Interview with Dr. Charles Henry Parrish, March 17, 1977

Charles Staiger: Okay, this is a pilot interview for the Kentucky Oral History Commission with Dr. Charles Henry Parrish, professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Louisville. And today's date is March the 16th, 1977. And this is the first interview of a series concerning Black history in Louisville, Kentucky. And these interviews will focus on the economic aspects of Blacks in Louisville and Dr. Parrish. I wonder if we could begin with perhaps your biographical background, where you were born and raised and where you went to college.

Charles Parrish: I was born in Louisville and went to the public schools in Louisville. And then I went to Howard University in 1916, graduated 1:00in 1920 and then the next year to Columbia University with a master's in 1921. And I didn't do anything about my advanced degree for another a few years. And I went to the University of Chicago where I received a doctor's degree in 1944.

CS: In sociology.

CP: In sociology. My undergraduate worked was in mathematics.

CS: At Howard?

CP: At Howard, yes.

CS: Quite a jump.

CP: And I began sociology when I went to Columbia. That's about the size of my, as a matter of fact, I've done most of my academic work right here in Louisville except for summer sessions and for two stints of visiting professorships after my retirement in 1969. 2:00And then I've been back here. I went to Lincoln University in Missouri and was there during the year 70 71. And then I was invited to the chairman of the interim, chairman of the department, division of the Social sciences at Dillard University of New Orleans. And I was there two years, 72, 73, and 73, 74. And then I've been back here since at the University of Louisville.

CS: I believe you began teaching at the college 3:00level, at the old Simmons University here CP: In Louisville? Yes. At that time, when I finished Columbia, I began teaching at Simmons. And then at that time, Simmons was the only degree planning school for Negroes. And it was the first school approved by the approving agency, accrediting agency for four years. It had be a bachelor's, it happened, of course, my father was president of Simmons at the time and I came out of school so I didn't have to look for a job.

CS: that's convenient.

CP: I taught there up until the time that the Simmons University, 4:00as it was called at the time I went there, it had become Simmons University. But prior to that it had been the state university, this was the Baptist—Negro Baptist had supported it and began in 1873 and was given the name of Simmons, not until the early part of the early nineteen-hundreds, 1915, I think it was changed from state to Simmons. And then the grounds at Seventh and Kentucky, which had been the location of the Simmons, it was the location of the Simmons University was sold to the University of Louisville in 1930—31. 5:00And the Louisville Municipal College had its origin and the classes were begun in February of 1931.

And at that time I was at Chicago and I came to the LMC, it was called the Louisville Municipal College for Negroes. Later the for Negroes was lopped off.

The beginning of 1931 was from the beginning. 6:00Of course, the Louisville Municipal College was operated as a part of the University of Louisville and it had an Arts and Sciences campus at Simmons and the Arts and Sciences campus had built up campus. The occasion for this is rather interesting. Some years, a few years before that, I think two or three years before the Louisville Municipal College was organized, the university had tried to get a bond issue for the development of funds for the university. 7:00And it was widely believed that the defeat of this bond issue was because there was no provision in the bonds or on the vote for Negroes.

CS: Was this in 1925?

CP: It must've been, yes. So in the next two or three years, there was another bond issue and it passed with strong support from the, and on the promise of something, some arrangement being made for the university attendance of Negroes.

CS: I believe it was the one that was passed. It was in 1925.

CP: Yes, one was passed. And the state law banned the, prohibited the attendance of Negroes and whites together in the same school.

CS: Is that the Day Law at Kentucky? 8:00CP: That was the Day Law, yes. And after the beginning of the university's relationships, two of the professors from the University of Louisville taught courses at the Louisville Municipal College. And this was the beginning of the relationship before the school was purchased, before the grounds were purchased. I think Dr. Mallelieu in history taught at the old Simmons University before it became a municipal college. He and I think Reed, I'm not sure, were the early teachers. I am trying to figure out where I should stop 9:00this rehearsal and go on to the next one.

CS: Well, we can— CP: But my career has been more or less confined to one city, Louisville. And so I have been more or less circumscribed in my activities by my ties to my birthplace.

CS: Let me, why don't we go on and get your reaction to some other questions. I was reading C. Van Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" and one passage stated that by 1953 Negroes were enrolled in 23 public colleges in southern or border states at the graduate level and 10 public colleges 10:00at the undergraduate level. And he further stated that all this had been done on a token basis. And before an uglier mood of defiance had developed was the merger of the Louisville Municipal College or LMC and the University of Louisville, a token gesture by the board of trustees, as suggested by this statement by Van Woodward. And perhaps you may want to clarify the term merger as we use it here.

