Chip German

[Extraneous material redacted]

PHYLLIS LEFFLER: Today is July 14th, 2022.  We are at the home of Chip German, also known as Robert German, Jr., and with me today are George Gilliam and Lorenzo Dickerson.  And I am Phyllis Leffler.  So can you start out, Chip -- thank you for doing this, by the way --

CHIP GERMAN:   [00:00:51] Sure.

PL:  [00:00:54] Just letting us know your date of birth?

CG:  [00:00:54] July 21st, 1952, which means one week from today, I will be 70 years old.  And my wife [00:01:00] told me today that I now -- she is considerably younger than I am, and she looked at me and she said, “I now know I’m married to an old man.  Historians are coming to interview you.” (laughter)

PL:  [00:01:14] True enough.  True enough.  And I know you lived in a number of different places, growing up, but I don’t know if you remember the addresses of those place or not, but I would love to have that for the record, and also if you would just -- well, just tell us the different places.  And then I’d like you to describe those neighborhoods to us.

CG:  [00:01:38] Okay.  Yeah, the earliest place I won’t remember well, because I was so young.  But when I was born, my parents lived with my father’s parents at 624 Ridge Street.  I’m pretty sure I’ve got that number correct.  I really don’t remember much about living [00:02:00] there, and I also don’t remember the exact date that we moved to our next house, which was the first one that my parents owned outright, which was in the Rutledge subdivision.  And it was 1435 Kenwood Lane.  And that house was built by a contractor, who was also a friend of my dad’s over the years, and then, you know, an old guy in Charlottesville, his real job was moving locomotives on the -- as they were being changed between trains, and that kind of stuff at the rail station downtown, mostly at the C&O station.  Anyway, that neighborhood was a kind of a fresh built neighborhood at that time, in the mid-’50s, I would say, something probably right around ’55 [00:03:00] or ’56 was when we moved there.  And my sister, who was 18 months younger than me, was born before we moved there.  So it was after ’54.  But it was a great neighborhood to grow up in.  It was not in today’s terms diverse.  We considered it highly diverse that we had a person from New York living behind us.  And the accent -- they were of Italian descent, and their accents were completely fascinating to the whole family.  And we used to love talking to them.  But that was about the size of that.  So I lived in that house until 10 years later.  And in those 10 years, that house moved from being in Albemarle County to being in the zone that was annexed by the City of Charlottesville, from Albemarle County.  So [00:04:00] I had a kind of a funny school attendance sequence.  When I started school, it was at McIntire Elementary School, which had been a high school when my mother graduated from it years before.  And then in what was, I believe, after my fourth grade year at McIntire, that’s when the annexation took place.  And we were -- I went to Greenbrier Elementary School, brand new school just built, City of Charlottesville School, close enough from the neighborhood that I walked to school or rode my bike to school, in those days.  And that also corresponded with lots of things happening in Charlottesville, all of the details which I won’t have very well fixed in my mind, but I think of it as the [00:05:00] massive resistance period, and the opening of other alternative education possibilities for people who were in the city.  And those included Rock Hill Academy.  And I didn’t mention this to you before, I had a relative who went to Rock Hill and played football there, so I was aware of that.  And then I really became aware of it in that context of what it meant, that this was also when Buddy’s Restaurant was getting demonstrations outside it, through this period.

PL:  [00:05:35] So that would be the early ’60s, then.

CG:  [00:05:38] Yeah, crossing over those 10 years that I was in that house in Charlottesville, it was all of those things were transpiring.  But not much -- I mean, there were mostly -- I think if there was anybody else in our neighborhood that didn’t look directly like everybody else in the neighborhood, [00:06:00] Caucasian, it was probably Asian folks more at that time.  And then in -- I’ve mentioned in the ’50s, my mom and dad went in with my mother’s sister and bought property out in the county here.  We began working weekends and nights to clear the land, which was really overgrown, and it couldn’t be used for much of anything.  And it wasn’t pretty overgrowth, it wasn’t forest land.  So anyway, we came out and did that a lot.  And so --

PL:  [00:06:44] So they bought property, but didn’t build a house right away?

CG:  [00:06:44] Not immediately.  Not immediately.  And so we spent a lot of time clearing it.  I think my dad had an old friend who was a farmer in Charlottesville.  One of the people who, within the city of limits of Charlottesville had cows [00:07:00] and chickens, over in Belmont.  His name was Robert Harris.  We also have relatives with that name.  That’s what this fellow was not.  But so he got us into the cattle business, so we had black angus cattle on the property before we moved -- before we built the house and moved down here.  And then we actually had them after that, so I have a little history of him taking care of cattle and building fences, and that kind of stuff.  So that was in 1965 that we constructed the house and moved out here.

PL:  [00:07:37] Okay.

CG:  [00:07:39] That meant that ’60 -- I guess it was late ‘65, so my first year going into the county school system was in 1966, ’67.  Is that correct?

PL:  [00:07:55] And where were in ’66, ’67?  What school?

CG:  [00:07:57] Let me make sure I’ve got the date range right.  It may [00:08:00] have been -- we may have commuted back to Charlottesville for a period of time, just to not change schools right away, which was a little bit more flexible at the time.  I think it was ’67, ’68 was my first year.  And that was Albemarle High School.

PL:  [00:08:20] Albemarle High School.

CG:  [00:08:21] And I went in as a sophomore.  And then the next two years completed at Albemarle, and it went to the university --

PL:  [00:08:30] So when we last spoke, I think -- hope I have this right -- you told me you went to Greenbrier in the fifth and sixth grade.

CG:  [00:08:38] Correct.

PL:  [00:08:41] To Jefferson in morning in seventh grade --

CG:  [00:08:42] Yes, I left out --

PL:  [00:08:43] -- wait a minute --

CG:  [00:08:45] That’s correct.

PL:  [00:08:45] To Walker, would be eighth and ninth grades, because you said you started Albemarle in 10th grade.

CG:  [00:08:51] I actually think I may have been in Greenbrier in seventh grade, and then the double year in Walker was -- I mean, the double year in the Jefferson [00:09:00] School, where we doubled up with the Buford students -- there was, I think, eighth grade.  And then ninth grade, I was at Walker.

PL:  [00:09:11] Okay.

CG:  [00:09:12] And I believe that’s going to prove to be right, because the years work out properly for when Walker opened.

PL:  [00:09:15] So Greenbrier was fifth, sixth and seventh?

CG:  [00:09:18] I think that’s correct.

PL:  [00:09:19] Okay.  So as you moved around between these different schools, did the composition of students in the schools change?  And if --

CG:  [00:09:27] Oh, definitely.  I did a poor job of getting to the point of what we were talking about today, and that was, the big change was going to Greenbrier to Jefferson.  And so but going from a close neighborhood-affiliated elementary school to a much broader population, junior high population, and also being in the company of the people from the other half of the city [00:10:00] who were going to go to Buford, completely widened the range of people that I had encountered, and opened my eyes to a whole sense of change.  That -- I won’t say I got immediately enlightened by the change and thought I needed to do something to help these things move forward, but I began to recognize that, you know, these folks are getting along fine here.  I don’t know what all the brew-ha-ha was about in the national media at the time.  Why are people resisting bringing people together?  I was doing a lot of reading all the time during those days, and exposure to other influences.  I think we talked about the fact that [00:11:00] I really do cite political cartooning in the Daily Progress as very influential on my thinking in those days.  And the particular cartoonists that I remember the most, I’ve said before, was Bill Mauldin.  And there were some -- I mean, I had been interested in Bill Mauldin for a long time anyway, because of his World War II cartoons, the Willie and Joe series from World War II, that I had seen in a book.  And then I began to recognize his signature on the cartoons in the Daily Progress, and he had some, I thought, really art depicting even more affectingly to me what was going on in the world than the words in the paper, or the reports that I saw on TV.

PL:  [00:11:56] So these cartoons had something to do --

CG:  [00:11:57] Were about Civil Rights.  [00:12:00] You know, just in every way.  Cartoons about -- political cartoons about the tragedies, like lynching, like police abuse of demonstrators.  There were just a range of themes.  It really did drive it home to me in ways that I hadn’t been quite as viscerally feeling as I did from seeing that art.

