Rod Gentry

ROD GENTRY: [00:00:00] Okay. 

GEORGE GILLIAM: [00:00:01] What’s your date of birth?

RG: [00:00:02] May 30th, 1949.

GG: [00:00:09] And you were born in Charlottesville?

RG: [00:00:11] Born at University of Virginia Hospital.  In the Barringer Wing.

GG: [00:00:23] I know what your father did.  Did your mother work outside the house?

RG: [00:00:28] Mom, in later years, was in real estate and sold real estate.  She was a schoolteacher originally, and then she was a full-time mother while I was growing up.  You know, she volunteered.  She was an active, long, long-term volunteer at UVA Hospital and was chairman of the volunteers.  Whatever they call that position, for a number of times.

GG: [00:00:56] I remember playing Bridge with your parents.  They were [00:01:00] Bridge fanatics.  

RG: [00:01:02] Yeah, did you play with Charlie Page too?

GG: [00:01:04] I don’t think so. 

RG: [00:01:06] That’s a good thing.  (laughter) He took Bridge way too seriously. 

GG: [00:01:14] One thing I really don’t understand, I’d like you to clarify really is, what were their attitudes on race?

RG: [00:01:23] You know George, I honestly don’t know.  They never expressed a negative or positive about it.  They acknowledged what was going on.  My only recollection was when I was in Venable Elementary School, and I don’t know what year, Black children came to Venable.  But I remember my mother sitting me down and saying, “You know, these kids are going to be afraid and they’re going to be not with [00:02:00] their friends.  Be kind and make friends.”

GG: [00:02:05] That would probably have been in 1960.

RG: [00:02:15] Well by then, you know, maybe I’m conflating Lane and Venable because I was in Venable.  I would have been in first grade in 1954.  Right?

GG: [00:02:27] Yes.

RG: [00:02:28] Five or six years old.  And Brown v. Board of Education was in ’54.  So I’m wondering whether -- because we went to basement school during part of that.  But then we weren’t in basement school anymore and I don’t know the sequence.  But Frankie Allen was in elementary school with me.  And he was, you know, later a basketball star at Lane and coach and star at Roanoke College.  So [00:03:00] I know there were Black kids at Venable because Frankie was, you know, he averaged 57 points a game in elementary school.  (laughter) He was unbelievable. 

PHYLLIS LEFFLER: [00:03:13] If I could interrupt for a moment, wouldn’t that have been in 1958?  If the basement schools were in operation? 

RG: [00:03:21] I was nine years old then, so yeah.  And I don’t remember how long it went.  I went to two basement schools.  One was on Bruce Avenue across the street from the Tramontin’s house, the superintendent of schools.  And the other was on Hardwood Road off of Rugby.  And that was Margaret Jones.  

PL: [00:03:45] What was that like for you?  Those basements?

RG: [00:03:48] I mean we all thought it was great because it wasn’t like going to the school building, and you went home for lunch.  You know, it was [00:04:00] kind of fun.

PL: [00:04:02] And you didn’t really have a real consciousness about what that was --

RG: [00:04:05] No.  You know in those days, I would say that unlike today, the news you got wasn’t instantaneous worldwide.  It was local.  And my father was in the news business.  So you know, we would hear the news that he broadcast and we would read The Daily Progress and that was really the extent of what you got until Walter Cronkite came on.  And parents kept kids out of that discussion for the most part.  I think when they had discussions about race or anything that was controversial at all or upsetting, they sent you out to play.  So it was like you grew up somewhat sheltered from the reality of that.  That’s what I recall.  At least in elementary school.  [00:05:00] And then later as we were growing up, all the Black students in high school, not all of them because we had some at Lane, were at Burley.  And of course, Lane was Lane, and we had, you know I can remember the Woodfolk brothers, Ronald and Roland Woodfolk, who were incredible athletes.  And then Frankie Allen, and there were a group of others, but it certainly wasn’t all of the Black children because Burley was functioning every day.  And when you listened to the school lunch menus, you got the Burley menu and you got the Lane High School menu every single day.  And it would be sometimes the same, sometimes different.  

GG: [00:05:56] So where did your family go to church? 

RG: [00:05:59] First Methodist Church.  [00:06:00] And I do not remember a single Black person in that church.  But I wasn’t a be there every Sunday on the front row kind of kid.  I resisted, because I didn’t like going to church.

GG: [00:06:22] Were your parents activists in -- 

RG: [00:06:26] No.

GG: [00:06:27] -- any dimension? 

