Interview with Nancy Pollock, September 9, 1999

START OF TAPE I, SIDE A

Tracy K'Meyer: This is an interview with Nancy Pollock conducted by Tracy K'Meyer on September 9, 1999.  And like I said, I'd like to start with basic biographical type stuff, some very factual type things.  When and where were you born?

Nancy Pollock: I was born in Springfield, Kentucky, that's sixty miles south of here, but my family moved to Louisville when I was about two years old.

TK:  Could you tell me a little bit about your parents; what their names were what they did for a living?

NP:  My father's name was Lawrence and my mother's name is Avalene.  They had three children, four children all together; one is dead.  They were separated when they were, well, after about ten years of marriage.

TK:  Where do you fall?  Are you the oldest or the youngest?

NP:  I'm the middle, in the middle.

TK:  So, why did they come to Louisville?

NP:  Well they came to Louisville to get jobs.  My father, well, his father, my grandfather, was a farmer and my father had gone to World War II.  He had come back with the idea and the notion "That okay, you know, things are better for black people and I don't want anything to do with a farm."  And he was married to my mother and he came to Louisville to get a job in a factory.

TK:  Do you know which factory he worked for?

NP:  Standard.

TK:  American Standard?

NP:  Yeah, American Standard.

TK:  Did he work there his whole career?

NP:  Well, my father didn't live that long, but he worked there for like fifteen years.

TK:  Because it closed eventually.

NP:  Yeah, it closed.

TK:  Where did your mother work?

NP:  My mother worked at several jobs.  She worked Sheraton Hotel.  She worked at a small motel as a cook; she was always a cook.  At one place she was a chef.  She worked at another motel . . . Holiday Inn, that was it.  She was a chef there for twenty years.  And then she worked at Byck's, it was a department store, and she cleaned up there and then she worked for Mrs. Byck, the owner of Byck's, as a companion.

TK:  I've heard of the Byck's, actually, that they were highly regarded and things like that.  Where did you live?

NP:  When we first came . . . when my family first moved to Louisville we lived 3:00in a, my father bought a house.  And it wasn't much of a house, but it was house in an alley off of Zane Street and it was called Zane Alley.  They were little shotgun houses and the plumbing, the toilet, was outside, but, you know, it was a toilet and it was outside.  As I was growing up, you know, we would have to go outside during the night to use the bathroom.  And all blacks lived in this alley, but we owned our property.

TK:  Where is Zane?

NP:  Zane is . . . well, there's Zane Street and that's about a block from St. Catherine.

TK:  Oh, okay, okay.  Is it in the West End or is it in the central part?

NP:  No, it's between Eighth and Twelfth Street.

TK:  Because someone else I'm interviewing lives on Zane Street, so I just 4:00heard that name recently.  Where did you go to school?  Which schools did you go to?

NP:  Well, let me see . . . elementary school was in the West End; I'm trying to think of the name of it . . . James Bond.  And I went there up until the sixth grade, and then I went to Jackson Junior High School for three years and then I went to Central High School for three years.  And all my entire school curriculum and life was, you know, black, all black.

TK:  So you weren't affected by school desegregation in 1956?

NP:  No, not until I came to the University of Louisville.

TK:  Well, I'll get to that eventually, but . . . when we get you older, but 5:00could you tell me about any youth clubs, organizations, churches, anything that you were involved with when you were growing up?

NP:  Well, I went to Zion Baptist Church when I was young.  As far as youth clubs, they had a youth club.  It was across the street from Zane Street, well across from the houses on Zane Street. Across the street is a park and they had a youth club there. You could go in there and play basketball.  I don't remember the exact name of it; it's been a long time.  And you could play tennis and that's where I developed an interest in tennis.  I became a pretty good tennis player!

TK:  Oh, really!

NP:  Yeah.

TK:  Did they have leagues or anything like that?

NP:  No, they didn't have leagues, it was a kind of at random.  In those days when I was young, they were the earlier fifties, I mean like your schedule 6:00surrounded your housework.  You had to do housework, you had to work at home, and when you got through with that, then you were able to go to the park and play.  So usually the club didn't have organized hours, you know.

TK:  This is all when you're still a teenager still, so did you work outside the home?

NP:  When I was a teenager?

TK:  Yeah.

NP:  Yeah, I worked outside the home.

TK:  What kinds of jobs did you have?

NP:  I had a job as a cook, well, I worked at a hamburger stand and I flipped hamburgers.  Eventually I quit because the grease was hitting me, but I worked in a cleaners as a  . . . well, not a receptionist, but the person who takes in the clothes and gives the clothes out and then bags the clothes and does all the 7:00work that nobody else wants to do.  And I got paid the enormous sum of seventy-five cents an hour, which is interesting because one of my first memories of discrimination was that a white girl also worked there but she got ninety cents an hour and we did the same identical job.

TK:  How did you know how much she made?

NP:  Well, she was stupid enough to tell me, you know; not stupid, but she thought I made the same amount.  And she was pretty liberal minded, pretty open and pretty direct.  In fact, she was the one who encouraged me, you know, to protest for more money.

TK:  Oh yeah, what was her name?  Do you remember?

NP:  Anita, Anita Smith.

TK:  Oh, I've heard that name before. Maybe you've mentioned her before to me.

NP:  She lived with Anne Braden for a while.

TK:  Oh, okay, that's why.  You did mention it before, with Anne Braden.  8:00Well, that actually was, my next question was, as a child growing up, how did segregation affect you or how did you become aware of it?

NP:  I became aware of segregation when I was nine years old.  I went to Springfield to visit my grandmother.  And my grandmother gave me, I believe it was a quarter to go downtown, which was about three blocks away, to get an ice cream cone, but she didn't tell me anything about protocol or how to behave or act as a black person.  I thought well, you know, I acted normally; I was a kid.  And I went in and it was a very hot day, it was like a hundred degrees, and I went in and I got a vanilla ice cream cone and I sat down on the stool.  So the man that owned the ice cream parlor said, "I don't want no niggers in 9:00here."  And I said, "What's a nigger?"  And you know I don't, if I had heard the word before or not, but that was my first conscious time of really hearing it.  And then I said, "Well, look, sir," I said, "All I want to do," 'cause my grandmother and mother had always, you know, had raised me to be very polite and white and black, it didn't matter, so I said, "Sir, I just want to sit here because it's hot outside," and I said, "I want to eat my ice cream cone."  And he came around the counter and then he picked me up, and I was very little, and he threw me in the middle of the street.  Well, the ice cream went and I was bruised up real bad for several weeks, you know, and what I did in rebellion was 10:00I took a brick down to his store at night and I threw it in his store window.

TK:  Wow!

NP:  But, I was angry and that was the only way I could vent my anger because my grandmother . . . I asked her why it happened and she told me that I had to stay in my place and I didn't understand anything that she was talking about; it didn't register.  Then my mother came down because she heard what happened and she told me, "Well, you know, you have to stay in your place.  You are a Negro.  You have to stay in your place."  And the idea of place never quite registered with me.  I thought well, he's a man, you know, there are men, there are women, there are children; what else is there?  But I was hurt pretty bad.

TK:  Was your father still around at that time or had he passed away already?

NP:  My father was still around, but he had become an alcoholic by that time and he was living his own life, and he and my mother were separated.

TK:  And how close in age were your siblings at that time?  Did any of them know about this?

NP:  Yeah, they knew about it.  My sister is four years older than I am and my brother is two years younger.  They knew what staying in your place meant and they told me, they said, you know, "You shouldn't make waves, you should," . . . my brother said waves . . . they said, "You shouldn't talk back to the white man and all that."  They gave me these stern lectures.  I told them they were crazy!  And my brother and sister went as far as to say, "Well, this is the way God wants it."  And I said, "Well, I don't believe in God then!"  I couldn't 12:00believe that this  . . . I couldn't believe this!  I thought that anything that hurt someone was ultimately bad, as a nine-year-old, I knew that.

TK:  It sounds like you were learning at home, or from your mother at least, sort of to keep quiet and stuff like that.  Did you have anyone teaching you to go out and stand up for yourself or any other role models in that way?

NP:  Well, no.  I was a pretty lonely person.  I got Nancy Drew books and there weren't many black books around.  I didn't know any black authors and when I went to the library, black librarians always steered me towards books like Nancy Drew.  And so finally I rebelled and I went and got Darwin's theory 13:00of evolution, which I couldn't really understand that well, but I still got it and I read and I wrote a paper on it.  I wrote several papers on it, you know, but it was the idea that, you know, here again I was being told like, "Look, you are different and you can't learn."  And I was all alone; I had no one to talk to about anything.  I just didn't have anybody to talk to.  My mother, my sister, my brother, my cousins, my aunts; I didn't have anybody really to talk to. They thought I was trouble.

TK:  And this was at a fairly young age?

NP:  Very young age.

TK:  When was the first time that you aware that somebody, some grown-up, some adult, was fighting for civil rights?

NP:  This was when I was fourteen years old.  Dr. [W. J.] Hodge . . . they had decided to organize and protest, you know, against discrimination in Louisville. [interruption -- phone rings]

TK:  So, Dr. Hodge was organizing?

