Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (U.S.)

Ira Grupper was born in New York City in 1944. Before moving to Louisville in 1969, Ira was involved in rent strikes in New York and he took part in the civil rights movement all over the South with the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). In this interview, Ira talks about his personal friendship with Carl and Anne Braden, whom he worked alongside as part of the SCEF (Southern Conference Education Fund). Other topics include Ira's work as a commissioner and eventual Vice-Chairman of the Louisville and Jefferson County Human Relations Commission. He talks about being a staunch advocate for workers rights and an improvement in labor conditions. He also discusses his involvement with the busing situation during the 1970s and his role as an outreach spokesman who went to white communities to attempt to persuade them to support desegregation in the local schools.

Nancy Pollock, born in Springfield, Kentucky, moved to the city of Louisville at the age of 2 and began to get involved in the civil rights movement at the age of 14. She talks about her first experience with racism and segregation when she was 9 years old and the owner of an ice cream parlor physically threw her out of his shop while she was eating an ice cream cone. Following that she began to get involved at age 14 with the demonstrations happening in Louisville, as the youngest person there oftentimes. Pollock discusses her entire time in the movement, her various involvements in different groups, violence that she experienced and saw, her experiences in Louisville and outside of Louisville in Atlanta, Chicago, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and her involvement in the 1970s with the Black Panther Party. Topics include: her relationship with Anne Braden, Stokeley Carmichael, John Lewis, and various other figures, demonstrations (those that she led and those that she participated in) during the accommodations campaigns, the makeup of those within the accommodation demonstrations, involvement with Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE, the time that she was arrested for leading a demonstration at Hasenour's, the hunger strike that she participated in in Frankfort, the 1986 riot that happened in Louisville and her understanding of what happened and why, her involvement in the Black Panther Party in Louisville, Chicago, and Cincinnati, the differences between the west coast and east coast Black Panther Party chapters, the changes in the movement and within the various organizations over time, her work after she left the Black Panther Party in 1974, the changes in Louisville over the years that she was involved in the civil rights movement and her thoughts on who the leaders of the movement were in Louisville.