PL:  [00:12:36] And what do you remember about conversations around your dinner table, or with your parents?

CG:  [00:12:43] I remember that they were -- they were feeling their way along through understanding what was happening in the country, but [00:13:00] wanted -- I think the right way to say this is that they were open to the possibility that the way that they had been brought up wasn’t the right way for people to live.  And I saw that perhaps more overtly from my mother.  But we did talk a lot about these things at the dinner table.  And with -- there were a couple of really close family friends, in my mother’s case one person in particular, who came and was a rabble-rouser all the time in conversations in our house.  Her name was Lucille Hudson, and for her real job was an admitting person staff, maybe in the emergency room of the UVA Hospital.  But her real calling in life was art.  [00:14:00] And she was a really good artist, and we had paintings on our walls by Lucille.  But she always --

PL:  [00:14:08] So she, herself, was an artist?

CG:  [00:14:10] Yes, she was an artist.  So she was really influential, and influential in the way that she didn’t tell us how to think -- she made us think, you know?  That was -- and but I experienced that a lot in the schools as well.  I do have to say, I had good teachers most of the time, who really did invite us to do deep thinking about the things that were happening around us.

PL:  [00:14:40] Really?

CG:  [00:14:42] Oh, absolutely.

PL:  [00:14:44] So would you say they were progressive thinkers for their time?

CG:  [00:14:48] In some instances, yes.  And in other instances it was more that they could see that it was a fertile time to encourage people to go beyond their limits, which I think [00:15:00] is kind of a natural teacher thing.  I hope it’s a natural teacher thing.  And I certainly experienced it with some of the teachers that I had.  I can tell you, probably about half the people that I’m thinking of that moment, talking about that, I can’t tell you that I knew where their politics were, or where their views on social justice issues were.  But I know that they were absolutely dedicated to not letting my mind go stale.  You know?  It was like -- and now, there were others that were definitely progressive, and who were --

PL:  [00:15:38] Are there particular teachers you remember in this regard?

CG:  [00:15:44] Well, I’ll come up with one, and I can’t tell you that I’m confident that I know what her political feelings were, but I know that she loved pushing all the buttons possible to get me to think more about stuff that I was inclined to spout off about spontaneously, [00:16:00] without thinking.  And that was -- what was her name?  [Marcia Mason?], I think, was my senior English teacher at Albemarle.  She also led me to believe that I could become a writer.  And most of what I’ve done in my career has been -- I can trace back to somebody believing that I could do writing as a significant portion of what I did.

PL:  [00:16:33] I’m going to go back just to draw to your growing up years, in terms of the political and social climate that you were experiencing, being born in ’52.  So Brown decision’s ’54, you’re not going to know anything about that.

CG:  [00:16:53] Right.  Right.

PL:  [00:16:56] But then all of the tumult that comes after that in terms of implementing [00:17:00] Brown.  Were there any institutions that your family was affiliated with, church groups or things like that --

CG:  [00:17:07] Yeah, that’s a good --

PL:  [00:17:09] -- that would have had an influence on some of this thinking?

CG:  [00:17:12] Absolutely.  So the good -- a good sort of line of development in my thinking had to do with the church environment that I was raised around.  I can’t say “in” so directly.  My dad was a member of the University Baptist Church, a deacon.  It went in various directions over those years.  But I think generally speaking, the University Baptist Church struck me as leaning a little bit more toward generous thinking on social justice issues than maybe other Southern Baptist [00:18:00] churches did.  I don’t have experience at those.  But it was still a kind of traditional place.  And I went to -- my sister and I went to a Baptist church for a lot of our young years.  My mother went too, but she always -- we always knew she had difficulty with it.  And I was never sure exactly why.  And I think it had to do with both her introversion and the social pressures of that particular church environment, and so she felt uncomfortable, both as an individual, not because of other kinds of issues.  But it was a, you know, overflowing, warm, Southern celebratory kind of stuff that wasn’t in her basic nature.  But she also had other lingering [00:19:00] things that were going on that we didn’t talk a whole lot about, although they did come up in conversations, including with her friend, Lucille.  And we got to listen to a lot of those.  Anyway, over the years, I began to think -- I’m not sure this Southern Baptist is for me.  I’m not sure exactly where I am on the general question, as I’m thinking through this at the time.  I wasn’t sure where I was on the overall question of religion.  But I began to detect a real strain of not having a lot of comfort with organized religion, church stuff on top of whatever the belief structure was.  So anyway, I started exploring, and I explored with my mother at the time.  So I was a kid, and she would take me to different places.  And one of the places that we went was to the [00:20:00] Thomas Jefferson Memorial Unitarian Church up on Rugby, and that was definitely a place where she and I both felt more comfortable, and it put me in the context of some of the mainstream of what was happening in the Civil Rights movement at the time, because there were Civil Rights people, activists, who would come through and be at the church for services, and the church welcomed them and encouraged conversation with them.  And one of the things that absolutely stuck in my mind was, a week before, or one or two weeks before James Reed -- that name sticks in my mind as a victim of violence in the Civil Rights movement, who I believe was a Unitarian minister himself, came and spoke at the Unitarian church, [00:21:00] and then went and died in the South.

PL:  [00:21:01] Black Sunday, I think it was called, yeah.

CG:  [00:21:02] Yeah.  Yeah.  So anyway, those things affected me.  If you don’t mind, I’ll deviate over into art, because since we’ve talked, I’ve been thinking a lot about other things that influenced me greatly.

PL:  [00:21:17] Please, yeah.

CG:  [00:21:20] And I began to think about the movies.  And movies affected me in three varieties, I’ll give you, during this period.  Variety number one -- and I’m probably going to have the sequence wrong -- but To Kill a Mockingbird, the movie with Gregory Peck, was something that really influenced my thinking in a lot of ways.  It made me think about -- encouraged my thinking about things differently, as a younger kid.  The second movie, and I believe I saw that movie in the Paramount.  The second movie that I remember [00:22:00] that I saw in the Paramount was Dr. Zhivago.  And when I saw Dr. Zhivago in the Paramount, the movie was really affecting me in many ways.  But what I remember years later is not the plot.  I remember recognizing for the first time that Black patrons of the theater entered from the side and sat in the balcony.  I didn’t recognize that to be what it was as overtly -- I was sensitized by that time, by my own evolving thinking.  And when I saw that, I just thought, that is the stupidest thing.  I don’t understand.  And because I was seeing what was happening around the country, I was thinking, you know, this should be easier for us in this town, we get along better.  Why can’t we make those changes easier, or faster?  [00:23:00] So that was big in my thinking.  It still is big in my thinking.  That was --

PL:  [00:23:06] How old were you when you saw Dr. Zhivago?

CG:  [00:23:09] It was the first release of Dr. Zhivago, so I want to say that one’s probably ’65, probably, somewhere around?

PL:  [00:23:17] You would have been about 13?

CG:  [00:23:21] Yeah.  I think so.  And then the third, which is one that will drive all of you guys to research, I think, because nobody knows this movie.  When I was later in high school, and my parents allowed me to go to movies on my own, one of the first movies that I chose to go to was in the Jefferson Theater, and it was called, Putney Swope.

PL:  [00:23:46] Oh.

CG:  [00:23:48] And if you don’t know the movie Putney Swope --

PL:  [00:23:48] I remember the name.

CG:  [00:23:52] -- it was absolute -- it was one of those things that completely [00:24:00] was mind-altering for me, in so many ways.  One of the things that I think that movie -- I mean, I don’t think it was ever regarded as a great movie.  It was a Black director, Black actor as the lead actor in it, and the theme -- I just won’t relay the whole story, but if you get a chance to look at it and think about it in its time, it’s just hysterical.  It was a comedy, but it was a dark comedy, and it had to do with a -- to give you a quick synopsis, Black janitor at a advertising firm on Madison Avenue who becomes chairman of the board, because the board knows it has to take action, and he happened to be standing around.  So they thought, well, somebody ought to vote for him, and he became the chairman of the board because everybody voted for him, because they thought nobody [00:25:00] else would. (laughs) And then what he does with the company after that is, it actually -- it is great.  So it taught me about manipulation of people’s emotions through advertising.  It was really, actually, I thought, a good movie about advertising.  But it was a better movie about social issues, and it was funny, and I was on my own.  And I made my choice and was incredibly happy about the choice that I’d made.  Probably wouldn’t get great awards today.