NP:  He was organizing protests for demonstrations in civil rights and that's what I heard and saw on television.  And I didn't know what it was all about, but I went and looked up the word discrimination and I was happy!  At last I was going to meet people that would understand my actions and that would not cause me trouble because I had done something.  Maybe I would be in the right for once, you know.  So I went to Quinn Chapel and I was the youngest person 15:00there, and all the high school students, you know, I mean there were all black high school students, and they kind of took a protective attitude toward me as far as demonstrating.  Dr. Hodge and Reverend Sampson, they would talk about demonstrating, what we were going to do.  There was Beverly Neal, Arthur Smith, anyway, they all talked about what we should do and what we shouldn't do.  And we would actually organize into groups and there were so many places in Louisville that discriminated that we would . . . ten would go here, ten would go there, ten would go to another place.  And their habit was to . . . the 16:00police didn't know what to do, so what they would really do is they would try to arrest the leaders, like Beverly or Arthur Smith, and eventually, even though I was fourteen years old and in the ninth grade, I became a leader of a cell, you know, a little cell.  And so they arrested me and, you know, then eventually they began to arrest everybody and they were trying so hard to stop it.  And my mother let me stay in jail one night all night one time, because she told me, she said, "You know as a Negro, you should stay in your place," you know.  By this time I had talked to enough people like Dr. Hodge, Reverend Sampson, and 17:00there were a lot of, a lot of, people around that I talked to and they were telling me that you have the right to be a first class citizen and you are a person.  

And then I met Anne Braden and Anne Braden gave me books, you know, humanitarian books.  One of them was the story where she sold away the house.  She talked to me and she told me, "You have the right to be a person.  You are a person; don't let anybody tell you that you're not and you are not supposed to be second class or third class."  So I was meeting all these people and suddenly I had a world of my own, you know, and I knew what I was destined to do which was to fight discrimination, you know, injustice, you know.  And I began to acquire a vocabulary that was different from what I had known.  I wasn't lonely anymore, 18:00but I didn't date, and that was okay because like, you know, I was so in love with the civil rights movement, you know.  I was a majorette; that much I was, but besides being a majorette and in the honor society in high school, I did not participate in anything else because my heart was in the civil rights movement.  So for about two years we had civil rights demonstrations and believe me, a lot of us were hurt and beaten up.  I'm one of the ones that ended up in the hospital because I got hit in my head right here on the right side.

TK:  Was that here in Louisville?

NP:  Here in Louisville.

TK:  Could you describe the event that led up to that?

NP:  Yes.  I led a demonstration at Thirty-Fourth and Broadway and it was a movie theater at the time.  It was a young cop.  He took his billy club and he hit me right here on the right side and the blow to my head was so traumatic that I was unconscious for three days and I woke up and there were these students from . . . Southern Theological Seminary?  

TK:  Southern Baptist Theological Seminary?

NP:  Southern Baptist, yeah.  And they were praying for me.  Anyway, the doctor told me that I didn't have epilepsy then, but I would get it for sure.  One doctor went so far as to say that I would die from it when I was thirty or thirty-five.  What did happen was when I became thirty-three, I became totally 20:00incapacitated; I couldn't move or anything.

TK:  Really?

NP:  Yeah, so the fact that I'm walking now and talking and studying and have a life is just beyond me.  It's a miracle, you know, it's really a miracle.  But I was beaten and I have had headaches all my life, you know, as a result of that.  I have a steady prescription, you know, medication for migraines and everything, but I've had lots and lots of seizures, you know, from that.

TK:  I remember one time you missed class last year, right?

NP:  Yeah, right, you know, it's just like when I give you my note every semester, you know, when I miss class, that's what happened I have a seizure, but the fact that I'm alive means a great deal, you know.  Later this cop, 21:00policeman, came to the hospital right before I left.  He was crying and he said, "I can't do this anymore.  He said, "I've got to . . ." how did he put it . . . he said, "I have to get another job as anything," you know.  He said, "I realized that I hurt you and you're just a kid."  And he said, "I'm sorry," you know.  He was really apologetic and I accepted his apology and everything, you know, and he prayed with me and then that was the last I saw of him.  And today I don't remember his name or anything, but that was quite an event in my life.  It changed the course of my life.

TK:  Could you tell me a little bit about these, that is this is all before the accommodations campaign that I'm very interested in it, could you sort of describe some of the marches or some of the demonstrations as to how big were 22:00they, what did people do, just anything that you can remember to describe what they were like?

NP:  Well, I remember them like they were yesterday.  Some of the demonstrations were extremely large, I mean like there were seventy-five to a hundred people at one particular place.  Then some of them were very small, maybe when I say small, I mean like fifteen people or something, but the thing about it was it was not how many people there were, it was what the people were doing.  It was picket signs, you know, walking around in a circle, you know, trying to keep people from going in.  And then actually some white people would see us picketing and they wouldn't go in the restaurant or the theater, you know.  So a lot of the businesses began to lose money that way, because a lot 23:00of white people felt like well, you know, maybe black people shouldn't be equal but I still, you know, can't cross a picket line.  It was about crossing a picket line.  I don't know whether they was humanitarian, but then I think what stopped them was the fact that we had white people picketing with us and some of them were theological seminary students, some of them were just white students, you know.  A lot of these white students were very dedicated, you know, very very dedicated, you know.  So when they saw the white students and the white people, like Anne and Carl Braden, they would sometimes demonstrate, you know, white people would look and they would have a reaction.  Really, I don't know 24:00what they thought, but they wouldn't cross the picket line.

TK:  Kind of steer away.

NP:  They'd steer away, right.

TK:  So you're saying there's whites as well as blacks.  How would you describe in terms of number of women per number of men?  Is it even more one than the other?

NP:  It was about 60/40 in favor of women.  There were more women that marched than men.  But I'd say forty percent of the demonstrators were men.  They were young black men, young African-American men who, this was something new, you know.  Everybody's parents were telling them and a lot of preachers were saying, "Hey look, don't demonstrate.  You're upsetting the apple cart and who knows what they'll do to us."  You know, we were all saying what difference 25:00does it make.  But you have to understand that there was a religious foundation to everything that happened.  We would meet at Quinn Chapel . . . 

TK:  Do you want a glass of water?

NP:  No, it's okay . . . 

TK:  You would meet at Quinn Chapel, you said.

NP:  We would meet at Quinn Chapel and then we would pray and after we prayed, the preachers, well, Reverend Sampson or somebody would talk, and we would sing songs like We Shall Not Be Moved.  And some people would get up and sing religious songs, but it was very religiously oriented.

TK:  What time of day would this be?

NP:  It would be about four o'clock.

TK:  So it's after school in other words?

NP:  After school, yeah.

TK:  People would come out of school and go to these meetings.

NP:  We were encouraged by teachers not to demonstrate, too.

TK:  I was going to ask how did your teachers and classmates respond to this.  Were there students in the school that didn't demonstrate?

NP:  Well . . . 

TK:  You're at Central at this time, right?

NP:  Yeah, I was at Central and in Central High School there were about, I'd say, about twenty-five of us that demonstrated.

TK:  Out of the whole school?

NP:  Out of the whole school.

TK:  Wow!

NP:  And, you know, like there were two thousand students.  Can I have that glass of water?

TK:  Yeah, I'm gonna get . . . [interruption -- tape is turned off]

TK:  Twenty-five out of two thousand students you were saying.

NP:  Twenty-five out of two thousand students and out of that number, twenty-five, I'd say, we ended up with about five that were left.  One of the reasons why the demonstrations stopped was because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but also because there was a lot of pressure on teenagers, you know, 27:00not just the pressures from older people, but the pressures from your peers, you know.  You know, you didn't get the dates; you just didn't measure up.  I was running for basketball queen and I had beautiful long hair, and I was running around and everything, I remember. You know, the basketball team voted.  I was in and everything, and the teacher that supervised it, she didn't like me because she thought I was upsetting the apple cart, so to speak.  And she extended the deadline and had the team vote again and gave a personal speech on this one girl's qualities.  So, I lost.  So what happened was this was the 28:00beginning of discrimination.  I'm going to mention something here, and if you do real research, Dr. K'Meyer, you're going to find it or if you go through your research material, you will find it, black on black discrimination; this was the beginning of it.  There were a lot of blacks who had the perks; they had their homes, they had their life, they didn't want anything to upset it, you know, and as far as they were concerned, they were free.  When they got around the white man, I mean, they acted different and they did different, but they felt like this was an okay price to pay, you know.  But this was the beginning of black on black discrimination.

TK:  And is that by class or by. . . .?

NP:  Black on black discrimination is a movement within the black community 29:00where those in the black community who are always satisfied with whatever is happening discriminate against those who take an active stand, and say, "Well, look, maybe we can help the black race and maybe we can help society in general, you know."  They're the ones who don't want to do anything so they discriminate, you know, and if you're involved in any black activity, organization or neighborhood or whatever, you become an outcast.

TK:  So it whittled down to only about five people out of a very small group already.  So who else was doing the demonstrations besides the students?

NP:  Well, actually it was just us, the students, you know, but then we . . . I 30:00don't know . . . we had some housewives, young housewives, some older people.  Now there were some older black people in the demonstrations and there were older white people; there weren't as many but they were noticeable and they were visible, you know. 

TK:  These seminary students that you mentioned before, were they white or black or both?

NP:  They were white, all white, you know.  In fact they became very determined, a determined force.  You know, they began to question their professors.  They began to say, "Well, you know, God has to be God for everybody, you know.

TK:  I'm just going to turn this over.

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A

START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B

TK:  You don't happen to remember any of those seminary students' names, do you?

NP:  Well, no, not personally.  I do remember that they took me to a church in Indiana.  It was a couple of them.  I was sixteen at that time and I went up there and they prepared a special dinner and everything.  This church welcomed me.  One of the students was giving his trial sermon there, you know.

TK:  How did it spread, 'cause I know that a lot of these demonstrations were focused on downtown, but at some point Fontaine Ferry [amusement park] got involved, too, how did it spread to Fontaine Ferry or how did that come up?