CP: The statement cannot be taken in its literal connotation actually even after the origination of the Louisville Municipal College. You must recognize here that there had been pressure from the Louisville community for higher education opportunities 11:00for Negroes. And this was particularly true after the Simmons University had been sold to the University of Louisville. And even after the origination of the Louisville Municipal College, there was not satisfaction about the separate institutions. Now, the state law, the Day Law, was in effect, and of course you have to recognize that there was one important difference that Berea College in 1867 had admitted Negroes from the first in its origin provisions were made and the Day Law developed out of an opposition 12:00to the attendance of Negroes at Berea College. And the name of the man Day was a resident of, I think, of Berea, or at any rate, he was in the state legislature.

So the law took his name, which prohibited Negroes and whites attending school together or anyone teaching a mixed class of Negroes and whites with a fine of $50 a day for each violation or something of that sort. So that was in effect. And so the university could not do anything with respect to this because of the existence of the Day Law since around about, I guess 1910—12 there somewhere thereabouts in the second decade, I guess, of the century. So the pressure remained with respect 13:00to the system of education which was segregated.

CS: Where did the pressure, where was the pressure coming from to integrate?

CP: Coming from the NAACP suits were brought. And the major importance of Lyman Johnson was the fact that he brought suit and it was a attributable to the fact that the Day Law was violated by the winning of the suit against the University of Kentucky. And this was won in 1949. And there was something else I wanted to say prior to that was this, was this, that they had always been a pretty 14:00strong protest against all forms of segregation in the Louisville area. And one of the earlier cases, handled by the Supreme Court was on the housing in Louisville. It was called the Louisville and Baltimore cases. A city ordinance made it illegal for a white person to purchase property in a block which was predominantly Black, and a Black person was prohibited from purchasing property an area in a block which was predominantly white. And this case was taken to the Supreme Court and overturned, the city ordinance was overturned.

There are some publications 15:00which may be used to give the history of the legal aspects of this in 19—I'll have to find out the date now. But the Louisville Police Department sponsored a book for the education of police dealing with the police and minority groups. And in this volume, there are many copies of it out at the Police headquarters.

CS: This is a recent—?

CP: No, it was back in the late forties. And in the back of this book, there's a listing of all the laws bearing upon race relations for Kentucky and the history of all the legislation. If I had thought 16:00about it, I would've bought a copy of this, but you a copy of this, try to get a copy very easily. And several, for two years there was a committee, which is illustrative of the outgrowth of the protest. The Urban League had protested the cited instances in which Negroes had been treated harshly by the police without being accused of any particular crime. And so out of this, they developed a committee composed of persons from the University of Louisville, from the Urban League and from the police department. 17:00And this committee met for two years, and out of this, they developed this book, the Police and Minority Groups. So this is illustrative of a continuous protest about any form of desegregation. The Baltimore and Louisville Housing case, which I previously mentioned was one prior to 1915, I think. And then these discussions about the police brutality took place in the middle forties. So there was a continuous protest in the Negro community.

Now there had been several cases 18:00trying to upset various forms of segregation. The parks, for example, in the Louisville area were segregated and arrests were made in the public parks of Negroes. And out of this early protest, they set up a separate park for Negroes, Chickasaw Park. And even after the Day Law was upset by the park discrimination was still in effect, but many people did not realize that up until a city ordinance for permitting Negroes the equal the use of the parks—the parks were open to all. And this of course would suggest 19:00that Louisville was always a little bit different from most other southern communities. There never was a public accommodations, accommodation, segregation in Louisville.

This never did happen in Louisville, the parks public facilities were open until, well, I remember as a boy, the picnics and so forth in the parks were available until around about 1910 or 12, somewhere thereabouts. And that's when they were re-segregated. Anyway, one of the cases, the crucial case, of course, is a case that Lyman Johnson brought against the University of Kentucky. 20:00And this case went to the federal court in Lexington—this didn't go to the Supreme Court, the federal court in Lexington brought a verdict in favor of Lyman Johnson In 1949, Johnson attended the University of Kentucky during the summer of 1949.