PL:  [00:25:39] So tell me, growing up in all these different neighborhoods, did you have any non-white friends before high school?

CG:  [00:25:52] Yes.  In junior high school -- so let me answer that question slightly, alter the question just slightly different.  [00:26:00] And it’s about difference.  Did I have friends who were different?  And I did have friends who were different over the years.  I also have another string, which I’ll defer, and if it’s useful, I’ll bring it back in.  But we had deaf neighbors, hearing impaired -- whatever the proper good term today is, but at that time it was about deafness.  And the children were deaf.  And it was an incredible experience for me.  They were very close neighbors of ours on Kenwood Lane.  And so I spent a lot of time with them, and began to recognize the human part underneath that connects us even when there are a lot of superficial things that make us feel disconnected.  And so that was a real eye-opening [00:27:00] experience, and that was over a period of time, that was not just limited to -- and they were close neighbors.  When I went to junior high school at Jefferson and then at Walker, I did have great friends that I made there.  One of my favorites, who I’ve lost touch with in terms of maintaining a close relationship over the years from those days, was Kent Merritt.  But there were others in my classes.  Again, a little bit of the introversion stuff plays into this question, because I know how to interact well, but I don’t often put myself forward as, how about we go over to your house, or how about you come over to my house -- that kind of stuff was just not natural for me.  I don’t have close friends now.  It’s just the nature [00:28:00] of things.  But I did -- and I think Kent, when I last saw him some years ago, he remembered me from those days, which I thought, well maybe I was right, maybe I did have a friendship with him, or have I just created that out of old cloth here?  But in the stupidest circumstance -- we were in gym class together.

PL:  [00:28:24] How did that go? (laughs)

CG:  [00:28:26] Little, scrawny white guy, who could barely muster the muscular energy to disrobe and put on your gym clothes, and that kind of stuff.  And Kent -- he was -- as I’m sure he is now -- a kind, good guy.  And we struck up a friendship in those days.  And then years later, I would see him from time to time at UVA.

PL:  [00:28:57] So would that have been at Walker?

CG:  [00:28:58] That was at Walker.  That was [00:29:00] at Walker,  and that was not at Jefferson.  I don’t think Kent -- and we may have met in the Jefferson year, but we were much closer as friends in the Walker year.  And there were a lot of people there, as we’ve talked about, including our current mayor, and other people that I had grown up around there.  But Kent stands out in my memory from that year.  And then when we moved into the county, it was a different thing.  Do you want me to go into that part of it?

PL:  [00:29:40] So could you -- yeah, yeah.  Absolutely.

CG:  [00:29:43] Okay.  So I’m a stranger in the county.  Basically, all the kids that I had known when I was in elementary school, a few of them were still around, but there weren’t many that I recognized or got reconnected to when I went back to Albemarle.  And for [00:30:00] the first time, I was riding a bus to school.  And so as you know from driving in, that’s walking up my long driveway and out to the Stony Point Road intersection where Minor Mill Road and Stony Point Road intersect, and that was our bus stop, our bus was number 18.  The driver was an African American guy of, I’m going to say in his 50s to 60s range, I only remember his first name, John.  And really friendly guy, warm guy.  So felt good about my first interaction, getting on the bus.  You know, it wasn’t like I was a six-year-old getting on the bus for the first time, I was a -- whatever I would have been, a 15-year-old getting on the bus for the first time.  And when I [00:31:00] got on the bus, I saw for the first time that all the Black students sat in the back of the bus, and there was a scattering of white students in the front.  But there were more Black students than white students, at the point of where I got picked up.  And I think at that moment, I’d like to think, and we’ll have to find witnesses that can confirm it -- it was at that moment that I said, you know what, I can do something here that is extending my hand, saying this division I’m just not going to recognize.  And so I went and sat with the Black students in the back of the bus.

PL:  [00:31:42] It was not mandated that they sit in the back?

CG:  [00:31:43] No, no, no, no.  There was no --

PL:  [00:31:43] They just chose to sit in the back?

CG:  [00:31:49] Well, I would say it was a matter half of choice and half of unwelcomeness to sit in the other sections of the bus.  And there were a few exceptions along those lines; I’ve thought about that since we talked earlier.  [00:32:00] And there was a young woman who lived across the street, who was new the same year I was, I think.  And her name was Judy Warren.  And she was an African American student a year ahead of me, if I remember that correctly.  And she sat a little over the line into the white side of the bus.  And we got to be friends, over time.  And I think for her, it was a similar statement, but in the opposite direction, which is, I’m not going to recognize this barrier.  And she didn’t know the other Black students very well at the time, either.  And so anyway, we got to be friends, and we ended up sitting together a lot of the time.  But anyway, I just started that as a practice, [00:33:00] and for -- I’d love to say for the next three years, all three years, that practice continued.  But then there was this thing about teenagers and car privileges.  And I got -- when I turned 16, my parents let me drive our old International Harvester Scout -- probably a few people know what that is.  It’s more like a farm vehicle than a passenger car, but I drove that and took my sister to school, too, because it allowed us not to have to get up quite as early in the morning to catch the bus.  We did that in my junior and senior years, most of the time.  Still rode the bus from time to time, still sat in the same place all the way through that period.

PL:  [00:33:48] So mostly you rode the bus regularly just that first year.

CG:  [00:33:51] Just that first year.

PL:  [00:33:55] Sophomore year.

CG:  [00:33:54] That’s correct.  That’s correct.

PL:  [00:33:55] But I think --

CG:  [00:33:57] And --

PL:  [00:33:58] Yeah, I think you told me that it was there [00:34:00] -- correct me if I’m wrong -- that you heard the conversations that the Black kids were having about the situation in the school and with teachers.

CG:  [00:34:12] Absolutely.  I mean, it was an important year in many respects.  In it -- I probably didn’t realize it as well as I might have, that I was going from the school that had started through the steps of integration in the city into a school in the county that only had integration by exception, prior to that year.  I believe that’s correct, because there were very few.  And Burley had been open before that.

PL:  [00:34:49] Exactly.

CG:  [00:34:51] So these kids were talking about the things that they encountered.  You know, I had to break the ice for a little bit -- let me say that properly -- [00:35:00] we had to break the ice between us during that time, because they weren’t sure why I was there, and I weren’t sure -- I wasn’t sure that the folks really wanted me to sit with them in that section of the bus.  And then I started making individual friends, and it all became a very natural, I’m listening to your conversations about that, and I’m worried about some of the things you’re talking about -- those kinds of things began to happen more naturally.  So I began to hear -- one of the things that caught my attention really quickly was the situation about the cheerleaders at Burley.

PL:  [00:35:41] Great.

CG:  [00:35:43] So the cheerleaders at Burley, if I have the details correct, had been selected for the following year in their normal process before they left Burley, before Burley closed.  So there was a group of people who [00:36:00] would have been cheerleaders, if Burley had been open the next year.  And then there was the Albemarle High School white cheerleader process, which had done the same thing; apparently in the spring they do it before they make the selection before they come into the following school year.  And I began to hear that there were -- among the things that nobody had sorted out was how you were going to combine the cheerleading squads between the two schools.  And the decision was made that all of the Albemarle cheerleaders would be cheerleaders, and that, again, my recollection of the details could have gotten cloudy over the years, but I’m hoping this is pretty close to accurate -- but they would open a couple of spots for competition for Black cheerleaders to join the Albemarle High School cheerleading squad.  [00:37:00] That made no sense to me, just on the face of it.  And the kids who were talking about it, it didn’t make sense to them, either.  And I said -- I remember saying on the bus, why didn’t they just say for this year, we’re going to have double the number of cheerleaders, and we’re going to have both squads cheer at the games together.  And a few folks said, yeah, that makes sense to us, too, but that never came up.  So I have no idea whether -- and no clear recollection whether anybody on the bus was factually a cheerleader, who had suffered their fate of going to a new school and losing that role.  But anyway, we started talking about it, and to make a long story shorter, I tried to do a little investigation [00:38:00] as a new kid in school, I was really plowing --

PL:  [00:38:06] This was your sophomore year?

