big houses.
Franklin: [LAUGHING] Yeah. Oh, let’s see here. When you worked at Hanford, how did security or secrecy impact your job there?
Allen: Well, the things that I did, it wasn’t that kind of secret. Because, like I said, if I was in the lab, probably washing stuff down or something like that. Or if somebody wasn’t in the office, I was probably in the office, doing something. It didn’t affect me very much, because I just did what I was told. [LAUGHTER] That’s as far as I would go with that. I learned a lot while I was there working. But after I got sick, and I stayed—basically—I was basically in bed for a year. When I came out, and I was going to go back out to U.S. Testing, there was a foul, strong odor out there, and I backed out. I said, no, I’m not going to die out here. I was just going to go out there to see if I could meet with somebody and talk. But I got this strong scent of medicine and stuff. And I said, I’m not inhaling that stuff in my body no more. So the medicine that they gave me, I’m still on it, and that’s been 60 years.
Franklin: Wow.
Allen: Yeah. Still taking it, and that’s—I rarely take medicine that long. But I still have to take it.
Franklin: Do you know—what kind of medicine is it?
Allen: Well, sarca—they called it—they said I had gotten something like sarcoidosis. But if I had my medicine list, I could show you, but—because I got a medicine list. I get a medicine list, and on there you got this medicine, over the years, the same thing over and over and over. And they say, well, that’s what’s keeping you going. That’s what’s keeping your heart beating. That’s what they tell me about it. So, I’m grateful.
Franklin: Who were—do you remember any—who were some of the community leaders when you—in the African American community, when you moved here in the ‘50s?
Allen: Yeah. Well, one of the leaders was my cousin, Virgie
Robinson. She was definitely a leader. She was a leader.
Franklin: How long had she been here?
Allen: Well, she must have been here three or four years, I guess. Because when she came down there and saw me, and asked—because I had lived with her family from the time I was five until I was twelve. So she hadn’t seen me for a while, so when she came and saw me down, and asked me if I wanted—if I would come to Pasco. I would’ve just probably went anywhere at the time, because I was so desperate to get out of Little Rock, Arkansas. I hated it. But she—you said, who are some of the other people there. Well, I’m trying to think who was—well, always the pastors. The pastors seemed to be always the lead people. Dallas Barnes. He was going to college and he was working. The Daniels family, they were very—the men were very useful. Vanis Daniels and—
Franklin: Oh yeah. Yeah, he’s wonderful.
Allen: That Daniels people, the young men were good. Delores Groves. Mm-hmm. Yes.
Franklin: Did you know the—
Allen: She died two years ago.
Franklin: Did you know the Mitchells at all?
Allen: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: Did you have—because they lived in Richland most of the time, right? CJ and his—
Allen: Oh, yeah. I’ve never known him to live in—they used to come to church over in Pasco and then they stopped that, too. But yeah, I know the Mitchells. CJ Mitchell and all of them. But they were active—very, very active.
Franklin: Yeah. Because he—I think he became a realtor at some point and helped to sell houses.
Allen: And his son. His son—is he a judge?
Franklin: I think so.
Allen: I think that’s a judge, yeah, because I think I saw him yesterday on a—whatever they do. He had on a case.
Franklin: Oh, right, right.
Allen: Yeah, he was—
Franklin: And then you guys eventually moved out to even more west Pasco, right?
Allen: Yes.
Franklin: When was that?
Allen: 2003.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Allen: 2002 or 2003. Yeah, we built our own house out there.
Franklin: Okay, and how come you moved from Lewis and
—
Allen: Because we had this big park. And drugs—them guys were starting to meet out there in the park there. And I told BJ—because, in fact, they had tore a lady’s house, the inside out of her house because they found drugs in her house. And they had all her stuff sitting outside. And I told my husband, I said, we need to get out of here. I said, because this—I don’t like this. This is spooky. They got that woman’s house just tore up because they found some drugs in it. And the park, it just wasn’t fit to go to anymore. My kids used to enjoy going to the park, learning how to swim in the summertime, just playing. And all of the sudden, all these guys with these drugs and stuff were out there. So I just happened to be riding—because I didn’t even know that this existed, where I’m living now. And I got up there on Road 60 and it was a service station and there was Yoke’s. And I’m thinking, what’s going on? And I went around the corner and they had all these apartments, and then you could go in and sign in the book and check them out. So I did and I went and told my husband, let’s go back. So we did, we went back and we decided, okay, we’ll get out of here and put our house up. It was gone in three days.
Franklin: Wow.
Allen: Well, the lady across the street wanted it for her brother.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Allen: And somebody else was wanting to see the house, but this man was complaining. Well, you need to do this, and you need to do that. And that lady called me on my phone, because she knew my name, and she asked me, where are you living? And I did my best to tell her. She came out there and she gave me a down payment and told me, you call your husband and tell him to get that man out of that house. Because I want it for my brother. So they bought the house, and we got started.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great. How has Pasco changed from when you moved there in the early ‘50s to now?
Allen: Well, I think the population—well, we don’t want to talk about population, do we? What can I say? It’s a good place, it’s a nice place over there. Nice houses—some nice houses over there. In fact, they got a whole neighborhood behind this one church over there, behind Greater Faith—New Hope. Behind New Hope Baptist Church they’ve got a whole neighborhood that’s mostly Hispanic over there. So a lot—you go over there and you find 99% of the people that’s—so I have a lady friend of my granddaughter’s who—they got married recently, and they decided to build over there because it’s the cheapest place. They said the bill. So according to the paper, you know, it’s 90%--they figure that the population is about 90% Hispanic. Which is great. But it’s good to be able to find places to live, and live peacefully. That’s what you want to do.
Franklin: How—were there a lot of Hispanics when you moved to the area in 1950s? When did that begin to change?
Allen: You know, I don’t really know, because I was working and learning and taking care of babies—my children and everything. It was—I didn’t really do a lot of keeping up with the population change. But I know that we—now, when I lived on Lewis Street, we came back over to Richland—I mean over to the side. They had all the good stores over there: they had Penny’s and they even had Montgomery Ward’s, and ain’t seen a Montgomery Ward’s, and Sears & Roebuck, and all the drugstores and things like that.
Then one day I was at the West Side Market. Because I tell this all the time, and it happened. And this gentleman came in, and he had a board like you’ve got, and he had a big book. And he came into the store—the West Side Market—and he asked the lady that was at the counter, he said, I’d like to speak to your boss, please. She says, oh, okay. And so he walked around, and I said, hmm, I wonder what this all about. I’m going to see. So when the boss came out, he says, I see you don’t have no Mexican workers. And I’m thinking, uh-oh. Maybe I can get out of here. But no. And the guy kind of looked around, and he said, you don’t have no Mexican workers? You don’t have Mexican workers, you don’t need Mexican money. And I was thinking to myself, why couldn’t I have thought about that? I thought that was really cool, because by Saturday, I saw three people working in that store. Three Mexicans working. That was the West Side Market. Because we had the East Side Market, and the same guy owned both stores. So this was the West Side Market. But he got Mexicans—pretty soon, they had jobs. And I’m thinking, this man comes from nowhere—I don’t know where he came from, but all of the sudden, he tells this man, if you want Mexican money, you get Mexican workers. I said, that’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard. I love it. I loved that! Why couldn’t we have thought about that? Because we still hadn’t got no jobs down there. But I thought that was so nice, because then all of the sudden within like a month, every store around had Hispanic workers. And that’s good. And so then I read in the paper that Pasco was like 90-95% Hispanic. And that’s okay. They’re working, and that’s what counts.
Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Had it been difficult for people in the African American community to find jobs early on?
Allen: Mm-hmm, yeah. We didn’t find hardly any jobs. You might find one working. And then my cousin, he had a store over there on 4th Street—4th and Clark. It was selling sandwiches and things like that, and it didn’t really do too good.
Franklin: What did your husband do when he worked?
Allen: My husband worked for Boise-Cascade and Hanford. So he would work for Hanford for a while and get laid off, and then he’d go to Boise-Cascade. So then he’d go to Boise-Cascade for a while, and then he’d get laid off and go back to Hanford—no, Hanford would call him back. So he did that three or four times and then he said, you know what? I’m sick of this. This just doesn’t make sense for me to just keep going back and getting laid off and then go back. So my husband was a truck driver for Boise-Cascade.
Franklin: It would be hard to build up seniority that way, and a pension.
Allen: Yeah, see, that’s what he was upset about. Because like he said, this don’t even make sense. I’m working, and then Hanford call me back and there I go running back. And then work for seven, eight months, maybe a year, get laid off again. Go back out to Boise—Hanford call you back.
Franklin: What did he do at Hanford? Did he also drive truck at—
Allen: He was—no, he was an engineer. He was—oh, what—he fixed things. Yeah. I have some pictures of him in his office with the other guys that was in there. They did upkeep on instruments and different stuff like that.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Allen: And at Boise-Cascade, he was a truck driver.
Franklin: Oh, very different occupations.
Allen: So finally he moved; finally he decided, I’m staying with Boise-Cascade.
Franklin: Okay. Did he ever talk about experiencing any kind of discrimination or segregation at Hanford or Boise-Cascade?
Allen: No, I really didn’t. Certainly not at Boise-Cascade and Hanford, either, that I knew of. I felt very comfortable. Probably the first day or so, you know, when people looking at you going in. And then the boss man taking here and telling you about this job and this job, somebody might think something. But other than that, after a while, we would be hugging and—you know—being happy and we’d have dinners and everything would be nice. I didn’t have any bad feelings at all.
Franklin: Did you ever—you still have family in Arkansas, right? Some family in Arkansas, or did they all—
Allen: I [UNKNOWN] because my mother and my step-father died. So, no, I don’t have any that I know of.
Franklin: Oh okay, so you pretty much severed—
Allen: I—
Franklin: --severed ties in Arkansas. How do you think your life would have been different if you had stayed—if you had not come to the Tri-Cities?
Allen: Well, I certainly didn’t like Arkansas, and I wasn’t going to stay there, because believe you me, I have gone to other places. I went to St. Louis—I didn’t like that. Chicago, different places like that. Certainly wasn’t going back to Saginaw, Michigan where I was raised from the time I was five until I was twelve. I hated that place with two passions.
Franklin: Why?
Allen: Well, I didn’t do anything. You know, I was a little girl—I was a young girl there, and things started happening as I was moving on, because I was there from the time I was five until I was twelve. And that’s when I went back to Little Rock, where my mother was. But during that time, I didn’t even see my mother. Because they just didn’t have the money. And my stepfather, he did the best he could, but they wasn’t paying anything, hardly, for people working. He didn’t work in the mines or anything like that. That was one of the big places for people to work at, in the mine—mines and things like that. So, I wouldn’t have stayed there, under no circumstances. I literally hated Saginaw, Michigan—I mean, Little Rock, Arkansas, I hated it. And Saginaw, too. This—I fell in love with Richland and Pasco and Kennewick. I really did.
Franklin: Really?
Allen: Yeah.
Franklin: What was it about it that—
Allen: Well, I had more of a chance to get out and get into these careers. I got to finish up my education right here. That all by itself, you know. I got ready to do that, and then I did that. This man thought enough of my son to recommend him to one of the finest colleges in the nation, and we didn’t have 15 cent to grind, and he went. That just—
Franklin: Did he end up getting a scholarship to go? How did he—
Allen: Yeah, yeah!
Franklin: Wow, that’s really something.
Allen: Yup, they put him in and I got to go see him when he graduated. We all went to see him when he graduated. And then he got married, and his son went to West Point. That was good.
Franklin: Yeah. You must be very proud.
Allen: I am, and I was. He was a FEMA worker. He worked for FEMA, but here just about four months ago, another something came in that was kind of like FEMA. I don’t know the name of it. But he quit FEMA and went to this other place, because the way that he was going with FEMA, which the head office was in Washington, D.C., he would have to take his car—he lives in Maryland—and he would have to take his car up to where they all parked their cars and take a train to go into Washington, D.C. Because, he said, if you found a parking place to purchase, it’s half of your check. He said it was so expensive and everything. So he worked there for many, many, many years. But just this year—this past year, another company came in similar to that. It was just—but he didn’t have to travel to those terrible places like FEMA people do. You know, they have to go where all that mud and everything. And he’s done this quite a few times, and he said this one gives him a break. Because he’s 65 years old now. So he’s not as young as he was when he started it. He started it, I think, back when he was in either his late 30s or early 40s. And he worked all that time. So he said he was awfully glad to be able to not have to park his car at the—wherever they park the cars—to get on the trains. Because they have parking lots for people to go. And you still have to pay for that, too. That’s another thing you have to pay for.
Franklin: Wow, it’s expensive to make a living. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Tri-Cities?
Allen: Well, you know, I think—I believe that Hanford is a good place to work, because I got two daughters left out there. They’re both working—they got excellent jobs. Now, I got a son that died from that stuff that they got out there. It got in his system and everything. And he died about five years ago. From working out in that stuff. But I would—there’s danger in all kinds of jobs. You’d have to know what you’re doing to be working. Because it is dangerous, and a lot of people have left here that were working out there, and all of the sudden their lungs were messed up and various things like that. So I’m just grateful that I got sick, but I got well. Yeah.
Franklin: Yeah.
Allen: But I think that—I don’t know what the clothes had to do with me. And nobody told me that they had something to do—I’m wondering why did they say to put these clothes on and keep them on overnight, all day, and overnight and then get them changed. I don’t know what that was about. Nobody ever told me anything. But I have a suspicion that that was the cause of me getting sick like I did.
Franklin: Yeah.
Allen: Because I was up in Virginia Mason for quite a while and just various—you know. I was sick. I was in the bed for a year.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s really something. Disturbing story.
Allen: Yes, it is.
Franklin: Is there anything else you’d like to mention related to migration and segregation and civil rights and how they impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?
Allen: Well. I don’t like that kind of stuff, but—because my first thing to go with integration was when I got on the bus in Little Rock—I mean—I’m sorry, in Saginaw, Michigan is where I’d been living for seven years. When they would put me on the bus to send me home to my mother, they tagged me. They put my name and everything there so that they—okay, so when—we was riding the bus, just really good, and when we came to what they called the Mason-Dixon Line—and I didn’t know what it was; they told me later—this man, said, all right, all you niggers get to the back. And that just killed me. Because he had been—seemed like he had been so nice. Because I had been sitting right behind the driver. Because I was tagged. And so—and then he says, all you niggers get to the back. Okay. So then we went, and we went on a few miles, and everybody stopped for lunch. So I got in the—to run in to get some lunch, and they told me, you get to the back. You go around on the back side. So I went there and they had a bunch of sandwiches made up, and you never know how long them sandwiches had been there or what. But that’s what they had to offer. So that was my introduction to what it was going to be. And it was sick.
