AT Shorts: Interviews on Race
Four Archive Tucson interviewees talk about their experiences with racism: Joel Turner describes a formative experience with Tucson police, Barbara Lewis talks about different responses within Tucson’s black community to the segregated Dunbar School, Charles Kendrick takes us through his first day at the University of Arizona, and Shad Blair describes a lynching he witnessed as a child in Tennessee.
If you want to hear more oral histories that discuss race in Tucson, we recommend checking out the Sugar Hill Oral History Project.
Image: Joel Turner, top left (photo THS Badger Foundation); Barbara Lewis, top right (photo AZPM); Charles Kendrick, bottom left (AZ Star); Shad Blair, bottom right (AZ Star).
JOEL TURNER: Our teachers at Dunbar tried to gear us for Tucson High. You're going to Tucson High and things are going to be different. Because they're all white. Don't go up there acting. Put your best foot forward. But you've got to deal with the white people, and you know they don't want you.
ANDERSON: That was Joel Turner talking about leaving the segregated Dunbar School, and getting ready to attend an integrated Tucson High in 1946. And this is Archive Tucson from Special Collections at the University of Arizona Libraries. I'm Aengus Anderson.
Now, our moment, does not exist in a temporal bubble. We are the inheritors of history—a lot of history, much of it unrecorded and invisible. Whether we recognize it or not, that history affects us today. Nobody would dispute that our technology is directly built upon the work of yesterday’s scientists and inventors. Our culture is no different. The injustice of 17th-century slave law is here, today. Dampened by the Civil War, dampened by the Civil Rights Act, yes, but manifest in the distribution of wealth and opportunity, in medical care and incarceration rates and, of course, in violence. And you simply cannot form an accurate picture of what is happening today—you cannot make today better—without looking backward.
TURNER: They gave us good advice. Well, the main skill was to keep your mouth closed and stay out of-- and don't get close to the police. Stay away from the police. Never trust the police. I don't trust them now. That's because of the way I grew up.
I think I must have been about 12 or 11. I might have been 10. But I bought my own bicycle. I was shining shoes at Jimmy's right on—right there at Sixth and Congress. And right down the street, you had Ronstadt’s Hardware. On Sixth Avenue. And right up from Ronstadt’s Hardware, you had a bicycle motorcycle shop. And I went in there and I had $25 that I had made. I couldn't find a bicycle in there for that. But they had a white guy there with a bicycle that he was trying to sell. And he sold it to me. And I had enough sense to get a bill of sales from him. Back in those days, you had to get a license on your bicycle. It was a little copper ring they put around your bicycle with the number on it.
I had had the bicycle a while. Went down to Russell and Shepard. Russell and Shepherd was a bicycle shop on Fourth Avenue. And I went down there to get that license. So they hemmed and hawed with me about the license. And they called the police—I don't know they'd called the police. And the police came and told me the bike was stolen. And that I stole it. I told them, no, I didn't steal the bike. So they took me down to the police station. I showed them the bill of sale. They said, “you wrote that.” Well, I didn't write the bill of sale. They knew damn well I didn't write that.
And they took me downstairs—two policemen in a black room with a ceiling light hanging down, just like you see in the movies—and interrogated me. Oh, they kept me down there all afternoon. Told me they were going to send me to Fort Grant [juvenile detention]. And I was scared to death. Eventually, about seven o'clock, they let me go home, and took my bike. And apparently, they had contacted my mother because she never said anything, but I knew that she knew something. But she never said anything. So I didn't have my bike. But I hated policemen. I have never liked a policeman since then.
About a year later on a Saturday, my mother told me it was—she said, you get cleaned up and don't go anywhere. Stay here. And eventually, a policeman came. And she said, go with him. Well, they had already contacted her. So he drove all over town with me. And I didn't say nothing to him. I just sat there. I was wondering, what is this guy up to? You know, what is he up to? And he eventually took me to a place—I don't know where it was now. But they had nothing but bicycles there. And he let me out there, and they gave me back my bicycle.
ANDERSON: We record oral history because it preserves stories about lived experience and about the feelings people remember and carry with them for the rest of their lives. Joel did not publish an autobiography. It's unlikely he will appear in a written history of Tucson. He does not speak for anyone other than himself. Yet stories like his let us visit the past, expand our sense of experience, broaden history beyond traditional sources, and look at the present in a different light. Often, these interviews expand empathy.
