Where did you live? What was it like? What stands out about living in Memphis in the 1960s?
Memphis TN.
It was a great place to live but there was segregation, I remember there were white entrances and black entrances to movie theaters, and blacks had to sit on the back of the bus. But they were just starting to integrate because 8 years before they had police escorting kids around because schools were being integrated. By 68 there were black students in the white university. The changes that were coming but the average person wasn't really affected the way people think. But I did see in the 60s it was the end of the area where the KKK had been really prevalent. It had been prevalent before but it had gone underground.
Describe your life in 1968. What was a typical day like for you in 1968?School?Work? How was it different from today?
In 1968 I was in university and teaching part time it was busy trying to get out of college and support my self with out go in to a lot of student debt but college is much much cheaper then people could go to college and not build up loans like you do now. College tuition was less than 200 dollars for a semester. My day was go to school, then go to one of my two jobs and then go home and do work and I was dating...actually I got engaged in 68.
What do you remember about the day King was assassinated? What was different than normal? How did you feel? What did you think? Where were you when you heard? How did you react? How did things change throughout the night?
In certain parts of the town it was crazy and in certain parts it was normal. In some places had problems because it was already bad. King came in town because of sanitation strike to get more money and better working conditions for sanitation workers and the average person went about their daily routine you just had to be more careful in certain areas and there were certain parts of town you wouldn’t want to go to and there were curfews that was a big thing because they were early it got to a point where you would go to work and go home but after a couple days it calmed down. I was at school. How did I react? im trying to remember... I was a little nervous because I knew that their will probaby be problems but other then that we went about our day, except for the curfews. But it made people nervous especially being white and there were a lot of rumors like one of my neighbors who was an adult came out and said “Be careful, they’re going to be terrorizing our neighborhood” and it was a nice middle class neighborhood. And just be careful. And it made us be wary of any black person that was just walking down the street going from one spot to another. Everyone was nervous about what they were doing here whereas before they probably wouldn’t have been.
Describe your night after King was shot? Where were you that night? What was the city like?
The city was a little crazy. What was on the news was not what was really going on. There problems in certain parts but on the news it sounded like the whole city was going crazy but most people wanted to avoid the problems and they stayed away. It was more the activists that were causing the problems but I remember just staying home because we didn’t want to be out in it.
What did you think of King before and after his death?
Before his death I thought that he actually had sincere motives. He was much more peaceful than they are today. He was trying to actually get better working conditions, he wasn’t trying to cause a lot of people to get hurt. Like now they don’t care. They weren’t busing in people just the agitators. He believed in peaceful demonstration. He just wanted better lives for people of color. He wanted them to have a better life. After his death it was the same thing. I didn’t really change because he wasn’t the one who caused all the problems. There were others who are still around today that actually caused a lot of problems because they took that as the chance to make people riled up which was the opposite of what King really wanted.
Did life change at all after his death? Did people act different or view problems differently? Do you think people’s attitudes changed?
I think it may have helped a little with the integration and getting better wages and stuff for some people but I think it made more of an impact actually other places than it did here. But overall I think it motivated people to a degree but the changes were still slow.
Is there anything else about that time in your life that we haven’t discussed that you’d like to add?
I think it had a lot of good points and a lot of bad points. I think they were forcing integration and everything and part of the problem is that they didn’t look at some of the problems that would be caused by it at that time such as the busing of students from part town to the other so that they would get better education. The problem is that it caused more problems for two reasons: 1. kids were getting on buses at the crack of dawn and getting home very late. They got rid of the local school so that a lot of times kids got helped by teachers who would stay late. But with busing you couldn’t stay late if you had to go catch a bus. It really hurt the sense of community because schools and gyms would stay open and guys could stand around and play basketball and not stand around the street corners. But they couldn’t do that with busing so some of it had a negative even though it was supposed to have a positive. They didn’t look at all the aspects and then people would go to...uh...those who were in the poor areas would go to the more affluent areas. It made the discrimination between the groups at school rather than integrating them rather than everyone totally integrating and being happy with each other.