And in the fall, Earl Clements, who was the governor at that time, and the legislature was meeting, I think legislature was meeting the one Negro legislator 21:00was Jesse Lawrence from Louisville. Now Lawrence was a Republican and Clements the Democrat. So Clements called Lawrence in and said that there's something very wrong about the situation as it now exists. He pointed out that Lyman Johnson attending the University of Kentucky and every day he attends it's in violation of state law. So this ought to be changed. And so he wanted to have a revision, an amendment to the Day Law in order to straighten out this conflict between the federal legislation and the state law. So he mentioned this to Lawrence, 22:00and Lawrence consulted me about it and I suggested to him that you get Louisvillians who were members who were Democrats and had been active politically and he got Dr. Lattimore and the editor of the Louisville Defender, Frank Stanley, and had one or two other persons, Meyzeek who had been active in the NAACP and they went to Frankfort. And then out of this conference with Governor Clements, an amendment to the Day Law was developed. I can't quote from the amendment, but in effect, it gave the power to any board of trustees for institutions of higher learning, this means to beyond high school, 23:00to admit Negroes to any programs which were not available in the Kentucky State College. There was some fear on the part of the president of Kentucky State College who participated in this amendment procedure.

CS: That's Kentucky State in Frankfort?

CP: In Frankfort because there was a feeling that it might affect the enrollment of Kentucky State College. But the way in which the amendment was phrased made, it was very weakly phrased to eliminate the Catholic colleges. I think the amendment was passed in March of 1950 24:00I think. And the very next week, all the Catholic colleges said, “Well our institutions are religious institutions, so none of our courses duplicate courses at the Kentucky State College." And then a week after week or so after the Catholic college all over the state opened, the University of Louisville trustees met. And this financial situation was pretty stringent at that time and I suspect that this had a lot to do with it. But they took the position that there was a wide variety of courses. So they approved the admission of Negroes with the proviso 25:00that the Louisville Municipal College would remain in existence one year. This is 1950. So that the closing of the Municipal College was put off until June, 1951.

The graduate schools, professional schools, the university were open in the summer of 1950 and the Arts and Sciences in the fall, I guess the summer of 1951 or fall, thereabout, I don't have it exactly, but this could not be called, I think this would be inadequate to call it a token because it was an action on the part of the board of trustees to open the university to Negro students. And from the point 26:00of view of many citizens, it may have been there was some opposition and some discussion of it. But it occurred at a time when the university was acquiring a new president. And this was coincident with a time that Dr. Davidson came the university. He was strongly in favor of admission of Negro students and as a result he supported it on television. They questioned him very closely on television about this. And one of the statements which he made was that they had suggested that there be a person from the university from Louisville Municipal College to become an assistant dean of Negro students. 27:00And he said publicly, Davidson did that "We do not have any, we will not have any Negro students, only students." So there's no reason for any special [unintelligible] Negro students. And this did a lot to clear air. So I think that it would be inappropriate to refer to this as a token because the admission of Negro students was not automatically, all the students at the Louisville Municipal college became, were already a part of the University of Louisville. So their records were already here and without any handicap at all. All our courses were accepted and so forth. And they were just transferred from the Louisville Municipal College to the Arts and Sciences at Belknap 28:00campus. So there was no problem, there had never been, for example, a president of the Louisville Municipal College, only a dean. So in effect the so-called merger was merger of two divisions of the University of Louisville, which I think makes it a little bit different from the way it might sound as if you had a two separate institutions. Yes, the Louisville Municipal College had a dean, just as dean of the law school or any other dean and his position was the position comparable to other deans at the university. And the further part was that prior to the actual attendance of students had done that campus, the university faculty 29:00had taken the leadership along with the public school teachers in developing an American if a teacher's union in the AFT, CS: American Federation of Teachers.

CP: American Federation of Teachers CS: In the Forties, 1940s.

CP: Yes. And in this, the public school teachers and the university people were together until later the AAUP was of course especially appropriate for the university and the AFT became a matter primarily of the public school teacher.

CS: The AAUP is the American Association of University Professors.

CP: Yes.

CS: Let me flip this tape over. Okay, we stop here for a minute. 30:00We are continuing with Dr. Parish on side three here. I believe we just ran out of tape there as you were relating that last detail about students.

CP: I'm saying that although the university was desegregated, the Cardinal Inn which was off campus was not, and you get the outrage of Negro and white students leaving class and wanting to get something to eat and then having the Negro members of the informal group being denied service. But the point is that they hadn't thought about it until they went in to get something to eat. What I was saying is that there was very little self-consciousness on the part of the students until something 31:00like that reminded them of it. And then they set up a picketing and boycotting Cardinal Inn because of this.

CS: Did Cardinal change their policy shortly?

CP: After then there was a debating team and you can get this story from Hicks and Political science CS: Fred Hicks?