RG: [00:06:28] No.  And you know, I’ve thought about that.  My mother volunteered for lots of things but not activism.  She wasn’t an activist.  And I would imagine that my father, if he was inclined to be that way, couldn’t be that way because he was a broadcaster and he was a newscaster, and it wouldn’t have mixed well with his job at WCHV.   [00:07:00] 

PL: [00:07:02] Can I interrupt here for a moment?  So, excuse me I’m going to cough for a minute.  Okay, so when, I guess Annie Valentine had an earlier conversation with you and she mentioned that you remembered some kids, friends of yours perhaps, left to go to Rock Hill Academy.  So can you talk about that?

RG: [00:07:34] About the time that integration was occurring, and I guess that would have coincided with some period of time after basement schools were dissolved and kids were going back to school, the parents of white kids who did not want their children to go to school with Black children formed Rock Hill Academy.  And you know, the remnants of that are still visible.  [00:08:00] I don’t know what the building is used for now, but there were a group of people who I knew who went there.  And some of them later didn’t go there anymore and they came back into the public school system.  I don’t have any idea what was going on with Albemarle at the same time, we just weren’t in touch with that.  But I do remember that occurring.  And it was in response to, you know, we want to stay...  

PL: [00:08:31] But you don’t remember discussions among the kids about that or why they were doing that, or...?

RG: [00:08:36] No.  You know, I really don’t remember kids in school sitting around talking about race.  I’m sure it happened, I just have no recollection of the conversation.  If I can, I think [00:09:00] my recollection, the things that I saw, that I remember asking questions about were growing up in Charlottesville and riding the bus going downtown.  The white line in the back of the bus and all of the Black people riding the bus, sitting in the back of the bus.  Because I can remember getting up to offer a -- the bus was full, and there was an older Black woman standing.  You know, making her way down from the front of the bus to the back of the bus and I got up and offered her my seat.  And I was about 10 years old or so, couldn’t have been much older than that, because that’s what I had been taught to do.  And she, you know, kindly thanked me but continued on to the back of the bus.  And I remember I thought that was odd.  And then it dawned on me, it was like I’d been riding the bus and never noticing.  [00:10:00] Suddenly I realized that all these people are sitting in the back of the bus and there’s none of them sitting where we’re sitting.  And then you know, you would go in Leggett downtown and there was a white water fountain and a colored water fountain.  There was a restroom for colored only painted on the wall.  And literally years later it was painted over and you could still see it through the white paint.  You remember when Leggett was downtown?  And then Woolworth, the lunch counter.  There was a place where Black people eating lunch sat and white people sat in the best seats like at the counter.  And that was never challenged, it just unfolded that way day after day after day after day.  And I don’t remember Timberlake’s being that way.  You know, used to go into Timberlake’s to eat lunch with my mother [00:11:00] and I actually don’t remember ever seeing that occur there.  So things like that made it obvious and you say, “Well, mom why?  What’s with that?”

GG: [00:11:15] So how old would you have been when you first observed this?  When it first became clear to you?

RG: [00:11:22] I would say probably, George, between five and 10 somewhere, I think.  

GG: [00:11:34] Vinegar Hill.  Do you remember the razing?

RG: [00:11:38] I do, I do.  We were in Lane and they razed Vinegar Hill.  And I remember there was some conversation about that, the fact that all these people are going to be displaced and they’re going to Garrett Street, if I recall correctly.  And there was conversation about that and there was unrest around that [00:12:00] in Charlottesville.  And also they closed Lane High School because a population of rats invaded the high school when Vinegar Hill was razed.  So I’m assuming those rats were part of all the poverty that was on that hillside.  And I mean, it was all a predominantly, I think a slum landlord situation where people were living there and they didn’t own where they were living.  Somebody else owned it.  They paid them rent and I’m sure they paid them too much rent, but when they tore all of that down there was an influx in Lane High School.  

GG: [00:12:44] Remind me --

PL: [00:12:44] You weren’t at Lane?

RG: [00:12:45] I was.

PL: [00:12:46] In those years?

RG: [00:12:48] When Vinegar Hill was razed I was.  Yeah, I had to be in it.  At least the eighth...  Actually it was later because my year in the senior follies, we had a skit that involved [00:13:00] a gigantic rat so it had to be as a result of that.  Because kids were opening their lockers and there’d be a rat sitting there eating their sandwich.  Yes.

PL: [00:13:11] So what happened when they closed Lane?  What happened to --

RG: [00:13:15] Oh well they just closed it long enough to fumigate the building.  So maybe we got out for four days or you know, I just don’t remember that.  But I know I had to be old enough to be in the senior follies so that would have been 1967.  Does that coincide with Vinegar Hill?  Yeah.  And you know, the Jefferson School wasn’t part of the picture in that stage of the game.  So I want to say that was the elementary school, is that right? 

PL: [00:13:48] It got switched from being a high school and went back to being an elementary school.  Am I right with that?

RG: [00:13:54] And so Burley supplanted, yeah okay. [00:14:00]

PL: [00:14:01] What do you remember about Burley?

