Description:
Anita Arnold talks about life.
Transcript:
PAT GRIZZARD: Okay, we’ll get ready to [sic] start the interview. [pause] Okay. Now, do you know how you’re family ended up down in Oklahoma?
ANITA ARNOLD: I grew up around my mother’s family, and, uh, those were the Winrows [sp?].
PG: Okay.
AA: They came to Oklahoma from Murfreesboro—my grandfather came from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. And, my grandmother, um, her side came from Arkansas near Little Rock. So, that’s my maternal side.
PG: Okay.
AA: And on my father’s side, um… I’m not quite sure where they came from but I believe it was Texas. They settled in Clearview, Oklahoma. And, you know, my mother’s people were in and around Tecumseh, Earlsboro, Seminole.
PG: Okay.
AA: And Shawnee. [pause] So I have a lot of family.
PG: Uh-huh.
AA: Yes. On my mother’s side, there were thirteen of them.
PG: Wow!
AA: And on my dad’s side, there were twelve of them. So when you think about all of the ones that were born to all of those and they have the—I have lots of family.
PG: So, correct me if I am mistaken. Thirteen from your mom
AA: Yes.
PG: And twelve from your dad?
AA: Yes.
PG: Oh, wow! So did y’all have big family reunions?
AA: Yes.
PG: Ohhhh, wow.
AA: To this day.
PG: Heyyyy! [chuckles]
AA: In fact, my mother, she just—she’s ninety-seven years old.
PG: That is a blessing!
AA: It is! And, uh, what she was doing last night was getting ready for the 2020 family reunion.
PG: Alright!
AA: On her side we have those every two years. On my dad’s side, every year. And they’re always in Clearview on my dad’s side. They come from all over the country, and gather down there in what used to be the high school in the gym and… they fixed it up, and they have a weekend of, you know, country living almost…
PG: Alright!
AA: But my mother, they try to be a little more sophisticated, and, uh… we gathered in Washington, D.C., in 2018, and, uh… it was quite the deal, you know. We rode on the Potomac in a yacht, and there were about two hundred of us that showed up, you know, and, of course, they were just thrilled to be in the D.C. area, because, you know, you got the African, National African American Museum
PG: Oh, I was going to ask did you all visit there?
AA: Yes, yes.
PG: Oh, wow. How did you like that?
AA: Oh, I been over there several times, so I like it fine.
PG: That’s great!
AA: Uh, I know some other folk over there that are descendants from Oklahoma people. John Hope Franklin, who came out of Rentiesville, his son is the number two guy at the National Memorial, so he took me the first time on a personal tour, and I walked all 400,000 square feet. I couldn’t wait for the van when I got back. So, it was very tiring, but it was very interesting, and it just demonstrates how vast our history is, and still, they don’t have nearly all of the history. So, there’s plenty of room on the local level to, you know, develop African American history locally. I mean, plenty of room. Even though they’ve got all of the—they’ve got about 35,000 artifacts in their archives, you know, which they haven’t even pulled out yet. And they’re still receiving things from around the country.
PG: That is great!
AA: Yeah.
PG: I was fortunate to go [unintelligible], and we went I believe two years ago, might have been a year ago
AA: I remember the trip
PG: And, um, we just saw this vast, I mean, just a small—
AA: portion of the thing. I saw all of it, I think.
PG: I was just so enthused. Now, I wanted to see the Oprah Winfrey was in the [gallery?]—
AA: Yeah. The other.
PG: but it was closed.
AA: Right.
PG: So.
AA: Yeah. It is open I think only when they’re having special events in there.
PG: And they had vendors outside the bus selling their little t-shirts and their little bags…
AA: Right.
PG: I need to get a little bag and a t-shirt.
AA: Right.
PG: [laughs] Yeah.
AA: When you go in the gift store, you know, it’s so crowded in there…
PG: Yeah.
AA: I’m very pleased that two of the books, two of the six books that I wrote are in that gift shop.
PG: Yeah.
AA: At the National Museum.
PG: Well, congratulations! That’s great!
AA: Thank you. You know, I was thrilled that they decided to put them there. Of course, we’ve got a presence there, around Riley Leroy Pitts, the first African American to receive the National Congressional Medal of Honor, so he graduated from Douglass. You know, he’s—the books support that, and then of course, Ralph Ellison graduated from Douglass
PG: Right
AA: So… Ralph Ellison is in there. They’re both in the books. Those were the two people in the book that made them think they should have the book there at the gift shop. So. That’s a blessing. And I’m just real thrilled about that.
[Someone else enters]
PG: Good morning. How are you?
[Unknown]: Fine. Thank you
PG: I’ll be getting with you when I finish with her.
