Contents
1. Transcript
1.1. Session 1 (October 28, 2008)
-
Stevenson
- Good morning. I'm conducting an interview with Dr. Owen Knox on Tuesday,
October 28, 2008. First I'd like to ask you when and where you were
born.
-
Knox
- I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and my birthday is October fourth,
1918, and this October fourth I became ninety years old.
-
Stevenson
- Congratulations.
-
Knox
- Thank you.
-
Stevenson
- Okay, if you could tell me something about your parents and your
grandparents, even your great-grandparents, your family history?
-
Knox
- For what I know, first, my father was a day worker in a brick-making
factory, and he had very little formal education. My mother was a
housekeeper. She never worked, and she had an eighth-grade education.
Her name is Hattie Knox. I called her Sha, because I'm from Louisiana,
and Sha is Creole for dear.
-
Stevenson
- And that's S?
-
Knox
- Cherie, Cher, Cherie, Sha. We lived on Railroad Avenue, named Railroad
Avenue because the railroad--the train passed twice a day in front of
our house. And my maternal grandparents, I'm named after one. His name
was Owen Williams, and he was a laborer. I haven't been able to find out
in what field he was a laborer. And my paternal grandparents, I only
knew one, and it was my father's mother. Her name was Sarah Knox. From
what it appears to me I can remember, because my father died when I was
seven years old, so I didn't get a chance to learn a lot about his
parents, and I've been recently doing some research, and I'm getting
some names to follow, but I can't find anything about them, so I'm
working on that now.
-
Knox
- My grandfather on my mother's side was of mixed race. It's obvious that
one of his parents was a slave and the other one was free, and his mix,
in fact, I'm not sure of what the other one was, because being the son
of a slave, it's obvious that he had some mixed blood because he was
very fair, and so was my grandmother. My grandmother Sarah worked for
LSU, Louisiana State University, in the cafeteria department, very
strong, both strong-willed as well as strong in body, because one of the
reasons we did well during the depression was that she was able to bring
home food from the cafeteria to us. So she would walk about two and a
half miles with the food, and we would run to meet her, because we knew
that meant we had dinner that night.
-
Knox
- My father, his name is Samuel [Knox], who worked in the brickyard, died
when I was seven, as a result of what I recall, I guess you would call
black-lung disease now, because in the brickyard they made the bricks
out of clay, but the dust from the clay sometimes would be two or three
inches deep on the floor where he worked, and as a result he died at an
early age. My family lived together. My grandfather, Owen, bought two
lots and built a home on one of the lots, and when my parents married
they took his other smaller lot and built a house on it. So we were
considered pretty well off, because we owned our home. Nobody else in
that community owned a home.
-
Stevenson
- So that was unusual then.
-
Knox
- Yes. By the way, you can stop me anytime, because I just like to
reminisce about my own family.
-
Stevenson
- Keep going.
-
Knox
- But when they bought this home he built, my father and his friends, which
was what happened then. Everybody'd come in the neighborhood and all the
friends and build your house for you. And they built the house, what was
called a shotgun house. But my father didn't like the idea that a
shotgun house was one where they said if you shot a bullet through the
front door, it would go straight through all the doors and come out the
back door. Well, my father was innovative, so what he did was put one
door as you entered. You entered on one side, but when you left that
room to go to the second room, you had to go to the other side of the
house, and so he alternated them like that, so his was not a typical
shotgun house. Anyway, but the fact is that we owned a home, and the lot
was a long lot, so that behind the home we grew our food, or lots of our
food anyway.
-
Knox
- But I remember my childhood as being very happy, because I have four
siblings. I had two sisters and two brothers older; I was the youngest.
They're all deceased now. But my mother and my father also, with their
friends, they left one Baptist church and built a church, and by
building a church it meant I was in church a lot. So we had all kinds of
concerts and poetry readings and things, and because I was their child I
was involved in all of that. But there were two great experiences there.
One was the Christian experience, but the other one was the camaraderie.
I had lots of friends and lots of buddies, and we grew up together, and
then I went to a segregated school, obviously, in Baton Rouge. And that
was one thing--like I say, stop me anytime you want, because I just love
to reminisce.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Well, I do have a question. How was it that your parents built the
church? How did that come about, them building the church?
-
Knox
- Well, they were members of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, one of the
largest Black churches in Baton Rouge, and my--I don't know what exactly
Kin is, but he had something to do with my grandfather, because my
grandfather Owen lived in his house. His name was Headley,
H-e-a-d-l-e-y, and I notice when I'm doing the research that my
grandfather lived with the Headleys, and one of the Headleys was a
preacher. And Pet Headley, the preacher, was also a member of Mount
Zion. He's also a member of my family in some way I'm not able to
discern yet, and the two preachers of the Mount Zion Baptist Church had
a difference. As that difference grew, each one had his own
constituency, and Pet Headley's constituency included my family. So when
they could no longer get along in that church they left and decided to
start a church of their own. So they built a church called the
Progressive Baptist Church and it still stands, and when I go if I go to
Baton Rouge I go over there, because on the plaque on the outside, my
father's and mother's names appear. But they built this church and at
least one time I think I remember going to a prayer meeting at five
o'clock in the morning, Sunday school at nine, regular church at eleven,
and BYPU, Baptist Young People's Union, at four-thirty or five, and then
back at church at seven again, so there were days when I spent the whole
day in church.
-
Knox
- But what it did for me, though--well, first, let me tell you, my mother
in that church became I guess you'd call her an evangelist, but that has
connotations I don't like. But what she was--we couldn't have a speaker
full-time, a preacher full-time, so our preacher would come to us maybe
two times a month and go to some other place, another church, just to
make a living, because we certainly couldn't pay him a lot, and when he
wasn't there, my mother, who was one of the leaders in the church--my
father was a little reticent. He wouldn't take the leadership. He did
the work, but he wouldn't come take the leadership. But my mother took
the leadership, and she preached [unclear]. And I can remember sitting
there in the front row, in one of those chairs in the front row,
listening to my mother, and it still enthralls me, a lady who had only
an eighth-grade education, she could move the crowd as she wished. Her
words and the way she expressed them could move the crowd.
-
Knox
- Then I noticed something, that she would get the daily paper, and the
family of us in the evening, especially in winter when we could only use
the fireplace in one room, we couldn't use it to have everybody in every
room, and that was the only heat we had, except in the kitchen, so after
supper she would read the newspaper to us, and she would make those
characters in the newspaper come alive. If it was a crime scene or
whatever it was, whatever the news was, she made it come alive, and I
remember just being entranced by the fact that she could do that. I also
remember when I was in high school she would come to me and tell me,
"Now, look. I'm going to give this speech. I want you to read it and I
want you to be sure I say the right words and that I have the right
grammar."
-
Knox
- And then one other thing I need to say about this. I went to our school,
our local elementary school, started the first grade, because they
didn't have a kindergarten, so it was my first day to go to school. Now,
the first day of school you had to provide your own books and you had to
provide your own--so I had a Big Chief tablet, a pencil, a McGuffey
Reader, and an arithmetic book. The McGuffey Reader and the arithmetic
book were handed down from my older brothers. I got my little package
and went to school. My older brothers were still in the elementary
school, so I felt safe, I went with them. We went to school and I can
remember being just afraid. I didn't know what school was, and I didn't
know how you acted, what you do. But I'd been running around with some
other kids a year older than I was, my age and a year and two years
older than I was, and they had gone to school the year before I did. So
I went into this classroom, Miss Helen Black's classroom, first grade,
and I took my seat at my desk. The desks were in rows throughout the
classroom, and some of my buddies that I ran with in the streets, who
had failed previously the first grade, sat behind me. Well, they were
used to school, and I was scared. So I sat there staring at Miss Black,
and she was writing. She was looking up and she was writing, and she was
looking up and she was writing, and then Oscar and Pickett behind me
were laughing, talking. They were comfortable in school. But I was
staring straight ahead, and I noticed Miss Black was frowning as I guess
she was taking names in the register or something, or counting students,
but she was frowning.
-
Knox
- And I noticed she was frowning because they were making noise behind me.
I saw her reach down in the desk, and when she came up she had a razor
strap. It was just used to sharpen the razors, a razor strap. And she
came--it was folded up in her hand, and she started down the aisle to my
left, and I watched her and I thought about it. They're making that
noise, they're going to get it. And she got out of my peripheral vision,
and suddenly the strap landed on my shoulder, the first time and again
the second time. And I remember that I was completely confused. I didn't
know what to do. How do you react to being struck with that strap? What
do you do? I didn't know what to do but just automatically, I guess, I
picked up that five-cent Big Chief tablet, my McGuffey Reader, and my
arithmetic book, and my pencil, and I stood up and started out. And Miss
Black told me, "Owen, come back and take your seat. Get back in here."
And I could hear her yelling at me as I went out the door, went down the
hall, went down the steps to the street and walked the two blocks to my
house, and I never cried. I couldn't cry. I didn't know what to do. So I
just walked in the house with my stuff, and my mother asked me, "What
are you doing here? What are you doing home from school?"
-
Knox
- So I told her, and she told me, "You sit there." And she put on a jacket
and she left. When she came back, she never told me what she did or
said, but when she got back home she said, "You're not going back to
school." I said, "But what about--?" She said, "You're going to stay
right here." But the deal was, when my brothers got up, got dressed, I
did. When we had breakfast I had breakfast with them. They went to
school. My mother told me, "Get the reader out," and she would make me
read to her, and she knew enough to do that little arithmetic, and so
for that year and part of the next year I was home taught. Strangely
enough, my sister became a teacher after she went to Southern University
and got a degree. She became a teacher at that same school, and she
became a very good friend to Miss Black.
-
Stevenson
- And the name of the school?
-
Knox
- Reddy Street School, R-e-d-d-y, Reddy Street Elementary School. And I can
remember Miss Black coming to visit my house and never, ever did I stay
home when she came. When she walked in and greeted my sisters and the
family, I walked out the back door, down the walkway, and went with
my--and I never was able to speak to that lady in my whole life until I
left Louisiana. But that was my family. It was a happy family, five
children, and so the children took over, and my mother, because she
spoke, she went all over. She became president of the Baptist Home
Mission Society, and then there was a state, a Louisiana Baptist
Conference or Convention they called it, I believe, and she became an
officer in that.
-
Knox
- I remember once--and she spoke all over, and later on I went to some of
those meetings where she was speaking, and when I was able to drive, I
used to drive her to some of those meetings, and I sat and heard her
make all her speeches. Now, the son of the preacher of Mount Zion that
they cut off from, became a friend of my brother Willie [Knox], who's
next to me, three years older, and they became very good friends. His
son's name was Gardner [Calvin] Taylor, G-a-r-d-n-e-r Taylor, and I
believe to the day--I'm certain he's the greatest preacher I have ever
heard, not the greatest Black preacher, but the greatest preacher I have
ever heard. I think he's the greatest preacher the United States ever
produced, and he's still alive now. Anyway, that was my early family, a
happy family, but it took me a long time to understand what I wanted to
do with my life, and realized it was because of what happened to me and
what family I had and the church that I was in when I was a child.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Let me ask you this. Can you tell me about the area where you grew
up? It was a rural area?
-
Knox
- No, no. I was on Railroad Avenue. There was a station, a train station on
the east of us and a train station on the west of us, in this little
city of about 200,000, of about 60,000 or 70,000 then, but the capital
of Louisiana. So we were kind of in the--we lived in both--South Baton
Rouge, where most of the Black people lived, was just south of us, and
where most of the white people lived was north of us. The fact is, our
backyard--I told you we had a big backyard and we grew produce and corn
and stuff back there. But on the next street north of us was South
Boulevard, and that was a street where the white people lived. Now, the
back of their backyard and our backyard came together, so we knew them
well over the back fence. We knew them well. The fact is, I played with
their children, and you could do that, Black and white playing together,
until, well, we used to say until you're ten years old, but it was
really, I realize now, until puberty, and at that time you had to be
segregated.
-
Stevenson
- Right. Exactly.
-
Knox
- But what was great about that for me, it seemed to me some of the worst
things that happened to me were some of the best things that happened to
me, because when I went to high school, McKinley High School, when I
went to McKinley High School, all Black, and we were in this
neighborhood where white and Black are kind of mixed together, when the
white kids got out--at three o'clock both schools let out. And here we
are walking, all Black and all white, and some of us had to pass each
other to get home, and fairly regularly it resulted in some kind of a
confrontation. I can remember sometimes somebody, some white kid would
say, "Nigger," and that would start a pretty good fight. But anyway,
when the school district realized that we were having these conflicts,
they decided to keep the Black children in till three-thirty. That gave
the white children time to get out. And we were all so mad about that.
And now when I look back upon it, we had no curriculum for three to
three-thirty. We just had Black teachers and Black kids in a classroom,
so the teachers became creative. They taught Black history.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting.
-
Knox
- But they also taught poetry and art. And I can remember a couple of my
buddies--I ran around with what somebody would call a gang today. We
didn't call ourselves a gang then, but it was my buddies, we ran around
together. But I can remember one of them was "Doom." Everybody had a
name. Nobody was called by his regular name.
-
Stevenson
- Right, a nickname.
-
Knox
- I mentioned Pickett earlier. Pickett's real name was George Douse, but we
called him Pickett because he was skinny. And this fellow named Doom,
and one kid was named Easter, and Dirty Red. Dirty Red's real name was
Oscar Alcorn, but Dirty Red, and anyway this group of kids. But I
mention all of that to mention Doom. Doom was in this class with me when
we went to three to three-thirty, and I was amazed at what he would do.
He was creative. He would just stand up and start talking, and he would
build a whole world in his imagination and explain it to us so that we
enjoyed it. I don't even know anybody today that can just stand up with
no preparation and just start talking and talking to you and take you on
some imaginary journey with him, and so I just waited for three o'clock
to come so Doom could talk.
-
Knox
- Or some of the kids made up poetry, and we had in that class, we had a
kid named Alexander, who was mentally retarded. If we had had a
facility, he would have been in some special-ed class. But we didn't
have, so he was in class with us, and he used to recite poetry. He could
recite poetry. He couldn't learn arithmetic and stuff, but he could
recite poetry. Now, he amazes me. Then we made fun of him. But one day I
can remember, and this happened more than one time, he stood when the
bell rang and we were all coming in the class, and this was about fifth
grade, I guess, he stood at the door as we walked in, and every person
he made up a rhyme with his name. In fact, I remember today, what mine
was. I mean, nothing elegant, but Alexander, when I walked up coming
into the door, he looked out and said, "Owen Knox caught a fox, put it
into an old wooden box." Now it amazes me. Then I laughed at it. But
anyway, I came up with a group of kids in the streets, some of which
caused me to get in, well, fairly serious trouble.
-
Knox
- But I learned a lot. In fact, one of my best lessons I learned was one
day when we went to what's called the Community Store, which was the
biggest store in our community then, called Community Store, and we
decided one person would buy something, and the rest of us would steal
something in that store. I don't know if this is what you should be
putting here, but anyway it happened, so I'll tell it to you. So I
picked up a little bottle of cherries and put it in my pocket, and other
kids got whatever they got, and we all went up. There were, what, five
of us, and certainly I know we had to be suspicious, one person bought
something when five of us come in the store. So we walked out. Now, we
had a plan. If anybody follows us, we're going to run in five different
directions, and he'll have to decide which one--and it happened. We got
about half a block away from the store, and one fellow looked back and
said, "Here comes Mr. Man," whatever his name was, and he was the store
manager. So we all broke and ran, and he followed me [laughs] with this
bottle of cherries. I threw them over in somebody's yard and I kept
running.
-
Knox
- But the strange thing, when I looked up, I'm running away from this
fellow who's following me, and I looked up and I'm in the block where my
house is. I can't run past my house with this white man chasing me, so I
stopped and he caught me. He took me back to the Community Store, and he
made me sit on a big--it wasn't a crate, it was a sack of onions. He
made me sit on the sack of onions, and he sent somebody to tell my
mother. We lived about three blocks away. And I sat there until my
mother arrived, and here she is a leader in the community, and she came
in and she walked in and she walked to me. She didn't say anything to
me. She looked at me; I could tell she was displeased. She just looked
at me, and she asked the man, "What did he do?" And he said, "He
stole--." By that time they'd found the cherries. "He stole some
cherries." She said, "Well, how much is it?" So the fellow said, "No,
we're not going to charge you anything. We got the cherries back. We
just wanted you to know he was in here," and he mentioned the others,
"with Dirty Red and Pickett, and we wanted you to know it." So she said,
"Does he owe you anything?" He said, "No." She said, "Can I take him
now?" He said, "Yeah." So she said, "Come," and she started walking, and
I walked behind her, and we walked those two blocks. By that time,
everybody in the neighborhood is out at their front fence or front door,
looking as we walked down there.
-
Knox
- She took me home and we walked in the door. She pulled up a chair--her
chair was a rocking chair, and she pulled up a chair for me, and she sat
facing me. And she was about to lecture, I guess. She was about to say
something to me, and she couldn't. She started crying. And I started
crying, and she cried, and we hugged and cried, and then when we
finished that she said, "You know what you have to do." I didn't know
what I had to do. So she took me to the front door. By that time, Dirty
Red and Pickett and Doom and all those kids were across the street on
the corner, and she said, "You know what you have to do." And I didn't
know what I had to do, so I stood there a minute and then I guess a
light came on. I realized what I had to do. So I walked over to the guys
and I said, "I'm not going to be able to play with you anymore." And
they said, "Oh, yeah?" and they made fun of me, and fact is, they named
me "Cherry." "Okay, Cherry," and they laughed and they made fun of me,
but I turned around and went back home, and it saved my life, I believe,
because Doom was killed when he was in the eleventh grade. The charge
was that he was stealing chickens in a white man's backyard. Actually,
he had been going with their daughter. They had been in secret trysts
back there. Dirty Red may still be in prison if he's still alive, but he
became--he had a drug habit. In fact, this Christmas all of them--I
won't say all of them, but very few of them lived to be twenty-five
years old. But anyway, that's another--as I said, some of the worst
things in my life turned out to be some of the best things for me. So I
know a little about gangs, about trouble. I know a whole lot about
religion and education.
-
Stevenson
- Okay, well, I've got some follow-up questions for you. Your neighborhood
when you were coming up. You've said a little bit about what you did for
recreation and that sort of thing. Can you tell me about some of the
other families that you grew up with?
-
Knox
- Yes, I knew all of them. I lived at 835 Railroad Avenue, and that was
kind of on a rise, on a hill. In fact, it was called Swartz Hill is what
it was called, S-w-a-r-t-z, Swartz Hill, and we had the last house on
the top of the hill, not a big hill, but just an incline. The next one
was a grocery store, Baddocks Grocery Store, by the white fellow who
lived in the neighborhood. But going down that hill for the full block,
there were shotgun houses all the way down, and all the people were
renters, and occasionally the white owner would come and tell them, "You
didn't pay your rent," and take all the stuff and put it out on the
sidewalk. I call it sidewalk now. We called it banquett then, that's
kind of Creole or French. But he'd put all that stuff out on the
banquett. It would be b-a-n-q-u-e-t-t if anybody would spell it. We
never did. But that walkway, sidewalk was the only thing that was paved.
The street was gravel with the railroad track in the middle.
-
Knox
- But all the way down there were families, many of them about the same
general age as my family, with children about the same age as my family,
and they all were laborers. Almost all of them were laborers, and there
were a couple of very elderly ladies, spinsters we called them, never
married. Two lived in the homes down a bit. Since that was the only
paved place, one of my Christmas presents was--one of them--sometimes
the only Christmas presents was a pair of skates. So I'd get these
skates and go down on this banquett and then skate all the way down to
the next street. And I remember one of those elderly ladies--both of
them sat out on that porch. We'd wave at them, "Hi, Miss such-and-such."
As we went by, they'd wave. But one of them was not a pleasant lady. She
was not pleasant at all, and the fact is, what she did to keep us from
skating in front of her house, she took sand and put it on the banquette
in front of her house, so your skates couldn't roll over that sand.
-
Knox
- But the next lady next to that one--I wish I call their names--she was a
pleasant lady, and every now and then she'd get some lemonade and come
out and give it to the kids and get some cookies and give them to the
kids, and it took me a long time, and I think maybe my mother explained
it to me, but I couldn't understand how these two ladies were so
different. One is mean and the other is so happy and pleasant. And I
guess it was my mother--I can't remember how it came about, this
knowledge, but one had been--the lady who was the kind lady had been
what they called a fast lady. She wasn't a prostitute, but she partied a
lot, and she had many men, male friends and never married. The other one
had been a spinster all her life, never had a husband, a boyfriend, or
any, and my mother explained to me, or somebody, I don't know where I
came to this knowledge, but this lady didn't do anything with her life,
and so her life became what it is, and the other lady, even though you
might not approve of what she did, she felt that she had lived her life,
so she was happy with her life, and the other was displeased. It taught
me a lesson, and it kind of says, you've got a life, you've got to live
it. You've got to do something with it, so that when you cannot do
anything more at all, you can look back and say, "What a good time I
had." You have some memories, or you have something, or you have some
triumphs, or you did something worthwhile you're pleased with, and so
you're pleased with yourself for having done it, and that's part of my
philosophy. Do something worthwhile, enjoy something, enjoy what you do.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Let me ask another follow-up. Now, you mentioned about Black and
white kids being able to play up until puberty, and then you mentioned
this young Black man that was killed and that he was having a--
-
Knox
- Yes, a white girlfriend.
-
Stevenson
- Right. You came up during what we call the Jim Crow period.
-
Knox
- Oh, yes.
-
Stevenson
- How serious was that? I mean, were there other incidents involving, let's
say, mixing of the races, which was, of course, taboo?
-
Knox
- Well, there was very little mixing of races at all. When I came up, it
was the serious segregation. The fact is, it's had a serious effect upon
me. I'll tell you, one time my mother--well, to go downtown nobody had
money to catch the streetcar, so we walked about two and a half, three
miles. We'd walk downtown and back. One time my mother was taking me
down to the shopping downtown, and right before you get there was a huge
square, a block square. In the middle of that square was the courthouse,
and some white kids and police hung around out there. Now, there was a
path diagonally across the square. My mother took me by the hand, and we
walked all the way this way and all the way that way, and we did not
take that diagonal path, so I asked her why. She said, "Well, you don't
want to get in trouble with those people," and she was talking about the
white kids or white adults really. And I guess that's one of the things.
-
Knox
- The other one was occasionally our recreation included getting on the
trolley, and the trolley would go all the way around and round and come
back to where you were, and you had to go to the back of the trolley. It
had this thing that you perhaps know all about now, because of what
happened in Alabama, but they would take this marker which says "colored
and white" and put it wherever they wanted to. If they moved it to the
back, that meant all the Black people had to stay back there whether
they had a seat or not, and there could be seats for white people and
you couldn't have those, you'd just have to stand back there. But
occasionally for recreation we would get a nickel and go get on a
trolley. But I remember having to sit in the back, and only one time
that I was on the trolley with my father, and I could tell he was not
pleased until we got off and he muttered something, but I don't think he
cursed ever. I never heard him curse, but I could tell that he was very
displeased because we had to sit in a little cramped area when there
were other seats in the front. But for transportation, that's the only
thing I remember about.
-
Knox
- Except another traumatic thing happened to me with race, well, several
things, but this one. Huey [Pierce] Long [Jr.] was shot, and his body
was being viewed in the rotunda of the capitol. I don't know what you
know about Huey Long, but what I know about Huey Long is Huey Long was
trying to serve the poor people. But who are the poor people in
Louisiana? Most of them are Black. He didn't make a discrimination
there, so when free books came for the poor kids going to school in
Louisiana, Black kids got free books. That was the first time we'd had
free books. And so when he improved the roads, many of those roads were
roads that Black people used, so we considered him a friend. Now, he
never--he wasn't for any liberation or anything for Black people, but
what he did affected and improved the life of Black people.
-
Knox
- And so a lot of Black people got in the line to view him in the rotunda,
and one Black woman was in the line, and I wasn't even in the line. I
don't know what I was doing, I was so young. But I was standing outside
the line just looking at all that long line of people several blocks
long, and this Black woman stepped out of the line. There were these
police officers guarding the line all the way, and this police officer
with his jack boots on, kicked this Black woman in the behind and told
her, "Get back in line." She looked at him and so did every Black person
in the group. If looks could have killed him, he'd have been dead that
moment, and she got back in the line, and that was one of my
traumatic--the fact that I remember that little incident now, and I was
a small kid.
-
Knox
- But the worst one I saw and lived with with the school. Our school, an
all-Black school, was the only all-Black high school in Baton Rouge, so
all of the Black kids came to the one school, McKinley High, and the
superintendent of schools would occasionally come out to our school.