CG:  [00:38:06] Yeah, my sophomore year.

PL:  [00:38:07] Oh, wow.

CG:  [00:38:07] I had no idea what I was doing.  But I’d ask around.  And there may have been -- I may have had a cheerleader in my home room, very likely I had a cheerleader in my home room, and was able to talk to that person about it, and got more details.  And ultimately, we settled -- and I’m saying “we” -- on the back of the bus and also with some of the young women who’d been affected by it from Burley, who I did get in contact at the school, when they discovered that I was interested.  And so the idea came up, let’s do a petition to the school to revisit the question, and look at the possibility of just bringing both squads together on the field, time running very [00:39:00] short because the football season was already underway at the time, as I remember it.  And you know, I’m going to lose the sequence in here somewhere -- if it gained a little momentum, we got a lot of signatures, it wasn’t me walking around handling out the paper to everyone, but I did my share.  And I can’t -- I believe this was before any discussion of a, let’s walk out of the school to bring more attention to this --

PL:  [00:39:33] Just one second.  Do you remember what the petition was for?

CG:  [00:39:39] Really, for revisiting the question -- this is the way I remember it -- with the proposal that both squads fully be allowed to be Albemarle High School cheerleaders, both the Burley squad and the Albemarle squad.

PL:  [00:39:55] So you’d have a squad of 20 people?

CG:  [00:39:57] Yeah, there’d be a lot of people.  But [00:40:00] that seemed to make a whole lot more sense to me than just about anything else I could think of.  And of course, I think it felt like a, well, that might work, you can’t do it every year, and you’re not going to be able to send the whole crew to every football game and all the other stuff that gets complicated in those.  But I think a lot of people were saying, this is a good symbolic thing to do, why don’t we figure out whether we could figure out how to do it?  So anyway, you reminded me that others have said that there was a walkout related to it, and that part slipped my memory over the years.  And I’m sure I supported it, whether it was my idea -- I doubt it was my idea, but I definitely would have supported it as a next step.  Somewhere in the sequence I got called to Mr. Hurt’s office to talk about the petition.

PL:  [00:40:56] Mr. Hurt was the principal?

CG:  [00:40:57] The principal, yes.  And as I’ve [00:41:00] said many times before, I’ve visited Mr. Hurt multiple times over my years on subjects like this; never at my invitation, it was always his invitation.  “Mr. German needs to come to the office, please.”  So I’d go down and talk to him, and he was always civil.  He was never punitive on almost every case.  He was talking to me about why there were impediments to what I was asking for.  He never said, “Here’s the compromise,” or any of that kind of stuff.  But what he did say was, this is why there’s resistance, there are practical issues with the cheerleaders, you can’t fit or hold them on a bus, I don’t know, whatever it was.  I don’t remember the details.  But again, I didn’t get punished for it, [00:42:00] except for just the ignominy of getting brought into the principal’s office, and you know --

PL:  [00:42:05] Do you remember being nervous about that?

CG:  [00:42:09] Oh, I was nervous every time.  Most of all, the first time.  Most of all, the first time, because that was new for me.  I remember going to a principal once before, and it was in elementary school when I was caught yelling in the bathroom, and I visited Tom Holbert, who was principal of McIntire Elementary School at the time.  And he was, of course --

PL:  [00:42:39] So what was the outcome of this petition?

CG:  [00:42:40] As far as I know, for action, zero.  I’ve looked back at the annuals, and I still don’t see pictures of Black cheerleaders on that first year of the squad.  But it could be that the pictures were done before changes were made.  I vaguely [00:43:00] remember that there actually was one or two Black cheerleaders, but I’m not positive about that.  It could have been that the community of Burley cheerleaders said, you know what, we’re not going to do this, and I would have supported that --

PL:  [00:43:18] So my understanding, and I may have the year wrong, I may need to go back and look at this, is that the first two African American women on the cheerleading team at AHS were Phylissa Mitchell and Darlene Quarles Robinson.

CG:  [00:43:35] Could well be.

PL:  [00:43:38] We have interviewed Phylissa Mitchell, and tomorrow we are interviewing Darlene.

CG:  [00:43:42] I remember Darlene, too, from those days.  Now Phylissa was a year behind me, or two years behind me.  And so she would have been -- I’m trying to think -- I’m just [00:44:00] trying to think what year -- do you know what the year was, that they believe?

PL:  [00:44:04] Well, I thought it was ’68 somehow, which --

CG:  [00:44:07] I believe it was fall of ’68.  I believe that’s right.    

PL:  [00:44:08] That’s what I was thinking.

CG:  [00:44:09] So I’m talking about fall of ’67.

PL:  [00:44:10] Sixty-seven.  Right.

CG:  [00:44:14] Right.  I believe that’s correct.

PL:  [00:44:15] And my understanding of this -- maybe Lorenzo will remember the story better, or George -- is that the principal, on his own, Mr. Hurt, simply --

CG:  [00:44:32] Appointed?

PL:  [00:44:36] -- well, appointed, or brought in two additional people for the team in order to integrate the cheerleading team.

CG:  [00:44:44] That makes sense to me.  It makes me believe that that’s -- you know, it’s ringing bells.  And so --

PL:  [00:44:50] And I think --

CG:  [00:44:52] Now, do I connect the dots between what we did that first year, and what happened the second year, I hope -- you know, I have faith that Mr. Hurt was hearing [00:45:00] what we were saying.

PL:  [00:45:02] Yes.

CG:  [00:45:03] And he wasn’t hostile.  At no point was he hostile in any of that.  So --

PL:  [00:45:07] Yeah, that does appear to be his reputation, that he was interested in moving things forward as he could, you know.  Yeah, so my understanding was that there were tryouts -- I mean, again, this probably needs to be confirmed, and that none of the Black girls got on the team, you know, the subsequent year.  And he just categorically said, well, the two who came in closest to the top are coming onto this team.

CG:  [00:45:43] Right.  That is quite possible, and I’ve lost details, or memories for that.  But --

PL:  [00:45:54] So for the record, do either of you remember if that’s more or less correct?

GEORGE GILLIAM: [00:45:54] That rings true, but I don’t [00:46:00] remember the specifics.

PL:  [00:46:01] Do you remember, Lorenzo?

LORENZO DICKERSON:  [00:46:02] I definitely remember maybe Mitchell mentioning that he appointed the two of them.

PL:  [00:46:11] That’s right.

LD:  [00:46:11] He maybe definitely did that, for sure.

PL:  [00:46:14] Yes.  Yeah, he brought them in, right.  He did say that, for sure.  Right.

CG:  [00:46:19] Yep.

PL:  [00:46:19] So you were not an athlete yourself?

CG:  [00:46:23] Not beyond being -- I graduated from -- this is important information -- during Albemarle High School at six feet tall and 125 pounds.  So I did play a lot of basketball.  I was friends with a lot of the athletes, because I was interested -- my dad was a baseball player, he had been a baseball player at UVA in years past.  And so I was kind of naturally connected to athletics.  And I palled around, and have my whole life with athletes, and did especially at UVA when I got there, [00:47:00] continuing my relationships that I had, similar kinds of relationships that I had with that place.

PL:  [00:47:08] So you had African American friends who were basketball players.  Do you remember anything that they would have said about desegregating the teams, or anything of that sort?

CG:  [00:47:24] No.  I mentioned one that rode the bus with us was Ernest [Hicks?]. Ernest was a guard on the football team, if I’m remembering correctly.  And I believe Ernest was a year ahead of me.  And a more gentle soul, I don’t think I’ve ever met.  But he was a good football player.  Ernest and I would talk about this stuff a lot on the bus.  And, you know, he probably accomplished more with his gentle language about -- [00:48:00] again, people always appeal to me when they say, “This just doesn’t make sense.  Does it make sense to you?  It doesn’t make sense.”  And I may have gotten some of that from Ernest, because that might have been his approach.  Later, I’ll tell you, I have thought about it since you and I talked.  But in my career of writing -- so maybe I’ll get into that for just a second, and say just to lay the context, I started to get a reputation at Albemarle in subsequent years.  I don’t remember doing this as a sophomore, but I think a junior and certainly as a senior, I would write letters on topics of concern.  Can’t we do something different, kind of letters.  And after the first one was [00:49:00] printed in the paper --

PL:  [00:49:03] Student paper?