Franklin: Yeah.
Allen: Yeah, I just couldn’t believe that people could get treated like that. But I really didn’t have much to go on.
Franklin: And the Tri-Cities gave you a break from that?
Allen: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: Right? There wasn’t that type of environment—
Allen: No, we didn’t have nothing like that, that I know of. I’m sure that somebody somewhere had some discrimination problems. And like I told you, my then-boyfriend got trapped over in Kennewick. So I had to go and get him out—bail him out, and they told him, don’t come back over there at night.
Franklin: Do you think in general, for people you knew that also moved here, that life was better here than if they had come from the South?
Allen: Most of them that came here stayed. They stayed, they got jobs, you know. They had houses. To this day. So I think they—I think most of them liked it here. And I haven’t heard of anybody going back home, going back South. But I have a granddaughter that—she wanted to move South, because she wanted to go to a historically black college. And she did, and she’s doing a good job, and she’s happy where she is and everything like that. But, see, I wouldn’t—it didn’t faze me at all.
Franklin: Well, Rose, thank you so much for coming and interviewing, and just telling me about your life and your life story. I really appreciate it.
Allen: Well, thank you very much for asking me, and I’m sorry my memory’s not any better than it is. But—
Franklin: No, I—
Allen: That’s the best I got.
Franklin: No, you did a wonderful job. Thank you again, so much.
Allen: Okay.
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
General Electric
U.S. Testing
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1950-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1960-1966
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Rose Allen
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Segregation
Teaching
Civil rights
Description
An account of the resource
Rose Allen moved to Pasco, Washington from Arkansas in the early 1950's.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
01/12/2018
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
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A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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National Park Service
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Hanford History Project
Date
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9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
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For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
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Clarance Alford
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview on Clarence Alford on May 17th 2018. The interview is being conducted on the Campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We’ll be talking with Clarence about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities. And for the record can you state and spell your full name for us?
Clarence Alford: Okay, Clarence Alford, Junior. That’s Clarence, it’s C-L-A-R-E-N-C-E. The last name is Alford, A-L-F-O-R-D, that’s a junior.
Franklin: Okay. So, Clarence, tell me how and why you came to the area?
Alford: Well, I came to the area to see a brother. I had a brother who lived here that worked up at Battelle and I came to see him. After being here I met a young lady, came back to see the young lady and thought I would take a job and a few months later she was gone and I was stuck. I wasn’t able to find my way out.
Franklin: When was this?
Alford: This was 1968.
Franklin: 1968. And where did you grow up? Where are you from originally?
Alford: I’m from the State of Louisiana, a little small place called Ringgold.
Franklin: Can you spell that?
Alford: R-I-N-G-G-O-L-D. It’s 35 miles east of Shreveport, 100 miles north of Alexandria, 203 miles from Baton Rouge.
Franklin: Were you born in Ringgold?
Alford: I was born in Ringgold, yes.
Franklin: What year were you born?
Alford: 1944.
Franklin: 1944. You moved here from there? You were in your mid 20s when you moved out?
Alford: Yes.
Franklin: I wonder if you can tell me about life growing up in the South during the Jim Crow era.
Alford: In what sense?
Franklin: I guess, let’s talk about opportunities. What were your educational opportunities and experiences?
Alford: I was out of six of us: three girls and three boys in my family. Parents, one parent finished first grade and the other one finished eighth grade. Their push for us was to get an education. Out of the six of us, five of us ended up with degrees. Two finished high school and there was one that did not finish high school, probably the smartest of the group, he later got a GED and ended up in a unique position in the State of California. The schools that I attended was segregated schools, because at that particular time, integration has not taken place in the State of Louisiana. The pluses for me was the support of my parents. I didn’t want to go into the armed services. I had heard about the Teacher Corps and they had another corps, it wasn’t the Teacher Corps where young people could actually go and participate in an activity. And I found out very soon that that wasn’t an option. My parents very soon decided what we did. It wasn’t a decision that I decided. So when I got in college, I really had some difficulties trying to figure out what field I should go into. But I met a young lady who was a chemistry major and I thought, I like her, chemistry probably would be the subject. So I got my degree in mathematics with a minor in chemistry. I think sometime if she would have been a recess major I probably would’ve been in recess as a career.
Franklin: What college did you attend?
Alford: Undergraduate was Southern University in Baton Rouge Louisiana. It’s the largest black land grant college in the United States.
Franklin: But did you go on to get an advanced degree?
Alford: Yup. I was one of those individuals that was very fortunate, I had a chance to go to Pratt Institute in New York. Pratt, if you know it, has two things that people go there for; one is if you are in art and the second if you’re in chemistry. I had a chance to go there. I met a professor that told me I should go and get a degree and get a master’s degree, and so I did. When I got my master’s degree there was probably one of those individuals who took a little bit of interest in me and that was a plus. But that was—I took part of my degree here at Washington State University on campus and here. The fun part about it is that—something that I never anticipated—was I ended up teaching a class about three doors from here. That’s a whole different story but that’s a little bit from my background.
Franklin: That’s really interesting. What about work opportunities? What did your parents do in Louisiana?
Alford: My father and mother was farmers. My father ended up marrying my mother who was somewhat ambitious and they bought 40 acres of land in Louisiana and started a farm, and so they were farmers. It was a small farm with some mules and plows, but that was the lifestyle until the kids all grew up, they didn’t have enough people to continue the farm and so my father got a job working in the logging industry. He did that until he got a job driving a school bus on the last portion of his life, and the rest of it is history.
Franklin: Tell me about the house you grew up in.
Alford: The first house that we lived in I don’t really remember, because I was there for like two years. My parents built a house. The house that they built, we didn’t have an indoor plumbing but we had a five bedrooms. Because we didn’t have a living room; the living room was one big bedroom. That was the room that my parents lived in. it was on top of a hill, and in Louisiana you don’t have a lot of hills, but in that case we were on a hill surrounded by pine trees and oak trees. A good place to go fishing and hunting. It was a major highway. But prior to that time, for my brothers and sisters, it was different because at that particular time he had not built the house and so the distance between where they lived and the main highway was about eight miles, it was down a dirt road. When it rained, you didn’t go anywhere because the car couldn’t make it up the hill. But for me, the house we had was a neat house. My dad talked about the one—my brothers and sisters talked about going to bed at night and waking up thinking that someone urinated on you. But if you looked up you could see sometimes the moon and the stars and when it rained, from what I understand, the water came down wherever the holes happened to be and if you didn’t move your bed you had a pond in it for the rest of the night and it was cold.
Franklin: During your childhood, the South was under segregation, right? I wonder if you can talk about your experiences with segregation and with Jim Crow, in the town, commercial activities, things like that.
Alford: Well, because my parents did farm, I learned to work in the field very, very early. There was no such thing as a time frame that you start in the morning at 8:00 or 7:00. You started when my parents said time to go and we stopped when they said we’re going home. Because my father was one of these individuals who was able to communicate with people, we had a number of people that would visit us, who happened to have been quite unusual but common. My father’s relationship with those particular fellas, they would come up sometimes at night, knock on the door, they would bring something to drink and sit around or on our porch and drink. I don’t know how he developed that relationship. I don’t know why they felt comfortable to come to our house, but it happened.
In terms of me getting in trouble, didn’t happen until I was in high school. One night, we were going to the carnival, and of course there we called it a fair. I was driving home and I got stopped by a police officer. The police officer had us to get out of the car, he patted us down, he wanted to know where we had been, and we told him. So he decided that we should go to jail, so he took us to the little city in Ringgold. There, he put us in jail and I asked him how long we would be there, and that wasn’t the question that I should’ve asked. He said some things that are not very nice to hear. But later on he came--
Franklin: Like racial slurs?
Alford: Yes. A little bit later on I asked him if I could call my dad. And he asked who is my dad. I had given him my license from the State of Louisiana. He looked at it, but I guess he had not connected the last names. So, he asked me who’s my father and I told him and he said, oh, okay, you can come out. I was able to come out and call my father. My dad drove down and came into jail, and he wanted to know why. The fella said, well, he was driving the car and they was in the car and I stopped them. My father said, why? And I can’t remember what answer he gave, but my father said I’m taking my son, I’m taking these boys with me. He said, no, you’re not taking them. And my father said, no, I’m taking them. And he gave them one of the fellas that lived in the city, he said, either I’m taking them or he’s going to come down here and get my boys out of here. That was my connection with law enforcement. He did let us go, and they didn’t write up any charges, they just dropped two boys out at their house and told their parents and they were very thankful that we was at home. But other than that, just maybe a couple occasions where you were stopped by somebody and say some things that are inappropriate but life has been pretty good.
Franklin: Segregation pervaded pretty much every aspect of life in the South.
Alford: Right.
Franklin: What about—I understand you grew up on the farm, pretty rural. But when you went to town, did you have to use separate facilities, or when you traveled did you have to use separate facilities from whites. And I’m wondering if you can you describe those facilities?
Alford: Yup, it was—looking back at that particular time, it’s very difficult to determine what’s right and wrong because that’s just a set of rules. When I was growing up it was just a set of rules. If you were walking down the street and there was a white female coming in that direction, the appropriate thing was to step off the side walk. If you went into the store and you was buying something and someone else came in and who happened to be white, you took your items while they took care of theirs. In terms of so many things—when you only know one things when you only know x, it’s very difficult to see why. The reason behind that is that growing up in the South and where I grew up, that was just a code of ethics, if you will. I hate to use the word “ethics” in this case, but it was just a sequence of events that had been there for I don’t know how many years. So being born there, it’s just the way it was. That’s just the way they city operated. So when you saw a police officer, you wanted to make sure that you didn’t get very close to him, and the reason was because police was not considered to be your friends. Where, if they went to the left, you went to the right; if you could avoid seeing them, you did. That was taught to me by parents, is that I don’t want to see you in one of those cars being taken to jail.
Franklin: Right.
Alford: If you do these types of things, you can avoid it. That was the process of growing up in the South for me and my family.
Franklin: Were whites and blacks addressed differently?
Alford: It’d depend on the location. What I mean by that is that when you walked into a store, whites was always mister, okay, mister and missus, miss. That’s the way you addressed them. But there was cases where that part didn’t work. I’ll give you a case and it’s a case I think about quite often and I’m not so sure why it occurred. I remember my oldest brother, he had a friend and they used to play together, about the same age. When they got to be older, I don’t remember the age somewhere around sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, I can remember my brother, older brother, being in the store with us and Ray. Ray was a white kid who was about the same age as my brother, and we played together, we talked to each other, and we called him Ray all the time. On this particular day my older brother says, hey, Ray, let’s go hunting, or something. And these other individuals who happened to be white said, hey, he told his dad, did you hear what that boy said to your son? His name was Otis. And Otis said, what? What happened? He said, he called your son by his first name, he should be calling him mister now. I think I will probably remember this forever, Mr. Otis turned around and said to this fella and he says, the first time my son asks Max—that was my brother’s name—he called him mister I’m going to kick his bump-bump-bump all the way home.
It was the first time that I had ever heard a case where a white person said to another white person that this will not happen with my son. But why’d it occur, I don’t know; I just remember it happening. And we have talked—the family we have talked about that I don’t know, numerous times. The sad part about it is that when we got old enough to consciously get to think about it, the father was deceased and so was the son. I never had an opportunity—it was one of those cases where I wished I had an opportunity to go and talk to the father and ask him why, why we call you mister, but you didn’t want my brother to call your son mister? It’s a rare case and I don’t know the answer; it’s just something that occurred.
Franklin: How did the civil rights movement begin to affect your life in the South before you left Louisiana?
Alford: How did segregation impact my life in Louisiana? I think for me, it did three things: one, it gave me an idea of what power was able to do—what a person with power was able to do. The second part, I think, was, because of the conditions, and because my mother was so fixated, if I could use that word, with us going to college, that it made a big difference. There was six of us, and five of the six ended up with degrees, college graduates. Three of us with masters—two of us with masters; one should have gotten his, but he didn’t go back. But two masters and just the one that didn’t do as well. But I think because of the conditions and because of my mother always wanted to go to school. She said she always wanted to go to school and she never had a chance to go, and by and by, whatever, my kids are going to go. And that was what she wanted. I think that because of her, having a vision that we should go to school, has impacted my life. I think about it quite often with my own kids, that it has an impact on them as well.
Franklin: One of your brothers was working at Battelle, you mentioned. How did he come out to Richland, to Battelle?
Alford: He got his degree from Southern University in Baton Rouge. He was an agriculture major with a minor in biology. What happened is that after he finished school, he ended up getting a job in Idaho. He used to write to us when he got to Idaho, he lived in a little small place. I think this is true—less than 5% of the population was black. And so he worked there in the Department of Agriculture. And then he ended up going to some conference, and a fella was talking about the farm that he had in the State of Washington. Somewhere in that process of them communicating their jobs, he ended up coming to the State of Washington. The fella had a friend who worked for Battelle, and they were doing some type of research on some type of plants and he ended up going to take a job with Battelle. So that’s the way he got here.
Franklin: When you came to visit, what were your first impressions when you arrived?
Alford: Why would anybody live here? [LAUGHTER] That was—I could not understand why anyone in their right mind would come here; there was no grass, just lots of dirt. When I came to visit my brother, we had a wind storm. We was outside and you stopped and everybody would bow until the sand passed over. I thought it was a stupid place to live, no trees and all you got is dirt and sand, and very few of us, people of color. So I had not anticipated ever living here.
Franklin: What made you stay? What made you decide to put down roots in Tri-Cities?
Alford: At that time I was teaching school in California and I met a young lady while I was here. The Superintendent of the Pasco School District—there was someone else on the phone, but I remember him getting on the phone and saying, we would like for you to consider a job here in Pasco. We are looking for people with backgrounds in math and science, and I think you would enjoy it. Would you like to come? Yes, I’ve been there. Would you like to come back? We would like to talk to you. So, I came back to see the girl and it was a free trip because they were going to pay for it. I thought, I’ll go back and go through this little interview and see her and I’ll be back. I came and I made the mistake of listening to what the superintendent was talking about. What he was talking about, what he said, I can still remember it. He said we have a place here where we got—at that time he said—lots of Negro kids, that’s living and we don’t have that many teachers. We really would love for you to come here and work here. Then he said—he started talking about the benefits of coming and the area and all.