RG: [00:14:03] Nothing.  Other than the fact that the football team were the Burley Bears.  I mean we never went there, we never went to a football game.  We never went to a track meet.  The two schools didn’t compete.  Just like Albemarle, Lane was an island unto itself and Burley to itself and Albemarle to itself.  

GG: [00:14:24] Nobody wanted to be a loser of that game.

RG: [00:14:27] Oh I tell you, had we competed against Burley they probably would have wiped us out.  I mean,      Roosevelt Grier  [sic?] was there and they had some big guys.  And you know, it’s interesting.  Sports always seems to be sort of a common denominator that everybody connects on.  And I am surprised, thinking about it now, that that didn’t occur in those days.  That the coaches at Lane weren’t actively recruiting Black players from Burley to come to Lane.  [00:15:00] And maybe they did, it would be interesting to know whether Willie Barnett remembered that or not.  And he’s long since gone, but...

PL: [00:15:09] Well maybe this will help if I can offer a little context from what we’ve learned, is that Burley didn’t close until 1967.  But the schools were open, and Black students could, you know, come to Lane.  I want to make sure I get this right.  But once they got to Lane, if they were athletes, they had one year of ineligibility where they couldn’t play.

RG: [00:15:44] Oh, isn’t that crazy.

PL: [00:15:47] So that’s right. 

RG: [00:15:50] So that was to keep them from coming there. 

PL: [00:15:53] Well we’re still trying to figure out if it was that or if it was some rule that was, you know, regional.

RG: [00:15:59] You can find that out [00:16:00] from the Virginia High School League probably.  Right up on Pantops.  

PL: [00:16:05] The Virginia, say that again please?

RG: [00:16:07] Yeah, the Virginia High School League is headquartered right there and they would probably have some record of that.  If you were on State Farm Boulevard, our bank is right on the corner of State Farm Boulevard and 250.  So if you go to the next group of buildings that face State Farm Boulevard, the Virginia High School League is in there.  Or was in there.  

PL: [00:16:32] Okay, so we know there was some Black students who came to Lane and couldn’t play.  And you know, football was a real interest to them in terms of building a career, and so they applied to go back to Burley.  And so --

RG: [00:16:52] I did not know that.

PL: [00:16:55] Yeah so there were, you know, a handful of Black students [00:17:00] who came to Lane but a lot of them chose to stay at Burley until Burley closed.  And then, there was, I think probably the year that you graduated, the following year -

RG: [00:17:12] There was no eligibility requirement anymore.

PL: [00:17:15] Well once Burley closed, you know.  I hope I’ve got that right.  (inaudible) Lorenzo have I got that right?  Yes?

LORENZO DICKERSON: [00:17:26] I believe so, I’ve heard that for sure.  And of course you had to apply to go to Lane to begin with, just to go to school.

RG: [00:17:34] And I didn’t know that.  I didn’t know what that process was.  But it makes me think that people like Frankie Allen, who was at Venable, he did come straight to Lane.  He just stayed with, you know, and he was accepted by all.  A) because he was about that much taller than everybody and he was an incredible [00:18:00] basketball player.  And I think he would have been accepted no matter what.  He was just a guy you could connect with really easily.  

PL: [00:18:11] And did you know Kent Merritt?  

RG: [00:18:13] I did, but not well.  And he was younger than us.  Kent was an incredible athlete too.  

GG: [00:18:20] He graduated in ’70.

RG: [00:18:22] Yeah and then went to Virginia and played.  Steve Felger, do you remember the Felgers?  

GG: [00:18:27] I don’t. 

RG: [00:18:28] Steve was on that team.  And Kent and was the other... 

PL: [00:18:36] So what you’re really saying, I think what you’re saying, correct me if I’m wrong, but Frankie, people like Frankie Allen and Kent were accepted because they were such strong athletes?

RG: [00:18:51] Absolutely.  And you know, I don’t remember Frankie being an incredible student.  He was just [00:19:00] an incredible guy, period.  I mean he was somebody that --

PL: [00:19:04] So in that sense would you say that sports really was important in terms of desegregating --

RG: [00:19:16] Oh absolutely.  I mean if there were no sports, I think the integration that occurred would have been way more painful.  Because why would anybody want to go through that?  Why would a Black parent want their child to be subjected to a bunch of white racist behavior?  I mean, why would you ever do that?  And I think it probably took incredible fortitude for a Black mother in particular to tell her child, “You’re going to be going to school with mostly white kids and they may not all be nice to you.”  And you know, [00:20:00] that just must have been incredible.  It puts a lump in your throat to think about what that might have been like.  