[Unknown]: Okay. Alright
PG: [indistinguishable] technology
[Unknown]: I’m sitting in as your helper
PG: Oh. Okay. Alright. Alright, the next question I have for you…
AA: I do have one brother.
PG: Okay.
AA: We were talking about my mother’s family.
PG: Right. Right.
AA: I have one brother, and I’ve got eight sisters.
PG: Wow!
AA: Two of them are deceased on both sides, because my mother and father didn’t go the entire way, so…
PG: Yes.
AA: I’m the only child they had.
PG: Okay.
AA: And they both remarried, so my dad had four girls, and my mother has seven children, so… including me. So. That’s kinda how it is. So. That explains my siblings.
PG: What is your most memorable place on the northeast side? Of Oklahoma City?
AA: Douglass High School.
PG: Alright! Alright, alright. Douglass!
AA: I tell everybody that all I know is Fredrick A. Douglass schools, because at Earlsboro, the elementary school was Douglass. And when I came up here to junior high school, it was Douglass. And, of course, it was junior and senior high school. Douglass. In fact, this very building here is where I came for junior high school.
PG: Right. I, um… I also attended here when it was FD Moon.
AA: I attended when it was Douglass. That’s all I knew—it was Douglass.
PG: And I also attended Douglass from the 9th to the 12th. The old Douglass, not-- obviously.
AA: They tore down.
PG: Right, right.
AA: Yes, our class was the first sophomore class over there.
PG: Is that right? Okay.
AA: So we went in, right after it was built. We were sophomores by then.
PG: You know, we probably know some of the same people. Mr. Herons?
AA: Of course! I did study under him! And he was my negro history teacher.
PG: Well, when I knew him he was—what was Mr. Herons?—he was in the office at that time.
AA: Right.
PG: Yeah. Ms. Kojone?
AA: Yes. Mr. Moon? He was my principal junior and senior year of high school.
PG: Some of the best—to me, some of the best teachers.
AA: Oh, no question about it. They had—we had such high standards for our teachers.
PG: Yes. Yes. But what I did like was that famous window you pass by, and them boys sitting there looking— right at you!
AA: That’s right. [both laughing] Dick Hooper said they wouldn’t even let him sit on one of the…
PG: Now, that’s what I remember about Douglass.
AA: Right.
PG: Oh, gee. Okay. Well, that’s—we probably already talked about that. What are the fondest, the memories of Douglass, which you probably already talking about that. The emotions. The fondest memories of Douglass. We already just talked about that. The teachers?
AA: No, we just talked about that.
PG: Elaborate.
AA: Okay. My fondest memory…
PG: The emotions of it. The sights.
AA: Yeah. It was here, in this building.
PG: Okay.
AA: Was here in this building. Because Mary and Allison came here. When I was…
PG: Really.
AA: Yes. When I was in the eighth grade over here, and my best girlfriend was a tour around the school. And that was also the time I made my first appearance on the stage in there. And I had never been in front of a big audience, and my knees knocked the whole time. And I was really fumbling, you know, I guess they call it stage fright?
PG: Right.
AA: Well, that’s… I got my stage fright on that stage right there. And of course, my teacher, Mrs. Raglan, she was the English teacher. She said, ‘Oh that was beautiful! It really was!’ And it really wasn’t. She was just telling me that. I knew better, ‘cause I lost my place in the Bible and the Scripture I was supposed to read. I had my finger in there, you know. I didn’t have a bookmark or anything, so she just gave it to me. Said, ‘I want you to read the 23rd Psalm.’ Thankfully, my grandfather had built the church in Earlsboro. We were A.M.E.’s…
PG: Oh, wow! That’s interesting.
AA: Yeah. We were A.M.E.’s. So my grandfather and his oldest son built the church there. So you know, I had to go to church all the time.
PG: Okay!
AA: That was a requirement. And fortunately for me, when I had my knee-shaking moments here, I knew the 23rd Psalm by heart! ‘Cause I never did find it in the book [cut off by laughter]. And so, and she had written out the prayer at the end, so I was so nervous by the time we got down to the prayer ‘cause I’d lost my place in the book. The reason I’d lost my place in the book—we had to do the flag salute first! And you know, I took my finger out of the Bible so to put it on my heart, and so that’s where the disaster started.