When he did, he, my Black principal, and the people I guess he brought
with him would sit on the stage, and all school stopped. The whole
school came out, filled up the auditorium and sang for him, and he sat
on the stage and smoked a cigar, and I sat there hating him just as much
as I could hate anybody, because here we were, we had to do what he said
to do, and he had no respect for us at all. But anyway, that and the
other thing I mentioned about the students and the from three to
three-thirty experience.
-
Knox
- By the way, we could sing. I exulted in hearing that huge crowd of Black
people singing a spiritual. But anyway, the last one I'll tell you about
is when I graduated from Leland College, which is a Black college, a
Black Baptist college--I couldn't afford to go to Southern. Leland is
only five miles from Southern, but Southern cost too much for me to go.
And my mother had sent my oldest sister and there was no way she was
going to be able to afford to send another, because my father had died
when I was seven. Anyway, when I went to Leland, all-Black college, I
learned stuff that I didn't know anything, had no idea about. I took a
course in chemistry, and this Black college was so important to me,
because my chemistry teacher, Dr. Owen, and I could sit on the steps of
his cottage after school and just talk about chemistry, and talk about
world science and all. He had been all over the world, and it was
wonderful that I could have that relationship with my professors, which
I could never have had at any larger or any white university.
-
Knox
- By the way, there's one person you might know who was also a student
there at Leland College, and his name was Eddie, Edward G. Robinson.
Eddie G., coach of Grambling [College], and he was the tailback of our
school. Anyway, when I graduated from there, I was looking for a job,
and there wasn't one. There was nothing in chemistry at all, so I went
to education and I got a job in Mansfield, Louisiana, fifty dollars. I
have the telegram now saying, "You have been selected to teach at our
DeSoto Parish Training School in Mansfield, Louisiana. Your salary will
be fifty dollars a month." So I went up there and I taught science. They
didn't have a chemistry lab, so I taught science and math.
-
Knox
- One Saturday Oliver Baham, my roommate, and I went downtown. He wanted to
buy a white shirt, so we went downtown in Mansfield to this white store
and told the white clerk, "We want to see some white shirts." So he
brought out white shirts and hung about four of them on the counter.
Oliver looked over them and he said, "Um hmm!" And the white clerk said,
"Niggers don't say um hmm to me. They say sir." So smart aleck I had to
be, I said, "He wasn't talking to you, sir. He was just making a remark
about the shirts." And that made him mad, and he started yelling at us,
and soon there was a crowd of white people all around us. So Oliver
leaned over and said, "I think we'd better get out of here," so we
started for the door. We didn't run, but we walked and they parted and
let us out." Now, that wasn't the trauma. We went back, and we were not
unused to abuse and racial abuse, but we went back to the school. That
was Saturday. That Monday the Black principal of the school, Mr.
Johnson, called a meeting of the faculty, and an opening remark was,
"Some of the members of our faculty have been downtown antagonizing the
white element of the city." And I said, "I don't believe I can stay
here." But I taught until May that year and then I went home, and I was
talking to my mother and I told her about it, and she said to me, she
said, "Well, what else can you do?" I said, "Well, I think I'll just see
if I can go some other place, maybe Los Angeles, California." She looked
at me and she said, "Owen, I can live in the South and you can't. I
don't want you to go, but I think you'd better go." It took me a while
to realize when a mother tells her youngest son to leave her, it's
important. So that's why I came to California.
-
Stevenson
- Let me backtrack. I have some more follow-ups. In your home when you were
coming up, did you ever, you, your mother, your brothers and sisters,
discuss race? What did your mother tell you about race in terms of what
your place was, and did she relay any of her experiences?
-
Knox
- We never had any formal discussion like that. But what she would do is
when there was an instance of something, something happened and she was
discussing it, what she would really say to us is, "You must know how to
act. You must know what to do. And you can't--." What she was really
saying now I realize, "You can't just have a pattern--this is what
you're going to do. You have to be able to read it and decide what is
the best thing for me to do in this," and I think that's what she was
really telling us. There were those Black people who out and out
resisted it, and many of them were incarcerated and some of them died.
In fact, as I remember, when I was a little kid asleep early in the
morning, and I would hear some hustling and bustling moving in the
house, and I'd wake up. Sometime later I asked my mother, "What was that
when every--," and this is when I was grown, "--every now and then there
was a noise going on, and people running back and forth, and somebody at
the door and all, and then after that it's quiet and everybody went back
to sleep?"
-
Knox
- She said, "Well, your father is a member of a group," I'm trying to think
of the name and maybe I will, "and whenever a Black person is in trouble
with the white people here, officials or not, they, this group of men,"
Odd Men it was called, O-d-d--she said, "The Odd Men, they would go from
house to house and get a dollar or fifty cents or so and get enough
money to catch a bus and get out of town." She said, "And so what you
heard were those fellows who were in trouble with the police, in trouble
with the white people, and they had to get out of town, and they would
go from house to house with the Odd Men. The Odd Men would give them
money, and they'd catch a bus and go."
-
Stevenson
- That's interesting, almost like an Underground Railroad.
-
Knox
- That's what it was.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting.
-
Knox
- So that's another thing I learned about race. Most of what I learned
about race had to do with my own experiences, and that three to
three-thirty school gave me a chance to learn about Black people I'd
never heard about, that's outstanding Black people in all areas of
endeavor. My mother was never--I never remember seeing her more than
angry, and she was not the kind of person to talk about the white devils
and that, and she's certainly not the kind of person who would say,
"Accept your place." And my father, that was not what he--the fact is,
he was one of the leaders of the Odd Men, and one of the most
unfortunate things is here are these stalwart, hard-working, God-fearing
people, who have to accept or perish, and that struck me, too, because
my father wasn't the only one I knew. My father's friends, some of them
I used to like to kind of sit down like I'm reading and listen to what
they're saying, and some of them were revolutionary. But there was never
any act in my family, only resentment about the racial things.
-
Knox
- But let me tell you, what my experiences taught me, to hate white people.
My experiences said, hate white people. My family said, not all white
people are bad, and it took me a while to kind of process that, because
I came out of the South mad. I was angry. When I came to California, I
was angry, and my first experiences here were not that much better, so I
was getting angrier as time went on.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I'd like to ask you what your experience was then within your
family with other Blacks, in terms of what I call the dynamic of light
and dark skin color.
-
Knox
- Oh. Well, in Louisiana that's a big case. In fact, probably because I was
fair, I'm fair--my father's dark. My father's dark. His mother is fair.
Her father, from the little information I have--I think his name was
Dixon, but I'm not sure about that. I'm looking it up now--was dark. My
mother's father was Irish and Black. His wife, and I don't know which
wife, but she was part white and Indian, oh, and Black, and so my mother
had long hair and she was about my color. My father was very dark, a
handsome dark man. And I was Baptist, my family built a Baptist church,
so I was Baptist. When I was in high school, all the kids in Baton Rouge
went to one high school, and so those in that Creole section, very fair,
long, beautiful hair, fair women, they also came to the same school.
There was a girl named Alice that I became enamored of, so I asked her
if one Saturday she would go to the movie or Saturday matinee, the movie
with me, and she said yes. She said, "But you've got to come by my house
and get me." I said, "Okay." She was Creole.
-
Knox
- So I went by Alice's house one day on Saturday, and I walked in and her
mother came to the door and said, "Have a seat." I sat on the couch. She
said, "Alice will be with you shortly." And she went, the mother went in
the kitchen and came back out, and she had a cup of coffee and a glass
of milk, and she brought them and set them down. Now, I just believed
the milk was for me, the coffee was for her. She sat across from me and
she didn't touch the coffee, so I didn't touch the milk. She took a
spoon, and she took the coffee and got a spoonful of coffee, and she
dropped it in the glass of milk and stirred it up. She said, "That's how
much Negro my daughter has in her." I didn't know what to do then. I
just, yes, you know. And she said, "Now tell me, what are your
intentions?" Well, this was about tenth grade, eleventh grade, high
school. By that time the Creoles are getting married. What she is asking
me is what by now I know, I didn't know then, but now I know she was
asking me what are my intentions. Do you want to marry my daughter? Is
that why you want to take her to the movies, take her out? And I thought
about it, and she was staring at me waiting for an answer. I said,
"Well, my intention was to take her to a movie," and that's all I could
think of. So her mother told me, "Okay, go on," and Alice and I went to
the movie and came back. It wasn't dark when we got back.
-
Knox
- But when we turned--she lived in this cul-de-sac, and when we turned into
her block, her whole family was standing out on the banquett looking for
her. So I walked her all the way down to her house, I told her goodbye,
and I left. I never took her out again. But as fate would have it, many
years later in California, in Los Angeles, I'm driving down the street
and I come to Broadway and about 41st Street. I'm on 41st and I have to
wait then this crosswalk while the people pass across, and I looked at
them and there's Alice. So I waved and said, "Hi, Alice!" She looked,
she turned, and she walked on away. And I found out later she was
passing for white out here.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting, very.
-
Knox
- And she wasn't the only one. Her close friend of hers, who lived in the
same community where she lived--I became a real estate agent out here,
and I had to go to Bank of America to get the real estate agent to sign
the papers for me. I went to one on the corner of 54th [Street] and
Crenshaw [Boulevard], the Bank of America. Then I walked in with my
papers--escrow is what I mean, escrow officer. I walked in with my
papers to give it to the escrow officer, and out walked a girl named
Dorothy, who was a classmate of mine at McKinley High School. She looked
at me and I looked at her. Now, then, they don't have any Black people
on that side of this counter, and I knew, in the moment I saw her I
knew, and the moment she saw me she knew that I knew, and so I said, "I
have these escrow papers. Will you process them for me?" She said, "Sure
I will," and she went on and did the processing and gave them to me.
-
Knox
- I was talking to--telling her boyfriend, who by then lived up in Seattle,
so I said, "Clyde, you know who I saw?" And I told him. He said, "Yeah,
I know. She's passing for white." He said, "What you don't know and she
doesn't know is the white fellow she married is passing for white."
[laughs]
-
Stevenson
- Wow.
-
Knox
- I don't know, Clyde tells all kinds of lies. I don't know whether that's
true or not. But I said, "Oh, my god. They could have a baby that's
Black." But anyway, yes, I had lots of experiences, because in
Louisiana, in New Orleans it's worse than Baton Rouge. In New Orleans I
would visit--Baton Rouge is a bedroom community, and New Orleans was the
only place you could find fun, so New Orleans was the place where we
went to have fun and dance and party. For Mardi Gras I went there to--in
fact, I took my wife about five years ago, took her back to New Orleans
for the Mardi Gras, and I showed her the same thing I saw when I was
there. There was the club, they call them clubs, and they would have
parties during Mardi Gras time. We went to one big party--I can't
remember the name of the club now. But it was a big party, it was a huge
thing, and they had it in the big auditorium, and it was a huge,
beautiful affair. I think [Riley B.] "B.B." King sang there, and it was
a great party. In fact, it was like a picnic indoors. Everybody had a
table with all their food and drinks on it, and another group of people
with the party and the dancing, and we had a good time.
-
Knox
- And my wife and I--this had happened to me when I was there, but I was
showing her it was still the same. Almost all the people there were
dark. Now, in the hotel we were staying in, there was another party. I
had been invited to it only because I was Black. But I took my wife
there, I said, "Let me show you something." We walked in, and this is
kind of a sedate group. I walked in and I asked my wife, "Have you
noticed anything?" She said, "No, I don't know anything, except this
looks like a lot of white people." I said, "That's the difference. These
are Black people, but they're all fair at this party. The other party we
went to, they're all Black, and that's how New Orleans is," and that was
just four years, five years ago, or about six years ago.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting. So it's like in the past or even now it sounds like the
Creole community is self-segregating to a point.
-
Knox
- Oh, yes. There's a lot more, just like there's Black-and-white
intermarriage and intermingling, but a lot more of that among the
Creoles and Blacks, but it's still separate. In fact, color of skin is
still a major factor in Black life. In fact, for a long time the only
fair Black people who did well--the only people who did well in this
society, both nationally and locally, were fair. In fact, there's a lot
of--California, a lot in Los Angeles, early people--
-
Stevenson
- Early Black Los Angeles?
-
Knox
- Early Black people were fair who did well here in California, except for
those organizations and particular churches, and churches are the most
segregated of any institution we have, except for those coming out the
churches, they became [unclear], they could be dark. But the society
itself did not promote dark people for a long time.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Could you tell me what emphasis was placed in your home on
education?
-
Knox
- In every home that I knew anything about when I was coming up, like I
told you, from first grade on, there was never any question about
getting an education. There was never any discussion about it. In fact,
there was never any discussion about whether you would go to college or
not. The question was, how? The question was really, "How are we going
to get you in? You're going to college, but how are you going to get
there?" And my mother told me, "That's not your problem." And I asked
her, "Well, you know--." First I wanted to go to Southern. No, first I
wanted to go north, I wanted to go to some college in the North. In
fact, the one was Michigan State, because I wanted to be a doctor, and I
had heard that that's--and I thought I was smart. LSU wouldn't let me
in, Louisiana State University wouldn't let me in, so I applied to them.
Now, what I had heard is that if you qualify to go to one of those
schools, rather than letting you come to their school, they'll pay your
tuition at another school up North, and it was being done. Particularly
in Mississippi, a lot of that was being done, so I thought that's what I
was going to do. They didn't even respond to my application.
-
Knox
- But like I said, there was no possibility of ever my paying tuition in
any one of those schools, because we couldn't pay tuition to Southern
University, and that was the lowest tuition anywhere. But my sister had
gone to Southern. But my mother, being in this Baptist thing, conference
and all, that conference contributed to Leland College, which was a
small Black Baptist college, and since she contributed, and she spoke
for them all throughout the state, that was available to me, so I went
to Leland. I'm glad I did. Even Southern was too big for me. I needed
Leland, a little school. But in no family that I know--well, I think
maybe it was this. The only way out of the situation Black people are in
is education, and so there was never any question about the fact that no
matter whether you could do well or not, you're going to school.
-
Knox
- In fact, in my community, if you were walking around and you're school
aged and you're walking around, anybody in the community would tell you,
"Get yourself back over to that school. What you doing down here?"
-
Stevenson
- What do you think the roots of that is, why there was just no question?
-
Knox
- Well, with my family, what they saw is if you're going to better--and, of
course, that's the way they say it, "If you're going to better yourself,
you've got to go to school." But it wasn't any problem with me. First, I
told you, for a couple of years, the first two years I was home
schooled, and there wasn't any question about it. To me, my mother was
one of the best teachers I ever had, and she didn't even know the
mathematics. She didn't know. But what she knew is, in fact, she'd tell
me, "If you don't know that, when your brother comes home, ask him."
Then I was sent to Catholic school. She wouldn't let me go back to
public school right away, so the next year after she home schooled me, I
went to Catholic school, and they're very strict, very strict. So that
was a good education. Then I went back to the public school and that was
good for me, because by that time I got some excellent teachers. Maggie
Nelson, that's an excellent lady. She was the fifth-grade teacher, and
most of those teachers, there was something about the way they revered
education, something about the fact that this is important, but it's not
just important, it's, well, almost fun.
-
Knox
- Like I remember one time this Miss Maggie Nelson had put me in a play.
[laughs] The play was musical. I learned something there. My part was to
play--it was a Japanese play, and my part was to play this big Japanese
person in charge, and I was to sing my part. And I can remember that
about the third rehearsal Miss Maggie Nelson, a very nice lady, came to
me and she said, "Owen, I think we're going to do it like this. When it
comes to your part, I want you to speak it." I realized that, "You can't
sing." And what I spoke was, "For I'm a royal cuss, and you are but
dust." [laughs] Anyway, that has nothing to do with this.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Another follow up I have, you mentioned when you were in high
school and they required the Black students to stay that extra half
hour, and that the teachers took advantage of that time to teach you
Black history, poetry. Could you tell me about some of the highlights?
What type of Black history did they teach you? What type of poetry did
they teach you?
-
Knox
- Yes. Hmm. The poetry was across the board, but I remember some of it. I
remember one of them was called, "Woodman, spare that tree, for in my
youth it sheltered me, and I'll protect it now." And there was another
one, "Invictus." "Out of the night that covers me, black as a pit from
pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be, for my unconquerable soul."
Now, you can see what they're doing with that kind of poetry. They're
saying, "You are important. You are somebody important." And then one of
the teachers had read about--I don't know if she had ever seen anything
about it--the Harlem Renaissance, and so she taught us about all of
those outstanding poets, writers, speakers, musicians. And just recently
I read [Kareem] Abdul-Jabbar's "On the Shoulders of Giants," and in it,
it talks about the Harlem Renaissance. But the Harlem Renaissance, there
was a Renaissance basketball team, which was the first Black pro team,
and I was visiting a friend who was in Xavier University in New Orleans,
and that weekend the Renaissance team was playing Xavier, and Xavier had
an outstanding basketball team and an outstanding tennis team and
players. But I went to see it, Xavier and Renaissance, and Xavier almost
beat the Renaissance team that day, but the Renaissance team could only
go to colleges and local places to play, because there was no organized
Black basketball at the time, and you couldn't go into the pros.
-
Knox
- But anyway, those kind of things the people taught us, but one other
thing they did, they let us be creative. They said, "Write your story."
Or they'd give you a topic and say such-and-such a thing, "Write a story
about it." So we just wrote a story out of our own imagination, and that
kind of education wasn't going on anywhere. I mean, it was what the book
said.
-
Stevenson
- Right. So teaching the Harlem Renaissance, and what year would that have
been around? When they were teaching the Harlem Renaissance, that was
fairly recent history.
-
Knox
- That was history then. That was then.
-
Stevenson
- Right, as it was happening.
-
Knox
- It was happening then, yes, because, well, I don't know what the period
of the Renaissance was, but I know it was early in the century, and I
was born in 1918, so it was still going on.
-
Stevenson
- And the Black teachers that you had, were they encouraging you as
students to pursue a college education?
-
Knox
- Oh, yes. Everybody did, everybody did. In fact, they used to say, "If you
don't stay in class, if you don't learn this stuff, you're not going to
be anybody, so you'd better stay here and--," and so it was pounded into
us all the time.
-
Stevenson
- Were there any teachers who stood out that you remember particularly, and
were some of these teachers trained at Black colleges themselves?
-
Knox
- All of them were. All of my teachers, they went to Black colleges,
because all of them came from the South. When I went to Leland, some of
the teachers were from all over, but when I was in high school and
elementary school, all of my teachers were from Black colleges. Most of
them were from Southern University, but some of them were also from
Jackson State [College]. In fact, it was not Jackson State, it was
Jackson College then, from Mississippi. Oh, and one other place. Let me
see if I can call it. Tougaloo [College], Tougaloo in Mississippi. I
remember a teacher from Tougaloo. The reason I remember that is when I
went to college, my football team went to Tougaloo, and I became student
manager. I was too small to play football, so I became student manager,
and I traveled with the team. I went to Tougaloo and let me tell you, I
walked across--I would go before the team got there and prepare for the
team, where they're going to stay and the equipment and all of that. So
I had done all my work and it was early afternoon before the game in the
evening, later that afternoon, and I walked around the campus, and it
suddenly shocked me. Every girl I saw was pretty. I'd never seen this.
Later on I said, "Tell me, what kind of recruiting do you do that you
get all of these beautiful girls to come?" One fellow said, "It's in the
contract." They said, "No, it's not in the contract." But I was amazed.
Well, I just feel like saying it.
-
Knox
- But that afternoon I walked into the auditorium, huge auditorium, just to
see what the auditorium looked like, because at Leland ours was a little
auditorium. This was a huge, beautiful auditorium, and when I went in I
heard music. I looked down and I saw a piano player, a Black fellow
playing the piano, and so I sat in the last row of seats to listen to
him practice, then play. He never said a word. But across from him was a
nun sitting at the organ, and after a while she picked up and played the
organ, and he played the piano. They never spoke to each other. One of
those moments in life that I'll never forget. I just sat there and
listened to this music of these people who were communicating with each
other through music only. Nobody spoke, no other sounds were made, and I
just sat there, and that was at Tougaloo. I had a great time at
Tougaloo. But that's where most of our teachers came from. So you see,
if you ask me a question I'll be--
-
Stevenson
- No, that's what I want. Okay, this is a good-- [End of interview]
1.2. Session 2 (November 14, 2008)
-
Stevenson
- Good morning. I'm continuing an interview with Dr. Owen Knox on Friday,
November 14 [2008]. I've got some follow-ups from last time. Could you
tell me more about your brothers and sisters, your siblings?
-
Knox
- Yes. I'm one of five, and I'm the youngest. My oldest sister had a lot to
do--both of my sisters, but particularly my oldest sister, had a lot to
do with bringing up the family really, because my mother was active in
many organizations, particularly religious organizations. She was
president of several groups and she was in many, and she spoke
throughout the state and local community, so she was gone a lot of the
time. The fact is, one of the times I missed her most was it seemed that
every September there was some conference somewhere that she attended,
and that's the beginning of school, and so my two sisters really got me
ready. I'm the youngest, and she got me ready to go to school, even
through college for that matter.
-
Knox
- But they were both really instrumental in a lot of what I did, because
they assumed the parent--my father died when I was seven, and Eunice, my
oldest sister, was one who really helped me through the early years. My
next sister, Rosalie, she was the one who had an occasion to go to
college. She was the first one of my family to go to college. She went
to Southern University, became a teacher, and even taught at the
elementary school that I attended before I left elementary school; also
a great help to me. Particularly, both of them were of great assistance
to me when I went to college, because of the limited resources. By the
time I got to college, they both were employed, so they were able to
help me through the college, early college years anyway.
-
Knox
- My oldest brother--three males--my oldest brother, Sam, named after my
father, he had great difficulty. He was an excellent person, but had
great difficulty with the regimen of school, and he really dropped out
of school when he was in about the seventh grade. My mother had, as I
think I mentioned, an eighth-grade education, and so he was closer
to--my two brothers, older than I am, were closer together, and I was
kind of the baby of all of those. My other brother, Bill, who was only
three years older than I am, he was in school almost with me through--he
was up ahead of me in elementary school. We went to McKinley High School
in Baton Rouge together. He was ahead of me, and we went to college at
Leland College in Baker, Louisiana together.
-
Knox
- Let's see. All of them are deceased now. My sister--one of the
interesting things about family is when my oldest sister married, she
and her husband moved in with us, so [unclear]. Then when my next sister
got married, she and her husband moved in with us, which helped pay,
because my mother never worked and my father died when I was seven, so
that helped pay the mortgage and all the bills. And my two
brothers-in-law that I had at that time, were very instrumental and very
helpful to me in guidance and the like, because my older brother was not
giving me guidance at the time, but my two brothers-in-law did. And then
the fact is that we all had this big family now, and we all ate
together, and I think the family life did a lot to shape both my career
and my life.
-
Knox
- My mother was very religious, as I have said, and so that my sisters and
when their husbands came, they became participants in the church, and so
a lot of discussion around the dinner table, which was really a
tremendous learning experience for me being the youngest one and all of
these older siblings and their spouses brought a tremendous breadth of
experiences that they had to the table, that I listened to as they
discussed them. So a large part of what I believe and think and do had
to do with that family, my siblings and their spouses.
-
Stevenson
- Can you tell me a little bit about your sisters training to be teachers?
-
Knox
- Yes. My oldest sister also trained to be a teacher, and I think she
taught for a short time. She went to what was called--let me see, what
did they call that? I can't think of the name of it right now, but it
was a two-year training school for teachers. My next sister, Rosalie,
she went through to Southern University and the full four-year course,
and she became a teacher and remained a teacher until she retired. That
was both good and bad. It was good for me in that they assigned her to
the school where I was a student, and so whenever she disciplined or
gave a grade to a student that the student didn't like, the student and
I most likely would meet after school about that, because they'd take it
out on me. But that was both good and bad, too, because having a sister
on the faculty I think had a lot to do with my behavior at school, but
having also a sister gave me some problems with some of the other
students who were her students. So at that time, it was considered the
way to settle your differences was to have physical combat, and so I had
to engage in several fights after school.
-
Knox
- When I was a young, very young child, I think even before I went to
school in my community I described before, we lived kind of on a hill,
and all the houses down from us had children, and so we'd gather. But
there was a lady three doors down from us who liked the group of kids,
and so she took the little kids and sometimes in the afternoon before
they had to go in for supper, she would sit and tell us tales. So we
would gather on her porch, and she would just tell us stories, and many
of them I guess she made up as she went, but they were interesting to
us. But I remember one time sitting on a chair, and this wicker chair
had a seat that had tacks that held the seat down, and I picked up one
of the tacks and while she was talking to us, a story, and in many of
the stories there was a frightful kind of thing, and I swallowed the
tack. Now, that stayed with me for years, because it lodged somewhere
inside, and it stayed with me for years, and the reason I'm telling all
of this is because it had something to do with my health. I had a cough,
and so I wasn't a good fighter and I lost a few. I just can't remember
many of them that I won.