GG: [00:20:11] We’ve had Black people who were wanting to bring a white girl to a dance, got called into the principal’s office and told you can’t do --

RG: [00:20:27] Oh yeah and I mean, that sort of thing, you know, how many years later was there any kind of acceptance at all of mixed race dating of any kind?  And you know, I’m trying to think of what you would see that people didn’t make a comment about and if there was any area like that, it was probably white and Asian didn’t seem to threaten people for whatever reason. [00:21:00] But in Charlottesville, the Black and the white, the issue of dating was just completely out of the question.

GG: [00:21:09] Well my daughter [Louise?], who is now 57 so I don’t really remember what year it was, but for the senior prom she was invited by a Black boy.  And she came and talked to us about it, said fine, and you know, the guy came by the house and we met him.  I don’t think they had any sort of long-standing relationship but this would have been in the ’70s.

RG: [00:21:45] Yeah and see in the ’60s that just would not have happened, I don’t think.  At least I didn’t see it.  And you know, we didn’t have a big Hispanic population [00:22:00] in Charlottesville at that time.  We had a small Asian population.  But yeah, that would have been the Litmus test for you know, how do you really feel about this?  Well I’m going to make it real for you now and your son is going to be dating a Black girl or your Black daughter is going to be dating a white guy, how’s that going to be?  And that would have been galvanizing, to say the least.  And that was exactly the sentiment of people who went to Rock Hill, parents who formed that was, we don’t want any kind of mixing with any other group other than the ones that we feel comfortable with.  

GG: [00:22:53] That was the big issue?

RG: [00:22:55] Yup.  And I know [00:23:00] we didn’t even discuss, my parents didn’t even offer for me to go to Rock Hill.  I went to Lane, all my friends went to Lane, there was no question about where you were going to go.  It wasn’t even a conversation, there was never a conversation that was had about it.  And I guess you had to be a little bit wealthy to go to Rock Hill because they had to form the school and pay for it.

GG: [00:23:25] You know, tuition was in the hundreds though, not the thousands.

RG: [00:23:28] Yeah but in the hundreds in 1960 was substantial, I guess.

PL: [00:23:36] So you were an athlete yourself, right?

RG: [00:23:38] No, not really.  No.  I mean I played JV basketball at Lane and I was at best a seat on the bench. (laughs) I had no athletic talent whatsoever.  

GG: [00:23:52] (inaudible)

RG: [00:23:53] I had aspirations of being one but I had no talent.

GG: [00:23:58] What about interracial violence?  [00:24:00] We’ve gotten sort of mixed reports on that.  What were your observations?

RG: [00:24:06] I saw two Black girls get in a fight in the hallway at Lane.  One was a little bitty thing, and she beat the stink out of the other girl.  (laughs) And they got sent to the principal’s office and they were branded as troublemakers.  I remember that.  Either one of the two of them, as I recall, I don’t even know their names, would get into fights.  You know, they were just tough girls.  But I don’t remember ever seeing a Black person fighting a white person in Lane High School.  And in those days when two guys got in a fight, you ended up in Willie Barnett’s office at the gym.  And he took you in the weight room and he put boxing gloves on the two guys and shut the door, and you could beat each other’s [00:25:00] brains out.  And that was the way violence was dealt with, in my memory.  Football players, God no.  I want to say      Donald Thacker      and George Foussekis, and you can ask George about it, got in a fight in practice and Willie put them or Theodose, somebody, Dave Cooke maybe, put them in the weight room, shut the door with boxing gloves on, and they just went at each other until they couldn’t fight anymore.  

GG: [00:25:33] That’s a story I haven’t --

RG: [00:25:35] Well and these things get, you know bear in mind I’m not a firsthand witness, so you know what happens when people tell the same story five or six times, it grows a bit.  But you know, Willie would do that.

GG: [00:25:49] Could you tell us in some depth about your experience with the Human Rights Committee?  What that was all about, how you got tapped [00:26:00] for, what your experience with it was?