PG: You lost the place
AA: That’s right. But I made it through because I knew the 23rd Psalm even though I was doing this and turning pages and never found it. So that was one of my first memories here. You know, and that incident settled me into what it was like to be on the stage. And so I lost the stage fright, and [Constance Lee Tompkins?] was my public speaking teacher over here, and I liked the class so well, I took drama from her, and you know, debate, and I loved debate under Ms. Tompkins. I remember the subject was I was debating this other person on the subject ‘Which is more useful, the dishrag or the broom?’ And, oh boy, I took the dishrag. And so I just flipped him left and right, you know, in that debate. So that was a shining moment for me, and you know, really helped my confidence as far as the stage appearances. And then, you know, after that I been in a couple of plays, here at Douglass High Schools. So, I loved all of that.
PG: That’s great!
AA: And there were competitions around, even though it wasn’t an integrated society, we competed and I was out at OCU in a competition, and I remember I had finished what I was supposed to do, so they had a little student union building there, and they had a soda fountain over there, so I hopped up there on the stool, and there was a young man who was Hispanic, and I had taken Spanish under Mr. Thurston Graham. We had all these languages at Douglass.
PG: Okay.
AA: So I just said ‘Como se llama usted?’ like that. And he just look ‘round, and he just took off, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, I can’t hear that fast.’ You know, I mean, I just—I know Spanish, and I made a good grade in Spanish, but you can tell I’m a slow talker, and I don’t listen fast like some people, and he was talkin’ in a foreign language, and I just told him, ‘Hold up!’ I was just, you know, being thoughtful, speaking in your language. So we kinda laughed about that. So that was another memory that I have. And I took photography under Mr. Seward. And we learned how to develop the film, and print the picture and all that, so it was mostly boys in the class, so I ended up being Miss Photography in the homecoming parade. And the guy that was Mr. Photography, I was afraid of him, ‘cause he was one of the older guys. There were about five or six older guys who had gone to the service and came back, and they came right into the school, you know, in the senior year or something like... So, it was Alfonso [?] and I was just, ooh, like I see him and I just, it’s enough to make me turn around and go another way, you know, because they were older, you know, and I was what? Sixteen going on seventeen? I was seventeen when I graduated, but he was Mr. Photography, and the car came to a sudden stop, and I had on my gown and slid right off onto the street…
PG: Oh my goodness…
AA: But jumped right back up and got right back on there and nobody knew the difference. So I’ll always remember that moment.
PG: Right.
AA: And part of the reason I was afraid of Alfonso, in addition to him being one of the older kids there, we both studied Negro history together, and Mr. Harris would say, ‘I’ll be back in a minute, class. I’m going to my office.’ We might be taking a test. And Alfonso would say, ‘Golden, what’s the answer to this?’ And I would pretend I didn’t hear it, and he said, ‘You hear me talking!’ You know, and I thought—Mr. Harris would come back here, you know. So I say, ‘I don’t know.’ And then of course, he would just flat-out call me a liar, you know. And so, Mr. Harris would seem like magicly come in just as he get ready to cuss me out. He was known for cussing. That was part of the reason everybody was afraid of—and his family owned Statum Cleaners, see, but he was—
PG: Ohhhh.
AA: Yeah. So he was, you know, just, he was a terrorist. In my heart, anyway. I don’t think anybody else was scared of him. But I was. But I had classes with him, and you know, I—I made it on through high school, I mean, he was just all talk, and that was really all but—what I didn’t understand that, ‘cause—
PG: Right.
AA: I came from the farm, and, you know, it wasn’t like that. We had a very peaceful household. And so that—I guess that was part of city life. And I just… that’s the way that was. But I didn’t—I was pretty studious, I didn’t go to a lot of events, you know, at school, you know, I went to one teenage dance we had in the cafeteria over at the school that was torn down. I didn’t go to another one. You know, because when somebody would ask me to dance, I would say, ‘No thank you’, you know, that was my response, and it was like they were wondering, ‘Why are you here?’ So, anyway, I decided to stick with the books, and I had grown up on a farm, and I read a lot, and of course, the nearest neighbor was what? A quarter of a mile away? You know, so you had to put forth some efforts. I spent a lot of time reading, studying… I did a lot of traveling the world through books.
PG: Okay!
AA: And so, at Douglass, I helped out in the library too, and that helped me develop my love of reading. I to this day—to this day!—would rather read a book than watch TV. You know…
PG: Okay!
AA: And that’s just, if you came to my place, you would see me surrounded by books.