-
Knox
- But another interesting part of that is it prepared me for the kind of
violence that you find in the poverty community, and even though I
wasn't always or very seldom victorious, it at least told me how to
protect yourself in an environment like that. And so I think it helped
me a lot, particularly when I was grown up and I was in threatening
circumstances, and I remember it helping me very much when I was
principal of the school during the Watts riot in South Los Angeles. That
ordinarily would be an extremely frightening situation to be in, but I
think some of that early life where there was some violence prepared me
so that I knew that you don't panic, and you try to calmly figure your
way out and how you're going to save yourself. But anyway, that was my
early childhood.
-
Knox
- By the way, I swallowed this tack and about two years later, maybe three
years later, maybe more, I was reading the newspaper--I was an avid
reader, and I was reading the newspaper on my knees with the paper on
the floor, and I was bent down, and I started coughing and the tack came
up.
-
Stevenson
- Wow.
-
Knox
- Reading has all kinds of values to it. That was one. But now--at that
time perhaps I didn't value some of those kinds of experiences. Some of
them would be considered negative experiences, but I think in my later
life each one gave me some kind of a strength or knowledge or attitude
that helped me through problems later on.
-
Stevenson
- Would you say that your sisters being teachers strongly influenced you to
go into education?
-
Knox
- It perhaps did, but I think less--I never thought that it did a lot. The
first--my brother had a doctor is named after the doctor, one of the few
doctors in the Black community, Dr. Murray, and Dr. Murray was a friend
to my family. He was not just a doctor, he was a friend. He knew
everything about all of us from birth, and he was just a tremendous
friend, and he was somebody I admired. Not having a father, whenever he
came around he was always friendly, and so I always looked up to him as
being one of the really positive people in my community, and I think I
wanted to be a doctor more than I thought of ever being a teacher. As a
result, I took science courses, throughout college I took science
courses. The fact is, my major is chemistry and my minor is mathematics,
and I think it had to do with the fact that I was thinking of being a
doctor, and less thinking of being a teacher.
-
Knox
- What I think propelled me into being a teacher was that when I graduated
from college with a Bachelor of Science degree, there was no place in
Louisiana for me to do anything. That didn't lend itself to any
employment. So I decided that I would go to the North. The fact is, the
first thing I did, and maybe I mentioned it, I applied to Louisiana
State University, LSU, in the hopes that--I knew I would never be
admitted to the segregated school, but in the hopes that what some of
the universities were doing in the South then when a Black person
applied, they would steer them to a northern school, and the state would
pay their tuition, and I thought that would happen to me. Well, at LSU
it didn't. They didn't even respond to my application.
-
Knox
- But so I decided that I would go to the North and see if I could just
find a way to get into a medical college. I think the name of the
college that I wanted to go to was Rush Medical College. So I went to
Chicago, and I could go to Chicago because one of my uncles' family, his
children, my cousins, had moved to Chicago. So I wrote to them and they
said come up and I could stay with them while I decided what to do, and
I did that. I took what's called the excursion train, which means you
pay so much money you can get a round-trip ticket, and it's during a
certain sale that you could get the ticket at a reasonable price. So I
did go to Chicago, and my intent was, and I'd thought this through, I
said, what I will do, I will go to a medical school and I will sit on
the steps until somebody asks me, "What are you doing here?" and I'll
say, "I'm trying to get in, but I don't have any money," and hoping that
maybe somebody would say, "Well, come on in."
-
Knox
- Well, I got to Chicago and I spent the week there trying to figure out
where everything was and how to go about doing this, but during that
time, walking and traveling around Chicago, particularly in the
community where I was, I noticed that the people were particularly, I
don't know if it's called incested. The fact is, I walked one time,
walking down the street about a block from where I was living, and there
was a big fight in the middle of the street. Some fellows were fighting,
and they were beating each other up. But I noticed that nobody gathered
around as they had in the South. When we had a fight, everybody would
gather around and cheer for one of the combatants. But I noticed that
the people in Chicago walked past and nobody even looked. They just kept
going and let the fight go on. And after I thought about that a little
while I realized, I don't think this is the right place to sit and wait
for somebody to notice you and be sympathetic to your cause.
-
Knox
- So I devised another system. I went to the local bank, and the bank,
Manufacturers and [Merchants]--I can't remember the name of the bank,
but it's something like M & M, Manufacturers and something Bank.
I went in and I asked to see the president. They looked askance at me,
and I said, "It's important [unclear]." So they smiled and finally they
said, "Okay. We'll let you see the president." So they called a young
man out, and the young man came out and he was not a whole lot older
than I was. He came out and he shook my hand and he said, "I'm the
president's son," and he introduced himself. "My name is Solomon B.
[Smith]," I'll have to think about what the last name was, and I really
think they were just humoring me. But we got to talking and he said,
"Come on in the office." So I went in the office and sat down. Smith,
Solomon B. Smith was his name. We sat and talked. He sat at his desk and
I sat across, and I was thinking, this is amazing. I'm in the
president's suite. And he said, "Well, what do you want me to do for
you?" And I told him, "Well, here's my plan. I will take out a will. I
will take out also any other papers that secure this, but I would like a
loan from the bank to send me to medical school, which requires that
after medical school I pay the loan back to you." And he said, "Yes, but
on all our loans we require that you have something substantial." I
said, "Well, the only thing I have is me, so what I'm offering you is me
as collateral, and you make the loan, and I will pay the loan back
after." He said, "You know, that's interesting, never heard of that
before." He said, "But unfortunately, I'm the son of the president. I'm
Solomon B. Smith. That would have to come from Solomon A. Smith, my
father, who is in Florida."
-
Knox
- So he told me, "But he'll be back after vacation." So I waited and I went
several times, and Solomon A. Smith had not come back. Fact is, as far
as I know, Solomon maybe even never came back, or I was never notified,
and I went to the bank several times. But one day, and by that time it
was late September in Chicago, I walked out of the flat where I was
living with the boyfriend of one of my cousins. I walked out and the sun
was shining bright. It had been a cool week, but the sun was shining
bright, like a beautiful day, and I turned to the right and turned to
the north, and that's when I learned what the hawk was. I had heard it,
but I didn't know what it was. The hawk is that cold wind that comes off
Lake Michigan that sweeps right through the streets of Chicago, and I
remember it was so cold that I bent over and for a block or two blocks I
was bent over, and I remember my stomach hurt because I had bent over
leaning into that wind, and I decided the weather's not going to get any
better here, so I went back to Louisiana.
-
Knox
- But when I got back to Louisiana, I still had no job and I had no
schooling. So I received a telegram from a school superintendent in
northern Louisiana, which offered me a job teaching, and one of the
reasons that that happened is because several other people in my
graduating class had become teachers, teachers and preachers most of
them. And it offered--and I still have the telegram. It offered me a
position as a teacher in DeSoto Parish Training School, in Mansfield,
Louisiana, northern Louisiana, for fifty dollars a month. I accepted,
and I went to Mansfield and accepted that position, and I taught science
and mathematics at DeSoto Parish Training School, and that's where I
learned a lot about teaching, because you had to do everything. Very
little was prepared for you, materials and the like. You had to almost
invent them.
-
Knox
- But the year of teaching was all right until I think we discussed the
last time I was here, until they told me I was then antagonizing the
white element of the city. I went home and I discussed this with my
mother, and she told me, as I believe I told you, "I can live in the
South and you can't." So one friend who taught with me in Mansfield and
another friend who had graduated from--both of these had graduated from
Southern University, and another friend who had also graduated from
Southern University but couldn't find a job--he was a cook on one of the
ships in the Mississippi River, and the three of us sat down and talked
about it and said, "Well, for one summer let's go to Los Angeles." And
Carl [Thomas], one of the fellows, had a brochure from USC. So we
decided that we were coming out here and would go to a summer session at
USC. The three of us caught a [Continental] Trailways bus, and I refer
to that as, I escaped from Louisiana on a Trailways bus. The three of us
took a Trailways bus to Los Angeles, and we came here, and one of them,
Earl Walter, was one of the fellows, and Earl had a distant cousin here,
living on East Adams Boulevard, and the three of us moved into a room in
her house, and the three of us enrolled in USC and we went to USC for
the summer semester.
-
Knox
- And it really hadn't occurred to me that I only bought a one-way ticket
to Los Angeles from Baton Rouge, and we found ourselves--the fact is, I
enjoyed going to USC, but it was a major change, because I had never
attended a class with a white person before, and in this one I was the
only non-white person in the class. But it was a class in chemistry, and
there was another amazing thing about it is that chemistry lab that they
had did not resemble at all the one I had seen at Leland College. In
fact, I actually had to get a catalog so that I could identify all the
equipment in that one, because most of it I had never seen.
-
Stevenson
- So it was more advanced equipment?
-
Knox
- Yes, the equipment, the beakers and all the chemical equipment they had
was exotic to me. I knew the basics, because that's what I had learned.
But anyway, it was a good semester. I learned a whole lot, not in
chemistry. I learned a whole lot about living at [U]SC then. By the way,
SC at that time was not the liberal university it is now, and so I think
I knew every Black person on campus at that time. But that's how I
became a teacher. But when I went to SC, I'm still taking science with
the hope that I can still get into medical school. I finished that
summer semester, but I didn't have tuition for the fall, so the three of
us had to figure out what else are we going to do, but we had decided by
that time we were going to stay in Los Angeles. So we had to decide, now
how will you do that, and each one of us had to go out and seek a job.
-
Knox
- I got a job with the Youth Administration, it was called. Anyway, it was,
I guess, make work, because my job was to go into a public park and pick
up papers, and I did that for extremely low pay. But the interesting
thing, though, was an unfortunate thing for us, is the three of us that
were living there, the lady would let us live there, and they'd let us
cook, but we had to provide the food. Well, for those who've lived in
Los Angeles for some time, they remember that down on Central Avenue
there was a huge marketplace, and there they took the produce that was
sent in from all around Los Angeles and shipped it to the East. Well,
they couldn't ship ripe fruit or vegetables, because they'd spoil on the
way. So they had to ship them just before they ripened, and all the ripe
fruit and vegetables were available to the workers. Well, we found out
we could also go down there and get them. So we went down and whatever
was available, that's what we had.
-
Knox
- What was really fortunate, and I believe I told you that Lloyd--Earl, his
name is, Earl Walter, the fellow who had been cooking, he became our
cook, just for the three of us. He cooked, and the lady allowed us to do
that. So he would cook whatever we could find at the open market down
there, at the big market, we called it. Whatever we could find in the
big market, that's what he'd cook. Whatever that was, that's what we
had, which meant we had excellent food, because most of it was
vegetables and fruit. But we had a difficulty. They didn't have meat
that they were shipping, so we didn't get meat. And now and then we'd
put whatever little money we had, and we'd go down to the market down on
Central Avenue and get whatever meat we could purchase.
-
Knox
- But one day--this does not sound truthful. One day we had no meat, and
what they had down at the big market, what we had collected at the big
market was a vegetable, let's see, what do they call that, what's
zucchini? What is it?
-
Stevenson
- Zucchini, squash?
-
Knox
- Squash. They had squash, thank you. They had squash, but they had a lot
of different kinds of squash, and so we just brought some of all those
different kinds of squash home, and Earl made us a squash meal. Now,
this only happened once, but I'll never forget it. It was amazing. What
we did, we had one squash, a zucchini squash, and then we had that other
round--I don't know what that name was. But that zucchini squash, he
took it and he made something out of it that made it look like meat. It
looked like--I don't know how to describe it. It looked kind of like a
sausage. And then he took--what's that little round squash? I don't know
the name of that--and he cooked that, and that was our vegetable. But
there was this what they called summer squash, that yellow squash. He
took that and put some sugar on it and made kind of a batter like, and
that was our dessert. Excellent food, really, but amazing, and at that
time we laughed at it and thought how awful this is that we're--but I
realize now how wonderful it was to us.
-
Knox
- We were a close group there, had to be a close group, because we had to
support each other. But the three of us, we survived. Carl Thomas became
a lawyer, and Earl Walter became a court bailiff, and the three of us
became community activists. In fact, during the time of the Civil Rights
marches in the South, Earl was a leader in an organization called Call
Off the Dogs, which had to do with what was going on in the South at the
time. Unfortunately, the two of them--all three of us were smokers, but
both of them died as a result of smoking. Earl died of cancer, and I
recently went to his son's funeral, and Carl died of heart attacks, both
of them having had previously successful lives after a very difficult
start, and I'm the sole survivor.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I have a couple more follow-ups now. One, you talked at length
about your mother being an evangelist. At the time she was doing this,
would it have been unusual for a woman or particularly a Black woman to
be an evangelist?
-
Knox
- Yes, but she wasn't an organized evangelist. She and some other women had
an organization called the Women's Auxiliary, and they worked on what
they called the Home Mission Society and then the Foreign Mission
Society, and she was a leader in all of those, and as a result she spoke
all over. In fact, before she died, no, just before the Second World War
began, she was scheduled to go to Europe to a World Baptist Convention,
and then the war started and she didn't get to go. But anyway, she was
not an evangelist like going out preaching to crowds to get converts and
all. She preached at our church. Now, the reason she preached at our
church is our church, I believe I told you that my father and his
friends and their families built this church, and when they built it, we
couldn't hire a regular preacher, so he came and he'd preach two Sundays
a month, and the other preacher, well, not a preacher, he was kind of a
layman who became a preacher, and he preached. But sometimes neither one
was available, so my mother gave the sermon. But she didn't have a
church, and she was not, certainly not a televangelist, but she was not
an organized evangelist. She was a religious woman who spoke. She never
said she preached; she spoke. But it was all through her religion. Your
question was?
-
Stevenson
- Well, even though she was informally an evangelist, would it be unusual
for a Black woman to--?
-
Knox
- No, there were quite a few Black women. Fact is, if you remember the
history of Black people, it's that the Black women took the leadership
in almost everything--
-
Stevenson
- Yes.
-
Knox
- --anti-slavery and that. One of the reasons was that segregation and all
that it implies was more directed at men than women, and so it wasn't
unusual for women to take leadership in many--within the Black
community, not generally but within the Black community. So no, it was
not unusual or strange that she would do so. It was somewhat unusual
that she would be the religious leader in the church, because that was
kind of reserved for males.
-
Stevenson
- Exactly. Yes.
-
Knox
- But a lot of what she did--I guess I listened to her speeches, I guess,
as much as or more than anybody else, and I'm impressed. I have some of
it at my house now. It was amazing to me to see how she could get a
crowd, a group of people sitting there, and how she could use her words
in such a way that they came together for some purpose. It just
intrigued me that she could do that, and that's just by words. She
didn't do anything. She just used words, and they could have that kind
of effect, and that had a tremendous effect on me. I realized the power
of thoughts and thoughts put into words.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. There was a great migration of African Americans, I think both
after World War I and World War II. When you were still in Baton Rouge,
were you seeing a lot of people in your community coming out to Los
Angeles?
-
Knox
- Yes. And fact is, one of the reasons I found friends here is because they
had been part of that migration after World War I, and here in Los
Angeles a lot of the leaders, [Augustus Freeman] "Gus" Hawkins and many
of those leaders came right out of the South. In fact, many of them came
out of Louisiana.
-
Stevenson
- Exactly.
-
Knox
- And some of them were friends of my father, so when I came out here, I
could find some of those. In fact, there are some of those places I ate
Sunday dinner. In fact, the three of us used to say that come Sunday we
could get meat, because somebody was going to invite us to dinner,
because there was a large group of--and still is--a large group of Black
people from Baton Rouge and surrounding Baton Rouge, New Orleans and
Baton Rouge, who live here that knew us and knew our families, that we
could find friends with out here. So a lot of the times we joked about
it. "Who's going to take us to dinner this Sunday?" But we joined a
Methodist church. I was Baptist in Louisiana, but when I came here, the
first time I was invited to church after I came here was to the
Methodist church. And my two brothers who came out here previously,
their families had been Methodist in Baton Rouge, and so we kind of
gravitated to the Methodist church, and three of us became youth leaders
in the church.
-
Knox
- We established a church newsletter we did at Earl's home. We produced
this newsletter. And I remember one day we were preparing it. It was a
Sunday, and it was a Sunday morning. We were going to take the
newsletter to church, and about five-thirty we were doing it when we
heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, and so we couldn't get it in
the print, but when we went to church we announced to people there that
Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Hamilton [United] Methodist Church is
where I attended, we attended. But the church people knew that we were
kind of orphans in the city, and many of them invited us to their homes.
I think back on those as some real formative days, because of the
experience the three of us had together, and being from the South we
were having personally having experienced the segregation of the South.
Then being here in California, I think that the three of us just felt an
obligation to do something in support of the people in the South, and so
we worked that at heart. Also, that association with the two of them and
with our previous experiences in the South kind of shaped some of
what--well, it certainly shaped a lot of my attitude about
discrimination, but it also shaped some of my actions as well.
-
Knox
- I have fond recollections of those times, because--let me give you one.
When I came here, having left Louisiana where I was old enough to vote
but couldn't vote in Louisiana, when I came here I was looking for
somebody to vote for. I was just, "I can vote here," so I was looking
for, and I was reading the paper, and the big paper at the time in the
Black community was the [California] Eagle. I looked in the Eagle and I
saw that the Eagle newspaper supported a young man who was running for
the Assembly. I looked at his picture and I thought he was white, and my
immediate reaction was, I don't want to come all the way out to
California, the first vote is going to be for a white man. His name was
Gus Hawkins. And so my first vote ever was cast for Gus Hawkins.
-
Stevenson
- This was the election where he unseated Fred[erick] Roberts?
-
Knox
- Yes. Fred Roberts was a Republican, wasn't he?
-
Stevenson
- Yes.
-
Knox
- That's the one. In fact, I was talking to Gus Hawkins one day. He was
sitting and talking with a group of us, and he said he had no intention
of getting into politics, but when they told him about Roberts and his
Republicans, he figured somebody needs to do it, so he did it and became
one of the greatest politicians who we've ever produced.
-
Stevenson
- Certainly. Definitely. Okay, well, let me ask you this. When you got to
Los Angeles, what differences did you find in the African American
community here as opposed to Baton Rouge? When you came here, what were
the differences, and also differences in the larger L.A. community?
-
Knox
- Well, my first, and I can understand why I had this disappointment. I
left Louisiana, and for some reason you get an idea that California is
the land of freedom, and everything is open and free and available and
all, and it wasn't long after I arrived that I realized that, and it was
made apparent to me that the freedom I anticipated was not even in Los
Angeles, California. For instance, at that time I had a Bachelor of
Science in chemistry, and I applied to everything that they had in the
library. There was a library right down on Central Avenue, and in the
library they'd post all the governmental positions open, and I applied
for everything that's there, particularly anything that was similar to
my training, although I did apply to a lot of them that were not,
because I was looking for a job. But I found out also, one of the first
things I found out is that that wasn't open and free to everybody.
-
Knox
- Just to give you one example, there was something, I guess it's called
the CSI [Crime Scene Investigation] now. It was called--I'll think of
the name of it. But anyway, it was where they analyzed areas of
criminality or some murder scene. I can't think of the name of it now.
But anyway, I said, "That's a good fit for me. I'm a graduate chemist."
So I applied and took the exam, and I placed third on the exam. The
number-one person was placed in another position that he preferred, so
he did not take this position, and number two, I don't know what it was
about number two, but then somehow number two either did not pursue it,
so I became number one. I went to my interview, and I was told just flat
out by the interviewer that this position had been reserved for number
five, I believe, or six. And I said, "But you can't do that, because I'm
number one now." And they informed me that, "You're only number one
because these others did these things." They said, "But this fellow has
been in this position, had been working in this position for years, and
so we're going to place him there." So I argued about it and said, "No,
you can't do that, because I'm number one." And they showed me the law
where whoever makes the choice can choose one of the top three, and I'm
now just one of the top three, and I guess he got the job, I don't know.
I know I did not get the job. Then I realized that's not like I had
thought it might be.
-
Knox
- And I had another bad experience, too. I still didn't have a job. But a
dentist in a downtown office advertised for an assistant. Well, I'm not
a dental assistant, but I figured my background is enough for me to be
considered, and I went down to the interview with him, and he selected
me. I don't know who else he had interviewed, but he selected me, and he
told me to start on Monday, come in on Monday. And my job as he
described it was, whenever he finishes an office, he leaves all of his
tools there, and what he was saying, "You take all of those and you
sterilize them, and then you place--," and he told me how to do all of
this, so that was my job. This was a downtown office, and he had three
offices, and what he would do is get one patient and put her in one
office, and then when he'd finish with this, he would leave that office
and go to the second office and another patient.
-
Knox
- So one day, this is about the third day I was there, I noticed that he
had used two offices and he was on his third office, and he does have
another client, patient. So I not only took the equipment and sterilized
them and did everything I was supposed to do, but I noticed that there
was a little trash and stuff, so I'm on the floor and so on. So I got a
dustpan and a whisk broom, and I went around doing that, cleaning it up,
and when I got to the second office, he came out of the third office
into the second office. I was whisking this and he said, "You're taking
your time doing that." And it suddenly occurred to me, that's not my
job. This building has a custodian. He'll clean up the floor. That's not
my job. So I told him, "Now, this is not what I'm here to do. I'm doing
this just because you've used your offices." He said, "You're still
taking your time doing it." So I stood up and I was angry, and I looked
at him and I said, "I am not supposed to clean your place. You've got a
custodian. You've got a janitor. He cleans your place. I'm supposed to
do this." I don't remember his words, but in essence he said, "Well,
you're supposed to do what I tell you to do." And by that time another
dentist from across the hall came in, and he heard the discussion, and
he tried to talk to the dentist, who for some reason, I'd never seen him
angry before, but he was angry with me.
-
Knox
- And one of the things he said I'll never forget. He said, "Joe Louis
wouldn't come here and want to go swim in the Pasadena swimming pool."
And just somewhere in my mind I knew that there was something about
segregation of the Pasadena swimming pool, and it sounded like the South
to me, so I gave him some smart answers. And first, I remember part of
my answer was, I said, "Joe Louis is an ignorant man. I am an educated
man, and you can't compare me to Joe Louis." And the fellow standing
there said, "He's right," and that made the dentist angrier. He really
got mad. So I took my--I had a little green jacket that I wore. I took
my little green jacket off, and I took this dustpan and I reached them
to him and he took them, and I said, "Goodbye," and I walked out. Now,
the problem was I still had no job. [laughs] Hadn't been paid for that
one yet. But anyway, I had several experiences like that, that reminded
me that there's a lot to do in Los Angeles.
-
Knox
- And that carried over to when Martin Luther King [Jr.] came and spoke at
Wrigley Field. I was there, and when he finished his speech, someone who
had introduced him said, "Now, Dr. King, what can we do to support you
in Alabama?" He said, "What you can do to support me in Alabama is do
something here in Los Angeles," and that stuck with me. I said, "That's
what it is. You've got to do something here. You don't have to march,
you have to do something here." And so I joined the group of people--I
wasn't the leader, but I joined the group of people who on a Sunday
afternoon left Wrigley Field and marched downtown, only, I guess, about
thirty or forty of us, but we marched downtown. Now, this is purely
symbolic. We went down to city hall and downtown on Sunday when there's
nobody there. But we marched anyway, and then subsequently we had some
other marches, too, to the Board of Education and the like.
-
Stevenson
- So did this group have a name?
-
Knox
- No, that group didn't have a name. This was just a marvelous group just
came out of the speech. After that, then lots of groups formed. Marnesba
Tackett and several of the people, well, after that they got to be--by
that time I was a teacher. A lot of groups had gotten organized at the
time, and I joined many of them, too. I'm trying to think of the names
of some of them. Go on.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Yes, we can talk about that, because one of my questions was to ask
you about your involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in L.A. and who
were some of the other people that were involved with you, some of the
people that were leaders, that sort of thing.
-
Knox
- There were, well, put this all in context. Later on I went back to SC and
I got a teaching credential, and then I got assignment to a school. I
should mention about LAUSD, because I went back there, say, I got a
teaching credential, and I took several tests at LAUSD for a position as
a chemistry teacher and a science teacher, and I wasn't placed in any of
those. I was a substitute teacher in chemistry, but that was because I
wasn't a regular teacher, and the people who were not certified as
regular teachers in LAUSD could act as substitutes whenever LAUSD called
them and sent them in. So I taught one class as a substitute at
Jefferson [High School], but it occurred to me that there were fewer
high schools than elementary schools, and so the likelihood of being
hired was much better at elementary schools, so I got an elementary
credential, and I was assigned--I graduated with the whole group,
all-white group, when I left SC, and I went down to LAUSD and applied
for an elementary position.