And I thought, you know, maybe if I would take this job and stay for three or four years, learn as much as I can, I’m going to go back to Louisiana, and I’ll take what I got out of California, working out at a Catholic school, what I get out of this school here, when I go back I’m going to be very powerful. I took the job with the understanding that the whole intent wasn’t so much Pasco, but me developing some skills, some knowledge, that I could go back to Louisiana and work with a group of kids that look like me and make a difference. At the end of the second year I began to think, okay, yeah, I think I could pull this off. The third year, they integrated the schools in the city that I lived in that I wanted to go back. And that was a very sad moment. You put a lot of effort in something, and then you find out the possibility doesn’t exist anymore. It was a sad day to think that I’ve acquired some skills, some knowledge, and I’m going to make some difference in the lives of a group of kids. And that opportunity no longer exists.
Franklin: I thought integration was a major goal of the civil rights movement. How would things have changed for you so much when they integrated the schools back in Louisiana?
Alford: I grew up with a group of black kids, black family, and there are some things that are somewhat unique with us as a group. And so with my understanding, if I could take the knowledge that I have acquired from California and the knowledge that I have acquired form the State of Washington, and if I can bring those kids in, I could talk about possibilities. Not read about them, but talk about them. I think there’s a difference between walking and hoping to walk. There’s a difference between believing and thinking. There’s a difference between doing and talk about doing. And for me, I knew, under the right condition, I could make a significant difference in the lives of kids that look like me. And that to me was exciting.
The school that I worked in California was a Catholic school, and there was a sister, Sister Marion. Probably one of the best teachers that I had ever seen in my life, and she allowed me to come into her classroom and sit and observe during my planning period. Then one day I made a mistake. Made a big mistake. Sister Marion used to come in and she would have her books underneath her arm, and it seemed like she had just gotten a big dip of snuff, and she would put her books down and she would walk over and she would start her lesson. And I emulated that. She came in one day to do my observation. And I came in with my books the same way as Sister Marion, and then I did the same thing. She called me in after I taught that class and she told me, what’s this? I said, Sister Marion, I saw you walking in with your books that way, I saw you introducing. She said when you get 30 years of teaching, when you’ve taught 30 years of teaching, then you do that. Until that, you go back to the things that work for you. She says, you have a connection with kids, she says, you love kids, she said, they love you, and she said, you teach. She said, forget about the things that I do in my classroom. Because what Sister Marion did in her math class—she came in and comes to find her way in which the strategies of teaching. But I was so impressed with her that I didn’t understand that to get to that stage you have to have made all these minor steps. So I was blessed to have had a person who was able to tell me that. And as a result of that, I went back to teaching the traditional way, until I got to be a little bit better, and then I took some of those things that she did. Because it was a great skill; those were great strategies. Because she would walk in and she would call the kid in the back of the classroom. But I didn’t have those years. But by the time I finished my teaching career, I, too, could call the kid in the back of the classroom and emulate her.
Franklin: So, what led to your decision to stay? Because you mentioned that you had a plan of building skills and going back to Louisiana.
Alford: Right.
Franklin: But obviously you stayed. What led your decision to stay and to want to, you know, work on things here?
Alford: Well, one was that the school was integrated. It was no longer the black school that I had anticipated making a difference in. They were going through a series of problems. They were not—the schools were still having difficulties of integration and the problems that integration can bring. They don’t have to, but they can bring with them. Different races of kids, different backgrounds, different beliefs and if not done correctly, you spend more time on those nitpicking pieces than you do on instruction.
That was one piece; the second piece is that in Pasco, I had been there for a number of years, there was a number of families that kids had gone through my class and I was a half-decent teacher. I would say that on a given day, I could probably do fairly well. I had a relationship with kids and with staff and parents that made teaching not a job. Not a job. Because I don’t think teaching is a job. But I think teaching is about relationships, and out of that relationship, somebody turns out to be a little bit smarter when they leave than they were when they came into the classroom. Now that doesn’t just mean that the kids learn; I’ll tell you what, I’ve learned a lot from kids. I have kids that come and tell me about things that are happening in their lives and how they dealt with it that has allowed me to help someone else.
Going back to Louisiana and schools being desegregated not having what I thought was going to be there, I stayed. And there were some opportunities where, I wasn’t looking for them, but I was fortunate enough to get into special programs where we was trying to help kids who was coming—even in Pasco, there was a desegregated plan. It was a grant from the state. And I keep in mind that this area is integrated but where people lived was segregated. And they came to school, when they came to school, they brought with them not only their bodies but their knowledge and their skills and their makeups, and in many cases there was conflicts, misunderstanding, between kids who was white and kids who was black. As simple as someone calling another person a name, a person not understanding that this person may not have had breakfast and is hungry. There was lots of small things that occurred and I was given the opportunity to put together and implement a project, and this project was to deal with desegregation that was in the Pasco school system. At that point, we began to take a serious look at changing the model that we had. Prior to that time, black kids that lived in a certain area went to the school in that certain area.
Franklin: Right, earlier you had mentioned that for elementary, most of the—like, Whittier was the school for—because it was in east Pasco, right, and so it was predominantly black.
Alford: Black, yes. So when we began to desegregate the schools in Pasco, then Whittier was eliminated as a school. And those kids—because there was a bus throughout Pasco—they was bussed to schools where the schools were located in an area where almost no blacks lived. And with that, they kids took with them their knowledge that background, their likes, their dislikes, their misunderstandings and there was some problems, some racial problems that occurred in those schools. I was given the opportunity to be able to try to resolve that. The strategy that we attempted to use wasn’t so much of the kids as it was to do things so that the parents would understand the differences that was happening. Which is a total different idea than just working with kids.
Franklin: Was there a resistance to busing here?
Alford: There was a resistance.
Franklin: Could you talk—how did that take shape and how did you deal with it?
Alford: Well, what happened is that kids who lived in the same area—you know, you buy a house in the area because the school is supposed to be a very productive school, and someone come to you and says I want your kid to move to a school that’s not performing—it’s a very hard sale. It’s a very difficult concept that parent who moved in that area is saying, wait, I moved here because of the school and now you’re telling me that you want to send my kid over here with Snuffy who is having difficulties. That’s not right.
So the process was to sell a different concept. It wasn’t about where the school was located; it was what was in that school when you got there. If my kid is supposed to be attending this school, but he would get a better education on these particular subjects in this school, maybe we can talk. Maybe there’s—and that was what we attempted to do. We attempted to take the schools that had a particular population that had not been as successful and add to that school some things that made the school a magnet. Then you could ask parents, would you like for your kids to go here, versus tell the kids. And there’s a big difference between asking and telling.
Franklin: Yes. How long did the busing continue?
Alford: Until about ’66, if I remember correctly. There was a law in the State of Washington that came out, that allowed the school district to provide services without. What happened then the school district began to add different types of programs to different schools and began to consciously take a second look at boundaries. In other words if you have a gifted program here, any kid that wants to go to a gifted program can attend. It’s just located here. It’s not that you have to go there, but we have a gifted program here, we have a select program here, and we have another program here. Now you select a program for your kids. It’s about doing what’s best for kids.
Franklin: Right, so you’re having schools focused on different areas and be magnets and stopping any kind of changing the model from schools reflecting the neighborhood which resulted in—because of housing policy, resulted in all white schools—mostly white schools and mostly black schools and the property tax differentials--
Alford: Haves and have-nots.
Franklin: Okay, that was an attempt to kind of split that apart.
Alford: Right.
Franklin: Great. When you moved, you taught in Pasco, so you lived in Pasco, right?
Alford: Right.
Franklin: How would you describe life in the community when you got here in your early years here?
Alford: When I first came? I guess when I first came, it was so different in the sense that each school was considered a separate entity in itself. The idea of kids having teachers who happen to be non-white was almost not existent. But the school district made some decisions of purposely looking for individuals who happen to be a minority or blacks that matched the population that we had here. What happened then is that those teachers were spread throughout the schools. Families and kids began to see, in their building, teachers who happen to be black. Not only—so you have black teachers, white teachers, and some Korean teachers—not very many, but you have some of other ethnic groups.
One fella that, before we got married we lived together, we had like three of us, we needed an apartment. So it was easy to get an apartment on the teacher salary if you can divide the cost by three versus paying for it individually. All of a sudden we ended up, just by chance, one of the fellas was white, one was black—that was me—and the other one was Chinese, and we lived together. We lived in the same apartment. That made a difference. Because we were together, we went places together, we saw kids together, we talked about kids. That in itself at a high school level makes a difference. When you talk to a kid and the kid says, but he said or she said. But we were allowed to do some things that I think they would agree—the fellas—and I think that there were some teachers that were a part of the group at that time—I look back and we would invite—like there would be a fight this week between some white and black kids somewhere, it seemed like it occurred just—of differences. We would allow those kids to come where we stayed, we had a little barbeque. At that time, you could go down to the store you could get chicken for 15 cents a pound and you could get some SevenUps. So we invited the kids and many times we invited the kids who was involved in fights. And what would happen is just by talking to those kids and having those kids together, they became friends. In some cases we encouraged them to participate in athletics.
But it was just a different time. Jeff Dong—I don’t know if I should call names but for the purpose of people wanting to know who they were, who was Chinese. Very good history teacher. If you love history, you would love Jeff; if you hate history you would’ve hated him, because he loved the subject. He was about 5’6’’, 5’7’’. Then there was Sam Hunt, who was very light complexion and blonde hair. Comes from a politician, born in Yakima, brought with him a whole different set of skills. And then me, little black-looking fella from the south. And Keith Boyd, you know that group? Maybe I shouldn’t have called names. But anyway, there were some kids that came through the system, that knew us, and we could go to games. We were supervising games, because our salary was very low as classroom teachers. Someone says, we need someone to chaperon a bus. Well, guess what? The three of us was always there, it was a way to make an extra dollar to take care of the rent. Then of course, we started getting married and that part dropped off and the wives took over.
Franklin: So initially you rented the apartment with these—with your two other coworkers. Where did you rent?
Alford: It’s Cartmill, oh, it’s in Pasco. I don’t know if I should’ve called the name, but it’s in Pasco.
Franklin: East Pasco or west?
Alford: No, it was in west Pasco. Probably, from Pasco High and that’s where we taught at, we were—one, two, three—about six blocks away from Pasco High.
Franklin: Okay. Did you have any—because East Pasco had been prominently—was overwhelmingly African-American--
Alford: Right.
Franklin: There had been some resistance, as you’ve mentioned earlier, in Kennewick and some parts in Pasco. Did you have any resistance or trouble finding a home or living west of east Pasco?
Alford: Yeah, well, I’m not so sure how to answer that other than to say, I can remember looking for a place to live, and when we showed up—this is after I got married—showed up at the location where this apartment or house was, and the individual would come out and they would have kind of a look on their faces. I don’t know if it was just that I hadn’t combed my hair that day and I looked different, but I’ve had some walkthroughs in apartments where they say, okay, this is the bathroom and this—and you never stop. You just start, you go through and you end up back right outside the door there.
But I think—I don’t think they were bad people; I just think there was word about what could happen to their property. There were cases where we would go to places and you got there and it had been rented. You call and make an appointment—but I just think there was just a degree of luck that sometime you just end up at places where they get rented earlier, sometimes the person is in a hurry because they have to go to a meeting or something. I don’t think they are bad people; I think that they just want things to be the way they’ve always been. And sometimes when we want to keep things the way they are, it creates a misunderstanding. So I don’t think they were bad people; I just think they were just concerned.
Franklin: Was it a legitimate concern?
Alford: From their standpoint, yes. In cases where you have misunderstanding, in cases where the only thing you know is bad about someone or bad about a situation, that’s all you know, you form a conclusion. In mathematics we tend to say that when you’re doing a proof in geometry, you take all the information and from that information, you come up with a conclusion. I think in the school system, anywhere you go, people collect information and from that information they come up with a conclusion. Sometimes the data doesn’t support it, but it’s the best decision that they can make. I think it’s unfortunate sometimes when you take the data and you put it together and you draw your conclusion and your conclusion doesn’t support—is not supported by your data. In geometry we say, we collect the data and based upon the data, we look for conclusion. But I think in a racial situations sometimes we forget that piece.
Franklin: Did you attend church?
Alford: Yes.
Franklin: What church did you attend?
Alford: Well, before I got married, I attended a Baptist church in Pasco. It was a short period of time.
Franklin: Which one?
Alford: It was called Mount Zion.
Franklin: Okay.
Alford: It was short-lived. I got married, and my wife was Catholic. My father told my wife and I, after we got married, he said, now, if you’re going to make the marriage work, you need to go to church together, you need to live together and you need to be honest together. When we came back, I talked to my wife, she was Catholic and she didn’t want to change her faith. I was Methodist and I didn’t know a lot about religion. I wasn’t headed in one direction. And so, for me, going to church with her was not a bad thing. As a result we went to the Catholic church, and even today in the Catholic church in Pasco the number of all blacks—I can’t tell you what it is—I would like to tell you that number—but it’s a very small number of us. So we go to church together. Family that attend church together, live together and do things together—sometimes I think it turns out to be okay.
Franklin: Right, because most—the Baptist Church and Methodist Church were much more predominantly African-American in the Tri-Cities, right?
Alford: Right.
Franklin: Morning Star and New Hope. You had been brought up in the Methodist tradition?
Alford: Yes.
Franklin: What role—did the church play a special role in the black community?
Alford: Yes, a very special role. It taught the importance of men—appreciating men. And what I mean by that is that there is a Supreme Being, and because of a Supreme Being, what we do and who we honor is that Supreme Being and all the other things are not that important. But relationships--if you go to a black church, when the service is over, if you want to see people hugging each other and showing affection for each other, it happens there. It’s not about I love this person, but it’s a religious belief that we are children of someone greater than men. So yes, it plays a significant role.
Franklin: Do you recall any family or community activities, events or traditions that people brought from places they came from?
Alford: Yep, one of the things that—I’ll take my family as an example. After church services, when I was growing up, families would get together. You would go to someone’s house, not so much to eat but the fellowship. It is something that connects individuals. You always have enough time to—you make time to form those relationships. I think those that came from southern states that were black, I think most of us came with the understanding that Sunday is a day you don’t work. It’s a day where—it’s a God day, just some things you don’t do, you don’t do them on a Sunday. It’s changing now, but when I was growing up, Sunday was a Sabbath day; it was a day devoted to our maker. You form relationships and you laugh and you cook. That part is slowly being dissolved. And as a result of that, I think that we are losing something that is very important.
Franklin: Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you came from?