NP:  I was one of the few people that wouldn't let go, because, you see, what happened was that a lot of people just kind of went away, you know.  Anne and 32:00Carl Braden; I remember Carl Braden and me were, [unintelligible], we were involved in a demonstration at Fontaine Ferry and they picked us up and took us out, you know, and I think by this time I was sixteen years old, but I had matured quite a bit in this time and I had become involved with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which to me was just another organization, and at the time I really didn't have any idea how much this organization was going to affect history, you know.  I did things and I sat in on the planning of a lot of things, but I didn't keep any records or anything; I just participated because, you know, SNCC was devoted to ending discrimination.  33:00They wanted to get involved in voter registration and everything, and as a prelude to getting involved in voter registration, I went to North Carolina with a group founded by the National Science Foundation, I think that was the organization, when I was fifteen.  And I had been introduced to SNCC and so . . . 

TK:  There in North Carolina?

NP:  No, no, in Atlanta, Georgia.

TK:  Could you back up just for a second before and tell me how did you get introduced to SNCC?

NP:  Anne and Carl Braden.

TK:  Okay, they knew of it?

NP:  They were very involved in it and they took me to a conference in Atlanta and they took Lynn Phul.  They took the two of us to Atlanta, Georgia, and I got involved, and I began to meet people like John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, 34:00Hollis Watkins from Mississippi.  I met students at Clark University and Spelman [College] and anyway I met a whole lot of people.

TK:  But you were probably the youngest one.

NP:  Well, in fact, I was the youngest and what they did was they set up a protection watch on me, you know, where I went what I did, you know, 'cause they felt like they had to watch me.

TK:  Because you were so young?

NP:  So young.  Because they didn't want anything to happen to me, you know.  They were more like nineteen on up, you know.  As a result of being involved in SNCC, I went to North Carolina in 1962, summer of 1962, Raleigh, North Carolina, and I did voter registration work there with about ten other people, half white and half black, and we stayed in St. Augustine College there in Raleigh.  Well, 35:00my mother by this time was exasperated, and she had said , "Well, you know, if you die at the hand of the [Ku Klux] Klan, I mean, there's nothing I can do."  She said, "You'll be like Emmett Till."  And I didn't know who Emmitt Till was, but I went to the library.  My favorite place was the library because I knew I could always get information there and I went there and I did get a little information about who he was, but it didn't scare me.  I was devoted and . . . you see, Dr. K'Meyer, what you have to understand is that these demonstrators here in Louisville and anybody who decided to demonstrate in that time, white or black, decided that they were willing to give their life if necessary; they were 36:00willing to get maimed and to get bruised.  I'm one of the people that got hurt and wounded; I know, you know.  And it was not a decision you made lightly, because either you stayed out and were okay or either you got involved and if you got involved, you don't know what would happen; you don't know if you would go to jail, you don't know how long you would stay in jail.  There were some demonstrators getting beaten in jail, you know, and you didn't know if you would get beaten.  The case with me was always that she's so young, we're not going to hit her, you know, and all that.  So my age was a factor in me not knowing some things, you know.

 TK:  You described your own incident where you got beat up.  Could you describe any other incidents of violence that you saw or you witnessed in 37:00Louisville on the demonstrations?

NP:  Hmmm . . . . 

TK:  Because this is one of the things everybody says, "Oh, there's no violence in Louisville."  I mean this is a pretty constant refrain.

NP:  Yeah, I remember Arthur Smith, he's a minister now, he's sick.  I remember Arthur was hit or somebody close to him was hit in a demonstration.  They, the police, did not generally target an individual.  What happened to me was exceptional.  What they did was target the entire group and they would push you or kind of threaten you, you know and all and so forth.  Like I say, they'd push you, but then the trouble wasn't always with the police.  Police did keep 38:00some order, believe or not, order.  The trouble was with people, white, who would come by, who would disagree with our signs and we would walk around in a circle or we would stand in front of a place and we would say, you know, we'd be saying, "We shall overcome."  Okay, well, white people would come by and they didn't like this, some people.  Some people would throw stones.  Some people would trip people up, you know.  I mean you didn't cry about what happened, actually it was a badge of honor, I mean you know, like "Hey, I got I hit," you know.  But what happened to me was serious.  I didn't think it was a badge of honor, you know.

TK:  It's a different level . . . it's not just being shoved in other words, 39:00it's a different level of violence.

NP:  Yeah.

TK:  One question, you said you did some voter registration in Raleigh, was there any voter registration that went on with the open accommodations here in town?

NP:  No, not really; there wasn't any.  The target here in Louisville was primarily towards public accommodations; movie theaters, restaurants . . . now I'll tell you something that I thought you would mention but you didn't was, which affected just about every black person in Louisville, was the restrooms and water fountains.  They had the colored sign and they had the white sign and you know, like you could get really hurt if you tried to drink from the white fountain if you were black.  So one of the good things that did happen as a 40:00result of our demonstrating was that they took these signs down, you know, but then a lot of people were still afraid, they got confused, and they didn't know which water fountain to drink from, you know.  I think what happened was integration was a slow mental process for both races, you know.  I met people back then who were white who were against me and today I know them and hey, we're friends.  Integration was a slow mental process.  Racism had to be broken down and the same thing is true for black people, too, you know.

TK:  One thing I have been meaning to ask almost since the beginning because you brought it up twice, is how did you meet Anne and Carl Braden?

NP:  I don't really recall how I met them.  I think I met them at a demonstration or either at a meeting at Quinn Chapel, but I remember that I asked them if they had any books and that's how I began to know them.  And she gave me her number and so I called her and then I went down to her house and I was amazed, I mean there was this whole world that I didn't know about.  You'd be surprised at the public library for blacks at that time; it didn't have hardly anything and you know Carl and Anne had all of these books.  I mean books on humanism, I mean all these interesting subjects, you know, and I went wild! [Laughter]  I sat with cookies and doughnuts and I would read and read.

TK:  They must have liked you.

NP:  Huh?

TK:  They must have liked you.

NP:  Well, actually they didn't know I was there most of the time because I was in there reading in their front living room.  Every now and then they'd come in there and they'd say, "You want a pop?"  I said, "Nope, too busy."

TK:  I wanted to ask a little bit more about the different organizations that were involved in the demonstrations.  Were you technically a member of like CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] or NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] or any of those, or did you just participate in the demonstration?

NP:  Well, technically I was a member of CORE and I was also just technically a member of the demonstrations.

TK:  It seemed to me that there were a lot of people who participated in the demonstrations, who weren't really members of an organization.  Well, could you tell me a little bit about CORE, what was it like?

NP:  CORE was pretty liberal organization.  Actually, CORE didn't have much of 43:00a philosophy and that's why I got uninvolved.  CORE wanted direct action.  CORE wanted to be involved in the community, but I hung around for about six months, I think, with CORE because, until rather I realized that CORE was an organization that put limits . . . how can I put it . . . they put limits.  They wanted to do only one thing and they . . . how can I put it . . . they wanted to do just one thing and you had to do it their way.  CORE was into finances a lot, you know.  I would have done better going to the NAACP because 44:00at least there you would have had a diversity.  CORE was about . . . CORE was more intellectual, that's what I want to say.  CORE was much more intellectual and the people in it were . . . now I'm going to use some words and I know probably a lot of people in Louisville will say, you know, "Well, you're wrong, Nancy."  But there were Communists in CORE.  There were a lot of people in CORE who were trying to persuade the civil rights movement to go the way they wanted it to go.  That's the one organization that I didn't want to be involved in; I got involved in because of direct action.  I should have gotten involved in the NAACP.  Eventually though I got involved in SNCC. 

TK:  Now was SNCC very involved in Louisville?

NP:  Yeah, to a point.  

TK:  Was there people from SNCC that came here or . . . ?

NP:  Well, people from SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis . . . who was the mayor of Washington, D.C.? . . . Marion . . . 

TK:  Barry.

NP:  Marion Barry.  He came here. They came here and they would talk to students.  And actually SNCC could never really get a foothold in Louisville because a lot of people, you have to remember, a lot of people thought SNCC was too radical, you know, just entirely too radical.  You know, Stokely, I mean you know . . . see, he including Cleveland Sellers; if you could have ever seen 46:00the two of them side by side, you would not know one from the other.

TK:  Really!

NP:  That's true except that Cleveland Sellers wore these high top boots and that's the only way that I knew. [Laughter]

TK:  Which one was which?

NP:  I knew Stokely wore tennis shoes mostly, you know, so I could tell them by their shoes. [Laughter]

TK:  What if they were barefoot?

NP:  That's a joke, I know, but I wouldn't have known what to do.  They looked a lot alike.  But SNCC could never get here.  We tried to organize and demonstrate here and we had a small organization, you know, but what happened was by this time the demonstrations had fizzled out, interests in the demonstrations had fizzled out, and people . . . .  African-Americans here in 47:00Louisville--and I use black and African-American interchangeably--but anyway African-Americans here were aspiring to political careers.  You know, it became a thing where people were aspiring to the Board of Aldermen, school board, all that kind of thing, you know, so the demonstrations kind of fizzled out.  What happened, I believe, Dr. K'Meyer, was that the leadership of the demonstrations kind of made a deal.  I don't know what kind of deal and I don't know with whom, but I know suddenly one day we're demonstrating and then like a week later there are no demonstrations, you know.

TK:  It just sort of fizzled out.

NP:  Just kind of fizzled out, you know, and I really don't know and I couldn't really say unless I really did research as to really what happened, you know.

TK:  In the newspaper, it sort of indicated that it's there and then it's not.  Now I know that mostly I want this project and this interview about Louisville, but I do just want just for the record, get a real quick . . . I know that you were involved with SNCC and you went to other places, so could you just real quickly tell me which other places you went to?