CP: Fred Hicks. And he took a debating team up to Purdue and they traveled by car to Indianapolis and there two of the debaters were Negro girls and they stopped to get something to eat and the restaurant in Indiana, some place in Indiana refused to serve the Negros. 32:00But you have to ask him about that. It's very interesting. He got very violent. You can imagine this. But what I'm trying to point out is that there were so many kinds of things that weren't anticipated that nobody thought about it, that it came up, it was different. For example, a young woman came to me who reported a discussion at her sorority meeting about whether they should invite the Negro girls.

CS: This is right after the merger.

CP: Yes. And I think this was interesting because of the fact that this was a Jewish [person] caring whether there was segregation in the sororities, but I mean nothing came up. But what I'm saying is that these things were discussed in this kind of thing. So then there was a time when there was a great hesitancy 33:00and this is amusing now because there was really hesitancy about Negro athletes and the first years you couldn't get Negroes on the athletic teams. Then before the gym was available, the swimming was at the YWCA. What you do with your swimming class and the place where you're supposed to swim and you can't get— CS: —Part of your students in there.

CP: Yeah, part of your students in the class—before they had a swimming pool on campus, things of this sort would come up. Of course then we in 1960, 1962, 34:00as late as that, the Southern Psychological Association was a scheduled meeting and the Southern Sociological Bixler was a local representative for the psychological and I was for the sociology.

Yeah, I was the chairman of the department and we had to try to bargain with the hotels about having the meeting, next meeting, which indicated how far ahead of the community and we finally managed 35:00it, but they didn't want Negroes in the bars either the hotel at the [unintelligible], we tried at the Seelbach trying to get, and then they were afraid there'd be interracial clashes if the bars were open at the meetings. But that went off all right. And then of course visiting teams coming here in the early period, and I guess the university was instrumental in seeing that the visiting teams, the Negro players were accommodated at the downtown hotels, CS: Because they wouldn't have been allowed otherwise.

CP: Yes. See all kinds of things that you don't think of ordinarily. And so the broad effect of the university coming so far ahead, 1951, 36:00and you think about the Supreme Court decision in 1954 where the public school was still segregated until 1956, you see, and the hotels closed until the 1960s. You see this makes it in a sense so remarkable that there was no more fuss and also explains why the judgment of Dr. Davidson was so good in playing this down. And see, you could have had all kinds of difficulty with newspaper reports and so forth and this going on, everything being played up. And one other little incident, I should tell you, a young man Negro, son of a friend of mine came 37:00to me and said, "I had a little problem in the gym today. And some words were exchanged, and a couple of blows were exchanged and so forth and said, I don't know what you're going to hear, but this was a white fella, but there wasn't anything racial about it." Negro boy came to me and said, "Well, it wasn't racial. It wasn't racial, it was just a—"

CS: That's a misunderstanding.

CP: That's a misunderstanding between two fellows on different teams. I think they'd come and tell me things of this sort, but I think looking back and seeing how much later some of these other changes came about in the community says something about the development of the—. Another thing which people 38:00at the same time that Municipal at the University of Louisville opened up, you know, other colleges, I think there must have been about a hundred Black students that went to Nazareth locally.

CS: I didn't know that. During your tenure at U of L, after the merger, I believe that there were, the archives showed that 93 Black students came to Belknap campus from the old LMC.

CP: Well, I think that the best source on that, I guess I'm the best source on that because CS: Yeah, I'm just curious how that changed over the years, how accepting the university was to Black students.

CP: Initially I think it was not—there may have been 93 39:00from the Louisville Municipal College, but I think that in the first year there were 226 Negro students at the university.

CS: Right after the merger. How did this change over the years? What were the chances for Black students?

CP: We increased, of course we had several big increases in the late sixties when the whole thrust of Black power and the picketing of downtown theaters and eating places and so forth. But I got the first count from where the individuals 40:00lived in the city and went through the first student directory and made a report to President Davidson. So that should be available in terms of, I thought it was, I think there's a number I recall with 226 here and about 100 or the other at Nazareth, which is the same as Spalding.

CS: Once the college, once U of L was integrated, were there any administrative barriers set up to block Negro students from entering the university after that first merger?

CP: I'm sure not. You see the Louisville Municipal College students, 41:00their records were duplicated. In other words, their records in the as they should be, I suspect even now the Arts and Sciences would've records of students and then the registrar would've records of the same students and so forth. So it was then so that the records, financially and otherwise, were here at the university and there were no restrictions on the basis of comparison of the, if they took a course, that course we got full credit for all the courses they had taken and others who came, we may not have attended LMC, I'm sure there were no restrictions against them immediately finish in high school or persons coming in from other places. There were no restrictions, but in the early period, they were not getting athletes because the athletes were not participating.