-
Knox
- I was sent to three schools. They were three schools in South Los
Angeles. None of the other white students who graduated, who got their
credentials with me, not one was assigned to one of those South Central
schools. They were in West Los Angeles and the Valley and other places,
but not in South Los Angeles, and that was another time when I noticed
that this Los Angeles is a good place, but it's not yet a great place
for Black people. Anyway, I went and I became an elementary school
teacher, and also all the schools that I had interviewed in, the
teaching staff was predominantly Black, the students were almost 100
percent Black, but all the principals were white, which is something
that occurred to me. By that time I was extremely sensitive to race. And
so I was assigned to 79th Street School it was then. It's now McKinley
Elementary [School].
-
Knox
- I had an interesting experience, because some of the teachers were white.
Most of the teachers were Black, but some of the teachers were white.
But I got another perspective there, because the principal was white and
some of the teachers were white, and then among those white teachers
were some people who were as dedicated to the Black children who
attended that school as were the Black teachers, in fact, in some cases
even greater dedication to them than the Black teachers. In fact, it
occurred to me sometime later that they were there by choice, and I was
there, as well as many of the Black teachers, by assignment, and so I
got another whole perspective on race. I had learned earlier that my
mother had taught me, "All white people aren't bad," and so I understood
that to an even greater extent when I taught at that 79th Street School.
-
Knox
- But I did have several experiences that kind of directed me in the school
business to do something about discrimination in the school district,
and one was that the schools in South Los Angeles, it occurred to me,
were not receiving the same level of financial support as the schools in
other parts of the city. And some of the people, some of the teachers
there were being successful, some out of their own dedication rather
than out of the support they were receiving from the downtown office.
Then I noticed also that the assignment of teachers, there was some
disparity in that, because when it occurred to me anyway that a teacher
was in some trouble at some other school, that teacher was reassigned.
But it seemed to me that to an inordinate degree, those teachers were
assigned to South Los Angeles. So some of that I noticed, so after a
period of time it occurred to me that as a teacher I had some influence
on a group of students, but the way to have an influence on one's
school, you needed to be an administrator.
-
Knox
- And so I went back to school and got an administrative credential from
Cal State Los Angeles, and I got a general administrative credential,
which meant I could be administrative elementary, middle, or senior high
school, and that led to my becoming an assistant principal. And when I
became an assistant principal, I made the list of assistant principals
with another group, first the largest up till that time, the largest
group of African American assistant principals on the list that they
ever had had, and I think that was about twelve. My first assignment, I
realized there was a whole lot here that I didn't know about, and not
just about race. I mean, about instruction that I didn't know about.
-
Knox
- So a group of us decided, those of us who made that list as assistant
principals, when we got on the job we found a lot more to being an
administrator than we thought, and we thought we needed to get together
and discuss this with each other. So the twelve of us got together and
we discussed it, and out of that discussion came the feeling that we are
all assigned to South Los Angeles Black schools, and our experience is
that what we have known about the district is there is not parity in the
distribution of resources to schools in South Los Angeles [unclear]. At
that time they were building schools rapidly. The influx of students
here was great, and new schools were being built. But it seemed to me,
and I'm not sure about this, but it appeared, and the group confirmed
this, that we received even the equipment that had been used. In fact,
in some cases books that were being used. And by that time, the only
Black history that was being taught was what was found in the history
books, which they were selling to the South, and so the publishers had
to be cognizant of the desires of the South not to include all of these
contributions of Black people, and so the books were limited to the few
outstanding anti-slavery people, and that was the only mention of Black
people.
-
Knox
- And this little group of us started looking at all the kind of
disparities we saw, so we started a discussion among ourselves about
what ought to be done about this. And by that time there was a lot of
Black activity in Los Angeles, and so the school district in response to
the Black activities in Los Angeles had established an organization
downtown called Urban--I thought I had that with me. I can't remember
the name of that one, but are we going to have another session?
-
Stevenson
- Oh, yes, yes.
-
Knox
- Then I'll bring that with me, because they established this Urban School
Policy something. Anyway, we'll discuss it later. But in organizing
that, they brought in the fellow named William [Bill] Bailey, a Black
secondary administrator I think, or teacher, and they put over it a
Jewish fellow named Sam Hammerman, over this organization, and it was
kind of, "Look into relations and the charges being made by Black people
about the school district." So this little group of us went to that
office and figured we can get some assistance about these disparities.
And so Bill Bailey, the only Black person in that office, he had a
series of meetings, and they were with the group of us, and there were
by that time some Black principals, mostly female, and he put together a
meeting of these young new assistant principals, and those Black
principals had been there.
-
Knox
- Then the second meeting he added the white principals of Black schools,
and we sat and had conversations. At those meetings I was really
dismayed at what happened, because what I heard being said did not fit
the truth that I knew, and so the group--we were supposed to come
together to coalesce and be a constructive group, but I didn't see that
it was forming that way. Anyway, we had several discussions, and I guess
the last one of those discussions that I attended almost by
invitation--I was not invited again. But I was sitting there listening
to this discussion, and there was a white principal who was over two
Black schools, because they were small schools, and so they gave one
principal two schools. Now, when he was doing his two schools, he had to
have somebody he'll call a lead teacher or something left at that other
school. In case of an emergency, that person took care of the emergency
while he was at this other school. And he was saying--and he chose a
Black woman named Mrs. Johnson. He chose her to be over one of the
schools while he was at the other school, and this went on for a full
year or maybe two years. And while he was sitting there talking about
it, he said, "Well, look." All the white principals were showing that
they were not racist, and he was describing to us what he had done. He
had selected a Black woman to be the person over that school.
-
Knox
- That day, that morning I got a call, and it said they had decided that
the two schools had grown, so they wanted a principal at each one of the
schools. This white principal had chosen for the interim period the
person to be principal of that other school, he chose a white
probationary teacher, male, and Mrs. Johnson had been there doing this
for him all the time. And he was standing there praising himself and her
for doing that, and that day I heard that, and that's when I couldn't
take any more of that, so I stood up and told him exactly what happened.
I said, "And that is racist," I said, "because this young man is a
probationary teacher. He shouldn't even be in this position. Here is a
credentialed teacher who's been doing the job, and you've been praising
her for it, and instead you took a white person and put him in." And he
was livid, and everybody started yelling and shouting at each other, and
the Black principal whose house we were meeting in said, "This is a good
time for us to stop and eat. Let's all go eat."
-
Knox
- And as we were walking toward the table, she came over to me and says, "I
am displeased with you. You came into my house and disrupted," and she
gave me a dressing down. And I told her, "I'm sorry," and I walked out.
Now, this white principal followed me, a huge guy. He followed me out to
the street and he said--and I thought she was dismissing me and she was,
so I left. And he came out to the street, out to the sidewalk, and he
said, "If you ever make charges about me--." I said, "Look. If I ever am
able to prove what I think, you're going to be fired." And he sputtered
off, and I walked away, but he didn't know I'm a southern Black man
who's mad. Well, anyway, following that we organized what became COBA
[Council of Black Administrators], and if you don't mind, I'd like to
reserve talking about COBA to another time.
-
Stevenson
- Yes, let's do that. I have another question for you. So you came into the
district when, chronologically? In the fifties?
-
Knox
- Let me see. I believe I put down here--I brought this because I can't
remember dates anymore.
-
Stevenson
- Good, good.
-
Knox
- My employment record [turning pages]. I started teaching in 1952.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. You've talked about what the conditions were when you came into the
district, so there were no Black principals or administrators at that
time.
-
Knox
- No, there were. As I said, there were I don't remember how many, because
I remember we called them all together. At secondary there must have
been two or three male principals. At elementary there were, well, not
quite a few, but say seven or eight female principals of elementary
schools, and one male principal of an elementary school. Yes.
-
Stevenson
- So there were some when you came in, but you talked about other things
like lack of resources, getting--
-
Knox
- Disparity in the allocation of funds.
-
Stevenson
- --used books and things of that nature. So at the time that all this is
going on, what was the composition of the people at L.A. Unified in
terms of the board, superintendent?
-
Knox
- Well, let me see. I knew all of the elementary superintendents. They had
areas, and the superintendent of each area, and at that time when I came
in, they were all white. By the time I was talking about when we were
having these meetings, there was one superintendent, elementary
superintendent, Josie Bain. Jim Taylor, James [B.] Taylor, was in a
position at the time, because I remember he was part of some of this
discussion from their side. I mean, from the administrative side, James
Taylor. And I don't know where he was, but there was another
administrator, Llewellyn Mazique, M-a-z-i-q-u-e, and there may have been
more. But those I remember particularly, because I saw them. There had
been one member of the Board of Education who was Black.
-
Stevenson
- Was that Faye Allen?
-
Knox
- Faye Allen, that's her name, yes. And I remember the second time she ran,
a white woman in the Valley was also on the ballot called Faye Allen,
and that split the vote, and Faye wasn't reelected.
-
Stevenson
- I see.
-
Knox
- As I remember it. I hope all of this isn't allegory, but it is as I
remember it at that time.
-
Stevenson
- I see. Okay, well, maybe this is a good place to stop.[End of interview]
1.3. Session 3 (November 20, 2008)
-
Stevenson
- Good afternoon. I'm continuing an interview with Dr. Owen Knox on
Thursday, November 20 [2008]. I have some follow-ups. In terms of your
first teaching assignment, could you tell me about the curriculum you
were teaching and about the quality of the academics?
-
Knox
- My first regular teaching assignment in Los Angeles was at the 79th
Street Elementary School. Since then it's been renamed to McKinley
Elementary School. I first taught fourth grade, and then I taught fifth
and sixth, and subsequent to that I taught first and second. That was an
interesting experience, because many--at first I was surprised at the
quality of the teaching staff, because I knew even before I got there
that many of them had been assigned there without a choice to go
anywhere else. I anticipated that all of them wouldn't be happy to be
there, but I was surprised at not only the academic quality of the
teaching staff, but also their dedication to the children of the South
Los Angeles community, which was then and is now still a
socioeconomically depressed area.
-
Knox
- I received another surprise. It was a diverse staff, because there were
white and African American teachers, and I think there was one Hispanic
teacher, and there was a white principal who was very strict, really. I
didn't appreciate that quality in him when I first went there, but I
learned to respect it, because his intent was to get the best education
he could out of the students, teachers and students that he had. I was
also impressed with the diversity in the kind of approaches that the
teachers had for the students. Some of them were very strict, and some
of them were very academically oriented, and others had more social
conscience about the community in which they were teaching. But all in
all, it made a very good staff, and I learned a lot about teaching. The
fact is, I learned most of what I knew about teaching in that first
assignment. I had taught at a secondary prior to that time, before I
left Louisiana, but elementary was a new experience and one I really
learned to appreciate.
-
Stevenson
- What was the neighborhood surrounding the school like, and what was the
level of parent involvement?
-
Knox
- Well, this was a socioeconomically depressed community, high
unemployment. But there had grown up around the school a parent group
that was very supportive of the school, even though in the general South
Los Angeles community there was great distress about the quality of
education in the community at that time, which was 1952, but the parents
in this immediate community were very supportive of the school. Not a
large number of them, because it didn't attract a large number of
parents, but for those parents who did come and participated principally
in the PTA, the Parent Teachers Association, we got quite a bit of
support. That was evident also in the celebrations that we had. In the
elementary school they celebrate every holiday and some were not
holidays, and those celebrations, for instance, Cinco de Mayo was
celebrated there, and it was a tremendous outpouring of community coming
to see the dances of the students.
-
Knox
- And we spent some time preparing the students for that celebration and
almost every other holiday we celebrated, and that brought the community
in support of the school, even though as I said, there was growing
disturbance in the general South Los Angeles community about the quality
of education in all the schools, and it had to do with a lot of things
other than just what happened in the classroom. It had to do with the
quality of the structures. At that time, Los Angeles was increasing in
population. The student population was increasing rapidly, and many
schools were being built, new schools throughout the community,
particularly in West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley ,and
because these schools in South Los Angeles were old schools, had been
there a long time, they were not the same quality of building as you had
in the new schools that were being built, and there was some dissent.
-
Knox
- But at this school we got quite a bit of support from the parents, and
I'm pleased with the education I got just being assigned there, this was
my first elementary assignment and just being assigned there, and I
learned a lot about education and particularly the importance of early
education.
-
Stevenson
- You mentioned that your colleagues, the teachers at the school had
different teaching styles, and you in particular mentioned some with a
socially conscious style. Could you give me an example of that?
-
Knox
- Well, primarily I guess that was exhibited in the contact with the
parents of the students. What some of the teachers saw is that it took
more than just what the school could do to prepare these students,
coming from their socioeconomic environment, for success in school and
success in life, and so some of the teachers spent a lot of time with
the parents, explaining to them the importance of the students getting
their homework done and attending school regularly and attending school
on time, all of which at that time we had problems. In fact, they still
have problems with that. But another one was, I'll give you one example.
There was a young student who had some behavior problems, but he did
show some interest in music, because at that time the school district
had a music program, and he had shown some interest in it.
-
Knox
- So one of the teachers, having some contact with some member of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, got a trumpet and gave it to him, and
this changed dramatically this student's behavior. He became so
interested in music that he also--and as part of being allowed to expand
his music knowledge, he had to improve his behavior, and he did. I
always remember him as an example of, you have to go another step, a
little farther than what you do inside the classroom to be able to have
all students succeed.
-
Stevenson
- You mentioned and, of course, we know South L.A. at that time and still
is an economically depressed area. What were some of the issues with the
children that you were seeing as a result of this?
-
Knox
- What I saw was a wide range of interest in education. I'm sure it exists
today. I'm sure that when you live in a depressed area such as that,
which wasn't, by the way, the most severely depressed area in the city,
but when you live in an area like that, it's sometimes difficult even
for the parents to understand that education is a way out. In fact, it
is until now there are still some parents who live in economically
depressed areas who have difficulty seeing that education will change
the condition under which they live, and that was not understood, I
believe, by the general educational community, because their focus at
that time was that once you entered the school there are all of these
rules, regulations, and procedures that you had to follow, and the
purpose was to be able to go to college and to advance yourself
economically in community and world life, and that's a long perspective
from where you are when you are in a poverty area in the conditions
under which you're living.
-
Knox
- So what I observed was that there were a few people who recognized that
and decided that they had to do more than just teach a class, and then
there were others who felt that, "Come to school, follow the rules,
learn what we teach you, and that'll benefit you in life." It was
interesting to me, and it shaped, I guess, my educational philosophy,
because I saw both sides of this in my earliest teaching experience.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. You mentioned that there was concern in the community over the
quality of education. How did that distress manifest itself in terms of
organizations formed?
-
Knox
- It wasn't a generally apparent concern to that extent in 1952, but it was
an organizational concern. At that time it was the Urban League and the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, but
there were other burgeoning organizations within the community that were
saying to the Board of Education and attempting to say it to the
community, that this should be unacceptable. You should have the same
quality of buildings and of instruction and instructional materials as
any other school in the city, regardless of where it was placed, and I'm
witness to the fact that there was a vast difference in the allocation
of resources to schools in South Los Angeles, even in the allocation of
teaching quality in these schools, separate, different from that
allocation of teacher quality in other schools.
-
Knox
- Luckily for me, my first experience was with mostly--in my first
assignment, everyone there was a certified teacher of quality. Later on,
as the school system increased in population, many teachers of less
experience were then assigned to South Los Angeles, and I did notice
even then that some teachers assigned to South Los Angeles were teachers
who had had difficulty succeeding in other areas of the city. And some
of the organizations noticed that and were holding meetings and
discussing, and even some were approaching the Board of Education and
the superintendent to make changes.
-
Stevenson
- You mentioned there were some burgeoning organizations at that time?
-
Knox
- Well, those were burgeoning organizations, but those organizations
solidified later on, and those organizations shaped what became the
dispute that became of great activity in Los Angeles Unified School
District, and it led to other organizations within the school, the
Council of Black Administrators [COBA], as well as organizations outside
the school, but as time went on, not at that early time in 1952 to '54,
but later on toward the sixties, when throughout the United States there
was rising dispute and discussion and activity about the quality of life
of African Americans in the United States. So organizations within Los
Angeles followed that same pattern, and I can remember some of them.
-
Knox
- One of them was the United Civil Rights Committee of the NAACP. Mrs.
Marnesba Tackett was the leader of that group, and her attempt and the
NAACP's purpose was to bring together the organizations that were having
this dissent and organize them into a force, and that's called the
United Civil Rights Committee. But then later I remember Miss Margaret
Wright organized what she called a Black Board of Education. She said,
"The people in the school district downtown shouldn't be running our
schools," meaning Black population in South Los Angeles. "We should run
our own schools." And she organized what she called the Black Board of
Education, and she and Assemblyman Bill Greene tried to organize this
group into being a force in South Los Angeles, and then there were all
kind of others.
-
Knox
- I remember one particularly that should also be mentioned is Walter
Bremond. He had what he called a Black Coalition [Black Congress], and
he was doing something similar to what United Civil Rights Committee was
doing, getting organizations and people who were expressing this dissent
to come together and organize together. Walter Bremond is kind of an
unsung hero in that, because he persisted until his death to organize
African American organizations and people in South Los Angeles. I think
his daughter [Charisse Bremond Weaver] is now still following his lead
in doing things that he started in South Los Angeles.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Before we move forward talking about L.A. Unified, you talked a
little bit about your community activism. I'd like you to go into that
in more detail and how your early life and your experiences in Louisiana
sort of informed your activism, your attitudes.
-
Knox
- Well, I'm glad I never really escaped from what I perceived as the lack
of concern and the lack of assistance and the lack of even respect that
I had seen in Louisiana for African American citizens, and I'm glad--it
would have been easy to come to California, I believe, and have tried to
forget that and be a different kind of citizen, but I'm happy that that
didn't happen, and I'm pleased with how that did affect me. The fact is,
those organizations I just mentioned, I attended their meetings and I
was an active member of the United Civil Rights Committee, because it
was so easy to see the disparity in the treatment of African American
students in Los Angeles, which had some relationship to the disparity in
education of African American students in Louisiana, not as severe
certainly, because it wasn't as severely segregated, but there was
enough similarity for me not to be comfortable with it, and that led me
to participation with Margaret Wright's group and with Walter Bremont.
-
Knox
- And there was another one I need to mention, because it got so much
publicity at the time, was [Maulana] Ron Karenga's US. That's Maulana
Karenga's US group, which was very active also during that time. What I
guess shaped some of my activities during that time was the fact that I
had previously seen such abject discrimination in Louisiana, and I was
seeing something similar to that in Los Angeles, and the effect that it
was having particularly on young students. Part of what those
organizations pointed out to the community was that there was a such a
great disparity in the allocation of resources to South Los Angeles
schools and those West Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley schools, and
that had to do with books. Even one of my observations at the time was
that the books that we sometimes received were books that had already
been used, and I knew that the state allocated new books. And yet we
were receiving in some cases books that had been used. And something
similar happened, I believe, in furniture and other allocations to
schools in South Los Angeles, and I was particularly, since I was in the
school noticing this happening, I was particularly sensitive to the fact
that there was this disparity.
-
Stevenson
- Just a follow-up to something earlier. What were some of the
philosophical differences in terms of education of the community's
children between, say, Margaret Wright and her group and, say, the Urban
League and NAACP? I imagine there were various--
-
Knox
- Well, the first was a similarity. They could see the physical differences
in the allocation of resources. They also could see the difference in a
classroom. For instance, it became much more evident later on, but in
high school the courses in South Los Angeles were less rigorous, and
even some of them not even available. Some of the courses leading to
higher education were not even available in South Los Angeles. Now,
those things were kind of visible. You could see they were there. But
there were other differences that were not as visible, and one was the
difference in the allocation of actual finance, because when South Los
Angeles received new, inexperienced teachers, they were also teachers of
very low pay, when other schools had experienced teachers whose pay was
higher, which really means you have an allocation of resources with a
disparity. Despite the fact that what was so visible, that is, the books
and materials and the quality of the buildings and all, that's very
visible, but what it appeared to me is that outside of education the
protest was mostly on what was visible, what was physically visible in
the disparity. But inside, there was less protest, it seemed to me, and
maybe it was just because it wasn't as visible, was that the difference
in the quality of the education that the young students received in the
classroom, which I, being on the inside, could see, and in my
participation with some of these organizations, I tried to bring that to
their attention. But I wasn't the only one. There were other people who
were doing the same thing at the same time.
-
Stevenson
- So there were various viewpoints on how to fix the problem, I imagine.
-
Knox
- Yes, there were.
-
Stevenson
- And a whole range. Could you maybe tell me about some of these? What
solutions were people suggesting in the community?
-
Knox
- Well, as I mentioned, Margaret Wright said, "Let's have a separate school
district for South Los Angeles for African American students." But then
there were others who had separate agendas really. Some people
concentrated on the buildings and the quality of the buildings, and
well, no, some of the same ones--you can't really define them as closely
as being exclusive of each other, because some of the same ones and some
of the others were more concerned about the quality of the instruction
and the quality of the teachers who were assigned, and the experience of
the teachers who were assigned. And what United Civil Rights Committee,
Marnesba Tackett's group and Walter Bremont's group, the Black
Coalition, wanted to do was put all of these together as one big
protest, but that was a lot more difficult.
-
Knox
- It was easier, never easy, but it was easier to get a group to
concentrate on a visible disparity rather than the less visible
disparity of instruction. I can't separate them definitively, but in the
discussions that I participated in, it was wide-ranging disparity, along
with just, I guess, a historical objection to being singled out. It
appeared to be of less importance to the district, the state, and the
nation for that matter, as though the African American students and
African American people were of less importance to all of those
entities, and I think that general kind of, well, anger it was, it was
anger. I started not to describe it as anger, but that general kind of
anger at these just blatant disparities, as though you really don't
count, and I think that coalesced many of those groups to the extent
that there were marches on the Board of Education. While there were
marches in the southern states, there were also marches in the sixties,
too, in Los Angeles, against the Board of Education and the city for
that matter.
-
Stevenson
- You mentioned going to a rally where Martin Luther King [Jr.] was
speaking at Wrigley Field, and he told the audience that what would be
most helpful to what was going on on the nationwide scene was to do
something in Los Angeles.
-
Knox
- Yes. Yes, he was asked, "What can we do to help you in the South?" and he
said, "You can help me by helping yourself if Los Angeles."
-
Stevenson
- Okay. So with that as the backdrop, other than education, what were some
of the other issues people were organizing around, having to do with
bias and discrimination in the city?
-
Knox
- Well, the major one was about employment, the fact that there was
discrimination in employment. In almost every employing area, there were
fewer African Americans and fewer African Americans in a leadership
position, and that was very apparent. So many of the organizations were,
well, I won't say less interested in education than in the general
employment and quality or equality in employment and in promotions in
almost every field, construction. In fact, as new schools were being
built, even when the new schools were being built in South Los Angeles,
the workers were not African American, and the companies assigned to
build those buildings or to improve those buildings did not hire any of
the local people, nor did they hire African Americans who were
qualified, even if they didn't live in the local community, and that was
a major problem particularly of the NAACP and Urban League.
-
Stevenson
- In terms of housing, I know that there was a court case, Shelly v.
Kramer, that actually struck down the restrictive housing covenants in
'48, but that, in fact, it took several more years for people to have
the freedom to move where they wanted.
-
Knox
- Yes. Well, housing, well, obviously you know about the litigation that
went on because of restrictive covenants in the sale of homes. When I
came to Los Angeles, the Black community was confined largely between
Alameda on the east to about, well, actually it was to Main Street. But
there had already been filtered in areas all the way over to Western
Avenue of African Americans, particularly the farther west you went, the
fewer African Americans, but the higher socioeconomic level, the higher
economic level of those people who lived farther west than Western
Avenue were most likely to be lawyers, doctors, and actors and
actresses. I remember when I first came here, people drove me over to
see the beautiful homes of some actors and actresses who lived pretty
far west then, and it was interesting--it's been interesting all the
time, for that matter--to see the African American movement, first with
the removing of the restrictive covenants in the sale of homes, to the
west, and the places that were--in fact, not long ago I read in the
paper that there was some activity, of some criminal activity, and it
said in South Los Angeles, and that was on LaBrea, and that could not
have been South Los Angeles until now.
-
Knox
- But that migration was interesting, because when I came here, when I
first came in '52, Watts was a changing community toward African
Americans. But as African Americans appeared to have moved west, those
of Hispanic origin have been moving west from the east side, where they
were predominant, and so now Watts is predominantly Latino. Of course,
naturally it's a good thing to have these other areas open to those
African Americans who wanted to live wherever they wanted to live, and
that's the good thing, but the bad thing was by the African Americans
being dispersed throughout the community, they lost some of their
political power, because when they were concentrated in that first area
I mentioned, from Alameda to about Vermont, say, they could elect their
own representatives, and so many of the early successes of African
American politicians occurred because there was that voting power in
that compact community. I think Gus Hawkins was one of the recipients of
that, and we all should feel blessed that he was.