Alford: Yes. Now in order for me to answer that question—it’s a two-part question. I came from a little small town. It was about so big. And I came to one that was bigger. In this little small city there is only five jobs, so the opportunity is for five people. In a larger city you had fifteen jobs, so fifteen different opportunities. Numbers make a difference. Conditions make a difference. I think opportunities in the State of Washington also, because of economics, because of education, because of businesses there are so many pieces that fit into a puzzle that it’s kind of hard to come up with a simple answer to it.
Franklin: In what way were opportunities limited because of segregation or racism?
Alford: To what extent?
Franklin: Here, in Tri-Cities. For you or that you observed for others.
Alford: I think, when I think of opportunities, if the playing field was equal, it doesn’t mean that the result will be equal. The reason that I mention that is that the experiences that individuals have—and I think that in many cases, economics plays a role. It plays a role in some cases where, because this person has not been able to do these types of things, they have not had this type of experiences. It can be as simple as never having the chance to drive because their family didn’t have a car. And there’s a job for a milk man. Now, this person may have an education that fulfilled the requirement, but because they do not have a car at home or because of the conditions, the scale is somewhat unequal, even though the two individuals have very similar skills, the one skill that the one doesn’t have is that one person doesn’t have the skills to drive. His education level may be higher, but because the lack of one skill, the job opportunity is zero. When I think of this whole educational piece and the whole thing that has happened in the Tri-Cities is the playing field is very difficult to make sure that it’s equivalent.
Franklin: You mentioned when you moved here that Kennewick—you knew one black family there, but that was it. Did you have any interactions or any business in Kennewick? Any notable interactions with people from either Richland or Kennewick?
Alford: When I first came?
Franklin: Yeah.
Alford: No, when I first came, no, there was only—I started to give a name, but it was just one black family that I could think of at that particular time that was here. And there probably was more, but I didn’t know them if they were. I think that makes a difference. I think it makes a difference.
Franklin: What does?
Alford: If you know people—for example, if you can consciously go back and think of relationships, opportunities, people getting along together—if you know someone, you can come to form a relationship. If you don’t have any contacts, you don’t know that person, the idea of forming a relationship doesn’t exist, regardless of how hard you try, it’s just not going to happen. When I first came here, for example, most of the individuals that I knew that happened to be black or African American at the time lived in Pasco, and most of them lived within a mile of each other and you probably had 90 percent of them, all right there together. If there was an activity in the black community, you saw the same population. But most of their activities was in the community that they lived. The idea of going outside of the community to talk to somebody, to see somebody, is almost zero.
Franklin: Was the sign still on the bridge to Kennewick when you came here?
Alford: Yeah, it was there.
Franklin: Do you know what I’m talking about?
Alford: Yeah, it was sign that said Out Before Dusk. That was on the old bridge. It was a green bridge at that particular time, now the cable bridge. Yep.
Franklin: Do you remember seeing that sign?
Alford: Yep.
Franklin: How did that, you’d grown up in Jim Crow, you’d grown up in the situation where segregation was strict and it was legal. I think a lot of people’s perceptions of the North and the West is that it wasn’t the same system. How did seeing that sign make you feel?
Alford: I don’t—to be honest with you, it didn’t bother me, because I didn’t really—maybe I wasn’t smart enough. I think sometimes, as they say, ignorance is bliss. You see the sign, it’s there, and after a period of time you don’t even see it again. You become immune to things around you. I think that’s what happens in communities sometimes is that things have existed for such a long period of time that no one can see that there’s anything wrong with it; it’s just the way things are.
Franklin: Did you feel less welcomed in Kennewick because of that sign?
Alford: Well, I didn’t—no, I didn’t. Because I had a brother who lived in Kennewick and I would go across the bridge to his house, and then, for the most part if we left and went somewhere and crossed that same bridge take a right and went to east Pasco. I don’t think I was smart enough at that particular time, and when I say smart enough, I don’t mean of a particular knowledge, but I think sometimes you become—you see things, and if you’re not very careful you say, it applies to others but not to me. There’s the other part of it is that sometimes the best way to deal with something is to tell yourself, guess what? It doesn’t pertain to me. Because if you allow those types of things to affect you, it also changes your behavior. And what happens in many cases is that one of the big racial problems that we have—when there’s a problem in race—for the most part, it’s a misunderstanding. One person misunderstood the other person. Whether it be words, whether it be actions, whether it be just one disposition. It causes problem.
Franklin: Yeah. Did you spend much time in east Pasco? Was it a—did you have a social life there?
Alford: Yeah, when I first came to Pasco, there was a tutorial program over there. And, oh, God, I’m trying to think of her name that ran this—I can see her face right now. Maybe I’ll come to the name a little bit later, but she ran a tutorial program for kids.
Franklin: Is it Virgie?
Alford: No, it wasn’t Virgie, it wasn’t Virgie. God, I can see her face right now. But she ran a tutoring program and I used to go over and teach. I loved going over there because all the kids from the community would come in and you’d work with them and some of those kids now are adults. I’m trying to think who was on the bus who would’ve been one of those kids.
Franklin: You mean out to the—when we took the tour? Keith Barton?
Alford: Yeah, Keith Barton’s sister, because Keith would’ve been real young at that time. But, yeah, we used to go over and have a tutoring program at night with and work with kids and we’d plan activities with them. It was just kind of a fun time, really, but it was a way of helping kids. I look back at it and I think that the sad part about it is that those tutoring programs did more than just tutor; it actually gave kids an opportunity to see what can be.
Franklin: What do you mean?
Alford: In a tutoring program, and I’m talking about math and science because that’s my background, if you’re really working with the kid on a tutoring program and let’s say doing fractions—it doesn’t have to be fractions; it can be percentages—it doesn’t matter. You can talk about how to apply this concept—for example, if you are working on percentages, and the kid is trying to figure out how to do percentages, teach the kid and say, you know what, take a candy ball and say, you know what, I’m going to divide this up with three people. If I divide this up into three pieces how many parts will I have? Okay, if I just take this one piece, what part is this? This is one out how many? Out of three. Oh, got it, you meant—how do you do that? You just got—that’s a fraction. Well, I wonder if we can make it into a decimal. I wonder what would happen if we divided three into the one, we’d got 0.3333. Let’s add all this threes together, oh my god. So, there’s a relationship between fractions and decimals. And now you can teach the concept that the teacher’s trying to get the kid to understand.
So, I guess what I’m saying is that tutoring allows for relationships and also knowledge. It also gives the person the chance to think. And I think the tutoring program that we used to have over there was great, because you had the kids there, their parents came to pick up the kids so you got a chance to meet their parents. And the parents were so thankful. I can remember parent saying, oh, thank you very, very much, guess what, he did pass the test. Those little pieces—it’s not about money, it’s not about somebody like me, but it’s about the kid. The kid that wakes up one morning and says, you know what, this person made a difference in my life. That’s what education is all about.
Franklin: Yeah. Hanford was such a pull factor for African Americans from World War II and beyond, into the Cold War. What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?
Alford: Well, I guess the only thing I knew—I took a class. In this class, that was one of the things that they talked about, was blacks working at Hanford. That was one of the pieces. But prior to that time, I didn’t—it was there.
Franklin: What class was this?
Alford: It was an educational class through Central Washington State University. It was called—let me think about it a minute and I’ll try to remember the class, because it’s been a long time.
Franklin: From your perspective, what were African Americans’ most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights at Hanford?
Alford: Okay, now repeat that once more for me.
Franklin: From your perspective, what were African Americans’ most important contributions in the areas of work, community life and civil rights?
Alford: Okay, let’s take the civil rights piece and Hanford. There was a—I’m trying to think of his name. There was one person, and hopefully the name will come to me, that lived in Richland who was a real advocate for blacks.
Franklin: Are you talking about CJ Mitchell?
Alford: Uh-unh, no, it wasn’t CJ. It wasn’t CJ. He was very active; he was really—I can’t think of his name. But he was involved. He would come to the East Pasco Neighborhood Council meeting, which was a group over in east Pasco, and participate in activities where they was trying to integrate something, or there’s a worker somewhere, somebody being mistreated, a police problem or whatever. He was always one of those individuals that wanted to make sure that people realized that their rights were being violated. Sorry, I can’t think of his name. I can see his face, but I can’t put a name with him.
Franklin: Did he work at Hanford?
Alford: Yeah, he worked out of Hanford, yeah. I may have to call you back and give you that name.
Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford in the Tri-Cities during your time here?
Alford: I don’t know lots about Hanford.
Franklin: Okay, what about Tri-Cities?
Alford: Okay, repeat the question then.
Franklin: What were the major civil rights issues for African Americans in the Tri-Cities during your time here?
Alford: Okay. One was employment. Okay, and I can’t speak for Hanford, but employment was a big one. Schools in Pasco—that was a big one. So I would say employment, schools, police relationships. And school parent—school kids and relationship was another problem. For example, a kid would do something on the bus—he lived in east Pasco, and do something on the bus and the bus driver would put the kid off the bus because of his or her behavior. And I’m not saying the behavior they did was—it existed. But to put the kid off the bus was an answer—okay, it probably stopped the interaction between those two kids, but that meant somebody’s kid was on that bus that lived miles away.
Franklin: Kid’s possibly in danger.
Alford: Yes, if you did it today you could probably have a lawsuit.
Franklin: Yeah.
Alford: But at that particular time, it was he or she did whatever and they put him off. Parents at work, parents—I don’t know where the parent is, you know.
Franklin: What actions were being taken to address the issues you just mentioned? The employment, schools and police relationships?
Alford: They had an NAACP group that was here, and they attempted to deal with some of it. I would say the East Pasco Neighborhood Council probably they did a better job than those. They had numerous people who was the head of it, but a lady by the name of Kita Barton probably—and I hate to say this because it may not be totally correct—but I think she had a greater impact than anyone that I can think of.
Franklin: That’s Keith Barton’s mother, right?
Alford: That’s Keith Barton mother.
Franklin: Yeah, he talked quite a bit about her in his oral history.
Alford: Yeah, the lady, she had a way with words. She was the nicest person in the world, but she was very intelligent lady. Then there was another lady by the name of Mrs. Upton. I can remember the meeting we had was—there was an incident that had occurred where an African American was involved and we had asked the police officer and the Mayor to come and talk to us. They were talking, and so Sister Upton raised her hand. She stood up and she made a comment—one that I think about quite often. She said, I brought a tablet and I brought a pencil to write down all the important things that you’ve said tonight. And she said, I don’t have anything on my paper. What I learned through that comment that she made is that sometimes we talk, but there’s nothing to write down.
Franklin: It’s just empty words.
Alford: Yes, yeah. And I think about that—when I am trying to talk to somebody, I think of Sister Upton and whether she would have said, Mr. Alford, I have my paper and my pencil, but I don’t have anything written down.
[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: What were some noticeable successes, of the issues you mentioned?
Alford: I think that there’s probably five or six. I think one of the successes is that the individual was able to convince members of the school board that we had to make changes in the school system. And part of those changes happened to be taking a look at where kids are being bused to, and what types of opportunities are available to them. That was one piece.
I think the second piece was a part where individuals within the community began to participate. And so people began to be a part of the city council or be a part of a group. And then police department did something about bringing on an African American on the police force, which I’m sure he probably caught lots of problem. But it made a difference in the sense that it was somebody that you could go and at least talk to. Not that he could give you answers, but just to say, did you know.
Franklin: Well, and just that there was someone that looked like you on the police force.
Alford: Right.
Franklin: What were some of the biggest challenges in getting movement on the civil rights issues here?
Alford: I think they’re still there. Maybe not to the same extent. I think one is education, because what was happening there is that kids were being bused to a school outside of the area that they live in. Teachers who was teaching in the schools lived outside of the area where the kids are coming from. And sometimes in order to understand someone, you have to understand a little bit about the person. If you can’t visualize, for example, and I’ll give you an example—I was in middle school and I remember one day, this kid did something at school and I decided to take this kid home and talk to the parents. At that particular time I didn’t realize that men should not—I don’t know—there probably was a rule, but I didn’t know it, that a man shouldn’t be with a girl without another woman. Anyway, I got this kid I put in the back seat there in the car and took her home to talk to her mother. I get there, knock on the door, the parents come out, and I say, I brought your daughter here. She was in a fight today. I said, this is—I forgot how many fights this kid had been in—I said, you’ve got to stop it. Come on in, Mr. Alford. I went in. She said want some coffee? I said, no, I’ll have some water. So she brought me water. We sit down and we spent that time just talking. And for the first time I recognized why the girl was having some difficulties. Part of the reason for the difficulties that was occurring was because mom was giving one impression of the school and that was impacted in the way the girl was reacting in school. There were times when parents came and negatively impact their kids. So, it’s not always negative, but there are some cases.
Franklin: Yeah. Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?
Alford: Directly? Well, I don’t know how to answer this, but I’ll just tell you what I’ve done.
Franklin: Okay.
Alford: I’ve done little marches, for example, where—like in east Pasco where we used to have concerns about what was going on with African Americans or whatever—when we had little marches, I participated in those. Cases where somebody was in jail, was mistreated, I’d help them go down and talk to people in the city about those types of behavior. In the school system—because I was in the school system, I could actually go to the superintendent, and not have to—or go directly to the board and talk to them about seeing things that happened.
But I have not been one of those individuals who have ever planned an event for others to participate in. I always felt that—my father told me this, so forgive me—this is one of those pieces where he said, if you want something done, do it yourself. If you give it to someone else, they may or may not do it. My belief is that anytime something occurs that you think is inappropriate, first try to do it yourself and if you can’t do it yourself, then you talk to others as your last resort.
Franklin: Those are all important things that you mentioned. You know, civil rights encompasses so many different activities. How did the larger national civil rights movement influence civil rights efforts in the Tri-Cities?
Alford: I think that when you think of people being elected to office or people in certain positions and you see things happening on TV where you see somebody has done somebody incorrectly and so now you’re have a community meeting to deal with the same type of issue in Pasco. I remember having to go to a meeting where the city manager was meeting with a group of blacks about some things that was going on the city. And there was a lady who was so much smarter than me, I wish I had never thought of it. She stood up and she said, I have this piece of paper and I have this pencil—and I hope I haven’t told you this already, but if I have, forgive me.
Franklin: I think—no one said anything important, so I haven’t written anything down yet?
Alford: Right. Okay. From that piece to the next piece that happened after he gave his—he started up again. The second piece that happened is the lady that came up to him and said to him, I think we know what you want to do. And he says, okay, let’s do it. She said, what we are going to do—we’re going to send you home and you’re going to talk to the police about this and you’re going to come back. And then everybody got up and we left. I think it was the most effective thing I’ve ever seen in a community meeting. Very simple, straightforward, and it made a difference.
Franklin: From your perspective and experience what was different about civil rights efforts here compared to the national movement?