CS: I believe Louisville was a municipal 42:00college, then did the higher tuition I believe than say for instance at the University of Kentucky, did the higher tuition affect Black students, CP: The higher tuition that affected most the distinction between Nazareth and University of Louisville, although a higher percentage went to Kentucky State College the year after than had gone the year before the merger. In other words, Kentucky State College gained CS: Rather than lost as the present field— CP: Kentucky State College gained in that first year.

CS: Where is Nazareth that you're talking? Is it Nazareth University or CP: Nazareth College 43:00was a name that is now Spaulding College.

CS: Okay.

CP: And Nazareth is out near Bardstown and they were operating under the same auspices and then the Bardstown Nazareth was abandoned and the Nazareth here became Spaulding and then the other women's college Catholic women's colleges joined with Bellarmine so that both have become, whereas Nazareth was his first women's college, it's now co-ed and Bellarmine was a man's college and I think it's now coed, I believe it's coed.

CS: During your tenure at U of L, what were the chances of Black professors being hired by the university and how did that change over the years? 44:00CP: Well, the difficulty there was that the, so far as I know there were no restrictions. I don't know what applications were in the various other departments. And this is an interesting thing. In this early period, I became chairman of the Department of Sociology in 1959 and we were looking for an instructor, or assistant professor, and there was one man 45:00who applied, who an professor had his PhD and I think that the position available was below his qualifications. In other words, we had the money for an instructor or assistant professor who finally hired Donald Muir, who at the time did not have his PhD. He later got his PhD. He is teaching at the University of Alabama now. But there was just one Negro whom I knew applied at the time in this department. Now, whether there were any offerings, is difficult to say, but an interesting situation developed just a few years later than that when the northern 46:00white institutions were clamoring for Negro professors it was rather interesting. I left here in 1970 to go out to Lincoln and the reason I went out there and that's in Missouri was because of the fact that the chairman of the Department of Sociology had left and I had retired and they called me long distance and I went up there, went out there for the year 1970, 71, I didn't make the decision until July of 70 and over that whole year I was trying to get somebody to come out there to chair 47:00the Department of Sociology. And out of 200 Black PhDs in sociology, we weren't able to get a single one. Most of them had jobs at white institutions. And that was a great clamor for Black PhDs and the University of Louisville couldn't have competed in that circle. The man who was at the University of Kentucky left University of Kentucky. He said Notre Dame, the University of Kentucky had a woman, Doris Wilkinson and she's, she's in Illinois somewhere 48:00and I dunno whether she has anything to do with Black studies or not, but there was a period shortly after when the field was wide open for any Black person who had a PhD.

CS: This is in the sixties or in the seventies?

CP: Late sixties and early seventies. And with equal opportunity kind of thing, it's still the Black colleges are having a hard time being able to compete with the white institutions, which are now trying to get people. I know the University of Louisville made an offer to a woman I know who was teaching in Memphis and English department tried to get her and she turned 49:00them down. She was teaching at LeMoyne in Memphis and she's in St. Clair's area, she's a linguist and she had the dissertation on the Negro speech in Memphis. It was published in the Alabama Dialect Society number 50.

CS: That's interesting.

CP: But she had her roots in Memphis and she didn't leave, but I know they offered her.

CS: I wonder if I could shift gears here just a minute and see if you could perhaps review the conflict of ideologies between Booker T. Washington and DuBois and how they may have affected you and the Black community in Louisville. 50:00For example, was it easier for a Black with an academic education such as yourself to find employment than for a Negro with a skilled trade? Did the local unions exclude Blacks from memberships? If you might have any examples then if employment was found, how the salaries compared with their white counterparts.

CP: I'd like to refer you on this question number 13th. This is much misunderstood.

CS: Okay, that's what I want to find out.

CP: In 1930, DuBois gave a commencement address at Howard 51:00University, and it's called "Education and Work" in which he reviewed the conflict between him and DuBois—him and Washington. This address is published in full in the Journal of Negro Education 1932, summer 1932. The controversy between the two has had very little effect in the last, I guess last 25 or 30 years. It has, its historically has interest. I know when I was in college there was a tendency 52:00to make clear that Howard was not to be compared with Hampton, Fisk was not to be compatible with Tuskegee because of that, but— Speaker 3: The academic versus the technology.