CG:  [00:49:04] -- student paper, which had faculty sponsors who were supposed to review all the content, so I always got to feel a little guilty that I was getting them in trouble at the same time I was getting a little in trouble, too.  I’ll talk a little bit more about how that happened later.  But at that time, among the subjects that I succeeded in getting a letter in about was one that sticks in my mind as a great example of a dumb, liberal kid, thinking that he knows the right answer to everything, and writing it up, and it was about buying time for the then president of student council, who was George [Carr?], who was also the quarterback of the football team, to make positive change.  And I can’t [00:50:00] remember what the issue was, but Black students at Albemarle were concerned about it, I was concerned about it, too, whatever it was.  But I was pleading for patience with George.  And I began to realize -- and I think the football player who came to talk to me was [Natt Wright?].  And Natt, another much more gentle than his demeanor on the field human being -- you know, it was one of these moments I think about when I’m dealing with my kids.  The most effective I’ve ever been and criticism about them is to say, “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” -- and that’s what I got from Natt on that letter.  “I’m not angry, but I’m just disappointed.”

PL:  [00:50:55] So I’m not -- I need you to be a little bit more clear about this.  So you wrote [00:51:00] a letter.

CG:  [00:51:03] Yep.

PL:  [00:51:02] Asking for more time for George Carr --

CG:  [00:51:04] To be able to work on the issue that the Black students were concerned about.

PL:  [00:51:11] And George Carr was white or Black?

CG:  [00:51:13] George Carr was white.

PL:  [00:51:13] Was white.  Okay.  And Natt Wright, being a Black football player --

CG:  [00:51:19] Black football player.  And basketball player.

PL:  [00:51:22] Okay.  And what was his position on this?  He was supporting --

CG:  [00:51:28] You know, I think he was the one who said, “I need to come and tell you, patience is not going to solve this problem.”  Patience, I remember something like that language coming from that.  And that was -- that was one of the letters that I felt bad as I was writing, rather than just in retrospect.

PL:  [00:51:48] So you wrote a lot of letters, apparently?

CG:  [00:51:50] No, I probably wrote, like, six over my whole time, or something like that.

PL:  [00:51:54] But they were sort of trying to push at the boundaries.

CG:  [00:51:58] Yeah, and not only on racial issues, on every other [00:52:00] issue that I cared about, social economic, you know, as I mentioned to you before, I was reading everything all the time in those years.  And one of the things that I was reading at the time was Marcuse, and I was thinking, how do we make an enlightened society?  I’d write pontification letters that I hope will never see the light of day.  So if you find them, just bury them until I’m dead, okay?  But anyway, I got called down to the office regularly on those things.  And I got a reputation.  So the three speakers of the senior class were the valedictorian, the president of the student council, and little fuzzy Chip German --

PL:  [00:52:50] Really?

CG:  [00:52:53] Yes.

PL:  [00:52:54] Oh, the students voted you in to be a speaker?

CG:  [00:52:54] Yeah.  Yeah.

PL:  [00:52:56] Do you remember what you had to say?

CG:  [00:52:57] Oh, absolutely.  It was on -- [00:53:00] we did political, social and economic themes, and I had the economic theme.  So I drew the most likely to get the response from the audience of, “Sit down.  Call me stooge,” you know, or something like that.  So anyway, that --

PL:  [00:53:23] This picture you’re painting does not sound like an introvert to me.

CG:  [00:53:28] Oh, yeah?  I’ll tell you, I’ve spent my whole life fighting the two urges.

PL:  [00:53:32] That’s amazing.  But you were also involved in other things in high school.  Were you in the marching band?

CG:  [00:53:40] I was not, but I was -- I am a musician, I was for years.  I was in the band in the city, the combined city band they did at Jefferson School in those years.  So I was paying attention to what was going [00:54:00] on with bands.  And I did have also one of my confusions about integration was how Elmer [Sampson?] got to be a junior leader of the band environment at Albemarle, rather than having co-leading, co-directors of the band.  It just seemed to make so much sense to me that what we needed to do was, have people come in, in the positions that they held at the other school, and carry that for a while to set the tone, that this is -- it was separate and never equal before.  Now it’s together, and let’s try to do a little bit on the equal part.

PL:  [00:54:50] And still on equal, right?

CG:  [00:54:51] Yeah.

PL:  [00:54:52] Yeah.  I’m trying to -- I think I have someplace all the other things you did at the school, right?  You were in the [00:55:00] Chess Club, you were on the newspaper staff.  You were in the Coin Club.

CG:  [00:55:09] Yeah, those were --

PL:  [00:55:08] You were secretary and treasurer of the Rocket Club.

CG:  [00:55:10] Yes, let me be clear about what those were.  And we had a little conspiracy -- one of my good friends in high school was Bill [Hahn?], who’s still in the community, his father, John, was a psychology faculty member at UVA.  And Bill and I and a few other folks said, “You know, when we go to apply to college, it’s going to be really important that we have some other activities to be able to cite.”  So a group of us started joining clubs that ultimately we didn’t have any interest in whatsoever, in order to build our resumes for --

PL:  [00:55:49] College applications.  Yes.

CG:  [00:55:53] -- college applications.  Now I can tell you, you know, “hippy” [00:56:00] is an overbroad term to use for me at the time, but I was leaning toward the hippy side of the population in Albemarle.  And that wasn’t the predominant character of most of the clubs that I joined. (laughs)

PL:  [00:56:17] Clearly.

CG:  [00:56:20] So unfortunately, once you joined, it got into the record, and then appeared in the --

PL:  [00:56:29] Do you remember getting any pushback from white students for the positions that you took?

CG:  [00:56:34] Yes.  That really is an important -- that takes us back to what I believe was spring of ’68, am I correct, of the death of Martin Luther King.

PL:  [00:56:41] Yeah.

CG:  [00:56:42] So I got pushback all the time, but never threatening.  It was more like, “Who do you think you are?  You’re on the wrong side,” of every question that I ever took a stand on.  And that happens with everybody.  There wasn’t anything brave about that, it was [00:57:00] never with threats, it never cost me anything to have people be unhappy about that.  And I’m a kind of people-pleaser anyway, so that irritated me, but not to the point of inaction.  But that changed a little bit on the day after Martin Luther King was killed.  We, or the bus was a very different place on that day.  It was a place where bubbling conversation that characterized every other day on that bus was dead silent in the back, where I was with the Black students.  And I think my sister was back there with me that day, too.  And I just thought it was a horrendous tragedy in addition to a heinous crime, but a tragedy for the people that I cared about [00:58:00] that I’d been spending a lot of time with, and for me.  It made a big difference in my perspective on things, to the point of feeling hopeless about stuff.  So anyway, we were commiserating about that, and the white students in the front -- this was an odd day.  On our drive home, John was not driving the bus.  It was a substitute, and the substitute driving the bus was actually a neighbor of mine, white high school student, which happened, there were high school students driving busses, I think mostly as replacements, not as primary route drivers.  And I could see -- I could hear that he and one of his friends, who was also a neighbor, were complaining about why everybody [00:59:00] was so sad in the back of the bus.  This was a great day for America, or something along those lines.  I was both outraged and demoralized about things so much that day that I didn’t really take much notice.  I was wrong when I said my sister was -- my sister was on the bus when we went in in the morning, but she wasn’t on the bus when we came home in the afternoon, I think.  And when we came home in the afternoon, and this was with the substitute driver, we got to our stop.  And I was the only one who was going to get off, and they drove past it.  And I just ascribed it to, you know, they were going to let me off at the next stop, or something like that.  Basically the guy said, “Missed your stop, I’ll bring you back to it.”  And I said, “Okay.”  [01:00:00] But I got a nervous feeling that something good was not about to happen.  And all the other people got off the bus, they very quickly began letting me know that because of my sitting in the back of the bus, commiserating with people about Martin Luther King’s murder, that I needed to be taught a lesson, and that they were going to beat me up, whatever was the term they used, that’s what I heard.  So I thought, this was not going to be good.  We get back to my bus stop, and they actually pulled up the road, Wolf Trap Road and stopped there, because it’s on the opposite side of the road.  We were coming back, so it was on the opposite side of the road from my stop.  And the door didn’t open.  [01:01:00] And I said, okay, they really are serious, something is --

PL:  [01:01:07] How many people are on the bus at this point?