Alford: What was the difference between here and the national? I really don’t know what the biggest difference was between those two, other than the size of the national group. But I think it was just at a smaller scale—duplication. The people were different of course. Yeah, the people are different so you’re going to have different remarks, but very similar, very similar.
Franklin: Okay. Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and how they have impacted your life in the Tri-Cities?
Alford: I think they made me a better person. I think I’m the most blessed person, probably in the Tri-Cities. Yeah. I came here for a teaching job, and I was blessed enough to have been able to work with students from a classroom teacher, to a coordinator, to the administrator, including being the principal. I was blessed because I had those opportunities. And I think I learned more from the kids than they would ever learn from me. I learned more from the parents than the parents would ever learn from me.
At the end of the day, if we would just sit down together, I think we would agree that the major accomplishment that was made is that we put in the time to make a difference. Time is important. Sometimes I think people merely go to meetings just to garble and then they go home, but they never take the time to sit a little bit and understand what’s really going on. These kids are now adults and grandparents and it’s a little scary that they all came along. But I was blessed. I have been extremely blessed. I got my undergraduate degree and I’ll just back up just a little bit, why somebody, somewhere up there had blessed me.
There was a fella named Dr. Gabriel—well, let me start from the beginning and see if it makes a little bit of sense to you. I decided one day that I was going to leave, that I was going to go elsewhere. And I had a chance to talk to the superintendent. And a few days later he came back and said he’d had an idea, and he offered me a different job. That job gave me a chance to work with a fellow who was at Central Washington State at the time, and a little bit later on there was a fellow who worked out at WSU; I got sent to work for him for a period of time. At the end of my school career, the fellow that was at Central, Dr. Gabriel, my boss—I was his boss. The fella at WSU, at the end of my career, he retired and came back to work a program with me.
I look at those experiences and I think back through it—for example, when I was working on my masters—I did my master’s degree I turned it in, they go through and they check all this little things and tell you that you need to make this changes in it. One of the fellows that was on my committee, as I was leaving he came out and he said to me, hey, I know what you’re going to do.
Now, it’s probably not going to make lots of sense—it’s not going to make lots of sense to you. It’s Dr. Gabriel, the fellow that I was working for was the dean of the school at Central at the time. He said, you’re going to go home and you’re not going to turn this in. I know, he said. Because he asked me, he said,—no, no, no, no. Let me back up—let me back up just a little bit. I had gone in—and this is for my masters, you go in and you present all your information and you show them your little package that you have, and he wanted a copy of it. And he said—because what had happened is that, when I turned in my thesis—I didn’t realize that this is the way it goes—you go in—he wanted to go step by step—so, he gave me the—he said, this is what you’re going to have to have this, this, this, and this. And I didn’t know at the time that you’re supposed to finish this, you take it into—he’s supposed to take a look at it and see if it’s okay, and then you go to the second chapter and you do it and when you get through, you put it all together. I thought, since we had agreed on the topic, that I could just go ahead and do it all and then bring it in. I didn’t—seriously. I did not know that you’re going to compile it all your research data to support your idea, you submit that, they look at it—I didn’t know that. I just thought you go and do what you’re supposed to do and bring it in complete.
So, he said to me I know you’re angry, you are going to take it home, you’re going to throw it away, you’re not going to come back. He was right, that was exactly what I planned to do. And he said, it’s not a good time right now, you need to do this. So I went back, got another topic, did my review of my literature, went in to talk to him. The next step, and went in and talked to him. And I turned it in, but at the end he looked at it, and I can still remember, he said, I really like this. Take it down and get it bound and bring us back a copy because I want to use it with my students, and we’ll use it as a model. I was walking out the door, and Dr. Gabriel came up and he said, no. I said, what? He said, I know what you’re going to do, you’re going home because you hate the bum-bum-bum and won’t make a copy. He said, but you’ll be sorry someday if you don’t, because you’ll move to Central one of these days you’ll want to show it to your kids and your grandkids and you won’t have a copy of it. He said, but the decision is yours. And I thought about that the many times—he was right. That’s exactly what I did, and as a result of that, I never got my little master’s degree in my little folder in Ellensburg.
I guess what I’ve learned through all of this is that sometimes the winner loses. But then sometimes you can smile and say that’s one he didn’t get. But I’ve been blessed though; I’ve had some real neat opportunities. In fact, I even had a chance to teach here one summer. And that’s so funny because Dr. Gabriel, who was on my committee, was no longer working here. I got a job working one summer here and I don’t know why they thought—I think they got me mixed up with someone else and they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. But then I hired Dr. Gabriel to work with me. So, I guess what I’m saying is that, if we take a serious look of all of the things that had happened to people, many, many times, I think those experiences don’t have to be negative. Those hardships don’t have to be negative. Sometime, you can come out as a winner.
Franklin: Great. Well, Clarence, thank you so much for that and thank you so much for the interview.
Alford: Well, you’re more than welcome, you know. I appreciate the opportunity and if you find one or two little ideas that you want to put on a piece of paper, good luck. But it’s going to be hard; you’re going to have to look real hard.
Franklin: No, I’m not going to have to look hard at all. But thank you; that was a great interview.
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1968-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Clarence Alford
Subject
The topic of the resource
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
African American universities and colleges
Migration
Civil rights
Teaching
School integration
Civil rights movements
Description
An account of the resource
Clarence Alford moved to Pasco, Washington in 1968 and taught for the Pasco School District for many years.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
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05/17/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Documenting African American Migration, Segregation, and Civil Rights History at Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR), Hanford
Subject
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African Americans; Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
Creator
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National Park Service
Publisher
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Hanford History Project
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/1/2017-9/1/2019
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
For permission to publish or for more information contact the Hanford History Project.
Relation
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RG2D_4D AACCES Oral History Project
Language
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English
Identifier
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RG2_8
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
John Abercrombie
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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Robert Franklin: Okay, we are rolling. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with John Abercrombie on July 23, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with John about his experiences living in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
John Abercrombie: Okay. John C. Abercrombie. Last name is A-B-E-R-C-R-O-M-B-I-E.
Franklin: Great. And John is--?
\
Abercrombie: J-O-H-N, common spelling.
Franklin: Great, thank you. So, John, let’s start by talking about your life before Hanford.
Abercrombie: Okay.
Franklin: Where and when were you born?
Abercrombie: I was born October 29, 1944, 6:20 P.M.
Franklin: Okay.
Abercrombie: At the Spartanburg General Colored Hospital.
Franklin: And where is Spartanburg?
Abercrombie: Spartanburg is in South Carolina.
Franklin: Okay. Spartanburg General Colored Hospital.
Abercrombie: Yes, and that’s what’s stated on the birth certificate.
Franklin: Right. Because the South—you were born into segregation.
Abercrombie: Yes, I was, very much so.
Franklin: Correct. And so Spartanburg was a segregated town.
Abercrombie: Absolutely.
Franklin: Can you talk about that? What was—how was the town laid out and where—what were African Americans restricted from doing or being--?
Abercrombie: [LAUGHTER] Restricted from doing almost everything. In the black community, you had all stratas of economic involvement, because you were not allowed to live in white neighborhoods. The school that I attended, the elementary school that I attended when I first started was closed because it was condemned. The new school was approximately 100, 150 yards from my house. Yet there were white students living closer to the school who were bussed to a white school, and I had students that lived further away that had to pass two white schools in order to get to the black school. So it was a very segregated community.
We had two black police officers that were not allowed to arrest any white people. They could call on another officer, and if he decided to, he would; otherwise it did not happen.
In South Carolina, it was not until the mid—or actually the late ‘40s before the black teachers were paid the same as the white teachers. They had larger classrooms, they had less facilities, and obviously the buildings were not the same quality. So that was the type-thing that you had. We had the segregated buses; you were not allowed to sit in front of any white person. They did not have the sign designating that, but if some white person sat three-quarters of the way back, you’d have people basically hanging out the window because you could not sit in front of any person like that. The movie theaters, I never sat on the main floor of a movie theater until I came to Richland, because that’s the way it was in most of the places there.
Looking back, I think most people do not understand and realize what you were put through, and what people suffered in order to do that. Jobs were restricted. And you had people that had done very well in school who were not allowed into jobs that basically paid a decent wage. People could not buy houses, because the banks would allow you more money to buy a car than they would a house. So basically, the typical of many of the Southern communities that were there. So.
In the schools, basically, for every one dollar they would spend on a black kid, they would spend ten on a white student. Part of the Brown v. Board involved a case out of the area around Orangeburg, South Carolina, in which some students were walking nine miles a day each way to school. The parents asked for a bus; the school district refused. The parents bought a bus, asked for fuel. They also were denied that. And they ended up filing suit over that.
Charles Hamilton Houston, who was one of the professors in charge of the law school, was kind of a techie. He went down and he photographed many of the schools that were utilized by the blacks. In many cases you could sit in the classroom and look through the wall to the outside. Some of the schools had outhouses. Some of them didn’t even have outhouses. And he also photographed some of the white classrooms, and there was a very distinct difference. That played a very large role in the case of Brown v. Board.
And I won’t go into Brown v. Board. Oliver Brown and his daughter, his six-year-old daughter, had to walk past a white school, had to go through a railroad switching yard at the hours of school, which in the winter were dark, and then walk a mile to catch a bus to go to a white school—I mean, to a black school. So those were the types of things that many people had to put up with.
Franklin: Brown v. Board effectively desegregated schools in 1950—?
Abercrombie: I believe it was ’54.
Franklin: How did that affect you?
Abercrombie: It did not have much effect directly. As a result of that case, they were starting to build better schools. Actually, part of the South Carolina decision was that—not to integrate the schools, but that the schools should be equal. Not just in air quotes, but should be equal, which would have cost them a fortune. So the school that I went to in second grade, which was much superior to the one that I went to in first grade. Although I’m in the heart of the city, we didn’t have restrooms on the different levels of the school. It was a two-story school. You had to go outside and down into the basement in order to use it. But we even had restrooms in the classrooms in that building. Most of the schools that we used had been torn down because the quality of the school, the building, was not the same. Basically, nothing was equal. The principal of our elementary school had a PhD, and one of the few if not the only one in the district. So we had crosses burned on the schoolhouse lawn, similar to what happened when I went to college.
I went to an integrated college. We did have one white student there. And it’s an interesting story how he got there. He actually attended a Ku Klux rally when they were talking about what they were going to do to this guy if they ever found him. Not to be outdone, we doubled our white enrollment the next year and had two white students.
Franklin: Which college was this?
Abercrombie: Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina.
Franklin: And is that an HBC?
Abercrombie: HBCU. Historically Black College and University. Livingstone and Biddle University, which is now John C. Smith, played the first intercollegiate football game between black colleges. And so, John C. Smith is located in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Salisbury is about 40 miles away in Salisbury. Started as Zion Wesley Institute in 1879 and changed its name to Livingstone in 1887. During the time that I attended was sponsored by the AMEZ Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. And it played a very important role in my life.
Franklin: What did you study at Livingstone?
Abercrombie: Cutting class. No. Actually, I was a chemistry major.
Franklin: Chemistry major. And did you graduate from--?
Abercrombie: Yes, I did.
Franklin: How did a white—this is a little off-topic, but I’m just very curious. How did a white student end up at a HBCU?
Abercrombie: [LAUGHTER] He was traveling by train. He was actually going to Livingston, Alabama. He started talking to some students on the train, and they said they were going to Livingstone. Well, he thought they were going to the town that he was going. So he basically got off the train with them. They had treated him so well, he said he liked the place, and so he actually enrolled. So that’s how he got there. Kind of an interesting story, but that’s how we ended up with him there.
You find that we were not closed as a society. I remember one of the restaurants in—I guess you could call it “restaurant;” more of a hot dog stand—in Spartanburg, it had two entrances: one white and one colored. There’s a line that ran up the floor, up the wall, up the ceiling, and back down. We could not cross that line; they could if they wanted to. But the separate water fountains, they had refrigerated water; we had just a bubbler coming out. So it was the typical thing that sometimes people today don’t realize what was going on back then.
Franklin: How did you hear about Hanford?
Abercrombie: I heard about it from my college classmate, who was also a chemistry major, who interviewed in, I think, New York or somewhere, and actually came out the year before I did. I took an interview, got an offer for a job, came out sight unseen. I’m one of those people that looked in the encyclopedia, saw Evergreen State, and figured I’d be in tall trees and snow up to my armpits all year. I think when I first got here it was in excess of 100 degrees for the first 17 days and stuff. You know.
So I got that one wrong, but it worked out very well for me, because our kids were in a very good school system. My daughter actually went back to the school that her mother and I had attended and has done well for herself. My son went to West Point, graduated from West Point. And he has two sons now currently at West Point. The oldest is majoring in chemical engineering; the second one is in the law program at West Point. He has a third son who is kicking on the football team for Mountain Point in Phoenix, Arizona, and has a couple of more records to wipe out to get his brother off the record book, eclipse him on the record book there.
Franklin: Wow, that’s really wonderful. So you interviewed for—who did you interview with? What company did you--?
Abercrombie: Actually, I interviewed with Isochem. Isochem was US Rubber and Martin Marietta. I interviewed with Bill Watson in Nashville, Tennessee. That was the closest he was coming to the area, and I drove from Spartanburg. The weather was bad, so I had to drive south to Atlanta and then up 75 to Nashville. Interviewed with him, got an offer for a job here. I filled out paperwork for my security clearance. It was approved just before I got here, so when I came here I had a Q clearance and went to work at the PUREX facility in 200-East Area.
Franklin: Oh, great. What were your first impressions when you arrived?
Abercrombie: What the hell have I gotten myself into? Understanding that I thought this was the Evergreen State, I came through what is now Interstate 84 to 82, and came in near the Boise-Cascade plant, which at the time did not have the filters on and stunk to high heaven. I had not been in many places that did not have trees. So I thought, you know, this must be what it’s like to land on the moon. So I got here. When we got to Richland, I stayed with my friend when we looked for houses. That was a different experience for me, because we would see an ad for a house, we’d call, oh, you’re the first person to call! And, we’ll meet you there in 30 minutes! And we get there—you know, somebody just pulled up 15 minutes ago and rented the house. So, sorry about that. I even had one gentleman tell me that I’d go bankrupt if I rented the house, buying furniture. And that’s kind of interesting because he ended up working for me a while later, and I never mentioned it to him.
Franklin: Oh, man.
Abercrombie: But those are the type things that you ran into. Which didn’t seem strange to me, because I’m coming from the South, and I guess didn’t have any expectations of much different.
Franklin: Right. Where did you end up staying? Where did you—did you end up—you obviously ended up getting a house somewhere.