-
Stevenson
- What about in those years access to public accommodations and also being
served at business establishments, for instance, being able to use the
swimming pools and those sorts of things; were they still having issues,
were African Americans in the city having trouble in this area?
-
Knox
- I believe I mentioned earlier that when I came here, one of the first
jobs I got--I didn't last long on the job, because it became a
discussion with my employer. The fact is, I didn't last a week on the
job, because of discussion with my employer, because he was telling me
that, in essence, you ought to be like Joe Louis, because you shouldn't
want to go swim in Pasadena swimming pool, because at that time in
Pasadena the swimming pool was not available. But there were not enough
swimming pools to worry about in Los Angeles, except one down on 20th
Street, which was in the heart of the Black community, and there was no
way for it not to be open to the African American students. But all
others--for instance, eating places. Wonderful eating places down
Central Avenue and all around that area were owned by Black people, and
that's where Black people congregated and Black people ate.
-
Knox
- But I went to a restaurant, in fact, when I finally did get a pretty good
job and had some money. I decided I wanted to go downtown and eat at a
restaurant, and I did. I had a girlfriend, and I took the girlfriend
along with me and made a reservation and I went down. The first thing I
did was I stood waiting to be seated in a line. I wasn't first in line,
but people behind me were seated while I wasn't. Finally I was seated,
and then it took a long time before I was served. My girlfriend was very
disturbed about it, and I was very adamant about it. I said, to me I
just felt, "You're going to serve me or call the police and put me out,
but I'm going to sit here till you serve me," and they did. The food was
good. By the way, my girlfriend didn't eat anything. She was so
disturbed by the fact that everybody stared at us, and I just enjoyed
eating the food, watching them stare at me enjoying my food. But anyway,
that's just an example of the kind of thing that was going on at the
time. While we had access to some facilities, there was still a lot of
discrimination going on in eating places. In fact, it's almost in
everything.
-
Knox
- The one thing that I can remember, and maybe it's because I came from
Louisiana, where to go to a movie in New Orleans, which is a big movie
house in New Orleans--from Baton Rouge you'd go to New Orleans, but we
had to sit up high in what we called the crow's nest. We couldn't enter
the main theater floor. But one thing about downtown, those huge movie
houses at the time, which was also places not only of the movies, but
they're also places for--the bands came and they played in between
movies and the like--I never personally felt discriminated against at
all. I went to those often, because that was the source of some of the
greatest musicians ever, especially in the jazz world, and I never felt
any discrimination at any of those big theaters downtown. And even
though the theaters on Central Avenue, which is where all the African
American theaters were at the time, even though they had movies that
were not first-run movies, there were so many of them and they had such
a wide variety, I enjoyed myself on Central Avenue going to the movies.
Also, some of them had some of those movies, especially the Lincoln
Theater, had vaudeville like they had downtown and with some of the same
outstanding musicians and singers and dancers. And then I could always
have all the fun I wanted to just going down Central Avenue to
different--it's hard to say what they were, because there was a
tremendous amount of outstanding talent. Many of those people, those
artists, were not able to make a living in the general community, but
they were able to do pretty well in the African American community, and
so I saw the greatest bands and the greatest performers and the greatest
singers right on Central Avenue. When I came, I lived here. I lived
right off Central Avenue on Adams Boulevard, and on a Saturday afternoon
it was necessary to go out and stroll Central Avenue.
-
Stevenson
- So I know that Central Avenue really started its decline when people were
able to move west. What do you think the implications of not having
this, and not just an entertainment district but a business
district--you had your doctors, lawyers, businesses. What were the
implications of that, do you think, for the larger African American
community?
-
Knox
- Well, for the entrepreneurs and the business people, African American
business people, it allowed them to get greater opportunities going
west, and so Western Avenue became also--and now that movement has even
gone farther west, and African Americans had an expanded community for
their buildings. But for the small businesses it was devastating,
because small businesses, when we're in a very compact community, they
thrive. They were thriving then. But when the African American community
moved west, the small businesses found fewer customers, but the large
buildings, the large businesses, Golden State Mutual and the like, they
moved west and served the larger community, and it was a great
improvement for them. The greatest impact, I believe, the greatest
negative impact, was the political influence, because having a
less-compact community meant we had less-concentrated political power,
and so African Americans lost a lot in political power. They lost a lot
in small business development, gained a lot in large businesses--well,
gain, well maybe say a lot, because when you look at Magic Johnson's
Theater, that was then far, far west, and yet it thrives where it is.
But it was devastating to some.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Staying in the fifties, could you tell me what was the local impact
of Brown v. Board of Education in terms of the students in our
community, the schools? I mean, what trickled down from this nationwide
case?
-
Knox
- Well, you see, the changes were so slow when it came to the changes in
the population of schools in South Los Angeles that Brown didn't have a
very tremendous local impact. What the impact was nationally, and even
though in South Los Angeles we supported all of that activity, we were
not the recipients of a tremendous amount of change or immediate change
then. The fact is, they used it for whatever political purpose they
could, because now you have the national law to draw upon when you talk
about, to anyone in power, when you talk about local disparity, and so
it was more an advantage to us to use it, rather than its immediate
effect upon the local schools and the local school community. But
nationally, it was among the most historic changes in national attitude
toward African Americans and should be celebrated as such forever,
really.
-
Stevenson
- I'd also like to find out, in the early sixties you're starting to see
Gil Lindsay, for instance, being elected as the first Black councilman.
You're beginning to see more and more Blacks being elected. Gus Hawkins
goes to Congress in '62. What were the effects on the quality of life in
the African American community when we started to see--
-
Knox
- Well, the first thing was, I have to perceive that as, what did it do for
me? And I had, having come from Louisiana, having seen early
discrimination in Los Angeles, personally I could feel that there was a
change in what was going on in this country. There was a change that
affected me and the people, the African American people and all people
of poverty. And when I looked at now even nationally, for the presidency
of the United States, there is some concern about the African folk,
about African people. It came as somewhat of a surprise to me that some
of the richest people in the world running for office nationally,
understanding that they are not going to be elected by the Black vote,
were courting the Black vote, and then they're proposing legislation and
activities that benefited African American people, and that in my mind,
except maybe Abraham Lincoln, I hadn't looked at national people having
that concern of the African American people.
-
Knox
- But that and then other Supreme Court decisions about discrimination,
outlawing discrimination, and those had a personal effect upon me,
because I had seen so much of the opposite that it was good to see some
burgeoning change in the perception of African Americans. I guess the
word to me was respect. There's some respect for you as people, even if
you don't have the political power that someone is seeking to get
elected. There's some respect for me as a voter, as a person, as a
citizen, and I had some personal--and I'm sure that there were other
people who had the same feeling. The fact is, now when I talk to my
friends and there's such a joyous thing about [Barack] Obama being
elected president, I remember having the same kind of feeling as each
one of these changes came about nationally, and even though some of them
had less effect upon my life, they still had a great effect upon me,
because I perceived this change in how African American people were
being perceived.
-
Stevenson
- I'd like to talk about the Watts rebellion of 1965. Could you tell me,
what are your perceptions of the causes at the time? Did you see it
coming? And then if you could move forward and talk about the rebellion
itself.
-
Knox
- I remember my first reaction was "The Fire Next Time." And I kept
thinking, it's not next time, it's now, that there had been every kind
of an indication that would predict that the situation as it is is going
to cause us a major social upheaval, and when it did come, I watched it
carefully, and one of the things that struck me so vividly is--can't
remember the names of the people now, but I remember that this fellow
was driving his car and he was stopped by the police and he was beaten,
but that isn't what struck me. When they took him to put him--and this
is on TV--when they took him to put him in the paddy wagon, the
policeman who put him in kicked him, and my feeling was, you don't know
what you just did, that it wasn't his arrest, it wasn't his being
handcuffed. It was your kicking him in the behind which said to all
African Americans, "You have no respect, and as such, you should pay."
My personal feeling was, I wish I could make you pay for what you just
did, for one other reason is you don't understand what the symbolism of
that is.
-
Knox
- And I believe I mentioned to you that when I was a child I saw this lady
who was kicked by a policeman, a state policeman in Louisiana, who was
standing in line to see the body of Huey Long after he was assassinated.
All of that said to me, you don't understand. You have no idea what that
means. But I didn't even then predict that that would lead to the kind
of uprising that there was in South Los Angeles. I was working. I was a
principal of a school in the Valley, in San Fernando Valley at the time,
in August 1965, and I read that teachers and principals in South Los
Angeles who were white wanted out. So I went to my area office and I
told them I would volunteer to be a principal to take the place of one
of those white principals who wanted out of South Los Angeles, out of
Watts really. And I wasn't assigned, but I was told to go and visit this
school. I went to visit, and I went and I knew the principal, because we
were in the association together, so I went and I told him that I was
there because I would replace him if he'd wanted to leave, and he was
upset. He was white, and he was upset. He said, "I didn't say I wanted
to leave." I said, "But they told me that you wanted out." He said, "No.
I asked for a school a year ago that was closer to my home, and so I'm
waiting for a school closer to my home to open, because I live in the
Valley and I wouldn't have this long commute." He said, "But I'm not
leaving because of the Watts uprising." So I respected him for that.
-
Knox
- And so I went back and told them. I said, "No, he is not leaving," and I
said, "Another thing is, I am not going to replace somebody to make it
convenient for him. I want to replace somebody who wants to leave
because they're afraid. Now, if you don't have one of those, I don't
want to go." So I went back to my school. Later on I got a call and they
said this fellow had asked for it, the 102nd Street School, and I went,
and he was surprised. But it wasn't that he had expressed himself that
he was afraid, he had expressed to his superior that he was afraid, but
he was surprised that I was coming. When I went there, he said he didn't
know why I was there. Why was a principal of another school visiting me?
And I explained to him, but then he really did want to leave, so I was
assigned as principal at 102nd Street School. That was the first month
of 1966.
-
Knox
- But what isn't known is that in April of '66 there was another riot. It
isn't publicized very much, but there was another uprising in South Los
Angeles, and I was there at the time it happened. But your question was
what led to it, and what led to it was a series of national and local
incidents and activities of the government, local and state and national
governments, that were unacceptable to African American people
throughout the country, but particularly were distasteful in a place
like Watts, as well as in Detroit and some other cities, too, when at
that time we were in the midst of affluence all over, except for African
Americans. What really led to it is a perception that things are getting
better and better, but not for me. And I think as awful as it was in the
loss of life, in the loss of property, but it was inevitable, and
without some major changes in national, state, and local conscience
about African Americans and poor people for that matter, this was likely
to happen anyway. But it didn't just happen in Watts, it happened all
across the country.
-
Stevenson
- Were you involved--there was a lot of response by various organizations
afterwards. Were you involved in any of the response? And could you also
talk about what response there was in terms of L.A. Unified?
-
Knox
- Well, the first response from L.A. Unified was to increase the security
at the schools in those areas, and the second response was the
organization of an office in downtown called the Office of Urban
Affairs. That was the response of the school district, was we've got a
problem, we've got to make an office to see what the problem is and what
we should do about it. They organized this group and put a man named Sam
Hammerman over the organization, and he selected William Bailey, Bill
Bailey as an assistant, a white, Sam Hammerman, and then he selected a
Black, Bill Bailey. At the same time that this happened, a group of us
in education had been meeting, and our concern was this disparity that
we saw. The fact is, I remember that a group of us, when we took the
elementary assistant principal examination, and the largest group of
African Americans ever to pass that examination was the one that I was
in, and when we first got assigned it suddenly occurred, you know, we've
been teachers for a while, but we haven't been administrators. It's a
lot different once you're in this position.
-
Knox
- So we decided to put a group together. The group of people, of Black
people who were successful on that examination got together, and we
started discussing some of the--what we really got together about was
how to help each other in different--what do you do when this, what do
you do? And that's why we got together. But when we got together, we
started talking about this disparities we saw in the education of
African American students, because a couple of us were assigned to
schools that were partly African American and partly white and Hispanic,
but most of us were in schools that were predominantly Black, and we
noticed that things are not equal here. They're different here. And so
we started talking about the differences, and soon the discussion wasn't
about how to help each other in the position, it was, what's going on in
the school district and these disparities? So we had several meetings.
We met at several different places.
-
Knox
- We had one at my house and we met at other homes, and we discussed and
finally decided, well, when they had this organization of Urban Affairs,
we said, "Let's take our problem to Urban Affairs, but we're not going
to handle them unless they go to Bill Bailey. So we called on Bill
Bailey, and Bill Bailey said, "Well, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll
get you a group together," the group of administrators, of
principals--we're assistant principals--a group of principals, some
Black, a few Black, mostly white, who are principals of schools,
predominantly African American. And so he got those groups together. We
met at his house. We met at several other homes, and we discussed these
disparities with them, and it was nice to talk about, but nothing
happened.
-
Knox
- And so the group still met, and I remember one time at Jefferson High
School on a Saturday afternoon a group of us met and decided, what we
need to do is go to the superintendent. So the group said, "Let's select
somebody to go, and these are the things we want you to do when you go,"
and they selected four of us. Fred Dumas was one. He was a principal at
the time, the only African American principal, male principal of an
elementary school. And Verna Dauterive, she was a principal at Main
Street School, and Llewellyn Mazique, who was principal of Fulton Junior
High School, and I was the fourth one. Our idea was, here's what we want
you to go and talk to the superintendent about.
-
Knox
- So the four of us made an appointment with the superintendent. He saw us
at five-thirty in the afternoon one day, and we sat and talked with him,
and it was amazing to me. We were there ready for all kinds of problems,
a little fearful about our own careers and all, because we were going to
talk to the superintendent and give him nothing but negatives. And he
listened. He sat and he listened, and he asked questions and all, and we
told him what was wrong, and we gave him incidents of disparity and all,
and at the end he said, "Why didn't you come earlier?" Well, that had an
effect upon me, because they're saying, "You were expected to do this.
You should have been doing it a long time ago."
-
Knox
- So we went back and decided, now let's--oh, yes, by the way, nothing
happened as a result of that. He listened. But when we went back we told
the group, and the group after some discussion realized nothing is going
to happen, come out of that, so they said, "Let's organize ourselves
into a group," and so that's how the Council of Black Administrators
[COBA] was organized. And as a result of that organization--remember,
now, the times. Those were turbulent times, because this was right after
the Watts riot, the second Watts riot, right after Detroit and other
places, and all kinds of upset was going on. We then decided to be an
organization called the Council of Black Administrators. Well, Black was
not the very popular term at the time. It was Negro. And so some of the
people who had been meeting with us did not like the fact that now we're
calling it Black. That was a small group of not many people, though.
-
Knox
- There was another group, a part of people who were in the discussion
said, "But we can all get fired," and we could. So for
self-preservation, some of them decided not to be affiliated with it.
But also it was considered a separatist group. We called ourselves
Black, and that was at a time when the other organizations were
separatist groups, the Black Panthers and many of the others. And they
said, "We don't want to be affiliated with a group. We want to be an
American group. We don't want to be affiliated with a separatist group,"
and so they didn't, and so we lost some of our membership at the time.
But the ones that stayed got more important than the ones who left. They
organized the Council of Black Administrators, and in December we're
going to have the fortieth anniversary of that organization, which has
been fighting for equality of services and the promotion of Black
educators all of that time.
-
Stevenson
- What was the original charge of COBA, or mission, goals?
-
Knox
- When we got organized, Dumas was selected chairperson, and we told Dumas
that we had to go to the school district and let them know we were
organized in this. And he said--well, among the things he said I can
almost quote, he said, "This group intends to take positions on those
issues which affect the education of Black children or the services of
Black personnel, and hope that this may be done within the framework of
the institution." The implication there is, we're going to do it whether
it's within or without, and I thought that was very impressive then. By
the way, not long after that, to some people's surprise, even to mine
for that matter, they unanimously agreed to make Council of Black
Administrators a part of the school district, and so word went out that
this is an organization that's approved by the--by the way, that
approval wasn't unanimous now. When I said unanimous, I take that back,
because there were several members who were--well, I don't use the term
too often, but I'd say there were some racist members of the Board of
Education at the time, and they did not vote for it. But at least it
passed with a majority. I want to be sure to correct that; it was not
unanimous.
-
Knox
- But that organization has been working over time on the two things it
said it wanted to do, one, improve education of African American
students, and two, improve the selection of African American
administrators of quality in the school district, many of whom had been
discriminated against. When positions came up, if it wasn't in South Los
Angeles they didn't get the position, and I think COBA has changed that
to some extent.
-
Stevenson
- Okay, probably a good place to--[End of interview]
1.4. Session 4 (January 7, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- I'm continuing an interview with Dr. Owen Knox on January 7 [2009]. I
have some follow-ups from our last session. First, I wanted to find out
what was the impact on the African American community and the schools of
the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but also of Robert F.
Kennedy. What were some of the impacts?
-
Knox
- Well, those tragedies had a tremendous effect on everyone, I guess, but
particularly on schools during the time when they're fighting and
searching for success for poor children as well as both of those persons
gave such great hope to African Americans and African American students
and their parents, and so the assassination of Martin Luther King was
just one of those shocking things that almost everything came to a
standstill, in education as well as everywhere else, I guess, just
trying to process that assassination. What happened after his
assassination was a tremendous amount of resurgence in the things that
he had involved his life in and a greater interest in what he had done
historically and what he had done up until his death and what he
intended to do, expected to do.
-
Knox
- In schools there were pictures. The fact is, I presented to the Board of
Education a set of pictures that were donated so that Martin Luther
King's picture could be put in any school that requested it. By the way,
there was some resistance even to that from the board. That was a
conservative board at the time, and there was some resistance because
there were those who felt even until his death that he had other
motivations other than just the improvement of life in the United
States.
-
Knox
- What also happened is there was a greater interest, it seemed to me in
all of education, in the life and the life of his times. That's about
the extent of the positive that came out, because the negatives were so
tremendously effective. Education itself, if you can think of anything
good that came out of those assassinations, I think education itself
profited by bringing to the forefront the dreams and ideals of Martin
Luther King. What was kind of a surprise to me was the extent to which
the assassination of John [F.] Kennedy had an effect upon the African
American community, because somehow there was the belief that Kennedy
stood for better times for African American people, and it was like
losing a member of the African American family when John Kennedy was
assassinated, and also maybe almost an equal extent to the assassination
of Robert Kennedy.
-
Stevenson
- Just to follow up on the particular day of the assassination, was there a
concern with keeping peace in the schools? And sort of a second part to
that question, I know there were efforts made to keep people in the
community as well.
-
Knox
- Yes. I mentioned some positives that came out of very tragic events, but
as you know, throughout the country the assassination of Martin Luther
King brought riots and uprisings throughout the country, particularly in
Detroit and in Washington, D.C., but throughout the country and even in
Los Angeles. There was this malaise that no matter how much you try,
there's some event that stymies your efforts to bring about improvement
in the life of American people. At the schools it was necessary
particularly to do a tremendous amount of counseling to prevent the
death of Martin Luther King from being entirely disruptive in the
educational process. Throughout the country and throughout the Los
Angeles Unified School District there were efforts, there were
counselors, and there were obviously additional security personnel at
almost every school. And it had some effect. I think the counseling had
a great effect, because in the counseling in the schools it was more,
"Now that he's gone, we have a responsibility." That kind of counseling
was very effective.
-
Knox
- But it was such a tremendous blow to African Americans that it was very
difficult to keep things quiet in the Black community; not quiet, keep
them from exploding really in the African American community, because it
was such a tragic loss and such a loss to hope. I think that was as
great as the loss of life was the loss of hope and expectation that
things were going to improve. But I do give some praise to the Los
Angeles Unified School District in the efforts it made to keep the
schools at least operating to what extent it could during that tragic
time.
-
Stevenson
- Could you talk a little bit about what the effect was on both the schools
and larger community of the rise of local Left-leaning groups such as
the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam?
-
Knox
- Yes. The Black Panther Party was just one of those that had an effect
upon the schools particularly. One of the good things about it, the
Black Panther Party organized breakfasts for kids, because one of their
assumptions was students of poverty, particularly Black students of
poverty, can't learn in schools when you're sitting there hungry, and so
they organized breakfasts at local churches and local halls, to give
breakfast to the students before they arrived at school. Also, the Black
Panther Party brought an awareness to the disparities of services in the
community, although some of its actions as reported in the news anyway,
were considered revolutionary, and the fact is, maybe they considered
themselves revolutionary. And that kind of publicity made almost
everything that the Black Panther Party did a negative. Later on there
were certain other kinds of activities reported in the news that were
considered not just revolutionary but also criminal by the Black Panther
Party, but out of all of these there's always the negative and the
positive, and I felt part of the positive was that they brought to
attention to everybody that there were huge disparities in the lives as
well as in the education of African American people.
-
Knox
- There was another group called the Simbionese Liberation Society [Army],
and that group, which got a lot more publicity because of its activities
that had to do with banks and other institutions, it had less effect
upon education than did the Black Panther Party, in my opinion, because
their focus was more on what they called the liberation of African
American people than upon education, and the Black Panther Party had
both, but it also had an interest in the education of African American
students.
-
Knox
- There was another group, Dr. Maulana Karenga's group, US. At that time,
US was one of us, and the Simbionese Liberation Party and the Black
Panther Party were in the communities, organizing the people for what
they promoted was justice and equality for African Americans and all
people. But that one also, Karenga's US Party was also very active at
the same time. In fact, there's some time during that time that the
Black Panther Party and the US group had a confrontation on this campus.
At that same time, Marnesba Tackett had something called a United Civil
Rights Committee of the NAACP, and the purpose of that group was to
bring together all of these disparate groups that were fighting for the
same thing, for equality for African American students and African
American people, and she was attempting to bring all of these together
in one considered effort. It was not easy to do, but what was effective
about the United Civil Rights Committee was that it had a focus on
education, and Marnesba Tackett's, many of her presentations--by the
way, she died last year--her many presentations were before the Board of
Education. So her group's effectiveness was greater on education
itself--[unclear] on education, because it went directly to the Board of
Education and to the schools in the local community.
-
Knox
- And there was Walter Bremond. Walter had what he called a Black
Coalition, and he was also attempting to do the same thing of bringing
together the disparate groups in the community that were fighting for
equality. The fact is, at that time there were so many groups that I
remember also there was a Mothers of Watts after the Watts riots, and
the Sons of Watts, and all of these groups were active at the same time.
But what's interesting to me about that is all of these groups
were--this is around 1966, and during that time we were having these
discussions, a group of us, educators, Black educators were having the
discussion about the inequities in the schools that we who were
educators could see directly.
-
Knox
- And one of the persons that I knew well and met often with at that time
was Fred Dumas. Fred was from New Orleans, where he had attempted to
become a principal. He became a teacher in New Orleans, and he found the
same kind of a disparities as we were talking about in Los Angeles were
even greater in New Orleans, and so he organized the teachers in New
Orleans. The purpose was to get equal pay for Black teachers to that of
white teachers in New Orleans. But then he was inducted in the Army, and
he came out and he tried to become a principal in New Orleans, and they
refused to give him a principalship, and so he came to California and he
became a principal. The fact is, he became the first African American
male principal of an elementary school. There were some female
principals at the time, not many, of elementary schools, I mean, because
there were male principals of at least several senior high schools and
middle schools--at that time they were junior high schools--in Los
Angeles.
-
Knox
- But he and I and a few other people who were in the schools looking at
those inequities, we got together and during all of this other
discussion I told you about, these other organizations in the community,
we decided to organize the administrators in Los Angeles Unified School
District, and that became the beginning of the Council of Black
Administrators [COBA], and Fred Dumas became the first president of the
Council of Black Administrators. But at that time in the early and
middle sixties, it was a time of great turmoil in Los Angeles,
particularly in education.
-
Stevenson
- What would you say his legacy was on the education of Black children, but
also on L.A. Unified?
-
Knox
- Of Fred Dumas?
-
Stevenson
- Yes.
-
Knox
- Well, among many things, I just admired Fred because what Fred brought
that I couldn't bring was a quiet strength, and I had difficulty with
the being quiet. What I admired Fred for is he made tremendous
presentations before the Board of Education. One of his first ones was
called "Corporate Image." And what he depicted in Corporate Image in his
presentation to the board was how the school district looks in the eyes
of people who are suffering some discrimination or inequity in the
district, and that, I think, was perhaps the first time--I hadn't even
thought of how the school district looked. But when he talked to them
about, "Your corporate image in the community, not just in the Black
community, when you allow these discrepancies and disparities to exist,"
and I thought that was a tremendously powerful presentation. But he made
quite a few more, and one of them was--these were made as a
representative of the Council of Black Administrators.