NP:  Well, I went to Tupelo, Mississippi, and I was in Atlanta a lot.  Since I was so young, John Lewis and James Foreman decided that well, you know, Mississippi, I went there and they brought me back real quick, you know!

TK:  Because it was too dangerous?

NP:  Too dangerous and then when I got to Atlanta, they had somebody with me all the time and it was because I was young, you know.  And you know 49:00African-American men at that time . . . I don't know what other people would say, but I know that they were very protective and very, very concerned about my welfare, you know.

TK:  Now were you gone for like, were you basically just moved out of Louisville, or were you just gone for a week here and weekend there and month there?

NP:  A weekend here or week there, you know, I would go to Atlanta.  James Foreman and John Lewis, Julian Bond decided that the safest place for me was on the board of directors, and I was the only women or only female and I was young, and you know, I listened to what  they said I gave my opinion, but they figured that that was the safest place for me.  I've never known and I've never asked 50:00James Foreman or even John Lewis why was my safety so important, you know. [Laughter]

TK:  So, what goes on in Louisville, or what did you get involved with after the demonstrations fizzled out and stuff?  What happens next?

NP:  I did go to Atlanta to Spelman College for one semester and then I came back to Louisville to the University of Louisville in 1965.  I came out here with a lot of excitement, expectations, because I had thoroughly gone through Anne and Carl's library, had gone to the public library downtown and I mean I had read books and books and I knew that I knew.  I didn't have any problem getting into the university or anything like that, but there were the personal 51:00attitudes of the teachers.  I don't mean . . . you're a young teacher, Dr. K'Meyer, but I'm talking about some of the teachers then were, you know, like much, much older and they were all white.  There was one black professor.  I can't remember . . . .

TK:  Charles Parrish.

NP:  Yeah.  I decided to major in chemistry and they had discriminatory practices against me, you know.  U of L was a racist institution that did not want black students, not for academics. Now they wanted black students for sports, but not for academics.  What happened was that everyday when I came out 52:00here to U of L I ran into discrimination, blatant discrimination, you know.  I even had a couple of professors disregard me.  I would write a paper and they wouldn't put comments on it, they'd just put an F on it in the middle, you know, F, you know.  And I would ask questions and I know one professor, I took twentieth century literature, he said--nineteenth century literature--he said, "What do you think you know about [Henrik] Ibsen."  And I said, "Well, what do you mean?"  He said, "You're a nigger!"  I said, "What, you're more intelligent than that!"  And he just went on and kept on lecturing and didn't 53:00say anything about it and all these white students just went along.  It was the norm, I mean it was the norm, you know.  

But then out here on the campus of the University of Louisville there were Italian, Jewish . . . let me see . . . there were some Chinese, there was one African.  What happened was that they were in a discriminatory position.  I mean there was one Italian girl I took senior class with and I was a sophomore and her father was rich.  She was Italian, her father was rich.  She wore a great big diamond on her hand and everything and this white professor, I mean, he gave her an F real quick and she argued with him and he kept her from graduating, you know.

TK:  Really?

NP:  Now, probably maybe I was just ultra-sensitive, but I noticed not only the discrimination towards me but towards others, because I kept thinking well, maybe it's just not black people and I found out it just wasn't, you know.  The funny thing about it U of L was always very cordial and polite to foreign students.

TK:  Very welcoming.

NP:  Yeah, yeah.

TK:  How many black students were there at the time?

NP:  Ten.

TK:  Were they involved in . . . were they activists, these students at all?

NP:  No.  Let's see . . . the second year I was here Blaine Hudson came out here. [Laughter] And Blaine, Dr. Hudson, Blaine had grown up across the street from me when I was a kid, and he was such a quiet person who would have ever 55:00thought he would do some of the things he did, but he came out here and he started the Black Student Union.  He took over the campus and I was still a student out here and I heard on the radio that he had taken over the campus, and I tried to get on campus and they wouldn't let me on campus and he was in the administration building.  Yeah  it was in the administration building.  I don't know, but he took over the campus and created such a stir that ever since then U of L has had black this, black that, multi-culture that, foreign students this and that. [Laughter]  But he was a force for change, positive change, you know.

TK:  I'm going to interview him eventually, too.  Now did you graduate from U of L at that time?

NP:  No, I did not.  What happened was I had . . . over in the chemistry 56:00department, as far as my other courses were concerned I was doing okay, you know, and I was getting B's and A's, but in the chemistry department I had professors that were standing over my shoulders when I was taking exams and I'd be trying to write and they would stand right over my shoulders, nobody else.  And what happened was that my mind would go blank and I couldn't remember anything and eventually I'd get all these F's and so all those F's added up to me flunking out of U of L.  I just came back three years ago.

TK:  While you were at school, were you involved in any kind of activism in town or were you mostly focused on school at that time?

NP:  I was quiet.  By this time I was tired.  I don't know if you understand, 57:00I mean, like . . . 

TK:  Well, it was burnout that happens.

NP:  It was kind of a burnout and I was tired and I didn't know the direction.  I kept asking myself the question, "What have we really accomplished?"  I mean we had the Civil Rights Act and all that.  [U.S. President] Lyndon Johnson seemed to be for black people, which surprised me, but I remember that I kept thinking what have we really, really accomplished because in the black community nothing had changed, but everything had changed.  Seems like that attempting to integrate on a social level had somehow upset the black community economically, politically, socially, and in every respect in every regard, you know, and things were not the same in the black community anymore.  People were drifting away from one another, you know.  There was some good, I 58:00mean for the first time you could be friends with a white person or someone else of another race and you could go to other churches and everything.  I'm saying in the black community itself, it seemed like an era had come to an end, an era had come to an end.

TK:  I've actually heard that described that there was definitely something that was lost, you know, a sort of cohesiveness or something.  Were you involved in open housing then at all?  That would have been right when you were finishing up.

NP:  I remember I went and helped plan for the demonstrations, but I didn't actually demonstrate because about this time I was like a target.  See I had 59:00spent . . . at the age of seventeen I led a demonstration, the last one, non-violently at Hasenour's [restaurant].  I forget where it's located.

TK:  It's closed now, but I do remember where it was, yeah.

NP:  I led a demonstration there.  As a result I was arrested and I was put in jail, and a couple of days later they put me in the adult jail and at that time the jails were segregated and they put me in with these women that were murderers and I mean a little of everything.  And I didn't know people like this existed.  And these women were threatening me and one lady told me, "Oh, 60:00you're that girl that demonstrates.  Yeah, you're making it bad for us.  We're thieves.  We want things the way that they were."  So I got blamed for a lot of things, but anyway I went to court two days later.  And the food in jail was terrible.  I remember they gave us oatmeal that had roaches in it and coffee that was like water.  So you couldn't eat the oatmeal.  And they had this one toilet.  The room was about the size . . . it was a large room.  They had one toilet that didn't work.  If you went to the toilet, you had to use this, no matter how bad the condition and they wouldn't fix it, you know.

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B

START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

NP:  Anyway, I went to Hasenour's and I led this demonstration.  Two days later I go to court and Dan Taylor was my attorney and there was a judge, his name was Judge Pound.  And Dan Taylor gets to arguing with the judge and calls him a Pound face son of a bitch and Dan Taylor got a day in jail, but I got ten days in jail with these women who were threatening me!  When I got out of jail, I was paranoid; I was scared and I said I never ever. . . .  You know, I guess for every individual in the civil rights demonstrations there comes something that makes you stop or makes you think.  Those ten days made me think.  There 62:00was a threat on my life.  Suppose they forgot the paperwork and I just stayed in the jail.  See, I sit there and I thought all these thoughts, you know.

TK:  So after the ten days you sort of stopped demonstrating?

NP:  Except for one more thing, hunger strike.  

TK:  That's in '64.  No, when was the hunger strike?

NP:  Let me see, the hunger strike . . . 

TK:  The one in Frankfort?

NP:  The one in Frankfort, yeah.

TK:  Okay, yeah, tell me about that.

NP:  Well, that was right before I got arrested at Hasenour's.  With the young people in Louisville, I got together a hundred.  We went to Frankfort and there were older black people that went; some of them went on to great political careers and everything.  They interviewed me on TV and white people were 63:00begging me, "Please give up the hunger strike" because if one of us died, you know, then . . . 

TK:  There'd be hell to pay.

NP:  They'd be held accountable.  But anyway, we went to Frankfort for a week.  See, the Civil Rights Act had been passed federally, but it had not been passed as far as the state was concerned.  So officially there wasn't any civil rights in Kentucky, you know.  Kentucky had the discretion of imposing or not the Civil Rights Act.  So they decided to ignore the Civil Rights Act.  We went up there on a hunger strike.  We did not eat nor drink for seven days.  These seminary students that I had met earlier--I went and got some of them--and some of them didn't know me, and they came along and they prayed, I remember.  64:00And then we just didn't eat.  We didn't drink.  And I remember that one lady that was up there, she was an older black lady, she got sick.  Her name was Nancy and WLOU [radio] gave a broadcast that I had gotten sick up there and black people in Louisville got angry about that.  And see my last name, maiden name, was Pennick(?)  So they got angry about that.  Anyway at the hunger strike we had to sit there and watch the congressmen and the House of Representatives, you know, we had to watch them go through their bills and their motions and everything; and when it got to the Civil Rights Act they demanded 65:00that we be thrown out of the--we were at the top--they demanded that we be thrown out before they discussed it, you know.  So we decided that we were going to stay and the police were up there and a lot of people got hit and beat.  And what happened was some of the seminary students got beat, you know.

TK:  They were white students?

NP:  White students, yeah.

TK:  Were there students from outside of Louisville with you or was it just Louisville?