BARBARA LEWIS: I felt good there. I felt we were cared for. We were respected as children, accepted, and recognized. And our motto was, be the best.
ANDERSON: This is Barbara Lewis. She attended Dunbar several years after Joel Turner.
LEWIS: And I think we all tried very hard to be that because what was said was: you're black, and you have to be better than anybody else to be able to get even the lowest job, or whatever there. You have to be better. So we were actually. Over half of that school produced professional people. It was like, listen, you need to make sure your fingernails are clean. Always. Always. Hair. Everything neat about you. Everything low key about you in appearance, but sharp brain-wise. And it was low key. We were negroes then.
Now my father, he got a writeup in the paper and some people hating him because his criticism of Dunbar and everything was that it was a subjugated school. So then everybody came down on him—everybody I know—for saying that because there's the beloved principal, Mr. Maxwell. And he was wonderful, I can say. But he was doing the best he knew how to keep us going. And, yeah, we were. I don't know if any other school in the city when the superintendent visited that the students had to stand up, bow, and go, “good morning, Mr. Morrow.” Now if that doesn't show you something. I know other kids at other schools didn't do that. But we did.
ANDERSON: It's so easy to map this interview onto today. The double standards, the tension in how to respond to injustice, and people's stories cuts in all directions, which can make them uncomfortable. Here's Charles Kendrick, who enrolled in the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy in 1950.
CHARLES KENDRICK: Well, my first day on campus the worst day of my life. When I signed up for ROTC—I'm make a career out of the Air Force. By the time I got in, you know, I make a living from it. But Colonel Donaldson—I'll call his name—head of the ROTC, walked out of that line—straight line, it’d be about two blocks long—stopped in front of me. He said “from here on back, get in this line over here. Get in the army ROTC.”
ANDERSON: Is that because you were black? Or is that just--
KENDRICK: I was the only black in line. I was the only black in line. Was nobody up there but me. So he stopped right in front of me. My plans for a career in the military was gone, just that quick. Now cafeteria, at noon time, same day, and I'm standing in line, they wait on everybody but me. People behind me, they start waiting on them. So they wouldn't serve me in the cafeteria. But what really hurt most of all, when I would register for employee aid, I'm signing up for my deal, discount here. "Who are you?" My dad work with the university. "Oh, what does he do?" I said, he works maintenance. "What kind of job he got?" I said, he's a janitor. He sat back down in his chair and told me: janitor's kid do not count. My dad worked as a janitor there for the president of the university—Harvill, President Harvill and President McCormick—and I never got a penny of scholarship aid. So that still hurts.
ANDERSON: Oral histories take you where you don't expect to go. They're a reminder that you know nothing about the lives of people you may walk past every day. Shad Blair spent most of his life in Tucson, but grew up in Tennessee.
SHAD BLAIR: I've seen a lot happen here. Yeah, I've seen a black man hung by his neck.
ANDERSON: That would be back in Tennessee, or was that in Arizona?
BLAIR: No, that was in Tennessee. This guy was with a white gal, and she told it, and they caught him one night, and tied him up until the next morning. They they went down in front of the courthouse, and tied a rope to the tree, and hung him. No, it wasn't the courthouse, it was in front of the church in the country. And I hid behind a tree to see what they're going to do to the boy, and they strung him up and hung him. Put him on a horse, slapped the horse, and the horse went running, and that's how he got hung. With a rope around him and then they tied it to a tree. I've seen a lot.
ANDERSON: This is going to sound like a dumb question, but--
BLAIR: No, there's nothing dumb. You might get a stupid answer. [LAUGHTER]
ANDERSON: No, I probably won't. I don't know. I mean, I just wonder, how can you ever, like, feel—I don't know, just anything other than fear and disgust with white people after seeing something like that?
BLAIR: I'm a Christian. I forgive, and I try to forget. That's why. Because the only perfect man who ever walked this earth was Jesus Christ. And the people he went round, and healed, and gave sight back to, and worked the impossible to, they were too frightened. Spit on him and said, hang him, kill him, crucify him. That motivates me. It only happened to the good people. The bad people, nothing happened to them.
ANDERSON: We want to banish these stories into the past. To say, we have the internet, we've mapped the genome, and pretend that the world of lynch mobs is somehow as far away as the pyramids. But it's right there behind us. And in some ways, it's still right here.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and concision, but you can listen to the full unedited audio at archivetucson.com. Also, we highly recommend listening to Sadie Shaw's Sugar Hill oral history project, which you can find on Soundcloud.