CP: I think it has not—it's importance has been overrated at the time we are talking about it hardly heard anybody discuss it even to bring it up. I referred somebody to that same 1930 issue of the Journal of Negro Education was devoted to this discussion about DuBois and Washington. And this is rather interesting, of course the unions, the unions have made it difficult for Blacks to enter the skilled 53:00field. So education has become more important primarily because of the exclusion of Black actually in the poor areas of the city. [phone rings] The four areas of the city, I did some research which indicates that given the same low socioeconomic status there a much higher support for and interest in higher education among Negros than among whites. And of course a lot of my research has been right in this area in the Louisville public schools. So I would doubt that this—Negroes 54:00are worse off in the skills than they used to be. The building on campus, the administration building, the arch on the campus side was done by naval artisans. They were the only ones who knew how to do that at one time. They had complete control of the union that handled that kind of thing. You see the skills of slaves and the Negroes, it was in this area, particularly in the south. And you see the south has been very hard for unions to move into it. But there's always been in Louisville, always been a strong, very strong move 55:00for education, for higher education and the presence of Simmons here in the older days. And there was a Louisville normal school that developed. So we have had a strong interest in our education. When I think back about my high school teachers from Fisk and so forth, they had a strong, very strong move for and feeling for higher education. And if you think about it, you recognize that the blue collar as opposed to the white collar, blue collar interest where you have the son following 56:00the skilled work of his father and high school education, that's all that you need. And it's a mistaken idea to assume that Negroes are less motivated. Negro women for example, are much more highly professionalized, last time I looked, than white women. White women young women go into the clerical. For a while the girls high school here provided the clerical help in downtown businesses, law offices and so forth. And all the Negro girls could do would be to go into teaching school all over the south. You have in the elementary and public schools you had, at least a few years ago, this was true, you had a much highly, much more highly prepared 57:00Black women in the teaching profession than they had white, longer experience. I was consulted to a study of Georgia's segregated schools. And this was true there that the Black teachers were better prepared, had longer experience than the white teachers in the state. Partly this because partly this was due the fact that you have a movement toward urban centers where the educational levels are somewhat higher. So this has never been this kind of a contract because this has shifted the other way so that the unions have not been very sympathetic to Black membership 58:00so that the professions have been more appealing to the Black.

CS: In a completely different light. I was curious when you were going to school, what you might've thought of the Garvey movement, what was its message?

CP: I was in New York when the Garvey was at. I said I was in New York 59:0020-21 and also I did my master's paper. I did a study of a New Jersey community where there were the Negroes coming up from the south as they did after World 60:00War I, in this small New Jersey community where there weren't but 1100 Negroes altogether. The time I did the study, they had two Baptist churches and one of the Baptist churches and more recent was had to do with the migrants and they were all Garvey-ites. And the distinction you make is that the NAACP never did support Garvey. This was primarily a matter of the southern Blacks. The Blacks who were moving into the ghettos of northern cities, but never the NAACP or the Urban League. They had no support for Garvey.

CS: What was the message that Garvey was delivering at that time?

CP: Garvey, 61:00this is a message which has been compared to the Black Power of more recent vintage kind of thing. And it is sort of British in its stress upon Blackness and they had some interesting discussion of this in The Crisis and so forth at that time. But there was very little input so far as the Black professional groups were concerned.

CS: With your ties in Louisville did the Garvey movement reach Louisville at that time?

CP: Oh, I guess there were a few but they didn't have anything important, primarily—[tape ends].

CS: We're continuing again on side four. 62:00Back to the Garvey idea and his message, you said it can be compared with Black Power of today. I believe there is some— CP: That had the efforts to compare it, but at the time he, he tried to develop a Black steamship line and to set up relation with the notion of going back to Africa, I suspect was a part of it. But it's rather interesting because of the fact that the news outlet for Garvey, there was a man, I forget his name, who spent his last years here in Louisville 63:00and I used to have him come out and talk to my classes about the Garvey movement. But by that time there was nothing very much left of it. And I don't think it ever was a very strong here, but I know he would—a matter of interest even talk to us about Garvey and what Garvey intended, what he wanted to do.

CS: Was there a great deal of emphasis on the back to Africa movement or was it more just an awareness of Black culture?

CP: Well this revival, this revival came about particularly after 1964, 65. The book by Carmichael Black Power 64:00was published, I think it was about 1967, 68. And for a minute this looked like it was going back to Garvey, but as explained by its proponents, it was primarily political power. If you look at— CS: This is the Black Power— CP: Yeah, you look at Carmichaels, I have a very interesting comparison, I just mentioned it here, but I used to have in my class in race and ethnic relations, I have a statement which I did in 1930 labeled, "What the Negro Wants," in which I compare the statements, quotations from Negro leaders about what the Negro wants. 65:00And I said that over against an article by Carmichael "What the Negro Wants." And this is 35 years later and it's very interesting to see the contrast between "What the Negro Wants" in the thirties the Negro wants were primarily what the NAACP wanted. In the thing by Carmichael it turns out it's not a separate state or something of that sort, but it's political power. And if you remember the circumstances under which this occurred back in 1954, I went into Alabama 66:00and did a 33-community contact asking people, What are you going to do with the Supreme come down with this decision as everybody was expecting. And I made a visit to Lowndes County in Alabama, 75% of population Black, not one voter, not one person voting, not one person, not one person eligible to vote in Lowndes County.