NP:  Just Louisville.

TK:  Okay.  I thought it was a Louisville thing because you had said you got them together because it is a state law.  And eventually they did pass that law, didn't they?

NP:  They passed the law, yeah.

TK:  All right, well, you talked about how, you know, these things that inspired you to stop being quite so active, so going into the later part of the 66:00sixties, what did you see as still the important issues that needed to be addressed, I mean the Civil Rights Act had been passed, so?

NP:  The two issues that I wanted to address were the economics of the black community and also the violence that was prevalent in the black community that came from outside of the black community.  Also there was violence in the black community; there was black on black crime, it was beginning to happen.  And suddenly where the black community had been peaceful, and if there had been a heroin addict, you wouldn't have known it.  There were heroin addicts and there were more alcoholics.  I'm saying these are some of the trends you notice.  There was more adultery; there were things that were happening, you know, in the 67:00black community, but what I wanted to address was the violence being stopped.  

You know, my decision to become a Black Panther was not an easy one but caused by the fact that several black children around the ages of three, four, and five had been killed in different parts of the country by policemen.  And nothing was ever done to prosecute these policemen, I mean they didn't even lose a day's pay.  And the violence was caused by the very fact that these cops just wanted a shoot, you know, a nigger, you know.  And also they weren't only doing it to 68:00young babies, they were doing it to young men, older men; they were doing it to anybody they wanted to.  See, there was a backlash, I mean, we got the Civil Rights Act, we got the Voter Registration Act, and suddenly there was a backlash by a lot of people in the white community, you know.  I guess that's the only way I can describe it.  And you know, the police seemed to act not as a protective agency, but as an agency to be feared by black people, you know.  It was kind of like the police became an army in the black community; an outside army, you know, to keep control, you know.

TK:  Well, one of the things that that actually reminds me of and makes me want to ask your perspective on was the riot here in 1968.  Could you tell me your 69:00perspective on that, you know, what happened?  Were you here for that?

NP:  Yeah, I was here.  I was here when the riot happened.  My perspective on the riot was that it surrounded the very fact that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been murdered.

TK:  Just about a month before, right?

NP:  Yeah, right.  There were phony people, you know, we were learning this.  There were phony black people that were not exactly for civil rights but they were working for white agency like the police, or the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], or Central Intelligence Agency, and what they were doing was appearing out of nowhere.  And you know that was the thing about it.  I mean like people appearing in the black community and they were talking a great talk 70:00about, you know, "We ought to do this, we ought to do that."  And you know I always questioned them because, you know, I didn't believe in following someone whose credentials were very . . . whose credentials were in question.

TK:  Did that happen here?

NP:  Yes, you know, there was one guy . . . what was his name?

TK:  [James] Cortez?

NP:  Yeah, you know, I met him and asked him I said, "Who are you?" and everything.  He didn't want to know me and if he said he was of SNCC, he was not because I found out he was not and they didn't know him, you know.  So where did he come from?  So I figured that he must have been a plant, what we call a plant, and that his idea, the whole idea behind him was to stir up trouble in the black community where blacks would riot, blacks would get killed 71:00or the white establishment would have an excuse to come in and to police the black community, you know.  And I'm just saying this from the perspective of Louisville.  I don't know what happened in other communities.

TK:  Were you actually present at the rally that . . .?

NP:  Yeah, I went down there.  It was at Twenty-Eighth and Greenwood.

TK:  Right.

NP:  I went down there and I told a lot of people, I said, "Look, he's unreal," you know.  And he kept promising that Stokely was coming in, you know, that Stokely Carmichael was coming in and he was assured, and they delayed the plane because they didn't want Stokely getting off the plane because they didn't want Stokely talking to the people.  So I walked back--my mother lived at 72:00Twenty-Second and Kentucky--so I walked back home and I remember that I called Atlanta.  I forget who I talked to, but I said, "Look, this is Nancy."  I said, "Where's Stokely?"  And they said, "Mississippi, Nancy.  Why, you need him?" I said, "What's he doing in Mississippi?"  I said, "There's a guy named Cortez saying he's supposed to be here in Louisville!"  They said, "Nancy, if he were coming to Louisville, he would have called you."  They said, "At least he would come by and see you."  I said, "Well, I know that," but I said, "What part of Mississippi, maybe he's going to fly up?"  They said, "Nancy, do you think Stokely has the money to fly from Mississippi to Kentucky?" I said, "No, I don't think so."  Well, anyway . . . 

TK:  Did you ask them about Cortez?

NP:  Yeah, I asked them if they had knew him and they said, "No, we've never heard of him," you know.  And I said, "Is he affiliated?"  And they said, "No, 73:00we don't know anything of him."  They said, "Do you know another name?"  I said, "No, just that."  

TK:  That's really interesting.

NP:  Yeah, they didn't know of him.

TK:  So Stokely was down in Mississippi.

NP:  He was in Mississippi.

TK:  Which, you know, it's not easy to fly from Mississippi to Louisville.  There's not a lot of airports in Mississippi.

NP:  They, of course the people in Atlanta, said, "Nancy, do you think he has that kind of money?"  Because you know he's in Mississippi, you know.  But they said he was in Mississippi.

TK:  Well, that's interesting.  So you went home then before the rally was over, before the riot got started?

NP:  Before the riot got started.  But the police shot at three boys, three black boys, you know, they were playing basketball.  Police just opened fire on 74:00them and the boys ran over to, across the street, you know, in front of my mother's house.  I told them I said, "Hey y'all, come on in here."  So by this time . . . well, you know, I didn't have a gun.  My mother had a gun for her own protection, so like I got my mother's gun and you know, I loaded it up.  Well, this was before I even thought of becoming a Black Panther, you know.  I went outside and the police came riding up Kentucky Street and so they said, told me, "We want them three niggers there!"  I said, "Yeah, over my dead body, right!"  I said, "You shoot me and I'm going to shoot you!"  They said, "What 75:00do you know about a gun?"  I said, "This!"  That was my first experience standing up to the police.

TK:  Oh my gosh!  What a great story!

NP:  And so what happened was I said, "I'm going to walk these boys home."  I said, "Now you know, if you know what I know."  I said, "You will stay out of the way!" I said, "Because the gun got six bullets in it!"  And they didn't do anything and they just rode on and one of the guys that I helped was Herbert Jones.  He later became a Black Panther in Louisville.  So I walked Herbert over on Osage and the other two boys to their homes, you know.

TK:  How old were they?

NP:  Let's see, that was in 1968, I was about twenty-one, no, about twenty.  They were about fourteen.

TK:  So they were young.  That's what I was trying to get; they were young boys.

NP:  They were young boys, yeah.  They were like thirteen, fourteen years old.

TK:  So I'm trying to keep that picture in my head.  So these aren't young men you are talking about, these are young boys, really, still.

NP:  I really didn't want to get that gun, Dr. K'Meyer, but I didn't have no choice because I had looked across the street.  I had seen the cops deliberately shoot at them, you know.  And the boys, fortunately, didn't get hit.  This was during the riot, but they did this a lot during the riot.  But a lot of people got beaten up.  I think several got killed.

TK:  Two people got killed.

NP:  Two people, yeah.  Several people got killed, you know.

TK:  How long did it last?

NP:  I think it lasted like three or four days.

TK:  Did you move about the city during it or did you just try to stay home?

NP:  I went to work.

TK:  Where were you working at the time?  

NP:  Brown and Williamson.

TK:  Is that a factory work or office secretary work?

NP:  Factory, well, I was in the research laboratory.

TK:  Because of your chemistry experience?

NP:  Yes.

TK:  That's good.  How do you think the riot affected Louisville?

NP:  Well, it did several things. The riot caused a lot of people to get angry with black people.  I mean like blacks were angry with blacks because a lot of black people were saying, "Well, why were we tearing up our own property?"  What happened was they tore up Twenty-Eighth Street, you know, and Pete Cosby was given money to redevelop that property all along there, and what happened was he took the money and he indulged himself in a series of cars and fancy 78:00clothes and fancy trips and all that kind of thing, you know.

TK:  This was after the riot?

NP:  This was after the riot.  You know, I'm saying the city of Louisville what they did was they gave Pete Cosby some money, I believe it was Pete Cosby.  They gave him some money to redevelop Twenty-Eighth Street.  He didn't do anything and it's never been redeveloped, you know.  He's a black man who stole from black people, but the overall effect was a lot of older black people were shook up; I mean emotionally.  And a lot of older black people were scared to go out.  Then there . . . a lot of black people . . . what it did, what the riot did was it seemed to make everybody come alive.  Dr. King had been 79:00murdered and people who had told me to stay in my place were now telling me I had done the right thing, we ought to do more, and they had suddenly had a lot of pride.  You know, then there was the swing towards Afro-Centrism, you know, but a lot of black people that were in churches began to stand up for civil rights and it was, I mean, it became fashionable, let's put it like that.  You know how a dress is in fashion, civil rights became fashionable, you know.

TK:  After this, yeah.

NP:  After this, but let me tell you something, you're talking to a cynic, Dr. K'Meyer, and a bitter cynic.  Because you know, I have watched all along, ever 80:00since I've been young and demonstrating, a lot of black people ignore what I think is their basic responsibility.  Now I know some people can't, couldn't demonstrate because they couldn't work, because they had to work.  I know there was some who had children, but there were many, many people who could have at least spoke up.  They could have done something.  They could have donated a dollar or a quarter, you know.  And you know, today you have a lot of people enjoying the benefits, what I think are the benefits, of, you know, a few people's actions, and you know, and thinking that hey, this is the way it was all along.  You know, when the people like Beverly Neal and Jerry and Arthur Smith and Kenny, and a lot of people that I remember, you know, we were 81:00persecuted, you know, for going out on a limb and doing what we did.