PG: Okay
AA: And they just have followed me, even after I was grown, you know, I—we had a… our second house that we purchased, I have three children, a son and two daughters, and they do very well. They can—they’re very good. They’re very prosperous, they’re known in their fields. And we always had a bookcase, floor to ceiling bookcase, and it was filled. All you had to do was send me something in the mail that said ‘Join this book club!’, and I was joining it, you know. So, I just travelled the world through books and never dreaming that when I grew up, that I would become what some people would call a world traveler. As a matter of fact, I had—I’ve had several careers. When I first started working a real job, as they say, I had a little part-time job when I was at Douglass. I used to work at Blanchard’s drive-in, which was right across the street, and made good tips. I was a car-hop, and we made two dollars a night. And so, that lasted… I did that for one semester my senior year. I always had money cause I could—you know, I saved it, and people had a tendency to want to borrow from me, and my grandfather had drilled it in us as children going to school—Sunday School and church—it’s better to give than to receive, and I was always giving, so I still have a great spirit of giving. If I talk about myself, and seriously analyze it, you know, I think I’m the most generous person I know, ‘cause I’m willing to help anybody, and so a lot of people have been helped by me, and that’s a joy to me. So at any rate, when we lived at—we lived in different cities, or I have, anyway. My husband came from Missouri, and I didn’t really appreciate history that much, because when I was in school at Douglass, I liked Negro history, I liked world history, but I wasn’t that crazy about Oklahoma history. I thought it was kind of boring, you know. A bunch of facts and figures, and this battle over here and that battle over there. Which I didn’t care about. But I thought world history was great. And I thought Negro history was exciting. In fact, it was Mr. Harris that showed me how to write the first little book. He gave me a little project, and he said he wanted me to write a Negro history book. And I thought, ‘Oh, gee! I don’t know how to do that!’ So he showed me, he kind of explained what he wanted me to do. So I still have a copy of that little book. That was the very first little book that I had wrote, and it was under Mr. Harris. But anyway, after I grew up and had my three children, my first job was at Western Electric Company, and I didn’t really go out there to seek a job. Another friend who went to school down here in Douglass came by one day and asked me if I was busy, and I was just taking care of the kids, because my husband’s family believed the wife should stay at home and raise the kids. They didn’t believe the husband—they just thought the husband should work, and not the wife. So I was just home watching the kids, so I [saw?] just one of my kids—my son, he’s the oldest one. And she came by and said, ‘Ride with me out to Western Electric’. Well, it was out there on 66th, out there near Bethany, first. See, they had just kind of moved to Oklahoma at the time, and I just went in with her, and when anybody walked through the door I think they assumed you were looking for a job, and so, I wasn’t looking for one, but you know, they just hand you the application. So, I mean, I was fresh out of school, so to speak, and I just filled it out, doing something. So, we got called in to interview, me and my friend—different times—and so on the way back, we were comparing notes, like what happened, and I said, ‘They told me to come back and take the test,’ and they didn’t tell her that, so she got really burnt up. And so, I was just—she just got silent the rest of the way home, you know, and so, I went in and told my husband and I said, ‘Well what should I do?’ And he said, ‘Well, you put your foot out there, so you gotta follow through.’ So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go out there and take this test.’ Well, there was nothing I liked better than taking tests, you know, I was out of school, I was an honors student, and I just loved tests, you know, so they were so impressed, you know, they told me to start working, you know, this was in October, and they asked me if I had any questions, and I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Okay.’ And I said, ‘Well, I mean, what days do you get off for Thanksgiving?’ And they said, ‘Well, one.’ And I said, ‘One?!’ You know, like that, and so, they said, ‘Anything—’ and I said, ‘Well, how many do you get off at Christmas?’ They said, ‘One.’ I said, ‘One?!’ And so the guy said, ‘Well, what did you expect?’ And I said, ‘Well, I expect a long weekend at Thanksgiving time, and I expect, you know, off for Christmas all the way through January.’ And he said, ‘Anita, you been to school too long!’ That’s what he told me. And I thought, ‘Well, okay.’ So he said we’ll wait ‘til you’ve got all of your holidays out of the way, and then you can come to work January 4th.
PG: Okay.
AA: So, I didn’t know that the Urban League was busy trying to get African Americans hired out there, ‘cause, you know, they were—at that time, it was very active, trying to get African Americans jobs in Oklahoma City. And I didn’t know, so I just, you know, went out there, and the first day in January, you know, now from October to January, got sick the first day. Had migraine headache, and I never—so you know, so I couldn’t even hold my head up, and that was the other thing too—they apologized to me. They hired me with an apology and said, ‘We know you’re qualified for more that this and you should probably be in the office staff, but we’re putting you in the manufacturing.’ And so, they had me on an assembly line. So, after a couple of hours I couldn’t take it any longer, so they sent me to the nurse, the nurse sent me home and said, ‘Go see your doctor.’ And she had this little piece of paper and said, ‘Have your doctor fill this out and bring it back, you know, when you get well.’ So I went to Dr. Atkins, Charles Atkins, right, and he told me I had the flu or something like that. And he gave me some antibiotics, so I said, ‘Oh, by the way, they told me to give this to you when I was better and I don’t know how long you think I’—and he looked and he saw and he said, ‘You work at Western Electric?!’ Well, they’d been trying to get the doors open out there, and so— ‘cause they didn’t even have this many African Americans in the whole plant. And so, he said, ‘We gotta’—he started having me come every day, and he was pumping me with this penicillin, ‘cause he said this was bigger than I was.