Now Carmichael was speaking from that point of view, political power. And since then what has happened of course is that this matter of Black Power, if Negroes are registered to vote, and 67:00this is shown now because this is exactly what's happened. You see, but this is quite a different thing from Back to Africa. Do you see what it means? It's more it line with NAACP, Urban League. They all stress this matter of registration and so forth. So it turns out that the difference is not what the 30 some odd years might indicate. In between—and the Black Muslims are more separatist as it turns out than Carmichael and his Black Power thing would be. Your separatist in the sense that we want our own thing. Now you may have some evidence of this in a place like New York where they want to have your school boards located in a smaller area and completely controlled by the persons of that area. But when this talk about—they 68:00used to talk about when there were only 48 states—talk about the 49th state. So that sort, which is not quite the same thing of Black power, but Black power is political power. The political power is within the orbits of the political system of the United States, you see. And this is what's been happening all over and you go into the south now and you'll find Black mayors and so forth. And this is, I don't think that the Garvey idea has, I don't think this is a continuation of the Garvey idea. I think this was an intro kind of thing. Now there is an outstanding discussion about Africa and about where our roots are. And there is a conflict between Frazier, Black sociologist and Herscovitz 69:00anthropologist—used to be at Northwestern, in which she asserted in opposition of Frazier, a continuation of an African heritage, which Frazier denied a man who marital woman from here also took this idea of the search for vestiges of African culture among American Negros. Frazier took the position that originally this was almost lost and now we have a sort of a recurrence led by whites primarily. 70:00When I say whites I should say the study of linguistics have asserted that there's Black English and they discovered Black English and they traced this back to the stock age into which Black captives were taken, where the village differences, they were separated and in the process they developed a way of communicating which was transferred to the plantation and now has been moved into the ghettos of the northern cities.

But the burden of opinion I think is that there may be vestiges but there's no handing down 71:00of cultural heritage. And when you recognize the fact that within any African area there are many distinctive cultures. I was in South Africa and they have areas in there, what they call it now instead of apartheid, they call it separate developments in accordance with the five major language and cultural groupings and each has its own area. This is in South Africa and they're all different and their criticism of each other emphasizes the difference. There may be alike in the sense 72:00that they do not have a written language until it's developed later, but initially didn't have written language. And this one of the difficulties that you have when you try to do research that you get, well the research done on colonialism is primarily the drawn from colonial sources because they have documents. You don't get anything from those who were exploited because the only way you get them is to go to the oral tradition, which is rather interesting because I think that the stories primarily are committed to documents. And when you don't have your documents, then you're in a role primarily of an anthropologist where you have to, these oral traditions are very quite faithful 73:00because the only way in which you'd have a persistence would be a faithful recounting from one generation to another of exactly—it's almost like a child insisting you tell the story like it was if you leave off anything, "No, that's not the way it goes." They want hear, "That's not the way it goes." The effectiveness of this kind of socialization process is sometimes underrated but this I think is not a good picture of what has happened here in America. Even if the traditions were not broken, even if they were not broken, it would still be much more diverse than it was and then it's different 74:00parts of the country. Even the plantation heritage is not the same for one place to another. So this is an area which is quite unclear.

CS: Garvey's movement really did not have much effect on the Louisville community then and his back to Africa...