RG: [00:26:05] You know, went in the Air Force after flunking out of Virginia Tech.  And I remember Vietnam was going on, my parents were incredibly upset.  I got drafted.  They got more upset.  My father took me to visit the recruiters and I enlisted in the Air Force and I had to give, you know, two extra years for making that choice and went into the electronics career field.  And I don’t know how I ended up there.  I just tested well for that.  Knew nothing about electronics.  (laughs) Went to basic training, ended up in Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois and ultimately became a missile electronics instructor.  So I’m in the classroom teaching one day, the person I [00:27:00] reported to came and interrupted the class and said, “Something urgent, you need to come to my office.”  And I went to the office and they said, “You’ve been assigned 30-day temporary duty assignment.  And you and Captain      Othello Jones     , a Black lawyer, are going to have to be at the Champaign Urbana Airport at this time.  A plane’s going to come to pick you up and we can’t tell you where you’re going, just be there.”  And I left the classroom and I never ever went back and taught missile electronics again.  And the school for teaching that was a year long, so it was like a whole year for nothing.  Because I maybe taught four or five classes.  Got on the plane, met this Black lawyer.  He didn’t know where we were going, I didn’t know where we were going.  And the little jet flew us to, as I recall, Wichita Falls, Texas, and there was [00:28:00] a riot going on, on base.  And this all followed Travis Air Force Base, if you Google that, that was where I think the first outbreak of racial violence occurred in this country where there were, you know, buildings were burned down and it was a bad situation.  I was in air training command, and I don’t remember how many bases were in air training command, but we were presented with a team of people led by a lieutenant colonel.  And we were commissioned by a three-star general who was a guy named General Simler, who later was killed in a plane crash getting his fourth star.  And we were to be flown from base to base to base and find out what the mood on the base was, write a report, give it to a secretarial pool, go to the next base, they would type it up here and it would get to us eventually.  [00:29:00] And we did that for quite a long time.  And 30 days became 60 days became 90 days, we made our report and at that point we were called a, we were a human relations team.  And word sort of spread that there were a group of listeners coming.  And we would get to a base and there would be a room full of predominantly Black soldiers, Black airmen, who wanted to be interviewed.  Who wanted to talk about what was bothering them.  And we were simply there to ask questions and take notes, and we did.  And that morphed into the Department of Defense creating a race relations institute in Cocoa Beach, Florida.  And we went there, it was Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard all together.  And it was, [00:30:00] as I remember, like an eight week school and taught by a group of sociologists and others.  And we came back from that with a program, and in the interim, I’d participated in a writing of a course for air training command at the University of Texas with a couple of professors there.  And the armed services formed a group called Social Actions, which was to address drug abuse and race relations.  And I was on the race relations side.  We taught every week three consecutive six hour days dealing only with race relations.  And you asked explosive questions in a mixed group.  Every single person in the armed services had to go through this training.  Generals, [00:31:00] privates, airmen, you know, everybody.  And the first day you would come in civilian clothes.  You would all be siting there, and we would be asking questions like, the door opens, your daughter walks in with a Black guy, how do you feel about that?  They’re going to be dating.  And I mean, we would sometimes almost have fights.  I mean it would get so charged.  And so, a young man would be arguing with a guy about 50 years old sitting next to him.  The second day everybody came in uniform and the guy that he had been arguing with was like the base commander.  He was a two star general and he’d be sitting there the next day.  And you got this interesting juxtaposition between emotion and fear based on the structure in the military.  So it was quite an experience.  And I never returned to missiles again.  And when I got out at the end of [00:32:00] four years I was still doing that.  

PL: [00:32:03] Why do you think you were chosen for that?

RG: [00:32:05] Well you know, it’s interesting how (laughs) that worked.  It’s kind of like being in missile electronics.  To this day I’ve never seen a real Minuteman missile.  And I was teaching people who had been in the field 27, 28 years.  I was doing Minuteman-III and I was talking about one little part of the guidance and control system.  So I knew that, and they didn’t know that, but they knew everything else.  So in much the same fashion, I had gotten selected as airman of the month for the base for doing something.  I don’t even remember what it was.  But I got selected and the general presents you with a little trophy and they put your picture in the base newspaper.  And you know, I remember I got a car and a motel room out of (laughs) the deal.  Well the car was, (laughs) I had to give it back but you know, [00:33:00] they gave you some perks.  And so I figure that I got selected because this mixed team, which ranged from a lieutenant colonel down to me and I was the lowest ranking guy, we had Blacks on the team.  We had Hispanics on the team.  We had white middle class people on the team and you know, obviously I was one of those.  And so I think they said, “We gotta have a young guy and do you have somebody?” And the general probably said, “Hey yeah, I just awarded this guy airman of the month.  He’d be perfect.” And that’s the only thing I can figure.  That’s how it happened. 

GG: [00:33:46] So how did that change?  How did that experience over several years of working race relations, how did that change the way you experience race relations?

RG: [00:33:59] Well you know, I used [00:34:00] to sit around and think you know, here’s a white kid from Charlottesville, Virginia with no background whatsoever.  I mean I hadn’t even finished college at that point.  I had no background and here I am doing this.  It was like a bucket of ice water on a winter’s day thrown in your face.  I mean it was just, the reactions to the things that were going on.  So I think I got somewhat hardened by it.  You know, I got shocked and hardened and then I also was working very closely with older Black guys who gave me their perspective.  Because we were in the plane, we had our own plane and so we were flying place to place.  And we had writing desks in the plane and were making notes and writing, and it was just an incredibly inspiring experience.  But it was shocking also for me, I think. [00:35:00]

GG: [00:35:01] Has anyone ever written a history of this?