Abercrombie: I ended up—the first house that we moved into was on Gilmore. Gilmore I don’t think is there anymore. It was between Gilmore and Gribble, basically right off of Jadwin, a block over from Jadwin, there were some apartments there, two-story apartments. 1107 Gilmore, Apartment 8 is where we started off, and then moved into an A house later. Then moved to another A house, and then finally bought a prefab before moving to south Richland. But anyway.
Franklin: What was the hardest aspect of life in this area to adjust to?
Abercrombie: I’d come from the South, you know, where basically all black neighborhoods. Not that people are different or that we saw them any different, but I’m now in a completely different environment. Looking for somebody that had shared experiences was sometimes difficult, because there were not very many black people here. They were starting to open for professional people. I think that that year we had, I don’t know, six, seven people come in. Some of the other contractors were starting to bring people in. So it was kind of a unique thing, I guess, looking back on it. Part of it had to do with race, part of it had to do with age. Because most of the people here were older and established. I don’t think that it was a racist thing as such, because we were all finding ourselves, opening our wings, finding opportunities for employment.
When I’d been in the South, one of the reasons that I came out here is because I never even got a response from the companies that I had applied with back there. The interviews were somewhat limited on my part, but strictly on my part, because I worked as a journeyman bricklayer before I went to college. My intent was to go into home construction and other work. I was going to build and sell houses. So I came out here, because having a degree in chemistry, I figured that it would be good to have some experience should I need to go back into chemistry, should something happen to me physically in construction. So that was kind of the idea that I had. I would come out here and I was going to work for three years and I was going to go back.
At the end of three years, I was offered the opportunity to go into supervision. I said, well, if I’m going to run a company, this is a good thing to do. So I stayed. And then I’m thinking about leaving again, I had a chance to go in as the equal opportunity coordinator and write the Affirmative Action plan. Well, if I’m going to go into management of some sort, this is not going to hurt me at all. So I stayed for that. Then, I did not want to do that as a life’s work, because I thought, at that time, foolishly, that that would be a limited opportunity. Because I thought that once we had the opportunities to do things then that would kind of go away. The opportunity came to go into labor relations, came along. So I went into labor relations and did a lot in human resource area. That opened up another opportunity to get into law enforcement. I worked as a Benton County reserve deputy for 28 years. So, we—finding different opportunities and exploring different things as we go along.
Franklin: Oh, shucks, I just lost my question.
Abercrombie: So, you’re not the only one. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: No. No, not at all. Oh, I remember. What year did you come out?
Abercrombie: I came out in 1967.
Franklin: 1967, okay thank you.
Abercrombie: Actually arrived in Washington June the 20th and went to work June 21st.
Franklin: Hey, that’s exactly the same day that I started my job at Hanford.
[LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Although that was in 2015.
Abercrombie: Okay.
Franklin: So a little bit later. But same—I remember that day very well. So, how would you describe life in the community in Richland when you were—you know, in the ‘60s when you were here. ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Abercrombie: There were many aspects of it that were very good to me. Because, like I said, I was in a professional capacity. Kind of a homebody. So I did not get around a lot. Was not a social butterfly, getting around. The opportunities were there. It was a little bit limiting personally because, coming from a small school, you’re going up and competing against people that have been to University of Washington and the University of God-knows-whatever, but large institutions. You come into an area and you’re looking to compete against these people. But I think the biggest aspect and biggest thing that I had learned was how to do research, how to find out information. The first job that I got was trying to look for an electro-potentiometric determination of uranium in feedstock, and most of the information that I needed was in German. But fortunately Battelle had translators that were able to get the information. So, I felt quite at home, being able to get involved and just completely dive into the work. My wife later went to work and worked with the Department of Corrections. In fact, at one time she was a psychiatric social worker on death row at Walla Walla. But—
Franklin: Wow.
Abercrombie: But these are all things that we had no vision of before we left.
Franklin: These were opportunities that weren’t present for you in the South, or likely not present for you.
Abercrombie: Likely, very likely not present, yes.
Franklin: What did you do in your spare time?
Abercrombie: One of the things that I did was played flag football. We had a local team that played for many years together. And I guess I did a little bit of hunting, a little bit of fishing. Other than that, it was—I didn’t get into motorcycle riding until 1973. At this point, I’ve probably got about 300,000 miles riding around the Northwest on motorcycle.
I tell people that because doing labor relations, I would occasionally jump in with the train crew, because I wanted to find out what the various jobs were about. So I tell people that I’ve driven a train and flown a plane. Because when my son was at West Point and called home one Wednesday and said he was going to jump school, I said, that’s great, but you won’t jump before I will. I think I did my first jump that Saturday. Not bad for a guy that’s afraid of heights, but—went ahead and did that.
Motorcycle riding, another place that I goofed up, because I thought that would be a great weight loss program, because I figured that I’d travel around and wouldn’t be welcomed at any place to eat, so I’d get out there and go days without eating or something. But that turned out not to be the case, so—
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] When you moved here, the largest amount of African Americans lived in east Pasco.
Abercrombie: Yeah.
Franklin: Did you spend any time in east Pasco? Did you have any connections—
Abercrombie: Yes, I did.
Franklin: --to the African American community? How did you forge those connections?
Abercrombie: Well, for one thing, you need to go to a barber. Well, I was not—I didn’t know that anybody could cut my hair that was not familiar with it, so you’re going over there. You meet people. I find that in many places that you go, the migration of blacks has been people that know each other that go somewhere and get something started. For example, I had a friend that was here that moved to Los Angeles. I rode the motorcycle down to Los Angeles, and while I was there, we went around and met people. Well, he’s from Texas. So he can tell you just about everybody from Texas that’s there. And if you read The Warmth of Other Suns, you’ll see how some of this migration took place. My uncles from Union, South Carolina went to Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. And so people from Union had a tendency to go there because they knew somebody there.
I look at it now, and I look at the fact that my roommate came here and I ended up coming as well. Because I had no idea that this place existed, had no idea what it might be like. That was not on my radar when I started looking for jobs, because I looked for jobs in the neighborhood and in the area that I was in and areas that I had been exposed to. So it was very limited. In fact, the choice of chemistry versus chemical engineering came down to the fact that I really was not aware that there were chemical engineers. So in many cases you’re limited by what is around you.
I had seen the opportunities because my best friend was one house away. His father was a doctor. He had a very nice home, but he could not build it anywhere except in our neighborhood. Because nobody would have, one, sold him the land; there were a lot of restrictions on who you could sell land to, even if you had the money. And so, the community that I came from was pretty much self-contained.
My father was a teacher, taught for 42 years in the Spartanburg School District. My mother taught for ten years before she opened a restaurant. So I was around a lot of teachers and that type. But I was around everybody, because when she opened a restaurant, everybody came there. So, that’s kind of the atmosphere that I was raised in. When she started the restaurant, people had said, it’s not going to be successful because you don’t sell beer. She had her mindset, and that wasn’t what she was going to do, so, you know, it was a pretty healthy atmosphere to grow up in. And when I had children, I think that it was a very good atmosphere for the children. The school districts were very good and we didn’t have—there were problems here, but I didn’t have to face them every day.
Franklin: What sorts of problems?
Abercrombie: Typical problems. It may be difficult to kind of explain. But the first time my daughter, that I knew of my daughter being called out of her name was here in Richland. It was one of our neighbors. When I went to work in the laboratory—I’m not trying to be funny, but I had people say, you’re not like the rest of them. Rest of “them”? Who is “them”? So I asked, and they said, well, you know—and they didn’t know how to say black, colored, negro, whatever. So they would almost choke to death trying to tell me that I wasn’t like most black people. And I’d say, well, who do you know? Well, I really don’t know anybody. So it became apparent that they were getting their information from stories, second-hand, third-hand, the stereotypes that you saw in the movies, that you saw on TV, and whatever.
So as you’re going into a situation like this, you’re coming in to be a professional, but you have people that believe that you’re not. So you’re having to overcome stereotypes.
And that’s happening in many, many places.
When I worked in equal employment opportunity, for example, would have people that wanted to terminate somebody because of attendance. And I would look at the unit and see what’s there, and find out that they had people that had worse attendance than the person that they wanted to fire. So, as you’re talking to them, well, that’s so-and-so’s nephew. What’s that got to do with anything? But you have attitudes that develop.
When I was in that particular aspect, we had a guy that was a janitor, wanted to become a chemical operator. And so they went on a stereotype. Well, he’s so big that he can’t get his hands together. Well, the guy was mopping, and he’s strong enough, he could just sling the mop around and do it with one hand. They thought I was out of town and they were going to give him a test. They put him in two pair of coveralls, put him in boots and rubber gloves, and wanted him to go up some 20, 30 feet on a ladder. And if you think that it’s unsafe, why would you do that? They didn’t require that with anybody else.
So you’re finding that a lot of attitudes that people have are preconceived and the South has no handle on discrimination. But a lot of the people came up here. In fact, I was talking to an individual Sunday who came here in ’41. And I asked him specifically because I’ve heard of Kennewick being a sundown city. A sundown city is a city in which black people are supposed to get the heck out of town before the sun goes down. I’ve heard a lot of information of people that say yes, and he confirmed this. I’ve heard at one time there was signs that basically stated this, but I’ve not found anybody that has specifically seen those signs.
I know, as of later research, that Oregon was established as a white state, and at one time, it was against the law and you could be beaten for being in Oregon if you were not one of the people grandfathered in—which is another racist situation—at sunset. So a lot of these things I only found out later that existed. So.
Franklin: Do you remember any particular community events? In the African American community?
Abercrombie: Particular events. I will tell you the first time I heard about Juneteenth. Because there are a lot of people that came up from Texas. In South Carolina, I knew absolutely nothing about Juneteenth. When I first heard about Juneteenth, I was somewhat taken back, somewhat offended, because a couple of things that happened as you’re growing up. You never hear anything about the accomplishments of black people. It’s very limited. And normally that’s reserved for talking about George Washington Carver and a few other people.
But most people have no idea of the accomplishments of George Washington Carver. They associate him with the peanut. The way that he got associated with the peanut is a story in and of itself. But what he did, in terms of a scientist—in fact, when George Washington Carver first went to college, he went to Highland College and was accepted on the basis of his work in high school. But when he got there—and he had saved money and was able to take care of himself financially—when he got there, they said, oh, we didn’t know that you were black. Bye.
So he was distraught over this. He went to work. He was always a worker. And he worked for some people who encouraged him to go back. George Washington Carver then goes back to Simpson College, and at Simpson, most people have no idea what he was majoring in. But George Washington Carver majored in art and piano, and was very talented at both. But one of his instructors, Etta Budd, said, George, we really don’t think that a black man can earn a living in art and piano. And her husband was at Iowa State University, encouraged him to go there and work in botany. He worked with some of the great soil scientists of the era. In fact, one of his classmates became the secretary of agriculture in one of the administrations.
But they don’t talk about the fact that he had very strong friendships with Thomas Edison, with Henry Ford. In fact, when he was at Tuskegee and had trouble getting to his laboratory on the second floor, Ford sent engineers down and said you put in an elevator for him. Very close relationship. When, during the war, World War II, when metal was in short supply, he worked with Ford and they developed a plastic body for a car. Ford demonstrates it by hitting it with a sledge hammer and not damaging that car body. When rubber was in short supply, he made synthetic rubber. When we were having difficulty dying our clothes and dying a lot of other things because we used aniline, which came from Germany—we’re at war with Germany—we couldn’t even dye our uniforms. So he went up, and as a young aspiring artist, he had to develop his own pigments, he had to develop dyes. He knew how to do this and he came up with a full—excuse me—palette of colors to do this. And we think all this man did was made peanut butter? You know, an elephant stepping on a peanut makes peanut butter. This man was a chemist. He was a scientist. He did many, many things.
In addition to the peanut, he worked with soybeans, he worked with sweet potatoes, he worked with lots of other things. And part of his demise was due to the fact that when he was traveling and speaking he could not get a sleeper car because of his color of his skin. And I’m sure that added to the difficulty that he had in getting around. But we don’t make mention of many of the contributions he’s made, and he is by far not the only person that’s made significant contributions to this society.
Franklin: Did you attend church?
Abercrombie: Yes, I did.
Franklin: What church did you attend?
Abercrombie: Still attending. I was there Sunday. Actually, Richland Baptist Church on G-W Way. Which is right down the street. Now, when I came to Richland, it was my intent that I was going to live fairly close to work and I would be involved in the community that I was there. It was quite a while before I fully understood everything that was available in east Pasco. Probably would have attended the church there, but I made a decision on this one earlier. The people were friendly enough, and so my wife and I joined--
Franklin: Okay.
Abercrombie: --that church. I think we joined in 1968. So I guess technically we’ve been members for 50 years.
Franklin: Wow. Do you recall any family activities, events or traditions, including sports and food, that African Americans brought from the places that they came from?
Abercrombie: Again, I’ll go back to east Pasco. There was Jack’s Tavern, and there was the Paradise Inn, which I think Joe Jackson and Webster Jackson had started. I remember buffalo fish, which I had not eaten, you know, prior to coming out here.
Franklin: Buffalo fish?
Abercrombie: Yeah. I think it’s a member of the carp family; in fact, it used to get flown in, and they used to, you know, they used to have that. As you develop friendships, you share food, break bread with people. I used to have a fairly good-sized New Year’s Eve party. I’d go through quite a few chitlins and hog maws and stuff of that nature, which is some of the things we were grown up with. You soon start looking at markets.
You find that people have a tendency to congregate around things that they are familiar with. Race just being one of those things. Because, as a motorcycle rider, I found that there were a number of people that rode who were professional people, and we had similarities there. Same brand of motorcycle would sometimes be in this corner, professions would be over here. But when race is involved, it makes things stand out, and sometimes when you don’t know, and you’re walking into a strange situation, that may be the thing that makes the attraction. So, yeah, we went through those situations.
I found that as a motorcycle rider—I was a member of Hill & Gully Motorcycle Club, it was an American Motorcycle Association, and we traveled around to different places. So, there were dentists, there were lawyers, there were whatever. I had a tendency to spend more time with them than I did some of the railroad workers or some of the other things. Although, because of the width and breadth of the knowledge that I picked up here, I was able to fit in there as well.
Franklin: Were there—we already kind of talked about this, but I just wanted to ask this direct question, these next two questions. Were there opportunities available here that were not available where you came from?