CG:  [01:01:06] Just three of us.  Me, the substitute driver, and his friend who had been making comments the whole time.

PL:  [01:01:15] Oh.

CG:  [01:01:16] And so, you know, on my best days I wasn’t a good fighter, but I figured something not good is going to happen here.  So anyway, I got into a debate with them about it, and I said, “Look, guys, if you’re going to be this way about it, let’s just get it over with.  I’m not going to sit here and listen to you talk about this.”  And they pushed a little bit, never hit me.  They just were -- their victory was in the intimidation that they created, and never hit me.  So I got off the bus, went home, that [01:02:00] was the end of it.  I never lodged any complaints about it, or any of that kind of stuff, which is probably stupid.  But at the same time, you know, they dealt with me differently after that, too.  I never had a moment’s problem with either guy again.  And I’m not sure --

PL:  [01:02:19] Hmm.  Just flexing their muscles and letting you know --

CG:  [01:02:24] Yeah, but I also think that they respected -- they may have respected the fact that I didn’t go running to get them punished for it.  I don’t know.  That may be a more charitable view.

PL:  [01:02:37] Right.

CG:  [01:02:37] So anyway, that was rough.  But I don’t -- that’s one of the things that I don’t regret.  That was a horrible day, and the people that I cared about were feeling that more acutely than I could.  But I felt it, too, that [01:03:00] this group of my neighbors, this representative body of my neighbors, including the white kids, who were riding the bus and didn’t extend themselves at all in this, may (inaudible) hopeless.

PL:  [01:03:13] So Chip, did you attend a lot of sports events in high school?

CG:  [01:03:17] Every high school football game.

PL:  [01:03:20] Every high school football game.

CG:  [01:03:18] As far as I can remember, every high school football game.

PL:  [01:03:23] And were your high school football teams desegregated?

CG:  [01:03:26] Only the -- so the first year -- yes.  The direct answer to your question is, the high school football teams were desegregated at Albemarle, which is the only high school that I attended.  And it was for those three years.  And I think I remember, have you guys turned up the name Billy Tyler?

PL:  [01:03:42] No.  Billy Tyler?

CG:  [01:03:47] I want to say I remember a guy by the name of Billy Tyler, who was a --

PL:  [01:03:53] Black athlete?

CG:  [01:03:56] Black athlete running back, if I remember correctly, in that first year.  And [01:04:00] I don’t believe he played after that.  He may have been a senior that year.  That name popped in my head the other day, and I haven’t had a chance to look it up to make sure I’m remembering it correct.  But there was one.  Now I will say --

PL:  [01:04:15] Now do you remember any tension around the games, or did Black kids come as well as white kids?

CG:  [01:04:20] I remember confederate flags at the games.  You know, we were the Patriots, the Albemarle High School Patriots.  And I was always confused when a confederate flag would pop up at a game, because that didn’t seem to match -- but do I remember the community -- I mean, I was -- so I was goofing around at the games.  It wasn’t like I was sitting in the stands absolutely --

PL:  [01:04:51] Glued to what was happening?

CG:  [01:04:51] -- locked into what was happening on the field, which meant I was sort of seeing what was going on socially in the stands and around the field, because [01:05:00] I used to hate sitting in the bleachers.  I’d walk around and -- I did love watching the game and watching at a good place.  So I’d go to a different spot, kind of had a little bit of a photographer’s eye, go for a spot where I thought I’d see something interesting happen, and more times than not, I’d get rewarded for -- because nobody controlled -- you know, you couldn’t get on the playing surface, and you couldn’t get within a boundary around it, but you could walk around and do anything you wanted to at the high schools beyond that point.  So do I believe that there was something else going on in the atmosphere?  I would say probably more in the early year, and almost evaporated by my senior year.  And I initially remembered -- I thought we’d won all of our games in my sophomore year.  We didn’t.  But we did win all the games in the junior and senior year at Albemarle.  So winning has a way of uniting [01:06:00] people, too.  So I think that may have been helpful.  And everybody was a hero.  I don’t remember anybody ever being, you know, talked about in racial terms, like a blown play.  There was probably language that I either chose to ignore, or just don’t remember.  But I don’t remember the football games as being especially hostile, but I was the wrong color to know it, for sure.

PL:  [01:06:36] Mm-hmm.  Well, you seemed to be pretty sensitive to what was going on among the Black students, so I think you might have heard about it on the bus, or in other places.

CG:  [01:06:42] Yeah.  A lot of the writing in my yearbooks from those long ago years had to do with my pals on the bus [01:07:00] writing -- as I recall, the language of the day was, I’d see something like, “You’re not a soul man yet, but keep trying,” from my friends. (laughter)

PL:  [01:07:16] That’s great.

CG:  [01:07:19] I loved that.

PL:  [01:07:21] And talking about that, when we earlier talked, you spoke about -- I want to make sure I got this right -- I think Walter White, on the talent show?

CG:  [01:07:36] Yeah.  Yes, I’m hoping that I have that right, because there was another of the White family who had a band in those days, and I saw that in the annuals, the yearbooks.  But my recollection is, it was Walter and one other person who I’ve forgotten, but I thought might have been an athlete as well in my dim memory.  And that was in the talent show [01:08:00] - it had to either have been my sophomore or junior year, because I think Walter graduated in ’69, I think, but I’m not positive.  And yeah, so back on the theme of art influencing life --

PL:  [01:08:15] Yes.  Yes.  That’s where I want you to go.

CG:  [01:08:21] Yeah, I mean, the whole audience went nuts when they were singing to “Soul Man,” I think -- yeah, I think that’s what it was.  You know, those moments gave me hope that we were finding ways to get past barriers.

PL:  [01:08:40] So then, you know, part of the premise of this project, which in some ways, we’re interrogating by talking to folks like you, the part of the premise is that sports had a very significant [01:09:00] role to play in the desegregation process of high schools, you know, just what you said.  Everybody’s a hero when you’re winning, right?

CG:  [01:09:10] Right.  Yes.

PL:  [01:09:14] People are in a cooperative environment.  They’re working together to make something happen.  So can you comment on that?  Do you think that’s true?

CG:  [01:09:24] Yes.  So a couple of points there.  The first is about winning is an important factor in that question, because losing is invitation to scapegoating.  And losing means that people will find someone to blame, and in a kind of energized environment of new populations together, I can’t imagine that losing wouldn’t have [01:10:00] led to people blaming the newcomers for losing.  But boy, I’ll tell you, the winning was glue.  And it did a good job of bringing people together.  So yeah, unfortunately you can’t control that as closely as it would be beneficial to do, but I think it absolutely affected the experience at Albemarle, how the social climate weathered those years toward a better --

PL:  [01:10:34] Because you had winning teams.  Because the teams were doing so well.

CG:  [01:10:35] Because -- yeah.  Yeah.  Now I will say, we didn’t win everything in basketball.  But football was the big game, as I remember it, at Albemarle High School.  So the other sports mattered less, but there was a little spillover of goodwill, I think, that went from that, mainly because the same players played the other sports as well.

PL:  [01:10:59] But were there other ways, [01:11:00] other ways beyond sports that you feel had an impact?  You talked about this talent show, for example.

CG:  [01:11:12] Yeah.  The talent show was one thing.  So, for example, drama, the plays -- I could feel in the selection of material, especially with South Pacific, I think that was in our senior year.  I could feel it in the selection material some intent to explore themes that were useful to explore in that environment.  In that case, it was Asian, prejudice about Asian folks.  I think there was -- there were many ways that that could happen.  So we were talking [01:12:00] about introversion and how it plays out -- I was socially awkward, as in dating, that kind of stuff.  I can’t give you much testimony on dating in high school and how that worked, and dating events that were high school events, like proms -- never went to one.