CP: No, I think it would—see there are sources of research which are quite available which would indicate the reaction to the Garvey movement. What's interesting—this interest has always been a concern of mine because the availability of materials is sometimes not recognized. For example, in 1887 75:00the Afro-American press met here in Louisville and the meetings were reported by the Courier-Journal and Times in 1887. And one of the resolutions of the Negro press was offering a resolution in support of the Irish in their fight against the British. But you see people don't recognize this. Now right here in Louisville you have the meeting of this [group]. I have a book which I showed you in my library, William J. Simmons after whom Simmons University was named, has a book called Men of Mark in which the achievements of Negroes prior to 1887, 76:00the publication of this book, a book this thick. And some of the young Negro students think everything started in the sixties, yeah, [unintelligible] kind of thing. And see, I guess I havebbeen very fortunate because when I was at Howard, one of my teachers was Carter Woodson who did "The Negro in Our History." He is the originator of what used to be called Negro History Week, but he was one of my teachers. But he didn't teach me any Negro history. I took the constitutional history of the United States from him. There's not a course in Negro history on Howard campus. So what I'm trying to point out is that this talk about the strings 77:00of heritage and so forth, you just can't document its appearance. I think that generally speaking you can't, you may find a that word or something of that sort and sometimes stories. I am very much interested in my own field and the whole courses of socialization and I think that I guess you, the historian, might be interested in this too, but it occurred to me that we, well we're well off the subject now, but it occured me that when you think about, I asked some students What superstitions did you know about? 78:00And I made a collection of superstitions, had a class, and then each took a questionnaire and each one did five of these superstitions. An interesting thing about superstitions is that you don't know when you first heard about them. You notice bad luck to started then on Friday the 13th, but you can't tell when you first heard it, you don't remember who told you that. It's just a part of the culture. And I thought of a way of comparing socialization process by seeing what differences there are between let us say Blacks and whites on the kinds of superstitions 79:00which they know about. You could also, what kinds of stories were read to you when you were a child, various stories of folk tales and so forth. Again, you have a basis for comparison. Now persons have lost the source of these things. Same thing is true about stereotypes of any kind, that you get your stereotypes and how did you acquire them? This may be a way of getting at this socialization process when you find out that you share much more with people than you think. And when you begin to talk about the differences in vestiges and so forth, you forget that primarily the kinds of references we make are references which, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. That may 80:00come from Africa, but it's a part of everybody's—when you talk about the bush, that sounds like that sounds sort African doesn't it? But what I'm trying to say is that you begin to find out that we, a persons have a much more common denominator than you may think previously. Now I think that the ghetto may be developing certain things of its own, but they are are very little more recognized by Blacks than by whites. This is a matter of great interest to me, because this is the kind of thing I'm trying to research.

CS: Along those lines, your research, you mentioned the other day that you're looking into the Southern Regional 81:00Council and I was wondering if you may tell us a little bit about intend to do what you're finding.

CP: Well, I can't do anything until I can get some funds for the kind of thing which is needed, which is a interviewing on the spot, the guided interview form.

I guess I should say that with the state of things in the world today as they are, this whole matter of race and ethnic relations is much more than important 82:00now than it was a generation ago. Not necessarily in terms of conflict and rioting, but in terms of its worldwide implications and the extent to which we as Americans are involved in what's happening in other places. The development of sociology in the United States took place coincident with a period of reconstruction and as a result the sociologists in America have done very little research that is worth anything in this area. The British sociologists have been doing a lot more in this area than the American sociologists have done. If you look at the textbooks in sociology, 83:00CS: This is the area of race relations?

CP: Yes, the textbooks in sociology that were published in the first two decades of this century merely repeated the stereotypes that had developed out of the conflict about slavery. It was taken that all the Negroes were children and irresponsible and whatnot and all this. When I went to school at Columbia, the current theory was that Negroes, the development of Negroes stopped at the age of 14.

CS: This was in 1921?

CP: Yes, this is the scientific 84:00reference you see that has been very little. You look at textbooks.

CS: How did they explain, you go into college then if your development— CP: They had to explain this to me. The part of it is that this was the kind of stuff that gets into textbooks and it's still there, you see. And for that reason, I felt that there's a need for in-depth research in this area about the stereotypes which have developed. And I felt that because the Southern Regional Council was an agency which had devoted its 35 years of its existence to relations in the south, that it had attracted a number of people who were very important people, but whose possible contributions in this area had never been tapped. And what I was trying to do is to get these people to think about this, to probe as you do. When I ask you about superstitions, you begin to try to say, I wonder where I heard that first. 85:00And you don't. You see. So I got a letter from a woman whose husband, a very literate person, professor of English and literature at one of our important white institutions who did a book on the southern heritage. And she writes me and you can see the paternalistic kind of thing coming through, but she's never looked. I'm trying to get people to look at this, you see, and this is the kind of thing I'm doing. It's very difficult to get [unintelligible].

CS: Well, I want thank you for coming here today. I know you have another appointment to go to, so I hate to end. I've got so more questions. 86:00Perhaps we can get together another time and maybe for a shorter session.

CP: Well, CS: Thank you.

CP: I value the contact because I think it may help me to clarify my own ideas about many things that have some importance.

CS: I'm glad. Well, thank you very much. And now let me cut the tape off here.