Abercrombie: I’d have to say yes. Because there were very, very limited opportunities there. I’ve seen people that had great skills. And one of my passions at this point is trying to let people know that they have passions and talents beyond that which they have seen. Some of the best students that I attended high school and college with did not have opportunities to utilize those skills. If you look at, I believe the book is The First Class which talks about the Dunbar High School—or the Dunbar School in Washington, DC, a lot of very famous people came through Dunbar. But in some cases, you found that there were PhDs that were teaching elementary school, not because that’s what they aspired to do, but in many cases that’s what they were limited to do.
I think one of the reasons is that we have a disparity in education is because of the fact that people have gone to school, they have exceled at school, but when they went to look for opportunities to show or display their skills, they never had a chance. They never got into the batter’s box. They didn’t have a chance to swing for the fences. Because it was not there. And that has impacted this country for decades, and actually centuries. Because when we look back at some of the earlier accomplishments that people have made, you know, it’s astounding.
I think we get into a standoff position, because I think many white people feel that we hold every one of them responsible for slavery. Most people did not own slaves. And we also find that there are black people that owned slaves. William Ellison in South Carolina had over 60 slaves. He was a gin maker and gin repairman. And it’s an interesting story what happened to him after the—during and after the Civil War. Because he supplied goods as a businessperson to the Confederacy and after the Confederacy when the economy was starting to go again, they actually passed laws that prevented black people from competing against white people in terms of even seeking business. And so we get into the situation that the remnants of which still hang with us today.
And so, people move around, attitudes go, and a lot of the attitudes people have, they don’t even know where they came from. It’s what you were born with, what you were raised with, what you were—what you saw. And as I saw here, people had pre-established concepts of what they were going to get based on, not fact, but what they perceived to be.
If you ever look at the story of Clara Brown—and I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at Clara Brown; this is probably beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here—but Clara Brown was born a slave in Virginia. Her mother and she were sold to a different owner in Kentucky, and that’s where George Brown comes into the fact. She worked for the Brown family for 20 years. During that time, she was allowed to marry. She had four children. When George Brown died, that family was split apart, sold to different parts of the country. Her husband went one way, her son went one way. She had three daughters: an older daughter and twin daughters. Of the twins, one of them were drowned in a flood, and the remaining twin was—had a lot of nightmares about that situation.
Clara Brown got her freedom at the age of 56. Most people are not aware that in most states, when you got your freedom, you had one year to get out of the state or you could be re-enslaved. Clara Brown went to St. Louis. Clara Brown worked. She heard that people were going to the West and being able to enjoy their freedoms. And so Clara Brown earned enough money to pay passage to Denver, Colorado. However, she could not take a stagecoach, because the stagecoaches would not sell a black person a ticket there. So she found a wagon train headed that way. Now, she’s almost 60 years old at this point. She walked, but she booked on to cook. So she had to get up early and do breakfast, stay up late to do dinner. But she walked 700 miles in eight weeks.
After she got there, she set herself up in a laundry business. Ten years later, she has $10,000 in the bank, and this is in the 1880s, 1890s. Clara Brown, to her credit, was known as the Angel of the Rockies. There are at least three churches now that owe their existence to the fact that she contributed financially. There was a Catholic and two Methodist churches. She was Presbyterian, but she helped a lot of people along the way.
What happened is that many people based slavery on the fact that black people could not feel pain. So if you look at James Marion Sims in Medical Apartheid, you’ll see some of the horrible, horrific things that he did there. And also said that black people don’t grieve, so you can sell the people around. I’ll speed this thing up, and we can get back on track. But anyway, she goes and finds that her daughter is still alive, and her daughter is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She didn’t find her until 80 years of age.
Franklin: Wow.
Abercrombie: But that puts a hole in much of what the people that believed in slavery—because they said we don’t feel pain, we don’t have emotion, we don’t have the ability to do it. But so many things have happened in this country that have been based strictly on the perceived concept. So, I’ll get back on track.
Franklin: Okay. That was a great story, though, thank you. In what ways were opportunities here limited because of segregation or racism?
Abercrombie: As I indicated before, when we looked at people—I was here when we wanted to institute an apprenticeship program, bring people of color and women into some of the skilled crafts. Many of the—and I’ve had more than one person tell me that the next job that comes up belongs to my son, my nephew, my whoever. In other words, these people owned the job. Many of the super—in fact, most of the supervisors and foremen came from the ranks, and they brought those attitudes with them. So we did not open opportunities, even in the skilled crafts, and in many cases, even entry level opportunities to bring people in and allow them to perform to their level, because they had a lot to bring with them.
We look at people quite a bit different, because even in the schools, in the early grades, this particular mannerism is cute, but in girls and in minorities, you know, third, fourth grade, it becomes something of a distraction, it’s disruptive, it’s something else. The same attitude in a white male would be accepted as leadership, moving ahead. And so we face many of those problems here. Because we are people, and that exists. In terms of professional positions, the same thing manifests itself. We don’t have an opportunity to put input into the system and to show what we can do, show what other people can do, and open opportunities to people. So we got to a position where we had to have Affirmative Action because people were not given the opportunities; not because they could not perform, but—and the school system itself created a lot of the system. The school systems, not necessarily here, but all over the country.
Franklin: Right. You mentioned that when you first came to Hanford, you went out to work at PUREX?
Abercrombie: Yes.
Franklin: Right, and how long did you work there for?
Abercrombie: I came in as a tech grad and so I worked there for four months; I went to Z Plant, which was 234-5 Plutonium Finishing Laboratory, worked there for four months; and then I went to REDOX, worked in the Standards Lab for four months. At that point I then had a permanent assignment, went back to PUREX and was there for a couple of years before I had the opportunity to go as a shift supervisor, and worked there for a couple of years, and went into the EEO and human resources and other activities.
Franklin: What on-the-job training did you receive?
Abercrombie: Well, the technical graduate program basically was an on-the-job type training. We had people that we could work with in all of those positions. So, it’s kind of like getting used to the work that’s in the various laboratories. You had a chance of sitting down, talking to people about various openings that were available there. So you had kind of an idea of what was available and the ability to match that with what you wanted to do. While I was working at the electro-potentiometric determinations of uranium at PUREX, there were other things that I could have done. When I went to 234-5, it was emission spectroscopy, and we were looking at the impurity elements in plutonium product. Completely new field for me. At REDOX, I worked in the Standards Laboratory and got to see a different view of everything. When I went back to PUREX, I worked in quality control and quality assurance. Wrote the quality control and assurance plan for uranium, plutonium, neptunium for the entire plant, before moving into the human resource area. So, that was how some of that worked.
My classmate that had come out had worked in the counting room, and was able to work with the early computers. He worked in safety for a while. So we had a chance to look at a few different things there. So if that’s answering the question you asked.
Franklin: Yes, yes, thank you. How would you describe your relationships with your coworkers and your supervisors?
Abercrombie: I would have to say that it was better than I expected, because I had preconceived notions as well. And I found that in many cases, I got help from people that I never expected to ever get it from. I think part of it was the fact that you were able to kind of relax around some of these people, that you were able—some of these people. As if there’s a difference and a distinction in them. So we were able, because it was fairly small laboratories, fairly small work groups that you could kind of fit in and kind of work with people. And I think people were willing to help people that were willing to expend the time and energy to try to excel at what they were doing.
Franklin: How were you treated on the job?
Abercrombie: By and large, I would say that it was pretty good. I would not say that it’s perfect, but I don’t know any place that would be. I think the opportunities that came along were good. I think it could’ve been better. But I can’t really compare it to anything, because most of my experience was here.
Except for the fact that I did work with the City of Richland with the Human Rights Commission and for a time was chairman of that particular commission. I worked with the Benton County Sheriff’s office as a reserve, and got into that as a result of my labor relations experience, because I did have the Hanford Guards and wanted to find out what they did. So I went out and qualified with them, and spent a weekend in class and did the day and night qualifications with them. Benton County said, if we send you to the academy, will you go? Well, I wanted to find out what that was all about, and, yes.
And that was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. Because in the South, where I came from, when police came into your neighborhood, somebody was going to bleed. Man, woman, or child, somebody was going to bleed. So I got commissioned as a deputy with Benton County, I did not want to go in with the intent of beating anybody; I didn’t want to go in with the type of thing that I had seen growing up. So that was an extremely frightening experience for me. But I think I worked with a good group of people, and had my eyes opened, and I think I opened some of theirs as well.
Franklin: What kinds of interactions did you have with coworkers and supervisors outside of work?
Abercrombie: I think most of my activities outside of work did not involve coworkers. We had some, we had limited. I didn’t go out and do a lot of things. Like I said, an occasional fishing trip, occasional hunting, and motorcycle. Motorcycle I could do with a group or I could do by myself.
Franklin: Yeah.
Abercrombie: So.
Franklin: What were the most difficult aspects of the job?
Abercrombie: I think it was the idea of competing against people that had gone to named universities and thinking—and really not knowing what to expect. Because like you say—not, like I’ve said before, but when you are given hand-me-down books, which is what we got in our school system—when you see that there is some reason that you can’t go to that school, or you don’t have that opportunity—now, I had a chance, when I worked as a bricklayer to work in all the schools there, because I worked for the school district during part of the year, because my dad was in the industrial arts. The glass brick that they had in schools, when they broke, I was the one that went in and repaired them. So I saw the difference in the equipment of what they had versus what we had.
My high school, maybe had one reel-to-reel tape recorder and a broken-down film projector. And I could go there and see that they had full language labs, and they had individual headsets, and they had equipment that I absolutely knew—did not have access to. Textiles, which were big there, they had classes in loom repair. One of the better jobs there. I worked as a weaver in college, and was a weaver, and was selected to go into the mechanical side of things there before I decided—well, it wasn’t really a decision, because I was coming out here or going to do the bricklaying in the first place. But I think that sets the tone for a lot of things in your life, and you begin to wonder: can I compete? And that does a lot to affect where you end up.
Franklin: What were conditions like in terms of health and safety?
Abercrombie: [LAUGHTER] Having just read Plutonium Files, I think that a lot of the information we were given, I question. I don’t think that they knew exact information as much as they let on to us believing that they knew. I think in some cases we were kind of used as guinea pigs. One of the things that I have found is that I was exposed to beryllium when I worked at Plutonium Finishing Lab. That has caused me a lot of problems. In fact, during the ‘90s, the mid- to late-‘90s, I was diagnosed with bronchoalveolar carcinoma and told that I had six to ten months to live. And it turned out that it was similar to sarcoidosis, but actually it was the beryllium sensitivity and beryllium disease. They did a lavage and took lung tissue and that’s when they had come up with this prognosis that I had six to ten months to live.
But when you look at the whole body count, when you start looking at some of what we were exposed to, I think in some cases the decisions were made on a financial basis as opposed to a security basis. When we look at what we’re doing now and what we have left over as remnants in terms of the Tank Farms, in terms of the waste, in terms of many of the aspects that are giving us headaches at this point, I think they knew, but didn’t want to act on it. And it was strictly a financial situation as opposed to a long term safety situation. And I think some people were guinea pigs. My classmate has probably been dead ten years, and I’m not sure that Hanford didn’t contribute very highly in that particular situation.
Franklin: How did your racial background figure into your work experiences?
Abercrombie: Well, no matter where you go, you take them with you. You take your preconceived ideas and you run into people that have preconceived ideas. I’m not sure that Hanford necessarily would’ve been any different than anywhere else, because I did not work anywhere else. But you run into the situation where people have the preconceived idea that, for whatever reason, you maybe can’t do this, maybe you shouldn’t do that.
Hopefully things are a lot better. When I left Hanford, I did not leave feeling that I had been treated fairly in the end. Very much to the contrary. So. Overall, I think that it was good life experience. But there are certainly a lot of things, I think, that could’ve been significantly different.
Franklin: I understand. In what ways did the security and secrecy at Hanford impact your work or daily life?
Abercrombie: It had some impact, because some of the work required a Q clearance, the top clearance. I had less impact than most people, because my clearance got here just before I did. So I did not have a limited clearance. I had access to secret information when I got here. Some people were impacted, because there were certain jobs that they could not take, or did not have the opportunity to do, because it did involve some secret information. So I think it had less an impact on me than it did on some of the other people, if that’s the question that you’re asking. Certainly, it was a different atmosphere. But having been an only child and not being prone to be around and talking to a lot of people about a lot of different stuff, it probably had less impact on me than it did most people.
Franklin: What did you know or learn about the prior history of African American workers at Hanford?
Abercrombie: [LAUGHTER] As far as Hanford itself is concerned, I’m still trying to explore that. I’ll tell you with some degree of embarrassment, I just recently found out about the 555th, which was the first group of African American paratroopers in the country. They had trained, I believe, at Fort Benning, Georgia. At that time, blacks were not allowed to be paratroopers, because the Army was strictly segregated. But what happened is that they were camped right next to the training for the paratroopers. They said, we can do that! So when they were done for the day, they would go over and go through all of the exercises, all the maneuvers that they had seen being done throughout the day. And they excelled at that to the point that one of the higher officers saw that and said, maybe we need to make a unit out of these guys.
Well, what does that have to do with me out here? Well, during World War II, the Japanese were floating incendiary devices across the oceans in balloons and setting large fires. We didn’t want the Japanese to know that they were even being successful. So who do we send in? The 555th. They were stationed at Pendleton, and they made many jumps into the Pacific Northwest. One of those devices even landed at Hanford. Not being aware of the fact that we had done much beyond George Washington Carver, I didn’t spend a lot of time studying and looking into it, until fairly recently.
It’s kind of interesting how I got involved in black history at all, but, like I may have indicated Sunday, I was asking the gentleman that was here in ’41 or ’42 about Kennewick being a sundown city. And he said, yes. But he had not seen the sign. So whether it actually—whether there were actually signs or whether it was just known that such was the case in Kennewick—and I talked to a person that lived in Pasco. They made sure that they were out of Kennewick. So it affected a lot of people. When I came here and was looking at houses, people had told me, don’t go to Kennewick. So some of those stories, whether they were fables or not, did have an impact. So yeah.
Franklin: How did you feel at the time about working on the development of nuclear weapons?
Abercrombie: Repeat the question, please.
Franklin: How did you feel at the time about working on the development of nuclear weapons?
Abercrombie: I felt better then than I do now. I didn’t know a lot about nuclear weapons. But the fact that supposedly we had shortened the war with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I thought they were peaceful—or that it would serve a useful purpose. They were talking about plough sharing and being able to do other things with the energy, you know, making tunnels or canals or digging things. And I didn’t understand, at that point, some of the long term effects that radiation could have.
I think that in many cases, we moved strictly on the basis of finances as opposed to what could be done safely. I think that we were operating and putting waste into the ground with the idea that it’d be okay for eternity. And I think that had we taken seriously the concept that we need to take this from—no pun intended—from birth to the grave or birth to eternity in the beginning, I think that it would’ve been a lot sounder situation to get into.