PL:  [01:12:19] Bands, or, yeah, dances.  Dances.

CG:  [01:12:23] Sock hops, or something like that.  Never went to any of those.  So that testimony will have to come from others.  But I think those were opportunities as well.  Those were opportunities as well.  I would be really interested to know, because I wasn’t in many of those conversations whether or not social connections in dating terms, and dancing terms, just people interacting with each other, how that worked at that time.  But that wasn’t me.  I wasn’t there.

PL:  [01:12:57] Just a couple of more questions that Annie has asked that I ask you.  [01:13:00] Were you at all aware of the movement afoot in Charlottesville that came to be known as “Free Cherry Pie”?

CG:  [01:13:13] Yes.  I remember it.

PL:  [01:13:16] What do you remember about it?

CG:  [01:13:16] I don’t remember details at all.  I remember the slogan, you know, itself.  You know, I’m hesitating about even speculating what it meant at the time.  I remember it as something that could have been influenced by many things, since that time, which would be a person who was either wrongfully accused, or was suffering some consequence that people thought was unduly harsh.  I don’t even know --

PL:  [01:13:56] “Cherry Pie” turns out to be a nickname for someone called George [Frye?].  [01:14:00]

CG:  [01:14:01] Yeah?

PL:  [01:14:04] George Frye was a student at Lane.

CG:  [01:14:05] Yeah, I vaguely remember that, too, yeah.

PL:  [01:14:08] He is still alive, he does not want to be interviewed.

CG:  [01:14:11] Yeah?

PL:  [01:14:13] We don’t know too much about that incident.  So but -- and apparently you don’t have too much recollection.

CG:  [01:14:17] No, I can’t say that I do.  I definitely remember the slogan.  I definitely remember thinking there’s likely to be something there that I would be interested in.  But again, I was slightly off the city topics at that time.

PL:  [01:14:36] Sure.  Then do you remember anything about the Wall of Respect?

CG:  [01:14:41] Yes.  Where --

PL:  [01:14:41] It was at Carver Recreation.

CG:  [01:14:47] Yes.  I’m trying to remember, is Carver where -- at Jefferson?

PL:  [01:14:53] Yeah.  Yeah.

CG:  [01:14:56] Yeah.  I remember that, yes.

PL:  [01:15:00] You were not [01:15:00] personally involved.

CG:  [01:15:02] I believe it dates back even to that first year when the schools were together, something about that.

PL:  [01:15:09] It was in the early ’70s.  Late ’60s, early ’70s.

CG:  [01:15:14] Okay.  Well, I vaguely remember, there was a lot of discussion about the use of that property dating back to when we were split in there, and there was a lot of discussion about the Carver Rec Center, which technically wasn’t in that part of the school.  So I’m conflating different times, sorry.

PL:  [01:15:32] So apparently there were images drawn on the wall of Carver Rec of African Americans, African American national heroes, maybe some local people, we’re not really sure.

CG:  [01:15:44] Yeah, I remember.  Yeah.

PL:  [01:15:49] And the city Rec director, a man by the name of Ed [Wyant?], ordered them removed.  And then there were marches on City Council, [01:16:00] and efforts to sort of get it reinstated, etcetera, with a lot of African American students and their parents getting involved in that.  So I just didn’t -- but you were not one of those students.

CG:  [01:16:16] No, at that time I was at UVA, so I was marching, but I was marching about police treatment of Black students back then, which has been a renewed nightmare in recently years.

PL:  [01:16:29] Sure.  Sure.

CG:  [01:16:31] Yeah.  No, I do remember that.

PL:  [01:16:38] But it was --

CG:  [01:16:40] Let me give you a disambiguation note, by the way, as well.  And that is, you will encounter a leader of the Rec department in Charlottesville, his name was Eugene German -- no relation to me at all.  He would have been after that, I think.  He was there for -- again, I’m going [01:17:00] back to the Hereford and O’Neil years of running.

PL:  [01:17:07] We’ve kept you quite a while.  I’m just going to ask if George or Lorenzo have some follow-up questions.

CG:  [01:17:15] Yeah.  You know, we’ve talked about this before.  If my actions at that time sound unusual, I didn’t perceive them as being out of step with what was going on around me at the time.  Now did I know many people at Albemarle who were doing that?  No.  But did I read about people in the city who were doing different kinds of things?  Did I see it going on all over the country?  I didn’t feel like I was breaking through with some sort of strong -- I didn’t feel like I was -- I’m going to do this [01:18:00] a different way -- don’t forget that in ’69, ’70, there was a lot going on at UVA.  That was the year of shutting down -- so we were --

PL:  [01:18:18] It was May Days.  That was May Days.  Right.

CG:  [01:18:20] -- all engaged in -- yeah.  We were all engaged in things.  But what was the guy’s name?  Was it Steve [Squire?], or something like that, who was a radical at the time, who ended up getting charged with light in the ROTC, with Maury -- I don’t know whether it was Maury Hall, whatever it was, on fire.  So all these things that were happening in the high schools quickly became overshadowed by what was going on with respect to the war, and what was going on at UVA, especially in the spring of ’70.  So it’s really hard to think of any act that took place in isolation there as not [01:19:00] being just one of things that were popping up all over the place at the time.

PL:  [01:19:06] Right.  But there weren’t -- we have not learned of many students at Albemarle High School, many white students at Albemarle High School who, you know, who were proactive in terms of articulating a vision that had not yet come to be, you know.  And clearly you were.  I mean, when you came home, or when you were doing these things, did you have any reaction from your parents to it?  Was it --

CG:  [01:19:38] Well, they knew about most --

PL:  [01:19:37] When you were being called into the principal’s office on a regular basis?

CG:  [01:19:40] That they didn’t hear about it.  That was another nice thing about Mr. Hurt is, he never sent a note home. (laughs) Not for my infractions, anyway.  Great question.  My mother became increasingly -- again, in her frame of reference, more radicalized as the years went on.  [01:20:00] So she was completely in step with -- you know, she would be worried about whether I was going to get beat up on the bus, that kind of stuff.  But my dad, again, his work life was confusing, because his entire work life was filled with good old boys, you know?  The business people in Charlottesville that he was dealing with were the mainstream business people who had been in Charlottesville for many, many years.  So he never said anything to me, like, “If you continue what you’re doing, I’m going to lose clients” -- he never said anything like that to me.  And he could have.

PL:  [01:20:46] Sure.

CG:  [01:20:49] But he was -- I think in his case, and to his great credit, I would describe it as uncertain.  He was uncertain [01:21:00] where right was, and uncertain -- I think he was pretty confident that he didn’t know.  It’s not like he knew and you guys are wrong, it’s, I don’t know until I’m going to do what I do, and not engage on either side of this, most of the time.

PL:  [01:21:20] Right.  Right.  Lorenzo, I can see you have some questions.  I can see it in your eyes.

LD:  [01:21:26] I just have two.  I’m curious about your experience, you mentioned your grandparents living on Ridge Street?

CG:  [01:21:35] Yes.

LD:  [01:21:37] How long did they live there after you all moved?

CG:  [01:21:38] Oh no, they moved at that time.  So my grandfather was a -- I love to describe this.  He was with UPS before UPS existed.  He was a Railway Express agent, which meant that he worked on the railways on the service that delivered packages.  My father, when he was [01:22:00] young, drove a horse carriage through Charlottesville, delivering packages, from Railway Express.  That didn’t last very long, I mean, they had plenty of trucks.  But sometimes they used horse carriages to deliver packages, and that kind of stuff.  So my grandfather had retired.  He was already starting to get ill, and my grandmother was also starting to get ill.  So when they sold -- and I knew nothing, I still know nothing about that.  I told Phyllis that I’m sure there was an element of white flight in that; that they could feel the neighborhood changing around.  And in my parents’ case, they wanted to build their own house and own their own house.  My mom probably didn’t get along as well with my dad’s mom, as would be a predictor of peace in the family for a long time.  So anyway, that was a little bit of a separate issue.  But I think that the decision to leave Ridge Street for [01:23:00] my grandparents could well have had to do with the fact that the neighborhood was changing around them, and they weren’t sure what it meant.  And they went to a smaller place in Petersburg.  Much smaller place in Petersburg, and lived out their lives for the next, about, as I recall, seven or eight years.  Oh no no, that’s not correct, seven or eight years after we moved down here.  The previous down there, it would have been 17 or 18 years, something like that.