RG: [00:35:03] There was an article in Parade Magazine, do you remember Parade Magazine?  There was an article in Parade Magazine about that I guess the DoD presented to them.  And I remember that, and you know, I don’t remember...

GG: [00:35:21] When would that have been about?

RG: [00:35:23] Well George, let’s see.  It would have been somewhere, and my memory for dates is horrible, somewhere around 1970-ish maybe.  Seventy-one, because I turned 21 while I was in the Air Force.  

PL: [00:35:44] Can I return for a minute to athletics at Lane?  Did you go to a lot of games?

RG: [00:35:49] Oh I did, went to all the games.

PL: [00:35:52] So football, basketball...

RG: [00:35:53] Yeah and in those days, with the football team being as successful as it was, the attendance at a Lane game [00:36:00] probably was greater than a UVA game.  I mean the whole community came to that.  

PL: [00:36:07] And you know, do you remember were there parents of Black students who were on the teams who would come to the games? 

RG: [00:36:16] Oh yeah.

PL: [00:36:17] Did they just sit anywhere or -–

RG: [00:36:19] They did.  I don’t remember there ever being a separate place for Black parents to sit at a football game.  I just remember when there was a football game everybody was focused on cheering for the team.  

PL: [00:36:33] And people wouldn’t have then been conscious of the race of individual players, it was just a matter of rooting for the team?

RG: [00:36:44] Oh I think, I mean you couldn’t miss it.  The Black guy runs off the field, he’s a Black guy.  But it was the success of the team, the skill of the team.  Just the everybody wanted to beat Lane.  Everybody. [00:37:00] And nobody could beat them.  Nobody.  It was just amazing.

PL: [00:37:06] What were some of the schools you played?  Do you remember this?

RG: [00:37:09] Highland Springs, Thomas Jefferson, and Richmond.  Douglas Freeman.  I’d have to look in the annual to see the schedule but yeah, we played predominantly those kind of teams.  I remember we played Loudoun County one time.  And they had to travel so far from Winchester that parents agreed to put the players up.  You know, after the game they had to have a place to go.  And we got a young white guy who came, and I want to say that the score was something like 70 to nothing. (laughs) Of course it was horrible.  They just beat the living daylights out of that school but they were nice kids.  [00:38:00] (laughs) And everybody put them up and they went back home. 

GG: [00:38:06] We’ve heard a little bit about Lane in the late ’60s and then following a little bit further until they were able to transition to Charlottesville High School.  They talked about it being overcrowded and this gave rise to dangerous encounters in the school bathrooms.  Particularly involving some kids who were in a motorcycle gang.  

RG: [00:38:35] Wow, I didn’t know anything about that.  Yeah.  That wouldn’t have been tolerated while I was there.  You know, growing up I think all the way back to elementary school.  I remember sliding down the banisters in school, and the principal caught me.  Came around the corner as I popped off the banister.  I landed in his arms.  And he took me to his office, [00:39:00] sat me down, called my mother.  I’m sure my mother said, “Whatever you want to do with him.  Help yourself.”  And he spanked me.  And I mean, I was in elementary school at Venable.  And never slid the banister again, I mean it worked really well.  And it wasn’t a brutal beating.  But it was, I got spanked, it was embarrassing.  And you know, went back and told my friends.  I said, “You know that sliding down the banister thing we’re doing, it’s probably not a good idea to do it.”  Because (laughs) he shows up, Mr.      Robinson      was his name.  And so by the time we got to high school, I mean those coaches were tough.  Nichols, they didn’t tolerate any kind of, if you backtalked a teacher or were ugly in any way, you went straight to his office and you know, you’d sit there all day long.  I mean I never had to go to the principal’s [00:40:00] office but a lot of kids did.  It just wasn’t tolerated.  And parents supported teachers and administration to do whatever they needed to do.  

GG: [00:40:13] So how have your views on race relations changed since the 1970s or ’60s?  How have you matured? 