PG: Okay.
AA: And so he took me over to the Urban League, and he called Nathaniel Johnson, who was then the executive director of the Urban League, and they said, ‘Don’t quit that job! Don’t quit that job! Whatever, ‘cause this is bigger than you! This is bigger than you.’ And I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know about all of that,’ you know, but, so, they impressed me that it was very, very important, you know, that I stay there. Long story short, I moved around the country.
PG: Okay.
AA: I lived in Memphis, Tennessee, twice. I lived in Washington, D.C., twice. I went to school at Howard on a scholarship…
PG: Okay.
AA: From Douglass. And then I lived in South Carolina, right after I got married, and I also lived in Maplewood, New Jersey.
PG: Wow!
AA: You know, which is right next to New York. Almost—New Jersey is, and I worked in proximity. And so, while all those on the AT&T path, I’ll put it that way. I went through the system like that. I did leave at one point, and they were horrified that I left. I did, I quit. And went to work for the postal service…
PG: Okay.
AA: And became, you know, the second-highest level female in the U.S. postal service. You know, when I talk to a person now, you know, that works for the postal service, they say, ‘You were what?!’ I said, ‘PTS 24.’ And they, ‘You left that job?!’ and I say, ‘Yes, I did.’ So, they were just amazed, because that was a feat that you didn’t easily accomplish. That was, you know, the second highest—my next move would have been an appointment from the Post Master.
PG: Wow.
AA: Uh-huh. And so I—but I got mad at them, that’s why I left. I mean, I was having a great time, you know, on the job in D.C., you know, and my office looked over the Potomac River, all that kind of stuff, but I—
PG: Wow!
AA: I never have been one who had a lot of patience with racism. I just, you know, I will confront it, and I will leave if I think that that’s what’s happening to me. ‘Cause there’s no reason for that. So I went back to the Bell system. And they made a job for me! So, you know, that’s what I found out. That folk can do anything and I went back at a high level. Back here, in Oklahoma. That’s why, when I was in D.C., when my superior (not my immediate advisor, but his boss) thought that I had no choice because I was a high level and was well paid, and that I wouldn’t leave if, you know, he slighted me the way he did. But I was so upset about it, and so I was talking to a friend here, and they said, ‘Well, when you come home, well, you know, we want to talk to you.” So, the rest of that story was they made a position for me here. I was in the computer field. I had gotten most of my computer formal training through OSU Tech, ‘cause they were the first ones that had any kind of a computer offering. And then I spent a little time at UCO—that’s when we moved to Memphis, and I graduated from Memphis State University, which is now University of Memphis. And I was an honors student all the way through college. In fact, when I was at OSU, I was on the President’s Honor Roll, even though I was married and had three kids by the end. I carried a full load, worked a full time job, and made all A’s. And so, that was kind of how I was. So when I got to New Jersey, I thought I was going to Mecca, you know. I thought everything would be all equal there. And I saw this strange behavior going on, in the corporation there, and I thought, ‘This is ridiculous! Something has to be done about it.’
Long story short, I started doing—creating little things on my own, not my job. I just did it. AT&T was about to break up. The Bell system was about to break up. And they were going to spin off all the bells. And I was right there, in the mix of all of that. And so, what happened—I thought that, as a rule, we were the last hired and the first fired. I said, ‘We’re going to be in trouble!’ At the time, the Bell system had a million employees.
PG: Wow!
AA: And so, they were breaking it up—and everyone thought the breakup was because the judge ordered it. But then I found out that, corporate politics, it was a deal. AT&T and IBM had gone to the judge, and AT&T had wanted to get into the computer business. They were not into that, they were a phone business, and the engineers and the Bell labs people convinced the officers we were in the computer business because it was the same concept, you know, behind all of that telephone equipment. And they said, ‘All you have to do is put a box around it!’ Well, it was more than that. So, at any rate, they decided to go forward with the breakup, and AT&T told all of their folk basically that if this didn’t work they were going to blame it on the judge for breaking up the system. It wasn’t the judge, it was the deal. But AT&T was sitting there, and they had deep pockets. They had lots of money because they had been about a two hundred year old company. And they had all the monopoly on all the phones. And everybody paid every month just like you were paying rent.