When I go and when I look at material like we find in Plutonium Files, they were doing experiments on people that I don’t think were necessarily ethical. I’m not sure that we weren’t in such a position there, because I think most of our difficulties came out when it became known to some people that the beryllium had manifested itself that I had been exposed to earlier.
I think that it was a bit naïve on my part in the beginning. I think I would feel differently now. I think that it is a situation that could be controlled and should’ve been controlled earlier in the game. So I think I felt better at that time, because I did not know some of the consequences of what I was doing, as opposed to now.
Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site?
Abercrombie: [SIGH] Tough question. And I think that for many of the questions that we have looked at. But I think that the long-range prognosis of what we’ve done is that we have been short-sighted, not only at Hanford, but in the way that we have handled the earth, that we’ve handled the environment. And we normally look at what is happening immediately; we don’t look at what can happen five years, 500 years, 5,000 years down the road from what we’re doing. I think we have to be concerned about it, not only with the nuclear energy—because I think nuclear energy can be done safely—but when we look at situations such as plastics. We’re having tons and tons of it wash up on shores of various places, we have large masses in the middle of our oceans, we’re putting it into our food system, that we need to be more cognizant of some of the things that we’re doing. In terms of Hanford, we have to look at the migration of isotopes towards our rivers and things of that nature. So I guess, that’s what I have to look at in terms of our legacy. I don’t think that we’ve handled it in the very best way. But I think we have to take today and do the best that we can for the future, or else we won’t have a future. In a way. If that answers your question.
Franklin: It does. Thank you. Switching to civil rights, what were the major civil rights issues for African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities during your time here?
Abercrombie: Major problem here, as everywhere—because this is not the only place in which the condition existed—goes back to the fact that I don’t think that people have been woven into the fabric of this country as they should have been. When we start looking at minorities, when we start looking at women, when we start looking at anybody that is not the majority, or is not accepted, or is not blessed by the majority, and leave them out, we leave the best of some people untapped. You know, I look back at the American Revolutionary War, and I look at Sybil Ludington, 16-year-old girl that rode the same night as Paul Revere. We don’t see the fact that that is a part of our history, that is a part of the fabric of us. So sometimes we leave people—significant groups of people—out of the equation, that in order to make this a better country, this a better world, we need to take the best of everybody.
Now, when I came here, like I said, or like we’ve talked about, many people were isolated into the area of east Pasco. Many people were not given the opportunity to work jobs that they were capable of performing. When you hold somebody down, you hold the progress of the entire group down. And I’m not talking about the racial group; I’m talking about everybody.
When we look at Charles Drew, for example, who developed the blood bank, and under the auspices of the American Red Cross. He left because they wanted him to spend his time creating two different blood banks: one for black, one for white. He said, no, that’s not going to happen. When we look at the developments that people can make, I think that we need to be working on the development of everybody, and pull this thing together. The fact that we even have to have black history is because we have not woven those accomplishments into the fabric that is this nation, that is this country, that is this world.
We look at Canada, for example, and not realize the number of people that have escaped slavery going up there. We don’t even acknowledge the brutality of slavery. We don’t acknowledge the contributions that people have made otherwise. Now we’re having—and I finally get this—Viola Desmond, for example, is on the Canadian ten-dollar bank note. She was arrested because she went to the movie and sat in a white seat, and they got her on taxes. Because the different in tax on the seat where she would seat and the one reserved for the whites was one penny. She was fined $26 and jail, I believe. They made some acknowledgement of that.
But I think we need to include all people fairly in the distribution of what’s accomplished. We have a school-to-prison pipeline where we’re making money off the fact of people being imprisoned. It costs way more money to keep a person in prison than it does to education them. When you educate a person, you eliminate much of what we have. We have people that are crying out and resorting to violent behavior, resorting to criminal behavior, because there is no opportunity for them. And I think that’s one of the things that we absolutely need to do.
We don’t have a discussion in this country of one of the most difficult subjects that there is to broach, and that keeps that divide there. We need to look at Germany and what they have done in terms of the treatment of the Holocaust and their contribution to it. I think there are lessons to be learned there. We are not the know-it-all of everything. And there are lessons to be learned. And unless we learn from those lessons, we’re not making progress.
Franklin: What actions were being taken here to address the issues that you brought up?
Abercrombie: Very difficult question for me to answer, because I don’t spend a great deal of time here anymore. I spend time between here and South Carolina. My contribution has been the fact that I have been trying to bring some of the items that have been left untouched together. I have a website, Amazing Black History, where I’m putting together a lot of information on contributions that have been made by blacks, and the purpose for that is not to elevate anybody, but to show people what’s there. It’s not to isolate anybody, because the stories that are on that site are intended to inspire everybody, whether they are male, female, black, white or any other nationality. It’s intended to get people to understand the impact that a person can have, the abilities that a person has, so much so that I’m doing that. That’s part of the dedication. I’m using that as examples; my primary intent is to motivate and inspire people to become the best that they can be.
Franklin: You mentioned earlier that you were on the Richland Human Rights Commission.
Abercrombie: Mm-hmm.
Franklin: Right? As the chair. What types of problems were visible to you as on the Human Rights Commission? How did the commission try to tackle those issues?
Abercrombie: It’s difficult for a city to run a function like that, because of limited resources. It was an all-volunteer group. I think we went through a couple of cases. But as you have a state commission, I think they’re able to function better. A federal commission, I think should be able to function even better. It was limited. But we looked at what was occurring. And I think most of the problems on whatever level come from a lack of knowledge of what people can do, and we take the preconceived notions and say the people cannot do this, they cannot do that, they don’t have the opportunities to do that.
When I was working as a bricklayer, we had a church, and we did the brickwork on it. But the church members volunteered and helped to save money, and one of the people that we had was a woman who was an ex-school teacher. I don’t know if you’ve ever lifted a 12-inch concrete block, but I have seen that woman take those things that probably weigh 70 to 80 pounds, one in each hand, and throw them up on the scaffold. That’s an individual. There are men that cannot do that. But we go around with the perceived perception of what people can do based on our mind and not the person. And I think it’s been very detrimental to minorities; I think it’s been very detrimental to women. I think it’s even been detrimental to men, because some of them probably have been pushed into areas that they would be less comfortable in, only because of somebody else’s preconceived notion.
Franklin: Were you directly involved in any civil rights efforts?
Abercrombie: Not directly. You mean, in terms of protest, or--?
Franklin: Yeah, I mean any kind of protest, lobbying, you know, sign making, efforts in the human rights council?
Abercrombie: Not directly. Now, we were involved in a group that existed late ‘60s, early ‘70s called BEAT, B-E-A-T, Black Expressions of Art in the Tri-Cities. We were attempting to make known what we could do. One of the activities that we had is we had Alex Haley come to town, and this is before Roots was written. He spent the day at my house, we talked with him extensively about what he had done, what he was working on at the time. He was working on Roots. I thought it was going to be about his research, and was tremendously excited about it, although when I got the book and read it, I was very excited about it as well. So we were—Tony Brown, we brought here. Most of the actions that I took were of the, hopefully, enlightening aspect of it, as opposed to those people that were doing the actually on the ground. I admired the. From the way that I’d come up, I didn’t really get involved in that. Looking back, I probably wish that I had.
Franklin: But you were focused on—your activity in BEAT was focused on kind of bringing influential people to kind of show—just to enlighten people about black culture and art and things like that. Kind of—influence people or just to share that knowledge?
Abercrombie: Yeah, I think it was more of an educational thing, because I had this preconceived notion that if you know me, you’ll like me. You won’t hate me. And I’m not talking about me myself, but I’m talking about the fact that—and one of the things that really, really upset me that I really didn’t understand—
[PHONE RINGING]
Abercrombie: Is that the end of our time? One of the things that I really didn’t understand is how a Christian could look at a black person the way that they were doing. When you look at the fact that there have been over 4,000 people of color hung in this country and they were hung by basically Christian people—are there two Gods? Why don’t we get some respect? Why does this situation exist? So, some of those situations really, really disturb me.
Why do we have to have two educational systems? Wouldn’t it be more effective if we had one? At that time, it was not pushing for integration as much as it was for desegregation. I think we get into a situation where those two ideas and concepts got muddled. I think that in terms of bang for the buck, I think the black schools gave it, because there were dedicated teachers that were there. As I saw integration taking place, in my wife’s home town for example, when the school that she attended, the high school that she attended was integrated, the white teachers came up there with dumpsters. They threw away trophies, they threw away records, they threw away all sorts of things because it did not mean anything to them.
So we approached integration, which I think is one of the biggest failed experiments that I can ever think of, because we went in with one group thinking they were vastly superior, another group thinking that they were for whatever reason inferior—although we had so many examples of people that did not fit into that category—that we’ve done ourselves a great injustice by the way that we went about this. We had people that felt that they were being forced into something. We didn’t pre-sell it. We just forced it on. This is the way this is going to be and that’s it. I think that we have made—and I think it’s good that we have gotten rid of many of the barriers. But I think a lot of them still exist, and a lot of them exist because we don’t understand, and because we fail to discuss. We have never really had a solid discussion in this country on race, and I think that many people are afraid of it. I just think that at some point in time, we’re going to have to have that discussion.
Franklin: Agreed. I like your point that—or at least I think the point you were making—that desegregation and integration aren’t the same thing, in that integration doesn’t—I think we thought integration would follow desegregation, but in a lot of communities over time, it just became segregated in a different way. Like with white flight or with—once busing was over—now our schools are more segregated than they were in 1960, because of the ways that neighborhoods or people have formed neighborhoods, and largely choose to live in certain areas over others. And we’re—
Abercrombie: Well, I think it’s more being forced into neighborhoods than others. Because we didn’t look at the fore-ranging impact of what that would happen. Let’s take my neighbor that I spoke of whose father was a doctor. He couldn’t move into a neighborhood that was comparable with his income level. Therefore, he didn’t get to go to the school that got all of the funding. And as a result, he’s impacted. They are also impacted, because they don’t get a chance to take advantage of what he could contribute, or what I could contribute, or what anybody could contribute.
And when you look at the color of law, and you look and see the depth to which this country has gone to maintain segregated communities, and when you look at how school districts are gerrymandered, when you look at how jobs then are created based on a lot of the factors that we try to keep out of our peripheral vision, you see why we’re in such bad shape. When we take our best students and give them everything that they have, everything that they need to excel, I think it’s great. And we need to do that regardless of color, race, religion or any other factor. And when we have students that learn by different methods—some people by example or whatever—we need to look more at how to get the best out of everybody.
Franklin: Coming back to your life, when did your work at Hanford come to an end, and what did you do afterwards?
Abercrombie: [LAUGHTER] It’s kind of interesting, like I said. I think the treatment that I received my last days of work at Hanford were not the way that I would treat a dog. I think that I was treated very unfairly. I think there were a couple of people that did some things specifically that were not in my best interest. About the time that I left Hanford is about the time that I got the diagnosis that I had six to ten months to live. It’s sometimes kind of difficult to think that those two are completely separated. I know when I was told the information about basically leaving Hanford, I made a comment at that time that scared me. And I would probably have done something that I would have regretted, but it was something that I had to leave alone or I think would’ve been consumed. So I’m at a point where I need to try to live out the six to ten months that I’d been given, make the best use of that time, as opposed to anything having to do with Hanford. So it was a difficult crossroad in my life at that time that came there.
Franklin: When was this?
Abercrombie: This was in the middle- to late-‘90s.
Franklin: Okay.
Abercrombie: As a result of having worked with people and seeing so many people that have been passed up and so many people that have gotten a false impression of what they can and can’t do, that right now my passion is letting people know that they themselves have capabilities. And I’m using a lot of the examples that I’m finding out that I’m talking about with you to show just that. And I think that there are lessons there that can help motivate and inspire all people. Because once you see what the lowest of these have done, then you see what you are capable of doing. And I’d like to work with those people towards those ends. So my ultimate goal is to do just that.
Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War?
Abercrombie: Hmm. [LAUGHTER] Well, there are some positive things there. Community can come together. Richland had come together in support of a particular cause, whether that cause is right, wrong or indifferent. I think that that is a life lesson there: that you can pull together. Hopefully you have the right direction, hopefully you have the foresight, and hopefully all of those are good. I think that is part of the legacy that should be this nation’s motto, that no matter where we are and no matter what we do, that we can work together, that we can pull for good. I think we need to be a little more foresighted in much of what we do, because we tend to be shortsighted on what is going to make a dollar today, which may cost us five dollars to clean up tomorrow. And I think that we need to realize that it’s individuals that make this country, and not necessarily the groups that make this country. And so that we all need to work towards that end. Maximize all of the resources, all of the talent, all of the people that we have, and not waste our time on trying to denigrate or minimize any person.
Franklin: Is there anything else you would like to mention related to migration, work experiences, segregation and civil rights and how they’ve impacted your life at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities?
Abercrombie: Overall in my life, it’s been the fact that I’ve been exposed to experiences that I never would had I remained a bricklayer. [LAUGHTER] And hopefully other people will have found the same. I guess the one thing that I’m thinking now, hopefully it will go along with the idea and the concepts of what you’re talking about—is I look at the article that I just did on Clara Brown where she had one year to decide to—or to move out of the state or be re-enslaved. Sometimes, we think that we don’t have to make a decision and not realize that not making the decision is actually making a decision. Sometimes it is accepting of a situation that we really don’t want. We need to be objective in what we look at and how we look at it and the consequences of it. We need to train ourselves in school and we need to train ourselves in life that we need to be willing to make decisions. We need to be willing to speak out for what is right. We need to be able to do that in order to move the country forward, to move the world forward. We cannot be so nearsighted that we don’t see beyond our own noses.
Franklin: Great. Well, John, thank you so much for coming and sharing your perspective and your research for your website, and weaving all that together for us.
Abercrombie: Okay.
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
PUREX
200-East Area
234-5 Plutonium Finishing Laboratory
REDOX
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1967-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1967-1995
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with John Abercrombie
Subject
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Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
School integration
African American universities and colleges
Affirmative action programs
Migration
Civil rights
Race relations
Racism
Description
An account of the resource
John Abercrombie has lived in the Tri-Cities since 1967 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1967-1995.
A National Park Service funded project to document the history of African American contributions to Hanford and the surrounding communities. This project was conducted through the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystems Unit, Task Agreement P17AC01288
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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07/23/2018
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. This oral history collection was done in partnership with the National Park Service under Task Agreement P17AC01288.