RG: [00:40:25] Well I mean I think I am aware that, I was trying to think, it seemed like Annie asked me this question.  And I gave her, I don’t know why I used this analogy, but I said life is like the Encyclopedia Britannica.  It’s 24 volumes in 1950 and it’s 24 volumes in 2022 as far as I know.  And so what happens with all the stuff that [00:41:00] happens that would have made it 100 volumes?  And the answer is, it get     s parsed and weeded out and some of it goes by the wayside to make room for new stuff.  And I think our lives are kind of like that.  You know, you are in the thick of something and it gets parsed out over the years.  The difference is, that I think I’m more aware of now, for a Black person it never goes away.  It is part of your culture.  It may not be part of your personal memory but it’s part of your family’s memory.  So you don’t have to go back very many generations to find out that there was oppression, suppression, lack of opportunity, poor treatment.  Somebody in your family has experienced that.  Almost [00:42:00] one hundred percent of the time.  White kids in general, that just doesn’t happen to.  I mean you get in fights with somebody or you have a disagreement but it’s not the same.  And so I think white people can grow to understand and appreciate, to some extent, what the Black experience in America is like.  But we cannot truly get it because it didn’t happen to us.  In fact, we perpetrated.  And you know I think that’s the part that white America has trouble with is saying, because you’ll hear people say, “I never did any of that.  I never treated anybody poorly.  I never mistreated anybody.”  But just like the Black family, you don’t have to go back very many generations to find somewhere in your lineage where somebody did.  And so you own that.  And I don’t know how, obviously [00:43:00] that stuff has got to get reconciled.  And you saw all that issue emerge with the statues.  And I told Annie, I said, “You know, I didn’t want to see the statue taken down.  I don’t want to think about it being melted down.”  But it has nothing to do with race.  It has nothing to do with the civil war to me.  It has everything to do with growing up.  It’s my experience in Charlottesville.  The living nativity scene was at the base of that statue every Christmas in my formative years.  And we always went there and stood around and looked at the nativity scene.  And so Lee Park was the place where that happened.  And so you know, that’s my feeling about the statue.  When you talk to Dickie Tayloe his feeling about the statue is different than mine.  But I totally get it.  I mean, you’re a Black grandparent [00:44:00] and your grandchild is with you and he says, “Grandad, who is that man?”  And what do you tell him?  What are you supposed to tell him?  He’s nothing to you.  And he’s never going to be anything to you.  And I get that.  But it’s an emotionally, for whites for whatever reason, it’s an emotionally charged issue.  

PL: [00:44:20] So growing up were you conscious that that statue was of Robert E. Lee?  Or was it just a place where you went?

RG: [00:44:25] Sure.  Because all the elementary school kids had to go there and write a story about it.  We had to go see it and we learned about it as a piece of statuary.  We learned about the significance of how it was made.  We of course studied the Civil War in grade school.  

GG: [00:44:46] The War of Northern Aggression.

RG: [00:44:48] Yes that’s right.  I mean you got the southern version of it.  Which is why most people in this area would have been, if they’d picked a side, they almost always, I want to be a Confederate.  [00:45:00] You know, and that stuff just seeps into you.  Nobody sits you down and says, “Son we’re going to be a deep southerner.  This is the way it’s going to be.”  It just seeps into you.  Like light through a crack in the door.  

GG: [00:45:20] From what you personally have experienced, do you think that there was more violence today over race issues than there was 30 years ago? 

RG: [00:45:33] Oh absolutely.  Absolutely.  Well, I can’t definitively answer that because I don’t know.  It’s a news item now.  It wasn’t always a news item.  In Selma, Alabama, violence was all the time I’m sure.  In Charlottesville, Virginia it wasn’t the case.  At least I didn’t know about it.  But today I think it’s escalated.  I think people are [00:46:00] emboldened by a number of things, white and Black.  It’s just a generally more violent time we live in today.  

GG: [00:46:11] Phyllis do you have additional questions?

PL: [00:46:17] I don’t really think so, not at this moment.  But I’ll bet Lorenzo has some.  (laughs)

GG: [00:46:25] Lorenzo you always come up with the best end of the day questions.

LD: [00:46:29] (laughs) I think I actually only had one.  I was curious if you had teachers at Lane that stood out to you, and if you remember any of those first Black teachers at Lane High School?

RG: [00:46:44] I don’t remember a single Black teacher when I was there, but I had a lot of teachers who stood out to me.  I mean, I had an algebra teacher who, I guess I wasn’t doing very well in algebra [00:47:00] and she said, “Well you need to stay after school today.”  And I remember saying, “I can’t stay, I gotta go home.”  And she said, “Oh no, no I’ve called your mother and you’re going to stay and when I’m finished with you I’ll take you home.”  And that’s exactly what happened.  But I don’t remember a Black teacher.  There may have been one in Lane but I just don’t remember.  That’s an interesting question.  I gotta ask some others about that, whether there were.  The athletic department was all white.  The history department was all white.  The English department was all white.  I just don’t remember any, Lorenzo.  Not at Lane.  I wonder how many white teachers were at Burley.  I don’t even know that.  [00:48:00] 

LD: [00:48:02] Once it became an integrated middle school, there was only two Black teachers there then.  Once it switched over.  There were two Black teachers at Lane, the first couple that came a little after the students desegregated.  Teresa Walker, Price-Walker, or Walker-Price rather, and Lyria Hailstork, who is Roosevelt Brown’s sister.  

RG: [00:48:36] The first name rings a slight bell with me, the second one not.