PG: You’re right.
AA: Uh-huh.
PG: Wow.
AA: And they decided—and you know, I told them. I said, ‘That’s a mistake! That’s a mistake!’ They sold off all the phone bays, and decided to go into designer phones, and phone summer stores, and it was quite the mess. And people never did know it because they had so much money that it could be covered up, but that—I was right there in it. And so, they were trying to reduce the workforce down from a million employees to 600,000. And so, it was at that point that I said we need to do something for ourselves, you know, and so, I called six of our friends together, and I said, ‘We need to have some professional development.’ And that’s how I got off into doing professional development conferences. And so, we had the first professional development conference, you know, for staff, and it was managers, black managers, we were aiming for at AT&T, at Basking Ridge, which was where their corporate headquarters sat, and it’s not too far from Bedminster, where today’s president is, big golf course and all that. It’s just kinda—
PG: Right.
AA: —Near there. But nevertheless, we didn’t hide it—we just—we had our meetings after work on company property, and we had that Saturday and Sunday were a two day conference. And, we didn’t tell the officers. We didn’t ask their permission. We just did it. Cause we were entitled, we thought, just like any other. Long story short, one person in our group wanted to invite his vice president, and this was supposed to be a black conversation. And we thought Benny was just, you know, wanting to get ahead, you know, with his vice president. He nagged us so bad, so finally we said, “Okay! He can come, but he speaks on Sunday. He’ll be the last speaker, the last [locknose?] speaker.” Well, that was the first the officers had a clue that we were doing anything! So they were nervous. They thought we were going to protest and walk around the building, all that sort of thing. But that wasn’t—it was a win-win kind of situation. I mean, it was going to help the corporation better than it was going to help us, you know, in the long term, and so… we had a reception the night before at a hotel when this officer that we didn’t even know showed up—just showed up at the reception! And went from one little group, little and they came to where I was standing talking, and they said, “Wh—Anita, why is this necessary?” I said, “What do you mean ‘Why is this necessary?’ I think we should talk— I mean, the system’s ‘bout to break up. We have an interest in what’s going to happen to us, and what we’re doing.” I said, “It’s a win-win for everybody.” When I said that, he started writing, and left, and disappeared. The next day, that Saturday, Ben and his Vice President, sure enough, was the only person not of color at that conference. And we had people from all around the country that came to that conference. And so when he showed up, cause the snow was deep, he didn’t say a word, he just registered, and of course, I said, “What are we going to do? Beaula’s here.” I said, “The show goes on.” I mean, we don’t change any script just because he showed up. So, he was being watched and I’m sure he knew that. All day long, you know, “He went into this workshop,” and he just acted like he was a registered—he didn’t say anything, he just went in. And then Sunday morning, even though the snow was deep, he showed up again and registered for everything all that day.
PG: Huh.
AA: And so then, it finally got down to his speech… and when he got up there, he said, “I want the seven people that put this conference on to come right here on the stage.” And they said, “Well, what are we going to—” and I said, “We’re going on the stage! You heard the man tell us to come out there. And everybody in the audience like, “[audible gasp]” ‘cause they had been holding their breath all day, ‘cause they thought they—we’d all be fired, you know, that’s what they thought. He said, “On behalf of officers of this corporation, we want these seven people to help us create the new AT&T company.” Which is in place to this day. And everybody in the audience, “Oh! We wanna join! We wanna join!” There was nothing to join, you know, but we had to form an organization. The short of that story is, the organization is… I took early retirement from AT&T, had thirty thousand members nationwide.
PG: Wow.
AA: And, the exciting thing coming up is, in Washington, D.C., in July, they’re having a conference. They contacted me. Here. I hadn’t been keeping in touch, but I’d heard they were looking for me, and so, I got a call, and they told me they were going to bring the founders back. And so, today, the organization has ten thousand members nationwide. The same organization that I started is ten thousand strong today. And that was amazing to me—I thought they were, you know, out of business by now. That was—that was 30, 40 years ago.
PG: Wow.
[unknown]: Let me ask a question? [clears throat] I know Jan’s trying to get us to wrap up.
AA: Oh. Okay.
[unknown]: Let me ask this question. So you’ve touched a lot of a lives across the—
AA: Nation. Yes.
[unknown]: And you saw some values in this community and this state of Oklahoma.
AA: Right.