TK:  And now there's a lot more people who say they were involved than there actually were.

NP:  I have met so many Black Panthers since, you know, the Black Panthers folded up, and the funny thing about it, I don't tell them I'm a Black Panther or have been, I listen to their stories, and they make up these wonderful tales and I sit and listen.  And I never correct them, I just let them, I said well, if they think that way, let them go on.  But, you know, the thing about it is I've met so many Black Panthers, I've met so many people who were in CORE and NAACP, they were in this demonstration and that demonstration and all that and so forth.  And there are a lot of people that know that I really was in it so they won't lie, you know, but those who don't know me will lie!

TK:  A couple of things I wanted to ask you about coming after and then getting into your Panther experience, but first the Black Six trial, were you in any way involved in that?  Did you follow the news or get involved in the campaign?

NP:  I really wasn't very interested.  I wasn't interested in the Black Six trial because I thought it was a hoax and I thought this was . . . a conspiracy involving Cortez, and whoever he was aligned with, to distract the black community from the business of taking care of race relations.  My mother was on the jury of the Black Six.

TK:  Really?

NP:  Yeah.

TK:  Isn't that interesting!

NP:  And she was on the jury and I was . . . I kind of lost interest.  I mean I thought it was a hoax and I believed several things.  One thing I believed was that everybody would be exonerated and I believed that Cortez would conveniently disappear and I also believed that the black community would be more disorganized.

TK:  Well, it did take up attention from what I could tell.

NP:  Yeah, but it took attention away from the things that needed . . . you know, there were people, Dr. K'Meyer, at this time--you know this was before food stamps--there were people who were hungry who were dying from neglect.  And I mean the black community needed to keep its focus on what was happening, you know.

TK:  You had mentioned a minute ago Afro-Centrism and with the interest in economics, I'm wondering what influence did Black Power ideology have in Louisville at that time?

NP:  Well, it had a lot.  Blaine Hudson had a lot to do with the Black Power ideology and Jerry Neal.

TK:  Really?

NP:  Yeah.  They never became Black Panthers, but they led to me becoming one, you know, because they talked and everything about ideologies surrounding the concept of power; how power is what really influences everything.  You know, if you have the power you can make the change.  As far as Black Power and Afro-Centrism, you know, that became fashionable just like it became fashionable 85:00to say, "Well, I have been in the civil rights demonstrations," you know, "Or I was in the civil rights demonstrations.  Everybody began to wear Afros, dashikis, African jewelry.  I mean, you know, everything has been fashionable in the black race, Dr. K'Meyer, and I say this to you truthfully, things have been fashionable.  I believe that our race of people has not got down, has not attended to the serious business of real relations with America.  I'm talking about the system of America, you know because this is fashionable, that's fashionable.  If it's not the rap music then, you know, it was the dashikis, it 86:00was the Afros, you know, in the eighties it was the basketball players.  I'm saying something has always drawn attention away from the ordinary average black citizen who incidentally is the one most in need and the one that is really hurting.  

TK:  Were there any groups at this time formed or being formed that you thought were addressing the right issues?  And I'm going to open that window and get some air in here.

NP:  No, I don't think so.  This was prior to the Kentucky Alliance being formed.

TK:  Right, that's a little later.

NP:  I can't think of any group that addressed the issue.  There was a lull in 87:00Louisville and a lot of black people were indulging themselves.  They thought that wearing the dashikis and the Afros and the African jewelry, reading about Africa and all that, that this was, you know, kind of like similar to demonstrating or it was protesting or something.  You see a lot of black people wouldn't tell you but I will tell you, that the wearing of an Afro and the wearing of African dress, you know, a black person can wear this around a white person and what a black person is saying is, "Hey, you know, look I'm proud of my race and I don't care if you don't like it, and you're white."  And you may not be thinking anything about it.

TK:  So it's like a symbolic gesture?

NP:  It's a symbolic gesture, but I'm saying that the inferiority complex of being African-American is really deep in America, you know.  See, I still have 88:00to deal with the concept of inferiority; and what I did and what I've been fortunate, I have been fortunate in that I have white friends and you know, they have told me, they said, "Oh, you know, Nancy, one of the worst things that an African-American can do is try to, you know, please a white person and flatter a white person because that makes us ashamed," you know.  So I've learned, but you know I've also been bold enough to ask the questions.  I've also been bold enough to learn and also been bold enough to do . . . you know.  So you know, in the black community at that particular time, there was a lull and there were church organizations though.

TK:  What about--were you involved in any way with BULK, the Black Unity League of Kentucky?  That was a little earlier; that was pre-riot.

NP:  No.

TK:  Well, how did the Panthers form locally?

NP:  Well, I had been in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois, and I returned to Louisville and at the particular. . . .  You got to know the history of the Panthers right here and I'm telling you this, so you will understand.  The Black Panther Party nationally was divided into the West Coast and to the East Coast Panthers.  The chapter of Panthers here in Louisville was the East Coast Panthers.  I had come from Chicago which was technically West Coast and what was happening at the time was that Panthers were killing each other because the West said that the East shouldn't be Panthers and the East said that the West shouldn't be Panthers.  So anyway, that's okay, but anyway . 90:00. . 

TK:  What were you doing in Chicago? 

NP:  I was a Black Panther.

TK:  Did you go there for that reason?

NP:  Yes, I went there for that reason.

TK:  Okay, so how did you become a Panther then?

NP:  Well, I became a Panther when I seen a six-year-old boy, black boy, eating out of a garbage can in Cincinnati, Ohio.  And I had a '68 Mustang and money in my pocket, good job, I was attending the University of Cincinnati taking some courses and . . . 

TK:  I think we may need to back up; how did you get to Cincinnati?

NP:  Oh, I left Louisville.

TK:  Okay, you left Louisville just to go work or . . . ?

NP:  No, to go stay with my cousin in Cincinnati.  I decided I needed a geographic change.

TK:  So you moved to Cincinnati and then you had this experience you were just saying about seeing a six-year-old boy.

NP:  I was working at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati and I was on my way to work and I seen this little black kid eating out of a garbage can.  I stopped my car 91:00and he said he was hungry and I remember that I said, "Take me to your house."  I went to his house and his family didn't have any food at all and there was a whole family there, mother, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, kids, and everything.  So I took the mother to the store and I had some money.  I wasn't rich.  I was a poor person myself, still what I did I took her to the store and I got her beans, got her some pork chops and things like that.  She was so happy, you know.  The can, the garbage can, was right next door to a building; and there was a picture of Huey P. Newton in the window and I remember that I 92:00stopped in there before I took the kid home, because I was new to Cincinnati, to find directions to where this kid lived.  And they told me, they said, "Well, you go over there and do what you got to do but come back.  So I went back . . . 

END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B

TK:  So was that like the local Panther headquarters or something?

NP:  That was the local Panther headquarters and this was in the year 1969.

TK:  1969, okay.  So that's where you joined?

NP:  I joined there, right there, and I became . . . I was secretary of the chapter and I held political meetings on Sunday evening for the community, you know, and we would usually have about fifty people.  But as a Black Panther, I became trained in weapons, I became trained in a little of everything; self-defense, you know, discipline, a lot of discipline.  I learned to do what 93:00I didn't want to do, you know, and one thing I didn't want to do was walk and I learned to control my emotions and my thoughts.  I learned to be part of a group as opposed to being an individual, you know, and then there was so much to the Black Panthers, you know, social programs, self-defense.  

Our main target was self-defense because like . . . you know, the black community was always being attacked by white people and by white cops; and so we would get badge numbers and, you know, we would go around and we would be armed and this is openly armed with 30/30 Winchesters and all that, you know, all 94:00kinds of guns.  And we would holler, "Lock and load!,"  you know, if we got into a dangerous situation, which meant that we put a round in the chamber, which meant we put a bullet in the chamber, you know.  That meant that hey, you know, somebody's going to shoot us or we're going to shoot somebody, and the reason for that was that we had a belief that black people had the right to life.  There was so many black people being killed and murdered and nothing was done about it and all that; nothing was done about it.  And we as Black Panthers [unintelligible], tell you truth.  If you talk to a phony Black Panther, they're going to tell you the glories of the Black Panthers; I'm not going to tell you that.  I'll tell you one thing, the Black Panther Party was a Communist party.  We read the Red Book by Mao Tse-tung, we were into [Karl] 95:00Marx, [Vladimir] Lenin, we did not believe in God, and we did believe in human beings, you know, and we were not anti-white, we were anti-oppression.

TK:  Now how did you end up, you said you went to Chicago?

NP:  Chicago.

TK:  Was like a job for the Panthers?

NP:  I just transferred chapters.

TK: So how did you end up back in Louisville?

NP:  Well, what happened was in Chicago I got into an argument with a Panther, but I had gotten sick with bronchitis, and so what happened was I came back to Louisville to rest, you know, because I was really tired and I couldn't do anything in Chicago, so I came back here to rest.  And then I met, quite by accident, Ben Simmons.  I met George Thomas Alexander.  I met Judy Simmons, 96:00you know, she married Ben.  I met Yvonne, John, Carol Morse, Herbert Jones, these were the core of the Black Panther Party here in Louisville.  Then I found out they were East Coast Panthers.

TK:  What is that?

NP:  Well, that meant that they were headed by Eldridge Cleaver.  You see, by this time Huey Newton had a chapter and Eldridge Cleaver, who incidentally was hiding out in Algeria, had the East Coast Panthers, you know.  As I say, it was a war going on, you know, and actually the division between the Panthers had been started by infiltrators.  I don't really know how it got started, I just 97:00know that I looked up one day, and you know the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party was out and there were other chapters on the East Coast.  There was an East Coast and there was a West Coast; Louisville happened to fall in the East Coast.