LD:  [01:23:35] Do you remember -- and you should have been 12, 13 -- do you remember Vinegar Hill --

CG:  [01:23:37] Oh, absolutely.

LD:  [01:23:38] -- being demolished?

CG:  [01:23:41] Absolutely.  And I have to say, that was my first experience with urban renewal, the generic and gloss-over term.  And I did find it really strange the way that happened.  [01:24:00] I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand what kind of damage was being done in that process, but I did observe it thinking, is this good?  Is this good?  You know, we were all saying it was good in Charlottesville at the time, because, you know, it was going to improve the urban environment.  But I was concerned about that at the time.  Yeah, now, -- it’s harder to find people who remember Vinegar Hill, and the way it existed for a really long time.

PL:  [01:24:41] Lorenzo just put together a terrific film about Vinegar Hill, with a wonderful title, called Raised/Razed.  R-A --

CG:  [01:24:52] Yeah?

PL:  [01:24:52] -- which comes first?

LD:  [01:24:54] Oh, R-A-I-S-E-D is first.

PL:  [01:24:58] And then R-A-Z-E-D is second.  Yeah.  So it’s [01:25:00] about people who grew up in that neighborhood, and then it’s being razed in the consequences.

CG:  [01:25:08] Yep.

PL:  [01:25:07] A terrific film.

CG:  [01:25:08] Well, you know, even when you were raised elsewhere, as I was for most of the time, at least what I remember of time, when I moved to Kenwood Lane, they were still delivering milk in milk trucks in bottles to an aluminum box on your front porch.  So we’d go whenever we wanted ice cream, or something like that.  We’d go on the fringe of Vinegar Hill at the Monticello Dairy and get -- we were always driving through Vinegar Hill.  But those memories recede fast, so I’m glad you captured the history of the place.  Cool.

LD:  [01:25:49] The last question that I have is just going from -- as a student, going from the city to the county, what was that like, being that the county was a bit behind the curve as far as the [01:26:00] city is concerned, as far as desegregation?

CG:  [01:26:03] Yeah.  I mean, it’s a really good question, because a couple of things go on there.  One of the things that I think would be really interesting would be to notice what happens in the university influence zones.  The university influence zones were, as I remember them, largely city-based through those years.  And people were moving out to the county, but the density of university people; faculty members -- now, employees is different, but I’m thinking mainly of faculty.  My bet is that, that has moved out into the county a little bit more now, and there’s more even distribution.  But I remember it concentrated a lot more.  So all of my friends at Walker, all of my white friends, were children of university people, one [01:27:00] way or another -- faculty members, people who graduated from medical school, or were medical faculty as well.  So my friends in those days were Gordon Morris, Hutchinson was a dentist, I think we talked about -- there were just a lot of people that were kind of connected to the university environment more in the city.  And so when I went to the county, I had people who had very different perspectives.  A lot more rural, a lot more farm-oriented kind of folks, probably more service professions and that kind of stuff, higher volume of those in the school circles that I saw.  Attitude was, I thought the city had been through its early stages already, so as you said, it was advanced [01:28:00] compared to where the county was in its thinking.  But you’d almost want to think -- I don’t know where to go with that, exactly.  I almost want to say that I felt at times more radical in my behavior than the Black students that I was working with.  And I’m wondering if that is a difference between the city and the county populations.

PL:  [01:28:34] Oh, that’s interesting.

CG:  [01:28:37] I’m not sure I can put a finger on that very well.  But, you know, all the folks that lived around me here, basically, you know, there’s probably a line that traces right back to times when their families were owned by people who lived in these areas, because there are a lot of family concentrations, the folks that I rode the bus with, there [01:29:00] were multiple families of [Colts?], I remember Jackie, Pauline, Braxton -- we called Brad, Brad was one of the people who came and played basketball with me down here all the time, in those days.

PL:  [01:29:17] What we’re picking up in terms of these interviews is that -- and we haven’t spoken to enough people from Albemarle, but that there appears to have been a lot more tension, you know, in Lane --

CG:  [01:29:36] Yeah.

PL:  [01:29:38] -- and within the city.  A lot more hostility, almost less opportunity for Black students in the schools, at least initially, than in the county.

GG:  [01:29:52] Yeah.  Yeah.

PL:  [01:29:52] Wouldn’t you say that’s right?  The county seems to have been a more -- almost like a more --

GG:  [01:29:57] People lived closer together in rural areas.  [01:30:00]

PL:  [01:30:00] They lived closer?

GG:  [01:30:03] Yeah.

PL:  [01:30:04] You mean Blacks and Whites lived closer together?

GG:  [01:30:05] Yeah, Blacks and Whites.

PL:  [01:30:08] Mixed more, yeah.

CG:  [01:30:09] Yeah, you know, it really is interesting.  And there’s also a rhythm of life issue.  I mean, when we came down here, I didn’t have friends that I played with -- I mean, again, I was 15, or 14, when we probably came first, 13.  I didn’t have neighborhood kids that I hung out with and did stuff with, which I had in the city, the whole time.  Whole different rhythm of living.

PL:  [01:30:47] And that has something to do with desegregation, because we’re hearing over and over again from African Americans about how incredibly tight-knit their communities were.

CG:  [01:30:58] Yeah.

PL:  [01:31:00] You [01:31:00] know, and the family-like relationships, you know, well, and that translated to the schools.  And then once you desegregate the schools, you lose that sense of community.

CG:  [01:31:13] You know, I really do believe that.  I’ve seen that in multiple instances over the years of different places that I’ve been.  One of the things that I didn’t say, and this is not on-topic, but I spent every summer working for my aunt in her medical research labs, wherever she was.  And so from the age of about 12, every summer I would go to where she was.  And for multiple years, it was Morgantown, West Virginia, for some years it was Boston.  I guess for those years, it was all Boston or Morgantown.  So I was exposed to different communities that had different elements to them.  And I think [01:32:00] maybe that was really useful in forming my kind of broader view of questions, not so much what’s the immediate context, but how does it fit in the larger picture of how people get along with each other.  You know, West Virginia was all about coal miners and problems.

PL:  [01:32:20] Right.

CG:  [01:32:22] Yeah, sorry, that’s way down a different path.

PL:  [01:32:25] Well, thank you, Chip.

CG:  [01:32:27] Oh, thank you.

PL:  [01:32:27] Thanks for your time.  Yeah.

CG:  [01:32:28] I hope there’s something useful in there.

PL:  [01:32:31] A lot.  Just a lot.  You’ve got a very good story.  A very good story to share, so thanks for doing it.

CG:  [01:32:39] Well, my heroes were the people that I got to meet through all those times.  And I continue to believe that we had made many mistakes in trying to figure out how to sort through this, and we were still finding our way.

PL:  [01:32:52] That was supposedly my last question that I didn’t ask, is how do you feel we’re doing with race relations today?  [01:33:00] That will open up a whole other --

CG:  [01:33:02] I can give you a direct answer to that question, and that is, I’m not -- I’m amazed at how tolerant the communities are who are suffering from this affliction.  And then I’m completely demoralized by people who are perpetrating the affliction, continuing to have power and influence.  I mean, it’s probably influence that bothers me more.  I’m worried more about -- you know, I say this to Dana every day, and that is, how can we do the things we do as a society and elect the people that we elect, and claim we have a good higher education, or education system in this country?  We’re not training citizens to understand what we were trying to build and the [01:34:00] original concepts of the country.

PL:  [01:34:01] Right.

CG:  [01:34:03] We just can’t seem to get it done.

PL:  [01:34:05] All right, thank you.

 

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