[unknown]: What is it that motivates you to stay and do your work—
AA: All of the stuff that I told you I accomplished there. I was thinking—fantasizing—when I was in New Jersey after all of this unfolded, that I should go home and make my contribution because I had traveled these career paths, and so many people have benefitted, and I wanted to come back home, naively thinking it would be, you know, with my experience and all that… but I wasn’t going to pursue it as such. I was going to pursue real estate. I am a real estate broker. And that’s how I got my three children through college, by investing in real estate in Oklahoma. And I started out on the path that… I told you that my background was my grandfather’s influence is better to give than to receive. So I’ve always been a giving person, always wanted to help, and so consequently, everything that you see me do, even though I went from real estate into the work with Black Incorporated. And these books that I have written, I saw that people were not writing our history down. It was being lost. And I thought it was important, particularly as I looked at Douglass High School… I came back, and the curtains were in tatters down there. The seats were broken, and it was a mess. It just broke my heart. So I got busy putting together some things with/through Black Incorporated, and getting the school back on track, so to speak. And so just before they tore the school that you graduated from—which graduated from too—down, I asked the principal down there at the time if they were going to give them some new pianos, since those pianos that we had, which we had everything, were raggedy. We had two grand pianos, and you couldn’t… you couldn’t even tune them. And so, when I found out they weren’t going to get any new pianos for the school that’s there now, I decided to raise money to buy Douglass, you know, a grand piano. I didn’t know they cost that much money, and I started with alumni, the people that I know that graduated, and I said, “We’re going to raise the money this way.” So we ended up with a grand piano, two brand new studio pianos, and two pianos that were donated. So Douglass now has five pianos in the fine arts department, and then there have been other things that I have done at Douglass, you know, for Douglass. I have brought the performing arts to Douglass. When Douglass was in trouble a few years ago and they didn’t think that the graduating class was going to be able to finish, I had trained, through the Kennedy Center program, those teachers down there to effectively teach Douglass students, and they all graduated, except a couple, you know, on time. The state superintendent, Janet Barresi, called me and asked if I would meet, come over to her office, and meet with her, and so that’s what that was about, what to do about Douglass. And so, for the most part, since I have been back here, most of my efforts have centered around Douglass, education, and our history. And so, even though I had turned Black Incorporated into what they called a presenting organization, where I bring artists from all over the world, to Oklahoma City, and all of this intentional, to be able to impact and showcase, you know, some of the rich history through the arts, and at the same time, because this is an eye-opener, you know, for the larger community, because they had never seen—they just weren’t familiar with these people. They weren’t even familiar with Alvin Ailey. And so, we brought Alvin Ailey here, we brought Le Ballet du Senegal here, and, you know, on the music side, we had one of the books I wrote. Oklahoma City Music Deep Deuce and Beyond, talks about the importance of music and Deep Deuce’s history. All of that you see economic development down there, on second street, it was all driven by all of these efforts. And so on the political side, I’m an unlikely person to be a politician, but I know how it works, because shortly after I got here, I was appointed to the Democratic National Committee’s site selection committee, the one that was held in Atlanta Georgia in 1988, when Michael Dukakis was the democratic [nominee] —well, I had not been active in politics, but my life unfolds in such a way that there are always opportunities and things that come up that allow me to make those contributions, so to this day and in history, nobody from the state of Oklahoma has served on that committee except me. And so it was through those—it was a four-year appointment. I didn’t know these people. I had just moved here. I had just taken early retirement. I had retired from AT&T at the age of 45, and so I’ve been giving, and writing, and doing whatever I can, wherever I can, even though the challenges have been huge, like folk drying up the money on you, and folk trying to take your programs over, and in some cases did. So, it’s been challenging, but on the other hand, it’s been very rewarding, too, because I have, in fact, travelled the world. Yes, I had a chance to go to Africa four times, was by invitation in three of the cases, and in fact met Nelson Mandela, at his palace, after he was elected president, so, you know, I’ve had great exposure, and many other countries that I’ve gone to are China, and Australia, and, you know, folk that are—countries that are in the news today, I’ve been there and done that years ago, so. I’ve had a very blessed life, to put it mildly, and most of my inspiration was to come back to Oklahoma and give what I can do from what I got out of a great education at Douglass. I mean, what else can you do? That’s—what else should you, I’ll put it that way, because a lot of people—what I notice, is, it’s not a selfless approach to it, you know, you achieve and it’s mine, and I did it myself, and so therefore I’m going to send my marbles on down the street and play with them over here. So I’ve never ascribed to that. I’ve always been taught to be selfless, and so that’s how I walk.
PG: My last question I want to ask you: what places can you see in Oklahoma on the northeast part of town, and you see have remained the same.