-
Knox
- He made several others, and one of them I also remember was the one
for--and this was early in this history--for the establishment of a
holiday, a school holiday on the birthday of Martin Luther King, and he
was one of the first to say this. So your question was about his impact.
I think it was tremendous at the time, because here was a professional,
thoughtful, scholarly presentation about the same things that were going
on in the community, which were explosive and considered themselves to
be revolutionary and certainly disruptive, and I think the fact that
Fred took that tack in dealing with discrimination made him very
effective, and I think that effectiveness remains to this day. I think
that because of the method he used at that time and the way he went
about making his presentation caused the school board to take a look at
itself, rather than justifying some rebuttal to the complaints that were
being made at the school district.
-
Stevenson
- Mr. Dumas headed up Urban Affairs, is that right?
-
Knox
- Yes, at a time--well, let me tell you what happened. My memory is that
the school district in responding to all of these demands for equity
made a loan of Fred Dumas to I guess the city or state government, and
he headed up an office whose name I can't recall at this moment, but to
deal with the inequities not just in the school district but in the
city. He stayed there a while and then returned to the district. As I
remember it, he was displeased--well, he was not comfortable in doing
what he was doing, because if I remember correctly, he thought it was
ineffective, and that's part of the reason he requested that he be
allowed to return to the school district as a principal. By the way, he
returned to be principal of Crescent Heights Elementary School, and the
reason I know that so well is because my son was a student there.
-
Stevenson
- So the Urban Affairs Department, what was the charge of that particular
department in L.A. Unified?
-
Knox
- Let me see if I can remember. Well, let me put it this way. First, he was
not in charge of the Urban Affairs Committee, the school district. He
was in charge of this special office, political office about the school
district. The Urban Affairs office was within the school district, and
the Urban Affairs office was--there was a fellow named Sam Hammerman,
who was put in charge of the Office of Urban Affairs. The reason for
having Office of Urban Affairs is because of all the complaints that
were coming to the school district. This is different from what I was
just discussing, the political office and the school district's Urban
Affairs Office, and Sam Hammerman hired as his assistant Bill Bailey,
William Bailey, Bailey being Black and Sam Hammerman was white. They
were working in the Office of Urban Affairs, and their business was to
respond to the requests of these groups of Black administrators and
United Civil Rights Committee and all these other groups. And by the
way, that's one of the ways that the Council of Black Administrators
became organized, because we went, the Council of Black Administrators
went to the Urban Affairs office and discussed with the Urban Affairs
office what the problems and disparities and inequities were.
-
Knox
- And part of it had to do with the promotion of Black personnel. It was
difficult for a Black person to become an administrator or even a higher
office than principal of a local school, and so that was one of the
requests they made to the Office of Urban Affairs. The other request was
that there were inequities in funding, as well as in practices and even
materials in the schools that were predominantly African American. And
so the Urban Affairs office's purpose was to see how to respond to these
demands, and the Urban Affairs office then had several meetings, in
homes, in the community, to discuss some of these. I'm not sure what the
purpose of the board was in establishing it. I'm sure that they were
under great stress and pressure to do something about inequity, and as a
result of these meetings that were being held, that's how the Council of
Black Administrators--well, we were not a council at the time. But it
went before this group, and we made our presentation before the group of
Urban Affairs. But having met several times to get the presentation
together kind of assisted us in becoming an organization. We were just a
group of people who wanted to say something about the disparities. But
in having this series of meeting it brought the group closer together in
its planning.
-
Knox
- And so then in about 1968 we went to the Board of Education and asked
that the Council of Black Administrators be accepted as a unit within
the school district, and after some discussion and a series of meetings,
in August of 1968 they decided to do so. And so the Council of Black
Administrators really was assisted in organizing itself by the fact that
it had the Urban Affairs committee working. That was not one of their
intents, but it was one of their results, and Fred Dumas was selected to
make the presentation in 1968 to the board and became the president of
the Council of Black Administrators, and that was forty years ago.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. One more thing about Mr. Dumas. I understand that he was involved
in creating some what they would call today diversity programs or
cross-cultural programs?
-
Knox
- I'm not as aware of--in his local school he perhaps did so. I remember
when he became a region or area superintendent in the Valley, and I
think that's the place from where he retired. I remember that in that
office he did a lot to bring the groups in the Valley, predominantly
white groups in the Valley, and now that we were having integration, a
lot of students and some teachers who were African American were then
sent to the Valley to integrate some of the schools. Fred then got a
core group in his area where he was superintendent that did a lot to
kind of bring some, well, let's see, it wasn't cohesion. I don't want to
use the wrong word, because it wasn't that. It brought together some
people of good will, both white and Black, and as a result of that, part
of the integration in the Valley went a little more smoothly than it
would have gone otherwise.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I want you to talk a little bit about the process of having more
Black vice principals, principals and administrators then, and who all
was involved in that effort, including parents and community groups.
-
Knox
- Well, all those groups I mentioned earlier had some effect upon that,
because it set the stage that something has to be done, and so some of
the results of those demands, even after some of those groups were no
longer in existence--I think the one that survived was Karenga's US and
the NAACP, but its United Civil Rights Committee did not survive. But
all of that activity from all those different groups set the stage for
there being some consideration for the promotion of African American
educators to higher positions of authority, and also to lessening, not
diminishing, the disparity in the services that were provided for
African American schools and others in the school district.
-
Knox
- What appears to me is that without the kind of tumultuous activity in the
early sixties, some of the gains that African American educators as well
as African American students made would not have happened. For instance,
the amount of money spent on schools in South Los Angeles--it was South
Central at that time--in South Central Los Angeles was far less per
student than the amount of money spent per student in the Valley and
West Los Angeles. By the way, that disparity still exists, not to the
same extent it was then, but it still exists. And some people said, "No,
well, they've built new buildings in South Los Angeles, and so they
improved." The major difference in the amount of money spent, it seems
to me, has to do with the teaching personnel. Because of an agreement
that the school district has with the union, the teachers can to some
extent select where they want to go to teach. And so for whatever
reasons, and it may just be fair, and it may be difficulty of the job or
for whatever purposes, most of those teachers who get any tenure move
out of South Los Angeles to other areas of the city. Well, that means
experienced teachers are constantly moving out, which are being replaced
by inexperienced teachers, and as a result inexperienced teachers
receive less money, experienced teachers receive more money, and so more
money is spent on schools not in South Los Angeles, and that exists
until today. That disparity has not changed.
-
Knox
- The other one that hasn't changed very much is the success of African
American students in the schools in Los Angeles Unified School District.
In the present day, African American students have the least amount of
success of any ethnic or racial group in the City of Los Angeles Unified
School District, and that's on almost any measure of academic success
that you use, and that's the reason the Council of Black
Administrators--and I just wish all the other organizations would join
in the fight to change that, because what bothers me most about today
and that disparity is that there is no concerted community effort that I
know of to bring about the change. What's really devastating about it to
me is they're beginning to blame the victim for his own plight.
-
Knox
- Well, when you--even some of our Black national leaders are beginning to
say, are saying, not beginning, are saying that Black parents need to do
more, Black students need to do more, and maybe part of that is true,
but that's not the major problem. The major problem is the effectiveness
of education of African American students, and unless you believe that
African American students have a diminished capacity to learn, unless
you believe that, the scores we see in the schools should not exist. And
I don't hear anybody saying, "I believe that African American students
are less intelligent." But I don't hear the same people saying that it's
schooling that makes the difference, and I'm sometimes not popular in
saying that, but when you say that the students are at fault, why? Well,
they sit in class and they pay attention and all the kind of things they
say about African American students in schools, that's the result of the
failure of the schools prior to the time that he got to school, and were
the result of the failure of the schools to succeed with his parents,
and the failure of the schools with his parents' parents. And so
sometimes to me it seems we are blaming the student for our failures,
for generations of our failures in schools.
-
Knox
- The other part of that is the promotion of African American personnel.
When you look at just a few years ago, following all the upset about the
disparities and the like, and all the community activities, when you
look at that you see what happened then. Well, at one time Los Angeles
Unified School District had in its top echelon of administrators, even
the superintendents themselves, an African American male, the CFO, Chief
Financial Officer, an African American male, the finance chief or
assistant chief financial officer, was an African American male, the
head of classified personnel was an African American male. Now look at
it. That was just a result of the tumult of the early sixties and middle
sixties. Now look at it. Above the position of area superintendent there
is one African American male in the downtown office, an assistant
superintendent, and I don't see any clamor as we saw in the sixties for
that disparity.
-
Stevenson
- Then and now, what effect would you say changing demographics,
racial-ethnic demographics in the district come into play?
-
Knox
- Well, that's one of those two-edged swords. What happened in Los Angeles
is--this has happened in Los Angeles for a long time before. In the
1960s and all earlier than the 1960s, most of the African American
population was, say, east of Crenshaw, east of Western even, and so it
was a compact area. And getting protests at that time was fairly easy,
because African American people lived close. Then after some legal
success by NAACP and Urban League and several others, the rest of the
city was open to African Americans, and so there was this local
diaspora, and Black people moved west. But in doing so, they joined
other communities and so their political effect became lessened.
-
Knox
- Now, let me hasten to say that that's also a perception, because even now
African Americans have a political, I wouldn't call it power, but a
political voice to the extent that it can still elect white personnel to
higher positions in the state and the city. But nevertheless, it lost a
lot of its power by this dispersal of the population throughout the
city, and maybe that's part of the reason it's difficult right now to
get protests for African American students not succeeding in the Los
Angeles Unified School District. I know that some of the leaders, NAACP
and the Urban League and some other groups, I know that they meet
privately perhaps with the heads of all the departments and schools and
in the city, but what it appears to me that's needed is a mass, a
massive protest to the devastating effect that a failure of educating
the African American youth in Los Angeles Unified District has now and
will have in the future--and let me hasten to say, to educate African
American students is not difficult, unless you believe it's difficult,
or unless you believe it's impossible.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Maybe you could tell me in all of this about your first position as
vice principal and principal.
-
Knox
- Yes. When I started district, I really started district at secondary. My
major in the university was chemistry, and I had great difficulty trying
to get a job in the district. The closest I came is I was substitute
teacher at one of the high schools. I returned to college and got an
elementary credential and started teaching at elementary school, and I
was told when I started that what you should do is aspire to some of
these positions of authority in the school district, and I was also told
it'll take about eight years as a teacher before you can even apply. But
anyway, I took all the tests for assistant principal and principal, and
I was assigned as assistant principal to South Park Elementary School in
the first promotion that I received.
-
Knox
- Prior to that time, though, one of the ways to get there was to teach as
a training teacher for aspiring teachers who were working for a
credential from the universities, and so from UCLA and SC, Cal State and
the like, their students would be assigned to some of the schools for
some hands-on experiences. And if you became what they called a training
teacher, that was one step to become assistant principal, so my intent
was to become a training teacher, and I found that extremely difficult.
One time I was told that for--by the way, the schools, UCLA and SC and
Cal State, ran these programs with the school district. I applied to be
a training teacher, and I was told--it was at USC's training program. I
was told by a person who may or may not have been telling the truth, but
told me that my application was turned down because as the person in
charge of the program said to this person who was telling me, "We have
never had an incident with our young female aspirants to teaching, and
we don't want to have one." What that said to me is, I am Black, so
therefore I shouldn't be trusted to be a mentor or a trainer of these
young white females, because there may be an incident.
-
Knox
- But later on my application was still there, and later on a Swedish
principal of a little school in Hollywood called me and asked me if I
would be interested in an opening at her school. And I said, "Yes, I
would, but I think you should know that I'm Black, and you should know
that before you even interview me." She said, "I knew that before I
called you. Will you come in for an interview?" And I went in and this
lady told me, "I'm not interested in your race. I want to know can you
teach, and can you teach young people how to become a teacher?" I said,
"That I can do." She said, "Then you're hired." I did that for a couple
of years, and then I took the assistant principal exam and I passed, and
I was assigned to South Park Elementary as assistant principal, and
subsequent to that I took the principal's examination, and I was on the
list. They make a long list of about fifty people, and I was on the list
about fourth down, I think. And as openings occurred, they filled them.
-
Knox
- In my memory, they filled all the positions above me until they got down
to my name. The next school, at the 75th Street School, the principal
position was open. I was called and said, "Be prepared, because you may
be assigned to that one." And I was never assigned to that one. Then
what happened, the next opening was in San Pedro, and I didn't get that
one. It went to somebody below me. Then there was one somewhere in the
Valley, and I didn't receive that one either. By that time, three
positions below my position had been filled, so I went down and talked
to the assistant superintendent, who was in charge of personnel, and I
was told that they tried to choose the person who best fit that
position. So I said, "Well, wherever the next vacancy occurs, if I'm not
assigned to that one then I will make whatever legal protests need to be
made, because I'm being passed over when other people who are less
qualified according to the list are being assigned."
-
Knox
- And I was given the next one, the next opening for principal. It was El
Dorado School. Now, El Dorado School--I still lived in South Los
Angeles--is the last school in the northern end of the Valley. If you
miss getting the off ramp there, you're going on to Bakersfield. Well,
anyway, I'm not sure I was told. People have speculated that they
figured I wouldn't accept it because it was so far away, but there was
no chance of me not taking it, and I did. By the way, there were some
concerns about how the community would feel about having--they'd never
had one at this school, an African American, and certainly not an
African American male. It was a tremendous experience, a wonderful
experience. I was welcomed by all the people. I never at any time felt
at all that I wasn't the person they would like to have at that school.
It was a wonderful experience for me, because it did something for me. I
went with some trepidation, too, because I said, maybe they're right,
maybe the people don't want the Black man in these schools. It turned
out to be just the opposite.
-
Knox
- It wasn't that the communities weren't ready. It was that the people who
made the assignments weren't ready, but the communities were ready for
integration and so I had a wonderful experience, and all of my
experiences as an administrator from that time on have been positive.
-
Stevenson
- That's interesting, because Jim Taylor relays his experience being vice
principal and principal at [unclear] in the Valley very similar, had a
very nice experience.
-
Knox
- The problem was the fear was more in the minds of the people who made the
assignments than it was in the communities, and by that time, with all
the kind of activity that had gone on and all the problems of race that
happened throughout the country and locally, those communities were
saying, "We're not those people. We're not standing in the doors to keep
Black people from coming in." One of the other positives was that in the
Valley the CSUN, Cal State University, Northridge, they were working
also on the same problem of race, and so they were very helpful. They
were helpful to me and helpful to the whole community. In fact, I think
they had a lot to do with the fact that those communities were no longer
fearful of African Americans or other than white administrators and
teachers in their schools.
-
Stevenson
- I do have one follow-up from earlier when we were talking about the
different organizations, Black Panther Party, etc. Were you aware that
any of the organizations recruited inside the high schools? Were there
student members of these organizations?
-
Knox
- Oh, yes. I had an interesting experience with that. During this time that
these organizations that I mentioned, the Black Panthers and all the
others that we talked about before--one other that I didn't mention was
the Communist Party.
-
Stevenson
- Yes. Could you talk a little bit about that?
-
Knox
- The Communist Party, or the people I met, I don't know about the
Communist Party, but the people I met who considered themselves
communists, who were going to assist Black people in getting equality,
were university students. Just the ones I met; I don't know about the
others; the ones I met. One of the experiences I had with them was I
was--at the time then, I had been asked to do a special project for
South Central Los Angeles for the school district, called the Jordan
Educational Complex. The purpose was to see if we couldn't change the
organization, because the regular organization of the school district
was senior high school, separate division, junior high school, separate
division, elementary school, separate division. They had separate
superintendents. They had their business separately.
-
Knox
- Well, this was not the way students go through school, so the purpose
was, can you reorganize this in such a way that the elementary, middle,
and senior high school are in an organization together? So we tried that
with the Jordan Educational--Jordan High School, its feeder middle
schools and the feeder elementary schools, so instead of those people
meeting separately, the principals and the other officials and the
teachers of senior high school and the middle school and elementary
schools all met together to plan. So we organized that one, and the fact
is, it preceded the reorganization of the school district in some of the
ways it is now. But while I was working at that organization, there was
what they call a blowout. That's where the students just walked out of
school one day. All of them left the school one day, and one of the
schools that they left was Fremont [High School]. Fremont had a walkout.
-
Knox
- So I was dispatched by the school district to see what can you do, what
should we know, and what's going, and how can we handle this? So I got
involved with it, and to get involved I had to go to some of the
community meetings, because these didn't just happen in the schools.
These happened in the community and went to the schools. And I found out
there were a few people in Fremont--I don't know about the others. There
were school walkouts throughout the city, senior high schools throughout
the city. But in Fremont I found that the leaders were young, white
students who went to the schools and went to the communities and
organized the communities and organized the walkout.
-
Knox
- So I decided to go to one of their meetings, and I sat in their meeting
and listened to them talk about revolution to these young students. Some
of the students were student leaders, bright kids. I won't identify them
now, but there's one of them, an extremely bright fellow, who led the
walkout at Fremont, and I sat and listened to what he was being told,
and I couldn't keep my peace. So when they finished talking and saying
that what you should do is refuse to go to these schools, I just
couldn't keep my peace, because I can't see anybody saying the best way
to bring about change is not to go to school. So I had to stand up, and
they were talking about being revolutionaries, and I said, "Well, let me
tell you what the real revolutionary is. The real revolutionary is one
who brings about change, not one who yells and screams and all, but one
who brings about change." I said, "And I am about bringing out change
and equity in the school district."
-
Knox
- So I was talking to the leaders, the school leaders, and these young
communists were talking about their theory about revolution, and I said,
"Well, I'm going to bring about change. Therefore, I'm a revolutionary."
I said, "But my change is going to be in the school, not in the park
where you go when you leave, walk to school. It's going to be in the
school. So if you want to meet with me, meet with me in the school, and
we'll sit and talk right there about how to bring about change in this
school." And when I went back downtown, the school district had had
someone else who didn't identify himself as being with the school
district, listening, and he reported to the superintendent that I went
into the group and told them I was a revolutionary. And the
superintendent called me in and said, "I understand you stated yourself
as a revolutionary." And I said, "Yes, I did," and I explained to them
the context in which I said I'm a revolutionary. And he said, "Well,
you've got to be careful. You can't go out there representing the school
district saying you're a revolutionary." I said, "I understand that," I
said, "but you understand the scene where that's said and what I really
said and meant by it." Well, anyway it didn't matter with me anymore.
Nobody ever mentioned it to me after that one time with the
superintendent.
-
Knox
- But I explained all of that to say that I had one experience where the
Communist Party, at least these representatives who said they were
representatives of the Communist Party, were saying that revolution or
change would come about if we just refuse to obey the law and just
refuse to go to school. Anyway, that young man that I saw as the leader
of that group who was listening later on became a lawyer and is a noted
lawyer in the city.
-
Stevenson
- I know who you're talking about. Yes.
-
Knox
- But anyway, I was a little surprised about who the leadership was, and in
another meeting I mentioned to these African American student leaders
that, "You tell me that what you're going to follow is a young white
person who tells you, who's maybe now hardly older than you, and tells
you what to do? You are a bright, brilliant Black person. You ought to
tell them what to do." I was irate at what was happening to the
students, but I was pleased that I got an opportunity to be in the
middle of that one. By the way, when I left that meeting, and this may
have just been in my own mind, but I drove down Florence Avenue from the
meeting, and there was a car behind me. I got on the freeway and went
north, and there was a car behind me. I put my right-turn signal on to
say that I was going to get off, and the car did the same thing behind
me. And I went right to the off ramp and I cut back on. The other
person, they cut back on and followed me. The next time I didn't put my
signal on. I just went very fast--they went fast--and when I got to the
next off ramp I waited till the last minute and I cut off, and they went
on straight. Now, they may have not been following me, but I was
concerned because I'd just left this meeting. These people who called
themselves communists were displeased with what I had said, and I was
worried because that was not a safe time in the city anyplace. But like
I said, that just might have been my own fear. But I'm saying that
because I think part of what happened in other schools was similar to
what happened at Fremont.
-
Stevenson
- Right, because they also had the blowouts in some of the East L.A.--
-
Knox
- Yes, the first one was out in East L.A., and then it happened in several
others. And I had another experience that may have nothing to do with
this, but Hamilton had a walkout. My son was going to Hamilton.
-
Stevenson
- What year was that?
-
Knox
- I think it was the same time the others happened.
-
Stevenson
- Maybe '71?
-
Knox
- About that.
-
Stevenson
- Yes, because I was there.
-
Knox
- Oh, you were there?
-
Stevenson
- Yes.
-
Knox
- Well, my son came home--when I came home that night, my son was waiting
up for me. At that time we had to go to meetings every night almost. And
I got home, he was waiting up for me, and Margaret, his mother, said,
"He wants to talk with you." So I sat down and said, "What's going on?"
He said, "Well, today we walked out." I said, "You did?" "Yeah." I said,
"Why did you walk out?" He said, "Jefferson [High School]," on the other
side of town, "walked out, and therefore we thought it would be a
support to Jefferson if we did." I said, "And so what do you do?" He
said, "We walked out." I said, "Well?" He said, "Later on we went back
to school," and he said, "but the principal said we were suspended, all
of those that walked out were suspended." And I said, "Okay. So what's
next?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "Well, let me tell you. If
you're asking me to give you some advice, you should have asked me last
night before you walked out." I said, "So you must have had a plan of
some kind. You wouldn't just--I know you had a plan." I knew he didn't.
"So whatever your plan was, use your plan. You walked out. You want to
go back in?" What he was thinking, I'm an official downtown, I could
reinstate them. I said, "So tomorrow night when I come home, tell me how
did you get back in school." And I was scared all day long. I said, oh,
my God, I don't know what's going to happen.
-
Knox
- I got home that night. This time all is quiet. He waited till I'd had
dinner and he said, "Oh, Dad?" And I'm still worried. I said, "Yeah, how
did it go?" He said, "We got back in." I said, "What did you do?" He
said, "We went, a group of us went to the principal and sat down and we
explained to him why we did it, and he put us on probation, and he said
that we could come back to school but we're on probation, and if we did
anything like that again we'd be expelled." And I said, "That's right."
I said, "You decided to do it. You have to figure out how to undo it,
and I'm glad you did that." I wasn't going to say a word in his behalf,
and I made it extremely careful. I even told my secretary, "If the
principal calls here, tell him I'm busy. I'm not going to talk with him,
because I know he would want to know what I want to do. I don't want to
tell him." But I was so pleased that he did it himself.
-
Stevenson
- Just to follow up, when you were dispatched to Fremont by L.A. Unified,
did they give you any instructions?
-
Knox
- No, they didn't. What they were saying is, "We need to know what's going
on. What caused it?" And what they wanted me to do was just find out
what it is and come back and report to them so they could take whatever
action was necessary, and since I was known in the community, because
I'd been a principal in the community, I'd been assistant principal,
principal, and a teacher all in that same community--South Park is one
of the feeder schools--so they didn't give me any instruction. They just
figured, just collect information, and they didn't expect me to say
anything. I don't think they expected it. They didn't tell me to say
anything, but I couldn't sit there without saying it.
-
Stevenson
- So what was the response when you did report back?
-
Knox
- The first response was the one I gave you. "What are you doing calling
yourself a revolutionary?" What he thought is I was identifying myself
with the communists, and I had to explain to him, "The report you got
didn't tell you everything that went on." But I was irate, though. I was
irate when I sat--here are these nineteen-, maybe twenty-year-old white
girls and two white fellows, telling a whole group of Black people what
to do. And my first reaction was, this is inappropriate. This is totally
inappropriate. And maybe that triggered whatever else I was to do in
that meeting, because I was just irate when I sat there and said, Black
people almost the same age--these are eighteen-, seventeen-,
eighteen-year-old students, and here about twenty-one-,
twenty-two-year-old white students are telling Black people that you
know better what Black people ought to do than Black people know
themselves, and I guess that was my reaction.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I think this might be a good place to--[End of interview]
1.5. Session 5 (January 21, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- Good morning. I'm interviewing Dr. Owen Knox on January 21, 2009. I'd
first like to talk about sort of as background the couple of landmark
court cases. One, of course, is Brown v. Board in 1954, but even before
that in 1945 there was a local cases called Westminster v. Mendez, where
a Hispanic family brought a court case against the Westminster School
District on behalf of their eight-year-old daughter. It was ruled in
their favor, and she was able to attend the white school. Brown v.
Board, of course, mandated that segregated education was inherently
unequal and therefore unconstitutional, and lastly, Jackson v. Pasadena
[City School District] School Board again said that segregated schools
violated the equal-protection clause of the Constitution. These
nationwide cases, what impact did these national cases have on local
education, particularly of African American children, and what were
people that you were associated with talking about in terms of how these
nationwide cases had a local impact, or if they did?