GG: [00:48:41] George Tramontin --

RG: [00:48:48] That’s it, George.  I couldn’t remember his first name.

GG: [00:48:51] He told me that there was a speech therapist who [00:49:00] served the school system when he was the superintendent.  And he said that white parents would not let their children go to speech correction because it was a Black teacher. 

RG: [00:49:16] Really?

GG: [00:49:18] Yeah.  He just shook his head and said, “I cannot understand what must go on in the parent’s head that they won’t let their child get speech correction because it’s a Black.”  

RG: [00:49:35] You know, I would guess that it was because, particularly then, the Black dialect was different than white dialect.  I mean, there was a difference.  You heard it on the street.  So I would imagine a white parent maybe said, “I don’t want that happening to my kid.”  It doesn’t make it right but I would be willing to bet that [00:50:00] that had something to do with it.  Which again is racist as it can possibly be.  But everything was polarizing.  You know, the only common denominator was sports, I think.  And then it was limited to certain things.  Because we didn’t have a gigantic athletic department in Charlottesville anywhere.  I mean it was football, basketball, baseball, and track, and golf and that was it.  There was no soccer.  There was no lacrosse.  None of that.  

PL: [00:50:36] I guess I would like you to reflect a little bit on how much progress you think we’ve made in Charlottesville.  Or whether we’ve made real progress in terms of larger issues of desegregation and race relations. 

RG: [00:50:55] Well that’s a hard one to answer.  [00:51:00] If you listen to our mayor, who was our mayor, she was very polarizing.  And to her there was no progress.  I think obviously there’s been progress.  It’s not good enough or fast enough, I’m sure, but there is progress.  Now whether that progress is because the boundaries of the law have changed that make it be that way, that certainly is an influence.  But I think in general there is a much broader acceptance, particularly with younger generation of Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians.  You see groups of kids, mixed groups of kids together all the time.  So that would lead me to believe that we have made progress.  [00:52:00] I think it took an awful long time to get to here.  And obviously it’s not right.  You know, people aren’t paid equitably.  Jobs are harder to come by.  I don’t know, I’m not very articulate about that question but clearly some progress has been made.  But it depends on which side of the fence you’re sitting, your vantage point.

GG: [00:52:33] And how tied it is to -- 

PL: [00:52:34] I was going to say, I think you are articulate on that subject so thank you.

RG: [00:52:39] Oh well thanks but...

GG: [00:52:42] I think that the progress, historically, has been tied to the development of middle class.  And Charlottesville still has a remarkably small middle class for non-whites. [00:53:00] There’s the university faculty people who are, you know, paid what they’re paid.  And I would say that that, obviously there are a few more people but that’s the foundation of the Black middle class. 

RG: [00:53:20] Well you know it’s... I was thinking one other thing when I was in the Air Force, there was a Black gentleman who was an academician who was helping us write this course.  And we were somewhere in Mississippi.  So Keesler Air Force Base was in Mississippi so I’m assuming we were down there.  So the front gate of all the bases has a big welcome to whatever base it is.  And if there was violence against any service member in town, [00:54:00] the base commander would very quickly go to the town council and say, “Do you like the money that all of these thousands of people spend in your community?”  And they would say, “Oh yeah, yeah.”  “If this happens again, I will put your town off limits to all of the people on the base.”  So they would close an entire base to an entire community.  And the dollars would just go away.  And so they had the power of economics.  And so we were in a restaurant having a hamburger and we were sitting at a counter.  And his first name was Ben     , and I can’t remember his last name.  And the waitress came and talked to me and took my order, and he was sitting next to me and she never looked at him.  And she started to walk away and I said, “Wait he needs to order.”  And she said, “What do you want?”  And so he ordered what he wanted and we ate.  [00:55:00] And when we finished eating, I saw her throw his plate and silverware in the trash can.  And mine went in the thing they bus the table with.  And that tells you everything you need to know right there.  And that was to me, I said, “God Ben, I can’t believe it.”  And he says, “I’m used to it.”  You know, so I know that’s why I say the Black experience is so different.  And you gotta see something like that to realize what an idiot was standing in front of us, serving us.  That’s a person, you can’t ever change somebody like that.  There’s just nothing you can do.  You could give her an organ and she probably wouldn’t take it, you know?  

GG: [00:55:49] I think you’re right.

RG: [00:55:50] So my theory is that it’s not going to change until you can’t pick one race out from the other.  And when it gets to [00:56:00] the point where you really don’t know who you’re talking to, people will quit putting labels on things.  Which leaves Asians at a distinct disadvantage, if you think about it.  

GG: [00:56:12] Yeah, I think so.  We have kept you too long.

RG: [00:56:17] Oh and I’ve enjoyed it, I have no particular place to be.  I’m a retired guy.  (laughter)

 

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