AA: When you say “the same”, I mean, nothing has really remained the same, I mean. Everything has been really… challenged. I’ll use that word. You see some buildings that are still the same, but that doesn’t mean that the culture’s the same. I see little pieces of the culture here and there as I interview and as I write for… write these books, when interviewing, you know, and talking to people who came up, even after me, I can tell the difference in the cultural scenario. It’s not the same, you know. And I’m not sure that we’re all walking in locked step, of one mind. As a matter of fact, I know we’re not because I get, you know, since I’ve done the work that I’ve done, I get calls from other people who are not interested in a united Oklahoma City instead of a fragmented Oklahoma City. And I’ve been asked the question, “Who do you think, say in northeast Oklahoma City, can unite the community?” They realize it’s been fractured. It’s not the same.
PG: Right.
AA: There is no togetherness, and you don’t see much of “It takes a village to raise a child”. You don’t see that kind of effort. So it’s like trying to recreate some of that, to the extent possible, and that comes right up to the pathways to greatness, the moment that we’re in now. And the current superintendent asked me, what do I like—how did I feel about the plan that was voted on 8-0? And I said, “Well, I can see some good things.” I said, “I see, and believe in, the early childhood development, because our children are not being prepared for school, and they’re behind. They’re behind before they get to mid-high or junior high, whichever way you’d want to call it. They’re not being prepared at the elementary level. I got my preparation in the country, and I know that you get your learning in the fourth grade. And if you—when I said learning, I mean you know your ABC’s perhaps, but you’re not getting your comprehension until then, and that’s why I say the learning begins like in the fourth grade, so I like that. And I like the fact that you don’t have three and four year olds under the plan, attending elementary school, even though we have exemplary... showed results over at Wilson elementary school. It’s a highly desirable school, just like I was a founding member of the Classen Advanced Studies School. It’s highly desirable. So I know my stuff works when I say I’m Black Incorporated, which is, you know, one and the same, I’m a one-woman staff over there. Went to a lot of people— ask, why do you do it, I don’t understand how you do it. Hey, I’ve been trained through the corporate world, through real estate. I have things that I can share, and I do. So I think we’re going to move in a right direction. I’m not saying it’s the Promised Land, but I also told them, I like what I think I see, which are personal aspects, or personal relationships. And you don’t have those kinds of personal in—I don’t care if you’re in business, you know, those relationships are important. If you’re in school, the teacher-child relationship is important. The teacher-to-teacher relationship is important. So is, you know with the principle, you know, you have to be up close and personal, you know, about these things. So I like some of those things that are implied in their plan. But, I also told that I realized that over time it takes a lot of hard work, and I relate Oklahoma to the situation that China found itself in. And I know there from having visited China when Mao was chairman of, you know, China at that time—people were not allowed to go to school for ten years, and you had generation after generation that dropped through the cracks, because they didn’t go to school. So when Mao was finally up from the chair, and I don’t know his story, or how he got up out of the chair, but advocates of education over there were like criminals, and they fled to the countryside. So when he was gone and they came back, and they tried everything. They tried day school, night school, television school, all kinds of school. And at that time, China had a population of 1.6 billion people, and they concluded sadly that some people would have to be left behind, because they couldn’t get everybody. But they started where they were, and they worked very hard, educating through every kind of media, anything that you could think of. So look at China now. They’re very competitive, and, you know, when you see Asian people come into the United—and they’re recruited to come into the United States, to go to Silicon Valley and all of that. How does that effect Oklahoma? Well, we’re not in the ballgame, we’re laying flat on our backs. And I said, “There’s only one way to go and it’s called up!” You know, at this point. And it, just as I came back here and saw Douglass with the tattered curtains and the broken chairs and the ragged pianos, then, just recently when the report card came out and Douglass was an F school, that’s heartbreaking.
PG: Yes it is.
AA: Yeah. And—And I’m passionate about it. I’m an advocate, and that’s what makes me tick.
PG: This is the last question. Do you know of anyone else that you could recommend for us to talk to and ask these questions?
AA: Do you have Horace Stevenson on your list?
PG: You want us to ask him?
AA: Oh yeah! He’s—well, I’m not trying to push the class of ‘57, but—
PG: Horace Stevenson?
AA: Yes, but he owned a number of MacDonald’s…
PG: Okay.
AA: …around here. And, he has a story to tell, and he gives a lot to Douglass, and recently, in the Oklahoma City Community Foundation…
PG: Okay.
AA: …There was a picture of him and his whole family, how he has taken that franchise and empowered his family so they don’t ever have to worry about finding a job. So that’s…
PG: That’s near [Admiral and Roy?]?
AA: Yes, that is. And he was quoted in the publication that came out, that he always gives to his community. And he does. So he would be a good one, because he is a generous person. I like generous people.
PG: Alright. I thank you very much for your time!
AA: You’re welcome. And feel free to input anything you want to.