-
Knox
- Yes, they always had a local impact, because the major impact that I saw,
that I observed, was that each one, to what extent you knew something
about them, each one served as a stimulus to the local activity, because
prior to that time you were just met with rebuttal. But when you have a
national case or even a local case that gets publicity locally, the
local groups are stimulated, and everybody I knew where I lived opposed
segregation. But there were so few opportunities to actually do anything
about it, and to have any legal backing for doing it meant that it was
less effective and as a result less energy was put into them, even
though there were a lot of complaints. But now, the moment you see
nationally or locally or any one place where there's been a victory,
then it stimulated the local activity of the NAACP and all the other
groups that had any interest in ending segregation.
-
Knox
- What I saw was simply more conversation as a result, people saying, I got
an idea that, "Maybe we can do something about it." Prior to that, what
I observed was some resignation as though--people used to put it, "We
can't get nothing done here," which is kind of a prevailing attitude in
the Deep South anyway. But whenever you got that glimmer of hope from
some other place where some activity had occurred and had been
successful, it invigorated the local group.
-
Stevenson
- So where were and who were the people calling for integrating or
desegregation, and how early was that in the district or in the
community?
-
Knox
- In Los Angeles, for the time I arrived here in 1940, and I became
interested in the school district not long after that, my observation
was that there was lots of local discourse, local discourse, community
discourse. There was a lot of even local--you couldn't call them
protests, because they didn't go anywhere, but a lot of angry discussion
in the community about the conditions that they saw. And this grew in
the communities, particularly South Los Angeles, to the extent that most
of the local groups at that time--the principal ones were Urban League
and NAACP, for African Americans anyway, Urban League and NAACP, and the
new SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and there was a lot
more discussion now as we see some expectation of hope, and then the
local cases gave that some impetus, too.
-
Knox
- Almost all the groups that I met with, whether they were religious groups
or social groups, there was a seething discontent. But I think the fact
that nationally there was legislation, or nationally there was a court
decision, kind of coalesced those groups to the extent that they then
became a force locally for desegregation. I remember during the first
tentative desegregation efforts in Los Angeles, by court order by the
way, that these local groups then coalesced and became a force in the
community. I remember in Urban League there were several meetings with
and without educators. My interest became that most of the effort for
desegregating a school was coming from outside the educational
establishment, outside. Educators were not participating to the same
extent.
-
Knox
- Now, that had several reasons, I believe, as I observed. One was those
educators who had jobs within the school district had concern about how
active they could be for desegregation and still retain their positions.
I believe we talked about the founding of COBA, because in the beginning
of COBA the idea was that even though desegregation was moving, equity
was not being practiced. But as the court cases went through the courts
and decisions were made and the order was given to the Los Angeles
Unified School District to desegregate, it was necessary for COBA and
any other educational organization to become active, because some of the
demands about what they were requesting, some of those demands were
requesting things that were not necessarily educationally sound. They
were talking about facilities and the like, but they were not talking
about education itself, what happens to a child in a classroom, in a
desegregated classroom, and so when educators became involved, the
Council of Black Administrators and other organizations became involved,
even the universities, by the way, became involved, then it became not
just facilities, but it also became equality regarding the quality of
instruction.
-
Knox
- The fact is, the integration effort, one of the expectations of that--if
a Black child sits in an all-Black class in an all-Black area, the
method by which he can fail to get equity is easy, because you can just
fail to give the same supplies and activities and all the rest to all of
those people in that area. So the idea was, if a Black child then sits
in a class with a white child, they cannot refuse to give the same
quality education to the Black child, and while that was kind of an
impetus for desegregation, it was also short-sightedness in that not
perceiving that even though Black children attended previously all-white
schools, they could be segregated on that campus, which amounted to
segregation whether they were there or not, and that is what happened in
many cases.
-
Knox
- For instance, African American children, students were to a
disproportionate extent put into remedial classes and into
special-education classes. But besides that, in many cases they were
made to feel so uncomfortable that they had to gather together to
support each other, and so they segregated themselves on the white
campus, and by the way, that remains until today, partially because it
was their only support, because they were not receiving equitable
welcoming treatment by the teachers. Many of the teachers themselves did
not favor desegregation, but they were forced to have African American
students in their classrooms, and even until today we have a problem in
equality of educational success with African American students even
attending a previously all-white school.
-
Stevenson
- What were the viewpoints you were hearing from Black parents in the
community?
-
Knox
- Well, that varied. I joined the group that said one of the problems was
transportation, because most of the African American students lived in
the area that was segregated, and just to be transported to--and in the
beginning there was no transportation provided, even in the law there
was no transportation provided, to go to a school that was all-white,
which was usually quite a distance away. So I joined the group called
Transport a Child, TAC we called it, Transport a Child, and we went to
the local churches to recruit students, and to do that we had to talk to
the parents to have them allow their child to get on a bus that we would
provide, that would take the students to a previously segregated,
all-white school. But it was interesting, the response we got from
parents. Many of the parents did not trust sending their child out of
the community where they were not able to be themselves to see that they
were treated fairly, so many of the parents turned us down and said,
"No, I'd rather not."
-
Knox
- Then there was the other part. There was the feeling that, "My child will
not be safe if my child is taken to that hostile territory where this
other school is, and so I don't want to trust my child to go." As a
result, many of the children on the first bus that we provided--by the
way, it came to an elementary school not too far from here. Many of the
students who came were children of the people who were working in the
organization of Transport a Child, and I remember observing at the time
that these children are having great success themselves in their
segregated school, and my feeling was that when they go to that other
school, they're going to be achieving above the average of the new
school, because they come from families that have been doing this and
interested in their education for a long time.
-
Knox
- An interesting part of that was that a few of the moving-picture actors
and actresses became interested in the movement, and they supported some
funds for Transport a Child to get a bus to take the children and bring
them home. When the discussion was which school should we take them to,
one of the actors said, "The school which my child attends is a good
one." Anyway, we said, "Okay, we'll target that school." And one other
reason he said so is because, "On that campus we have a bungalow we're
not using, so if they claim they don't have space, there is a bungalow
there that we can say--." My recollection is that discussion--and by the
way, he took it to the school and they discussed it at the school, and
the word got out, and my recollection is there was a request that the
bungalow be removed from the school so that they wouldn't have space,
prior to the time we could get this organized and a bus there. And even
though the actor and his wife argued against it, they were still
planning to move the bungalow, except since they put the bungalow on, a
tree, a huge tree had grown up between the bungalow and the only exit,
and they had to discuss whether we remove the tree so we can remove the
bungalow. And while this was being discussed--this is somewhat hearsay,
but while it was being discussed the bus was provided, and the children
came out and were enrolled, and they had a successful experience at the
new school, despite the fact that the preparation necessary was not
taken by the school and the school district at the school to which they
would go, as far as I know, so that the teachers would know they're
dealing with another child of another culture, and there may be some
experiences that both the child and you will have that you wouldn't have
had otherwise, and you needed to be prepared for that.
-
Knox
- Well, that was the very beginning of desegregation, of actual busing, of
busing. That's the beginning of busing for desegregation.
-
Stevenson
- So this program was a pilot program?
-
Knox
- It was a citizens' program outside the school district. It was not a part
of the school district. Later the school district, I think by court
order but maybe not, I don't know that, but finally the school district
organized a whole program for transporting children from segregated
schools to other segregated schools for purposes of desegregation, and
that became one huge division of the school district and was very
successful. Well, it wasn't successful then, take that back. It wasn't
as successful as it could have been, even though the school district
attempted to provide some inservices to the teachers that were receiving
the students. At the major part of that, well, when the court order came
that the school district has to prepare a plan for integrating, and they
said the names of the schools and the places that had to be integrated
and the school district had to prepare a plan, at that time I was
working in the Valley. I was assistant superintendent--I was
superintendent of a region.
-
Knox
- And so a group of parents and I--parents were upset, even though a
senator from the Valley, from San Fernando Valley was a leader in the
opposition to desegregation. But what happened is some parents and I sat
down from both sides, from the East Side, Pacoima, to the West Side of
the Valley. We sat down and said, "If this happens, what are we going to
do?" So parents and a few principals and I and some other counselors and
I just sat down and said, "Just what would you do if you have to do it,
even though you may not like doing it? If the court makes you do it,
what should we do?" And so we had a plan. We said how many children from
this school, and we took each school and said, "How many children from
this school would go, and to what school would they go?" considering
housing and transportation, and what we were looking at is the least
distance traveled to get there. And I'm so glad we did that, because
later on the school district submitted a plan to the court. It was
rejected because the court's response was, "That's minimal compared to
what we're expecting you to do."
-
Knox
- But in this area where I was in the Valley, we had a plan, and we were
asked what would our plan be. And I, sitting in with the representatives
of the court, I was asked, "Is that the best you can do?" And this was
asked in front of the Board of Education, really. And for a moment I was
stymied, because here can I say, "Yes, I can do better than the
district," in front of all of my superiors. But the other answer was to
lie, because we had a plan that was better than that. So I said, "Yes."
And the court representative said, "How long will that take?" Well, it
had taken the school district several weeks, months. I said, "A couple
of hours." And they said, "Well, can you do that? What do you need?" I
said, "We don't need anything. I just need a calculator, because you've
made some changes." So I got my group of parents and administrators and
we sat down and said, "With these changes, just with a hand calculator,
you can make these changes, and what our previous plan was will work."
They accepted it, and we used that plan for a while.
-
Knox
- But I lost some--the fact is, one member of the Board of Education said
to one of my parents, who was white, assuming she was a segregationist,
I guess, said to one of the parents, "Did you hear what that god damn,"
well, I'll say bastard, but that's not the words he used, "said?" That
was during a recess he said that to one of my parents, and when we got
back to the office in the Valley, this parent came--one of my principals
came to me and said, "Did you talk to that parent that the member of the
board spoke to?" I said, "No." So he brought her in, and the lady could
not even say the words that board member used in referring to me for
saying that I could do a better program, and I had to urge her until I
finally got her to at least let me know what did she really say? And she
finally told me, and I was so incensed I had to go and confront that
board member, and I did so. And, well, no action was taken against me,
but she refused to admit that she had said that, and they wanted
to--"Let's call in the parent." I said, "No, we'll let it go," because
she was almost in shock when I asked her to just tell me what the board
member said.
-
Knox
- But anyway, that was part of my initiation into the two first efforts at
desegregation. One was the Transport a Child program, and the person who
really worked hard and inaugurated it, and really it was her idea--her
name was Nira Hardon, N-i-r-a H-a-r-d-o-n. I will always remember her,
because she said, "If they won't desegregate the school, let's do it."
And so she and I and a few others organized Transport a Child, and a few
ministers by the way. Well, anyway.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Maybe this would be a good time to talk about Crawford v. Board,
which I believe you were referring to.
-
Knox
- Yes.
-
Stevenson
- If you could say a little bit about the background. I know that it was a
student at Jordan High School.
-
Knox
- Yes, it was a student at Jordan High School, and South Gate High School
was the adjoining high school. Now, Jordan High School is on 103rd
Street in Watts, and its boundary is one block east of the school. Now,
you know usually a school sits in the middle of its boundary, its
service boundary that is, the middle schools and the elementary schools
that feed it. It usually sits somewhere geographically towards the
middle of that, but not Jordan. Jordan sat one block west of its east
boundary. Starting there going east was South Gate High School. Now,
South Gate sat fairly in the middle. Well, it's so obvious that the
purpose was to segregate or to separate Jordan, predominantly Black at
that time, and South Gate.
-
Knox
- And the student who brought the case, her parents and organization
brought the case on behalf of the student, the Jordan High School
student, and that was an amazing case to those of us who lived in South
Los Angeles, because here's a built-in case for you. There can be no
legal reason to set the boundary on one side only a block away from the
school on one side and extend far, far west on the other side, and far
west is African American population. But that's the case really that
brought desegregation to the Los Angeles Unified School District, which
by the way in 2009 is almost as segregated as it was at that time. But
anyway, that was a case that not only did it invigorate, but it
solidified the opposition to segregation in South Los Angeles. It was
more than any other single case I know, maybe in California but
certainly locally--it had the greatest effect upon the distribution of
students throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, but that
was the case that led to that desegregation effort that I described
earlier.
-
Knox
- But more than any other single case, and I'm not sure in California. I
would say in California, because it was the California Supreme Court
that gave the order. But more than any other case I know, it had an
effect locally. But all other efforts that preceded it led up to the
fact that now you've got a real case. Getting litigants, getting people
to want to sue the district was not easy. There were those who thought,
"We've got a pretty good school. Let's not endanger it. We'll never win
anyway." And others who were saying, "These are outsiders coming to tell
us what we ought to do," so there was local objection, but that was
overridden easily by many outstanding people, and particularly lawyers
who said, "This is our time. This is the time to bring this case, and
this is a case like no other that we could find, that's so obviously
segregating." I'm just glad all the people, parents by the way also, who
decided this is our chance to stop the segregation in Los Angeles
Unified School District, and all the parents and all the other activists
and organizations.
-
Knox
- It's one of those moments when--not a moment--when it was time in
history, when you're just glad to have been there, to have seen how that
operates and what could actually come about, concerted effort, legal
effort to desegregate the schools.
-
Knox
- What were the schools of thought I think would be the right term, in the
Black community in terms of the opinions for and against busing? I know
some of the more mainstream groups, NAACP, SCLC, Urban League, supported
busing, but what were some of the views of some of the other--I'm
thinking in particular of groups like the Panther Party, more
Left-leaning groups. What were their views on busing and the education
of Black children?
-
Knox
- Well, the dynamics of the community at the time were interesting, because
there were so many different points of view and so many different
supporters of so many different points of view. There were those who
figured, "We're doing pretty good. Let's not endanger that." But they
were few, very few. There were those who had for a long time fought for
equality, fought for better facilities, fought for better instructors.
That was a time when in the school district if there was a teacher who
failed somewhere else in the school district, there was always an
opening in South Los Angeles for that teacher, inadequate or not,
adequate or not. And there had been a lot of different kinds of
protests. So there were even people with their job who had fear for
their jobs. There were some teachers who were concerned. Fact is,
teachers were concerned for a long time, because they knew if the
children--if we desegregate the school population, we're going to
desegregate the teaching population, which means I'm comfortable here in
this school in my community near home. I'm going to have to go someplace
else. And so there was great concern over that.
-
Knox
- There was even some, if I remember, some union concern for the teachers'
welfare. But that was one side of it, who, "What's going to happen to
me? What's going to happen to us, and what's going to happen to this
school?" The other one was, "Are you going to bring in a lot of white
students to this school?" and there was some concern about, "What does
that bring to the character of our school?" because when you have an
all-Black school, you can do a whole lot of all-Black stuff, a lot of
Black history and a lot of celebrations that are identified with the
Black community. So there were a lot of unsettling concerns about what
desegregation meant. But the primary one was the bus itself.
-
Knox
- In the white community, it portrayed the bus as a hearse. It's a place
where I put my child on and I can expect the child not to come home,
because these buses have accidents and they get at--right now they can
walk to school. Now they'll get on a bus and go miles to some other
place. And both Black and white parents worried about that, but white
parents were adamant about that and about the bus itself. But there was
also a lot of anti-busing political activity going on, and it was
located primarily in the Valley, the San Fernando Valley, but to some
extent in West Los Angeles. And so it brought some antagonisms. People
were saying, "You don't like busing because you don't want my child to
be sitting next to your child in school." And then there was the other
one, "I don't like busing because it's unsafe. But secondly, I'm going
over to an unsafe area. I'm going over there where from what I read,
those people shoot and kill and fight and all kinds of bad things
happen," and so the stereotypes were pretty strong on both sides, but to
a greater extent, in my experience, on the white side, in opposition.
-
Knox
- The organizations, as you said, all the organizations were in favor of
busing, because there's no other way to provide desegregation unless
you're going to bus somebody. But what their fear was, and it was well
placed, fear was, "We're going to be busing Black kids, but we're not
going to be busing white kids, because the white kids are going to go to
private schools rather than come to us, and our children will be bused
out there," and that has turned out that's the way it was. That's how it
was. Later on the desegregation effort took some other turns when the
magnet schools, at high school level anyway, they would have a
particular curriculum in an area that students would like. You can have
an art school, and then you can expect some white students to want to go
to a prestigious art school, even if it's in a Black area, and even that
did work to some extent, too.
-
Knox
- So some my friends were put in charge of the desegregation effort, and
they did some excellent planning to support desegregation without it
being just transportation of Black kids, but even now there's
opposition. There's opposition to magnet schools or any way of
attracting students of different ethnicities and racial groups together,
some of which I don't understand, but maybe I do understand it because I
lived in the South and there are some vestiges of no matter how good it
works, it isn't a good idea. But the yellow bus became a symbol around
which segregationists--it's hard to say that, because it's those who
oppose desegregation, it became their symbol and they used it
effectively, because a lot of people have bought into it and say that
the bus--I received a phone call once that said that I was going to be
killed, and I was going to be put on the bus, my body put on the bus,
and the yellow bus was going to take it down to Johnson, who was the
superintendent at the time. Then I received some other threats that
parts of my body would be--I would be dismembered and it would be sent
to the school district.
-
Knox
- In fact, there was one time I had to have protection. The strange thing I
had for myself in that is I was never afraid, and the reason I wasn't
afraid is because anytime anybody calls you up and says, "I'm going to
kill you," he's not likely to kill you. If he's going to kill you, he's
not going to say anything, he's just going to kill you. So my fear was
more of anybody who hadn't said anything, but not of anybody who had
said something about what--and I received a lot of threats. But, oh, by
the way, I didn't mention that that plan that we gave to the court, that
the court accepted for the Valley, worked and worked well.
-
Knox
- In fact, several things happened. What we did is took the parents of
children who were going to receive some African American students, and
parents of schools that are going to receive some white students, and we
sat them down. The amazing thing to me was how they became an organizing
force. What they said is, "I didn't know that we were so much alike."
They didn't say it in those words, but they were amazed to say that, "I
have my problem with my teenage kid, and you have the same problems with
your teenage kid," and so they started talking about their problems and
the things that we shared. And then they started--they did something I
did not offer. They started having meetings where they provided food.
The parents on this side of the school would have them come over for an
after-school, and they would prepare food, and then would go over to the
other one. I was really pleased in the fact that many of the parents--it
happened also because CSUN [California State University, Northridge],
Cal State in the Valley, several of those professors, male and female,
got engaged in the planning, too.
-
Knox
- But the most exciting thing to me was to see a group of parents who'd
have very little contact with each other, had in their mind all kinds of
stereotypes, and found that we have a lot in common, and the lot we have
in common has to do with the fact that I live the same life you do. I
just in some cases I don't have as much money as you do. In fact, one of
the strange things to me was that when it came to finances, even though
most of the parents, the Black parents had limited resources, and most
of the white parents in the west part of the Valley were fairly--they
weren't all rich, but they were well-to-do. And when they got together,
the amazing thing to me was that they found one commonality even in
that. The Black parents had trouble meeting all of their bills. The
white parents had trouble meeting all of their bills. The fact is, their
bills had to do with the fact that, "I was doing fine when I bought this
huge, beautiful home. When I put in the swimming pool that did all
right, and I put in a jacuzzi and I was still doing all right, and when
I bought my Lexus I was still doing all right. But when I got the boat,
then I had financial problems. I can't quite afford--I can't meet all my
debts."
-
Knox
- The other one has much fewer resources, "But I have the same problem. At
the end of the month, I'm having trouble meeting all my debts." And so
I'd never thought, it never had occurred to me before that financially
they may find a common ground, too. I could see how intellectually
maybe, and even culturally they may find all kinds of common ground, but
I hadn't figured they'd find common ground in finances.
-
Stevenson
- Was that an informal group? Did it have a name, the parents' group?
-
Knox
- No. No, we just had to do it school by school, so we had to take a
school, "Who's sending your children over here?" and they're sending
their parents over here, I'm sending their children over here and get
those parents together, so there were groups all over, and no, there was
no one--I had an office for helping us in the desegregation effort. By
the way, Verna Dauterive worked in that office.
-
Stevenson
- Could you tell me whether you had any interactions with Bustop, which
was, of course, for those not familiar, an anti-busing group; could you
tell me about your--
-
Knox
- Well, yes. Bustop organized a community group, a big community meeting at
one of the schools in West Valley, and I can't remember the name of the
legislator, but he was the principal speaker. They had this auditorium
just filled with people against busing. I wish I could remember his
name. Anyway, they had him as principal speaker. Well, I can't remember
whether I was asked to go by the district, or whether I just chose to
go. I know I would have chosen to go anyway, because I'm the
superintendent in that community, and that's one of my schools they're
talking about. So I went and the place was full, and I sat in the front
row, and the senator who authored the anti-busing law that won, that
proposition that won, that stopped, that was the first effort to stop
and was successful. But this was before that passed, and he was speaking
to the people about it, and he was talking about all the awful things
about busing, including the safety issue.
-
Knox
- And when he was about to end, I was about to leave. He had this crowd and
they were all cheering him on, and he said, "I see Dr. Knox is here, and
he's representing the school district, so maybe he'll give us a rebuttal
to what I just said." And my first thought was that I have no rebuttal
to that. I only could say one thing, and I said it. I said, "Busing is a
political issue. He, the senator, is a politician. That's a political
issue. I'm an educator. What I do is educate children, so no matter
where the bus stops, when your child gets off the bus, it's my job to
see that your child is safe and well educated. I'm going to do my job in
education, and busing is his job, so he'll have to discuss busing with
you, I'll discuss education." I didn't get any applause, but I didn't
get the derision I expected to get from a group that had cheered every
word he said all evening long. But anyway, I escaped that one. But
Bustop was really the organization that ended busing for desegregation.
-
Stevenson
- Elaborate a little bit more on that. I mean, Bustop was a grassroots
organization?
-
Knox
- No. Well, you'll get me off of grassroots, because Bustop was an
organization of those people who opposed busing--they really opposed
desegregation, but who used busing as a vehicle to oppose desegregation.
They were well organized and stayed well organized almost from the
beginning, and they had that political interest as well as their
economic interest. They were well financed. They had their opposition,
too. There were not-well-organized, not-well-financed groups that
opposed Bustop, white groups that opposed Bustop in the Valley, but
Bustop was extremely well-organized, well-financed, and they were very
successful. They were very political, too, as well as successful.
-
Stevenson
- So speaking of white groups that were not opposed to busing, that were
supportive of it and not just in the Valley, just in the district
whether that's on the West Side, who were some of those groups? Where
did that support come from?
-
Knox
- I wish I could think of a name. There was a group in Westwood here, and I
can't think of the name of it. I never went to any of their meetings,
but I knew that they were meeting and they were supporting--one person I
knew who supported desegregation was Burt Lancaster and his wife. I
think her name was Norma Lancaster. There were several others whose name
I can't remember now, actors and actresses, but some of them lived in
BelAir and Beverly Hills, and so they were supporters of integration.
But I can't think of the name of any organizations. By the way, some
people in the Valley as well as some people in West Los Angeles helped
finance the efforts of the NAACP and Urban League and its efforts, but I
can't think of the names of any groups or any of the individuals other
than the Lancasters. They were active. I went to several meetings at
their home, where they asked us how could they help, what support could
they give, and they then met with other people. I'm not sure. I say Burt
Lancaster, but really the moving and that was his wife, Norma Lancaster.
She was the one who was the moving force in that, and she helped fund
and helped others collect funds for Transport a Child.
-
Knox
- Throughout our conversation, most of what I have discussed with you has
been a kind of negative side of desegregation, of education and all, but
throughout that time I met, sometimes in Watts and sometimes in South
Los Angeles, I met people who were white, who came from the West Side
and from the Valley, and who sat and had an idea that a desegregated
society was the best thing for the United States and for California and
for the Los Angeles Unified School District. I can't think of any names
at this moment, but I don't want to give the impression that this was
all Black against white, or white against Black. No names come to me at
this time. But most of my experiences of race relations have been
negative because of when I was born and where I was born. But through
that time I've met some individuals and some groups that were white that
were supporters of all the efforts that I've ever been involved in for
equality in education as well as in life.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Could you discuss how you feel your own personal background,
whether that's your education, your early life, how that has influenced
your views on segregation and integration?
-
Knox
- I'm not sure.
-
Stevenson
- How has your personal background, your education, how has your early life
affected your views on segregation and integration?