TK:  So they followed Eldridge Cleaver?

NP:  Yeah, and they produced a different newspaper.

TK:  Really.  So could you tell me some about, you know, what the organization did and what kinds of activities?

NP:  Well, actually the organization . . . 

TK:  Here in town, I mean.

NP:  Yeah, I know.  The organization here in Louisville, you know, actually spent a lot of time trying to organize and trying to go about organizing.  And I didn't say anything for a month or so and then I told them, I said, "Well, what you've got to do is get officers, then you've got to get a location of an 98:00office," and I said, "Then you've got to have a program, a social program."  And then I said, "Look, carrying guns is one thing.  You don't want to hurt nobody, you don't want to murder nobody, you don't want nobody to murder you."  I said, "But what you've got to do, you've got to get social programs."  And so they began to learn and they began to read.  I helped them somewhat.  Then there were . . . they had their own ideas.  They addressed the black community.  They talked to preachers, black preachers, like Reverend [Charles] Elliot and I tried to stay in the background because I just did.  I didn't want 99:00to get out front.  

The party started a program up in the East End of Louisville, a breakfast program.  Then we had a clothing program, a clothing program.  Then what we did, we had a program where we went from door to door and we assessed the needs of the individual black person.  Look, it took time.  Like to cover two blocks took two days, you know.  But see, what we did was if a person didn't have food, we got the food, we went and buy it, took the food.  If they needed something, clothes, even if they needed a pack of cigarettes or whatever, you know, we helped them get it, or if they needed to get on Social Security we took them to the Social Security office.  We were trying to serve the black community, you know.  So Carol Morse, who's in New York at this time now, she 100:00and I went out and walked around and did this and we also talked to them about voting.  We assessed the needs of the people.  See, we knew that you can't talk to hungry people about ideas, you know, no matter what race; and sometimes we accidentally ran into white people who were incidentally hungry and didn't have any clothes or sometimes they had social problems in their house and we would get them the necessary help, you know, but we would help the white people as well.  

Quiet as it's kept, the Black Panther Party helped a lot of white people too, you know, here in Louisville I'm talking about, you know.  When we started going down in Portland for example, you know . . . 

TK:  There's a lot of whites there.  It's actually mostly white, isn't it, Portland?

NP:  Yes, but it's primarily seventy-five percent white.

TK:  Yeah, that's what I thought.  In the Panthers locally, because you mentioned you and this Carol Morse is a female . . .?

NP:  Yeah.

TK:   . . . going door to door, what was the ratio of male to female in the local Panther group?

NP:  Let's see, the ratio was about fifty-fifty.

TK:  Really, that many women in it!  That's interesting.  And about what age group?

NP:  Let's see, age group from twenty to twenty-six.

TK:  Were you on the upper end by this time?

NP:  No, I was twenty . . . let me see . . . I was twenty-three.

TK:  And what was the occupational status of most of these people?  Were they working during the day and then doing meetings?

NP:  Well, actually, that was . . . we had a policy, well not a policy, but we 102:00managed to survive.  You see, like it didn't matter about us, well, I'll say it mattered about us, but a lot of us, you know, lived off our families, okay, who understood that, "Well, we don't know exactly but they're doing something to help the black community."  So our families kind of helped a great deal and we helped each other and every now and then some of the Panthers would take jobs and work for a while, get some money, you know, and everything.

TK:  So were you working at the time or were you living with your mother?

NP:  I was living with my mother, you know.

TK:  How did people respond to you, white people, black people, people you were 103:00serving, people in the community?

NP:  They were willing to accept our help.  They were willing to talk to us.  They were willing to talk to us because they were leery of us.  They had this pre-conceived idea of how we would act and what we would do and then half our time was spent in breaking down a wall of fear, believe or not, you know.  We spent a lot of time breaking down a wall of fear.  We had to tell the people, "Look, we're doing this because this is part of our, this is what our organization is about.  You don't owe us anything."  And a lot of them thought they had to come to the meetings, believe the way we did and all that.  We told them, "No, look, we're doing this.  If you should want to come, fine."  But 104:00then we had a program for recruitment.  That was a whole different matter where we went out and actively tried to recruit people.

TK:  Who did you try to recruit?

NP:  We tried to recruit younger people who were intelligent, who had some education, knowledgeable, kind of willing to take a chance, you know.

TK:  You had told me, just in conversation once, about help that you got from white businesses, etc., could you tell me a little bit about that?

NP:  Yeah, well, our breakfast program is a good example what I was telling you about.  We didn't have the money to buy bacon and eggs and bread and milk for 105:00our breakfast program.  Well, we went to stores and a lot of times they throw, being throw this stuff out, but as opposed to throwing it out, they would give it to us.  And then like we told them, "Look, if the food is no good, we don't want it."  Then what began to happen was we would go to different places and there were different white merchants who didn't want their names to be known who would give us food, good food.  And we explained to them that every now and then we would run into some white people and that we were anti-oppression, and we tried to explain to them and we told them, we said, "Look, we're not going to hurt you or anything like that, we just want to feed our people."  So they would give us food and they'd give us a lot of food.  Our greatest problem was 106:00where to store the food.

TK:  I was just going to ask.

NP:  Well, my mother looked up one time and her icebox was taken over, you know.

TK:  Well, where did you actually feed people in their own homes or did you have like a place?

NP:  No, we had a place up in the East End, it's a homeless shelter now . . . St. Francis?

TK:  Do you remember what street it was on or anything so I could locate it?

NP:  Jackson, not Jackson . . .

TK:  But in that area, the area they call sort of the Near East?

NP:  Yeah, the East End.  We had activity at the Plymouth Settlement House.

TK:  Oh, you do.

NP:  You know where that is?

TK:  I've heard of it, I've not seen it, but I've heard of it.

NP:  Well, we also had the breakfast program up here at St. Francis, not St. Francis . . . I tell you what, Dr. K'Meyer, I will find out the name of that place.

TK:  Okay.

NP:  It's a homeless shelter now and they've changed names, I believe, and I'm kind of confused, but I will find out the name and give it to you.

TK: Okay, that be great.  Did Morris Jeff work with you in the Panthers, Morris Jeff because he was at Plymouth Settlement House?

NP:  I've heard the name but I don't really know him.

TK:  He's one of the people I'm supposed to maybe try to get in touch with sometime.  You were saying that a lot of the issues . . . so you had these sort of the breakfast program, the door to door program, but you said one of the issues was always about self-defense.  Did you have any run-ins with the police?  Did the Panthers have any?

NP:  Well, actually not really.  You know, I had been in Chicago and I told, they were new here in Louisville, and I told them, I said, "Look, I will tell 108:00you one thing."  I said, "The best thing to do is to try to be involved in the black community."  And I said, "The way that you are going to have to do is you're going to have to avoid, if possible, any confrontation, but if you can't avoid it, then you will have to stand up to it."  What happened was that Ben Simmons and I, we located an office on South Eighteenth Street and it was near Eighteenth and St. Catherine.  So anyway Ben Simmons and I were walking back to my mother's house.  The police were occupying the filling station at the time 109:00and what they did was they shot guns in the air and shot them out and everything, and they knew we were Black Panthers and they were trying to get us to shoot so they could kill us, you know.  And Ben was getting ready to shoot and I said, "Look, don't do it."  And so we began to travel by car then, we stopped walking, you know, except when we got further down in the West End; Carol and I could go out from door to door, you know.

TK:  So they just randomly started shooting?

NP:  Oh yeah, they just randomly starting shooting!  They pretended like they worked at the service station, but they were cops; you could tell and they were shooting guns and everything.  I mean why would a service station attendant shoot a gun unless . . . I mean they had their own agenda, you know, but the 110:00real problem and annoyance of being a Black Panther here in Louisville was that they had the phones tapped, oh boy!

TK:  Oh, really?

NP:  Yeah, Hoover [director of the FBI] was still alive then, J. Edgar, you know, and he believed in wiretapping.  [short pause]

TK:  I wanted to see if I could get any information through the Freedom of Information Act from the FBI.

NP:  There's a file on me.

TK:  Have you ever gotten it?

NP:  No, I've never gotten it.

TK:  You can, you know.

NP:  But the thing about it is I know that it's about that thick, you know.

TK:  Yeah, because that's an idea I had just recently to see if the FBI has any records on Louisville in general and then specific people and specific organizations in Louisville.

NP:  Well on me, you know my maiden name is Pennick.

TK:  Right.

NP:   They would have a very thick file and you know, if you could help me, Dr. 111:00K'Meyer, you know, I don't know how about getting it, I would go about getting it.

TK:  I'll have to find out, but I know people who've done it.  I know people have gotten their own before.  I don't know if I can get somebody else's, but I know you can get your own. 

NP:  No, I mean I would get my own, but I'm just saying I wouldn't know the process, who to write to or where to write.

TK:  I'll see if I can find out.  I'm pretty sure I can find out.  How long were you with the Panthers here locally?

NP:  Let me see . . . from about 1971 to probably the first part of 1974.

TK:  Oh, okay, so several years.  Did it change over time at all when you were there?

NP:  When I was here in Louisville?

TK:  No, the Panthers, did it change over time or did it stay pretty much the same?

NP:  People became paranoid.  People in the party became paranoid.  There was 112:00more infighting in the Panthers here in Louisville.  We had gotten to the place where we had a considerable number of Panthers.  What we didn't know was that a lot of them were agent provocateurs, you know.

TK:  Oh, really.

NP:  Yeah, and they were there to stir up trouble and trouble is what they did, they stirred it up.  They had us fighting amongst each other and everything.  As a result we were not attending to social programs or anything.  We were barely hanging on with meetings, you know.  You know interestingly enough these agents were black, they were not white, you know.  You know, I have come to the question today of how could an African-American sell himself out like that, you know.

TK:  Yeah, you wonder if they do it for ideology or for money, you know.  Did the Panthers cooperate with any other organized groups?

NP:  Yeah, we cooperated with other groups.  There was the Black Labor Union.

TK:  Black Workers' Coalition?

NP:  Black Workers' Coalition, yeah.

TK:   I want to look into them some more.  

NP:  I know Roosevelt.

TK:  He's on my list eventually.

NP:  Yeah, but tell him Nancy Pennick says hello.

TK:  Okay, I will.

NP:  Okay, but Roosevelt . . . there was Roosevelt and there was another guy . . . anyway we went to their meetings and everything and they were great supporters of ours, you know.  But they got infiltrated, too.

TK:  Oh, really?

NP:  Yeah, you know what eventually happened, I think, was that they had an office over on Twenty-Third and Oak and what happened was it was gone one day 114:00and that was it, you know.  

TK:  Oh, really.

NP:  And their membership dwindled down to nothing, you know.  So did ours, though.

TK:  Really, people just dropped out?

NP:  People dropped out for all kinds of reasons.  There was more fighting, more fighting . . . 

TK:  Is it politically fighting over philosophy or is it personal conflicts?

NP:  It was personal conflict.  You know, the ideology of the Black Panther Party was that as far as male/female relationships were concerned, if you want a male/female relationship, go outside of the party; don't belong, because as long as you belong, you really, really, really shouldn't have a relationship.  There were exceptions made for some, but I know that like that was a detriment, you 115:00know, to the party.  Male/female relationships, you know, the emotion stirring, you know, women being jealous of this guy and all that, you know.

TK:  I asked about relationships with other groups, how about relationships with . . . was there much support from whites?  I know you talked about the people giving you the business the [unintelligible] on the side, but what about public support?

NP:  Actually, most whites didn't really say anything; most whites didn't really do anything except the ones that gave us support, you know, and so forth.  The cops, they came around us, of course, and they terrorized us for a while and everything, but they left us alone after a point, but we were not out of danger because there were federal agents, you know, hanging around.  You 116:00see, what happens is that when the local police pulls out, the federal people are coming in and we knew this, but we didn't know who to identify.  We didn't know who was who or what was what, you know.

TK:  That's interesting.  I did want to ask, well, I asked you how long you were with it, did it last much after you?  You said you got out about '74.

NP:  It broke up after that.

TK:  It just broke up?

NP:  Yeah.

TK:  Okay.  One question I keep meaning to ask and I didn't know where to put it in, so I'll just throw it in here, is when did you get married?

NP:  Let me see, I got married after I left the Panthers in 1974.

TK:  So it wasn't related to any of this?

NP:  No.

TK:  Just some other guy not related to . . . 

NP:  Yeah, just a guy.  Just a nice guy, so I thought, until he was jealous.  I found out he was jealous.

TK:  But it wasn't someone you met through . . .?

NP:  No.

TK:  Okay, we got a little bit of time left.  Do you want more water or take a break or anything like that?

NP:  No, it's okay.

TK:  These are some more general . . . well, one last question about you personally.  After the Panthers, were you involved in any kind of activity against racism or any of these kinds of issues after the Panthers?

NP:  I was troubled after the Panthers because everyone had portrayed us as being anti-white and I had done some crazy things, you know, worn sunglasses to keep from seeing white people, you know, things like that.  I remember that, 118:00you know, I tried to figure out a way to not make it up, but I tried to find a way and I talked to several ministers.  I finally found one who told me . . . you know, I tried to find a way and I said, "You know, everything is in a flux, you know," and I said, "Black people were discriminated against, this is true," I said, "But as a Panther, I had to witness the helplessness of white people as well."  And I said, you know, my attitude, you know, the way I felt about things, I've got to atone for it in some kind of visible, observable way.  So what I did was I went back to school and I trained to work with homeless people, 119:00addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, and I went back to Chicago and I worked with them.  And I did volunteer work where I didn't get paid, but I did have a job where I got paid and I worked with white, black, I worked with anybody.  And this was my way of like atoning for my misperceptions, well the perceptions I had.  

You know, I go from one extreme of all of us should be brothers and sisters to hey, look, you know, like we're the black race and whities should be out there and using all the language and everything.  And I learned that I wanted to be a human being and I somehow had to come into my own to be a human being, and then I remember what that doctor had said that, you know, I wouldn't live to see 120:00thirty, you know, maybe.  I said well, you know, I'm going to do something.  So I worked at it hard.  I worked with white, black.  I worked with the rich.  I worked with the poor as a counselor, therapist.  I trained . . . at that time homelessness was just coming into being in the seventies and I worked with a few homeless that there were, you know . . . 

TK:  In Louisville or were you in Chicago?

NP:  In Chicago, but I came back to Louisville and I would do these things.  I would try to motivate people with a different ideology.  I don't know if there's any brand to the ideology that I do have except that we're all people and we're all in this together, you know, and that we don't have a choice, we've got to work it out and that's it, you know.

TK:  I'm just going to get out another tape.  This one's going to run out.  One of things I wanted to ask you because you have been in the movement so long, you know in terms from being fourteen, I think you said?

NP:  Yes.

TK:  Is I want to talk to you about change over time in the movement.  How would you describe, in terms of the Louisville movement and if you want to say broader, the struggle against racism, how do you think it changed over time?

NP:  You mean the atmosphere or the actual . . . what do you mean exactly, Dr. K'Meyer?

END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B

START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A

NP:  A lot has changed in Louisville, I mean you know, blacks can go to restaurants and theaters and skating rinks and there's busing and black people 122:00can vote and all that.  The economics are not very good.  Blacks are still the last to get hired and the first to get fired, but there's a struggle in the black community today to survive.  And in the black community today, you know, there's not the closeness that once existed in the fifties.  So blacks are individually starving, blacks are individually being forgotten and neglected and the race relations, I believe, today are superficial here in Louisville.  At one time I think they were in the process of becoming real and I think what happened was that everybody's out to impress everybody, you know, the white is 123:00out to impress the African-American, the African-American is out to impress the white, you know, to show how I'm not racist, you know. And when you know actually change over time, you know, we went from a closed society to an open society, but the open society is riddled with all kinds of problems and troubles.  

I think that racism exists today but it's a different kind, a different nature, and so forth.  I think that a lot of people don't want to deal with the idea of difference.  When I say difference, I mean like I'm African-American, you're white; no one wants to deal with these facts.  If we deal with these facts, maybe we can deal with the whole problem of racism as it is, you know, and so 124:00forth.  Of course, as African-Americans, we were discriminated against by the white society, but you know a lot of people I see today, there's a lot of phoniness in the black community and there's not as much love and caring.  But then on the other hand, there's a lot of awareness and I think a lot of people in the black community from the seventies to, what's this, '99, well, they realize a need for change.  I think the idea and problem is who's going to lead us, you know.  Where are the leaders, who are the people with the ideas, you know, who are the ones with the brains who are going to say this is what we need 125:00and what we don't need, you know.  How do we relate to white people, what white people do we relate to, what do we do about the Nazis, what do we do about the Klan?  I think these are questions that black people need to address and need to ask themselves, you know, and we should stop being so alone and isolated.  And this is what's happened, we went from kind of a close-knit society to an open society where it's itself individual type deal, you know, and it's not a healthy, healthy, healthy thing.

TK:  You mentioned a second ago who's going to be the leaders and I'm wondering who, in the time since you were a young person and through your Panther experience, who do you say were the important leaders in Louisville in terms of 126:00civil rights issues and race issues?

NP:  Georgia Powers was an important leader.  Anne Braden was an important leader.  I think Arthur Smith was an important leader.  I think Dr. Kenneth Cosby is an important leader today, but he's only one man.  Let's see . . . Dr. Sampson was a leader, Dr. Hodge, but . . . 

TK:  What made these people leaders, do you think?

NP:  What made them leaders was the fact that they were willing to take a stand and they were willing to, these people were willing to take a stand and willing to put their very lives out there, because when you oppose something and you say 127:00hey, I think racism is bad or I think this should be changed, you stand a chance of being attacked not verbally, but physically.  I'm one to tell you, you can be attacked physically and the trauma resulting from it can last a lifetime or the rest of your life.  So what makes these people leaders is that they're willing to take the chance.  And Anne Braden is a white lady and she studies and she organizes and she lectures and does everything, but she's willing to take a chance to get up on the podium and say what she has to say to white, to black, to whoever will listen.  She has the conviction of her beliefs and that's what it really takes.  

I've lived . . . the last twenty years of my life has been involved with dealing 128:00with my epilepsy and if I hadn't had to deal with that and the fact of whether I was going to live or die, also facing the reality how do I feel about a white man that I didn't know that might be the cause of my death, you know, and I've had to deal with this in the last twenty years, otherwise I would be out there, you know, marching and demonstrating and whatever not.  I can tell you that I'm a person that's easygoing, I mean, I like people and if you notice I didn't say black people and I didn't say white people, but it took a lot of dealing with my own racism to be able to say I like people.  It took a lot of dealing with my own fears and to deal with the reality.  And life is beautiful; a lot of people don't see it that way.  With all my troubles and problems, with all that I've 129:00been through and the jails and the shotguns and all that, you know, life is still very beautiful.  It's the one thing that we've got that we can't afford to lose.

TK:  That almost made all the questions go right out of my head.

END OF INTERVIEW