-
Knox
- Well, it started off, I guess, in my household. My father died when I was
seven, but my mother was--some of the first memories I have of my mother
was of her helping people, and it was not just people, it was the people
of the community, it was the people of the church who needed help. But
also she was head of the Home Mission Society, it was called, and then
she organized a group, she and some other parents and people organized a
group called Foreign Missions, so they helped the local people in the
Home Missions, and she was also on the board of directors for Blundon
School, which was a school for orphans. Then she was on the board of
another, what we called the Old Folks' Home. In fact, in all of these
activities she was always helping somebody. My father was a quiet man. I
don't remember or know a lot about him, because I was just seven, but
one thing I remember about him is that when an African American person,
usually a man, was in some trouble with the white community, he and
another group of fellows--they called themselves the Odd Fellows--maybe
I told you about this. Late at night somebody would come by and knock on
the door and there would be some talk, and then they would give some
money, and this person could go to these fellows and pick up a dollar
here and a dollar there and use it to get out of town.
-
Knox
- So my earliest experiences were helping somebody, and I don't remember my
mother saying this, but somehow it seems to me she was saying to me when
I was much older, "Get an education and help somebody." So in my
lifetime, my first influence was my parents and my family, which said,
"Your purpose here is to help somebody." The second one, or maybe even
the first one was, "You can't do that without an education." So the
first purpose you should have is get a good education. The second
purpose is to help somebody, and so that was the first thing. But the
next, as I remember it, influence I had was living in the South in the
segregated--and seeing such wonderful people in my community, such
brilliant people, not schooled, perhaps unschooled, but listening to
them.
-
Knox
- Because one of the things we used to do is in my neighborhood we would
sit down, some of the kids would sit down with some of the old people,
and they'd tell us stories, and we'd go to the porches. A lady two
houses down from us, we used to do this all the time, we'd go and sit on
her porch in the late afternoon, just before you had to go home, you had
to be home by dark, just before you went home, and she would tell us
some stories. Some of those stories were about things that had happened
in her life, or some of them were just fables really. But what struck me
was they were able to say those things in such vivid terms that I could
live them. I was sitting there just listening and living through
whatever that experience was. And so I saw all of these wonderful
people, and I saw plasterers and carpenters, couldn't read, but could
plan a house, could plan a foundation, build the foundation and put a
house on it. In fact, our house was built by fellows who worked all day
and came home and helped my father put this house up from the
foundation, and later on when I looked, I said, "He can't read and
write. How can he do that?" And I thought that's brilliance. It's got to
be brilliance to be able to do that without having been trained to do
it.
-
Knox
- So all of my previous, early experiences had to do with the fact that we
have such brilliant people, and they're treated so mean by this society.
They can't get a job that really pays good money, and if they get one
they can be fired in a minute. If you get a house, if you're renting a
house, you can be thrown out anytime, so that also shaped part of my
life, that is, seeing the injustice of people who--but then in my home,
the few books we had had to do with Black people. I learned to read
early and I'm glad I did, because I read about some wonderful Black
people, but I also read about some awful atrocities on Black people in
slavery as well as the lynchings and all, and so all of that formed who
I am today, and who I am today is--one of the things I learned is in the
South and from being Black and being intimidated, one of them I learned
is that if in our relationship between the two of us somebody is going
to intimidate somebody else, it's going to be you, not me. I am not
going to be intimidated by you. You can't frighten me. You can't scare
me. In no way can you intimidate me to get to do what you want done. But
I'm going to try to intimidate you. If you try that, I'm going to try to
intimidate you, so it made me combative sometimes. Sometimes I was
overly combative perhaps, but those things shaped me and my whole life,
and as a result I've had some successes, and as a result I knew, as a
result of my own attitude toward life, I've missed some opportunities.
But it's okay. I wouldn't have wanted those opportunities if I had to
pay that cost to get them.
-
Stevenson
- Could you discuss the difference, in your opinion, between desegregation
and integration? This came up in another interview, where there was a
definite difference. And as it relates to L.A. Unified, what is that
difference?
-
Knox
- Well, I use them interchangeably. I haven't intellectually thought about
the difference between desegregation and integration. But I've read some
other people who have ideas about what that means. One of the ways to
look at desegregation is a negative way. It's a negative word, because
it says you're going to de-, you're going to stop something. And
integration is a positive word. It means you're going to do something,
not doing something against, stop something, but you're going to do
something. So integration really, intellectually to me, says, we're
going to put our groups together for a common cause. Desegregation
means, in my perspective, means we're going to forcibly bring groups
together.
-
Knox
- The reason I use desegregation for what happened in Los Angeles Unified
School District is because it was exactly that. It was forcing people
regardless of whether they wanted to or not, for students to be taught
in a classroom together. Whether the school district wanted it, whether
the teachers or principals or the students wanted it, they were going to
do it, and that's desegregation, and that's why it takes the law to do
desegregation. It doesn't take the law to do integration. I would have
preferred to have been involved in integration, which is working with
people who want to work together, but I wasn't. I was in that
perspective that says desegregation, we're going to force the people,
bus them, to sit next to them, to do whether they like it or not.
-
Knox
- But practically, integration in this school district would not come
without desegregation. Without court order and forcible busing and all
of that, none of that would have happened. Unfortunately, as I've said
before, it did not succeed, because we didn't take care of all of the
pieces, and several of the pieces had to do with attitudes. It's
extremely difficult to change attitudes, and it takes a long time to
change attitudes, and we didn't have a long time to do it. We just had
to make teachers teach Black kids who didn't want to teach Black kids.
-
Knox
- I have a kind of objection, I believe, even though I just did it, to
making those fine lines between desegregation and integration. It seems
to me more an intellectual exercise than it is a practical matter of
dealing with human relations, with people relating to other people, and
integration wouldn't have come just because everybody loved it in the
district. By the way, it had a positive--I think one of the positive
things about desegregation was that, as I told you once before about the
parents, but also about children. Children who went to desegregated
schools learned something about children they never would have learned
anything about had they not been forced to associate with, and as a
result, a lot of interchanges happened and a lot of good has come out of
it. In my discussion, it wouldn't have sounded like I felt that it did
anything. It failed as an educational tool, but it didn't fail the
society, because it brought people together who never would have been
together at all, and learned a lot about each other that never would
have learned a lot about each other.
-
Knox
- Even if you take something like Obama. Obama didn't happen because we all
remained apart and didn't understand each other. You had to understand a
lot and feel a lot differently to elect a Black man, to be white and
elect a Black man if you never knew anything about any Black people. So
all in all, there were good things that came about, and my evaluation of
it as not having succeeded has to do with the fact that it never reached
its potential for bringing people together.
-
Stevenson
- In terms of the Black community, parents, students, the community
overall, do you think there was a price paid for busing? In the whole
desegregation, integration, was there a price paid by the Black
community, and maybe even by the school district?
-
Knox
- No, I hadn't thought about that one. I just have to think about how to
phrase anything about--the attitude in the Black community about busing
was not--overall, I never perceived it as being negative. It was a great
concern in the beginning. It was a great concern, because parents had
concerns about their children getting on a bus going anywhere. There was
another part that the Black community had a problem with, and that is,
when I send my child off to that school, I'm not involved in the school
activities at all, because I'm not there. One other concern parents had,
a legitimate concern, is that some children spend an hour and a half on
the bus, and that's not instruction. That's going and coming, not
instruction.
-
Knox
- I know some Black coaches of athletic teams, and they were really
concerned because what happened is the Black students who were athletes
were bused to these schools, and so some of the schools--in fact, that's
true as of right now--some of the schools have track teams and football
teams made up principally of Black students, of Black athletes, and
these were athletes who would have attended the schools in South Los
Angeles. So I'm not just speaking about athletes, but also the same
thing happened to the band and musical instrument--Locke High School had
the best band, marching band in the city, and so they used to have
contests, and the best band would represent the school district in the
[Pasadena Tournament of] Rose[s] Parade, and Locke did every year. The
school district changed the system and said, "Instead of having a
school, we will have the best band, best instrument players, band
members from all of the schools," and that's what it is today. Today we
have--but that wasn't the only reason, just because the school district
didn't want Locke to win every year as it was doing, which I think was
true. But also, those band members started being transported to other
schools, too, and so that's one loss to the South Los Angeles schools,
predominantly Black school, was that once you started the busing and
once you started sending the kids around, you also sent a lot of talent
to other places other than the local school, and I think Locke is one of
the big losses in that effort.
-
Knox
- Washington also, Washington High School, too, because Washington Generals
had a great band. But even though there are some negatives to the busing
in that I just mentioned, I don't remember any concerted effort in the
Black community in opposition to the bus. I know all about it in the
other area.
-
Stevenson
- So you don't know of any opinions in the Black community about, say, the
quality of education Black children were getting was compromised by the
busing in any way?
-
Knox
- Well, part of it was that I didn't have any Black parents say that. I had
Black educators say this. What Black educators said was, and what I
recognized when I was in the Valley, is that students in South Los
Angeles in those segregated schools, when those students were bused to
the other school, in the beginning particularly, they were not treated
as scholars, for the reason that there was this perception that we've
got all these dumb Black kids coming, and so if they come, they're dumb.
If they're not, fine. And so some of the kids in the Black schools were
likely, because they were expected to by their teachers, were likely to
achieve higher than they were likely to achieve in the other schools,
because they were not expected to. My premise is it's extremely
difficult for students to achieve higher than the expectation of their
teachers. It's not easy to do that. And in the Valley and in West L.A.
where the Black students got off the bus, that added to expectation of
the teachers was in the beginning and perhaps until now, but certainly
in the beginning, that expectation for these Black students coming to us
is very low.
-
Knox
- Low expectations affected some of the students, that is, I don't have to
do as much, because they don't expect it of me. The fact is, they don't
even assign me anything difficult, so I'll just ride along, for some of
the students. Some of the others objected, and many of them excelled.
The fact is, I was very gratified whenever I went to a graduation in the
Valley and found that the valedictorian was Black, and it did happen,
but in the beginning it was extremely difficult for that to happen. So I
think the perspective of busing in the Black community was different
from the perspective of busing in the white community, which also led to
a difference in the reception of Black kids in the Valley. We never had
the problem of the reception of white students in South Los Angeles,
because they never came. That would have been an interesting thing to
find out how did the teachers in the Black schools receive the white
students from the other schools, but we can't do that, because we never
had the numbers to do the statistics.
-
Stevenson
- So what was it that finally sounded the death knell, as it were, for the
busing program?
-
Knox
- Well, it was really the legislature, the fellow I mentioned in the
Valley. Senate Bill 1 [Proposition] I think it was called, Senate Bill
1, and he was the one who wrote Senate Bill 1 that ended forced busing.
That's what it was called, forced busing. And so the school district
attempted something very widely, tried, since they no longer could do
forced busing, they would do voluntary busing, so you had the voluntary
busing system, and it still exists until today, and it's still a fight
to stop the voluntary busing. Some people that I know who did the
voluntary busing, Ted Alexander, for instance, did a great job of making
that whole thing work. Ted did something called the Ten Schools Program
that had nothing to do with busing, though. It could have if they had,
but nobody--it was just for students in African American area, but Ted
had that whole organization, and he brought in the teachers and the
people and the consultants and the psychologists and all, and had them
assist each other and assist teachers when they were receiving students
of a different culture. The district still has voluntary busing, but
it's diminishing and still under attack. And we still have a few magnet
schools, but they're diminishing, too.
-
Stevenson
- Could you just a little bit for those listening, not familiar about what
the Ten Schools Program was--
-
Knox
- Well, the Ten Schools Program--there was a series of protests at the
Board of Education about the education of African American students, and
each time they made these protests a school got a response. I
participated in some of the protests. One of them had to do with the
fact that African American students were not achieving as well in South
Los Angeles, which by that time was not totally African American, and
what the school district decided then--in fact, the proposal was given
to the school district saying, "Here are some of the things you ought to
do to improve the education of African American students, especially
students of poverty, South Los Angeles students." So the school district
responded by asking a group to get together and take this and see how
you can put it into action, and the Ten Schools Program became that.
-
Knox
- What the Ten Schools Program is they would take ten schools and in those
ten schools they're going to try these different procedures to improve
the learning of African American students, and several of them did very
well. The Martin Luther King [Elementary] School in South Los Angeles
did very well, an elementary school, to improve the education by using
some of the procedures. And what Ted did was brought in all the
resources to help these ten schools figuring that out of what is
successful here, the school district will pick that up and use it in
other schools. Well, several things happened. One of the things that
happened is those schools at the time they were selected were
predominantly African American, and the population shift in South Los
Angeles changed and they became Latino and African American, and all the
same procedures, most of those procedures worked just as well with
Latino students, but not all of them.
-
Knox
- But what didn't happen, the school system--is pick out what worked and
use that, and they never used those ten schools as a kind of laboratory
that was intended when the proposal was made. There was another proposal
made to the district called Children Can No Longer Wait, and that
program said that Black children can't just wait until you decide to
give them a better education. And that one said, "Okay, we gave a Ten
Schools Program and we gave you a procedure to follow to assist those
schools, and children can no longer wait. You must, school district must
come up with its own program to improve the education of African
American students." Well, that one they wrote some material and it was
never actually implemented. Nothing happened except they wrote it up and
put it on a shelf somewhere perhaps, because nothing ever happened with
that one.
-
Knox
- Another one was made by the Western Regional Council on Educating Black
Children, WRCEBC, Western Regional Council on Educating Black Children.
That's the Western Regional part of the National Council on Educating
Black Children, which Gus Hawkins started in 1986, and the Western
Regional Council, along with the Council of Black Administrators and
Urban League and NAACP went to the board and said again, "African
American students are the least successful of any racial or ethnic
group, and you must do something about that." So they got a group
together and they wrote a pedagogy for educating African American
students. I was among the groups making the demand. I never demanded a
pedagogy. All I wanted, my personal intent was you can identify the
reasons African American students don't learn in the schools. Almost
anybody can. The universities did that. Places you can find all across
the country, you can find information regarding African American
students and how you improve their education. You don't need to invent a
whole pedagogy.
-
Knox
- The problem with the pedagogy, when you had this big tome and you try to
take that to teachers, they don't have time, they don't have intent,
they don't have any incentive. There's no reason for them to take this
tome and go through it and make that practical in my classroom, and the
district doesn't have the power to make them do it. So anyway, that's
where we are today. We have this big African American educational
pedagogy that isn't being implemented. Several people tried very hard to
get it implemented, but it has an office downtown and that's about the
extent of it. By the way, some excellent people, they had some people
who had great thoughts and ideas, and they put them in the pedagogy, but
that doesn't make it practical enough to get to a classroom. And so
African American students as of today are the least successful in Los
Angeles Unified School District.
-
Knox
- Now, isn't it amazing that African American people--there are over forty,
and at one time there were one hundred schools for African American
students, universities, colleges, throughout the country. They
prepare--their students graduate and become the leaders and all across
the country in every area you can think of, and you just recently had a
superintendent from one of those schools. And now we have a president of
the United States who's Black. And in Los Angeles and throughout the
country, not just Los Angeles, African American students for some reason
are the least well educated. There has to be something wrong with the
system, not wrong with the people. But hope springs eternal.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. [End of interview]
1.6. Session 6 (March 12, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- I'm completing an interview with Dr. Owen Knox on March 12, 2009, and I
would like you to tell me about your involvement with the Western
Regional Council on Educating Black Children and its parent
organization, the National Council on Educating Black Children. If you
could tell me how the group started, what was the impetus for it, and
also about the seminal role played by Congressman Gus Hawkins.
-
Knox
- Well, let's start with the beginning. Congressman Hawkins called a group
of educators and organizations and people who should, if they didn't,
should have an interest in education. I think altogether about thirty of
us were in his office before he retired as congressman in Washington,
D.C. We met in his office, and he discussed just a few words to us about
the conditions of African Americans, the lack of accomplishment in large
urban areas particularly, throughout the country, and his request was
simple. He said, "And you have an interest, all of you have a great
interest in education and education of African American students." And
his question was simple. "What are you going to do about it?"
-
Knox
- We were such a diverse group from such diverse areas, lawyers and
educators and laymen, that we just had a general discussion. He didn't
say how you'd discuss this or what. He just said, "What are you going to
do?" And we started talking, just talking, and out of that conversation
came an idea that some action should be taken. And subsequently, after
long discussion, we decided we needed to get together again and talk
more about what kind of action should we take and how should we take
that action. So Congressman Hawkins called us together again, and this
time he had us meet just outside of Baltimore. We went to this hotel, a
brand new hotel in a new growing area, but there was nothing else around
the hotel. They were developing that area, but the hotel was there and
we met there.
-
Knox
- The reason I described the setting is because when I arrived there, I
realized that what Hawkins had organized was for us to talk and work and
not be distracted by anything outside. There was no other place to go.
So he put us up for a weekend, Friday, Friday night, Saturday, and
Sunday till noon, and he told us again that we had some discussion, but
now we need to say out of that discussion what action should we take. We
had a lot of ideas and a lot of different proposals and the like, but
somewhere in all of that somebody mentioned the word, "We need a
blueprint for what should happen to African American students." So we
kind of coalesced around the idea of a blueprint, and so Hawkins agreed.
He brought in several speakers. The fact is, he brought in several
politicians from around the country. One of them was Mervyn Dymally, who
was at that time a congressman from California, and some from New York
and other places, who had the same large urban areas that were failing
African American students.
-
Knox
- And he had them talk to us from a political point of view, and as lawyers
from the legal point of view, and he brought in some outstanding
educators and professors and the time that they spoke would be during
the time that we had breaks, particularly at lunch and dinner. But what
happened there was that ideas were kind of coalescing. We were kind of
coming together after many discussions and lots of disputes, really. But
what Congressman Hawkins had us do is we had breakfast and then we would
have a session, then we'd have lunch, and then we'd have a session. And
then I thought after dinner no break time after dinner, another session.
We did that Friday and all day Saturday, and on Sunday morning we had an
idea about what should happen. We should design something we
subsequently called a blueprint for the education of African American
students.
-
Knox
- Then Hawkins said, "Well, for all of us to go back to your local areas,
get other people, a group to have discussion around this idea from other
people when you get back." And when we returned to our areas, we came
back to Los Angeles, a group of us got together a discussion group, and
we added ideas to the ones about the blueprint. Then at--this was a
place called Hunt's Valley outside of Baltimore, we came back together
again for another weekend, and this time the discussion was more
pointed. Since we had talked about what we needed a blueprint, we also
talked about that the blueprint should be a blueprint for whom, and so
we had decided all of the constituencies, parents, teachers,
administrators, and as we talked we added more, and it became the
religious community and the business community and all. So we broke into
those groups to discuss those particular constituencies and what would
we say to those people about how to improve the education of African
American students.
-
Knox
- That time we had just a wonderful coalition of ideas and people. While we
had had disputes and differences and great differences in the beginning,
now we were coalescing around product, and we did the same thing. We had
speakers come in, but we had all day working. But this time it wasn't
because Hawkins asked us to do so, it was because we realized we had so
much to do that we needed all the time, and so sometimes late at night
we were still putting down ideas. But what came out of that, on the
Sunday morning after that second session we came up with a document, and
it's now called the Blueprint for Action in the Education of African
American Students and being widely distributed. It has been revised
several different times.
-
Knox
- But the striking thing to me after it was all over, I thought about it.
Congressman Hawkins in the most gentle way got us to work extremely hard
over a long period of time, and then I realized that's his mode of
operation in Congress. He's quiet, unassuming, but somehow he gets the
Congress as well as he got our group to work extremely hard to do
something worthwhile. Then one of the decisions we made is that we
should divide the whole country into regions. We had a Northeast and a
Southeast and a Central and a Southern and a Western, and Congressman
Hawkins said in the West group he wanted me to be the chairperson. On
the East group he asked a professor who was at Howard University to kind
of see that we get organized groups in the East. So we both went away
organizing our groups, and so the Western Region Council on Educating
Black Children is what I helped formulate in the West.
-
Knox
- At first it was the Far West, that is, Washington, Oregon, California and
Nevada. But we had all nine western states, including Hawaii and Alaska
and Colorado, so now we have nine western states. By the way, the first
meeting we had when I discussed the [unclear] called us together was
1986. Since that time, the Western Region was formulated and immediately
after that, about '87 or '88, and we've been having conferences and just
completed the most recent conference last weekend. I'm so pleased that
I've been involved in this group all the time, because we have been able
to get the Blueprint for Action in the Education of African American
Students into school districts. Los Angeles Unified School District has
adopted it as a working document, but like many large school districts,
it isn't widely promoted and distributed, but it is a working document
in the school district.
-
Knox
- Very recently, a group of us met with the present superintendent, [Ramon
C.] Cortines, of Los Angeles Unified School District, and in response he
came to the Western Regional Conference this past Friday, and he spoke,
and he held up the Blueprint and said, "I will see that every
administrator in the city gets a copy and implements this in the
schools," which was the first time we've been able to get any
superintendent to publicly make that announcement, but he did. So it's
been--for me personally to see something national as well as regional
come together like that on behalf of African American students.
-
Knox
- The difficulty now is getting local schools and school districts to act
upon it, not just upon the Blueprint, but upon all the ideas. In the
blueprint there are some succinct--oh, by the way, this is what Hawkins
said. He said, "I do not want an educational document. I want it easy to
read, succinct, and plain, so that everybody can understand it," and
that's how it's written.
-
Stevenson
- What are the highlights of that document?
-
Knox
- Well, the highlights, first it starts off with a statement of intent for,
say, teachers. Then one part of it has to do with an activity. There's a
stated activity, "Teachers should," first basic stuff, "be well prepared
to teach in your content, that is, to know the content of the subject
that you're teaching." Then it says step by step by step recommendations
of what you should do to be prepared, that is, review the literature,
make out a plan. A plan should include what your intent in that lesson
should be for that day, what is your objective, how you're going to
reach the objective, and how you're going to evaluate whether you reach
that objective, and what materials you need doing that lesson. Be sure
that you're able to achieve your objectives. It does that for parents
and it does it for students, and it says such basic things as,
"Students, come prepared. Have your books, papers, pencils. Be
prepared." And then it goes on down to a little more complicated action.
-
Knox
- But the action item and the little preamble to it, which says, "Overall,
what are you going to do?" and then it says, "Succinctly and distinctly,
what are the actions you could take to be sure that you do what you're
planning to do?" And since that time it's been revised several times,
even included the paraprofessionals, the business community. Some of the
ideas are fairly new for a school, especially a school like in a large
school district in Los Angeles, where they become isolates in the
community. But it says, "It is the administrator's duty to get all of
the entities within your community where your school resides to
cooperate in some manner to assist you in doing what you are supposed to
do," especially in communities where African American students and
communities where there are low socioeconomic areas.
-
Stevenson
- In a nutshell, what is the Blueprint's suggestion for effectively
educating Black children? I mean, if you were to sum it up.
-
Knox
- Well, what it says, as you've heard so many times, it says, "It's going
to take, to educate African American students successfully, it's going
to take the whole village." Generally it says it's a blueprint for each
entity there, but when you sum that all up, it's the whole population
that surrounds the school or within the school district, that you have
to harness the abilities of all and information from all of those
entities to be able to educate African American students. What I like
about it particularly, it says--when Congressman Hawkins was asked why
just African American students, his response was--I hope I can come
close to quoting him--that what ails African American students in
learning in American schools--no, African American students are the
proxy for what ails education in the United States. Therefore, if we
educate African American students, we will then have educated or have
shown a way to educate all students, so all students will gain from
educating African American students.
-
Knox
- And the implication is also not only that, the government will gain,
because the cost of not educating them is so great. In fact, as somebody
has just pointed to me the other day that to keep an uneducated person
who obviously has to find some illegal means of subsistence and is now
incarcerated, that the cost for one year doubles the cost of the
tuition, the cost of educating that person at Howard University. So he
said it's to everybody's value for us to educate African American
students, not just because they're African American, but because
everybody profits by their education. And overall, that's what the
Blueprint is. It's everybody's responsibility for educating African
American students, and if you use that responsibility in educating
African American students, it's available for use in educating any
students. And the Los Angeles Unified School District has now translated
it into five languages, I believe.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. As a follow-up, you were speaking about those early meetings in
Baltimore to form the organization, and you mentioned there were some
disputes. What were the disputes about, and how did the group come
together to a common understanding? [NOTE: Knox's microphone seems to become displaced so that he is
difficult to hear clearly.]
-
Knox
- Well, at the beginning, like I said, the group of us came from so many
different life experiences, and we were serving such diverse communities
and constituencies that each one had a point of view. Some of them said,
"What we need to do is get back to the old way that we used to educate
children in schools," use more disciplinary action and punishment. And
there were other people who had different views. They were saying that
what we need to do is have a more modern education, and we need now to
think about--at that time we said the twentieth century and what we need
to do in the twentieth century, rather than some model [unclear], so we
disagreed. Believe me, the fact is we even disagreed on some of the
statistics, and so that's one of the reasons Gus Hawkins brought in
outstanding researchers in African American education throughout the
country, because some were saying, well, there are schools [unclear] do
what they do, all over the country. And others were saying, "Yes, but
that's one kind of constituency, and these others are another kind of
constituency."
-
Knox
- There was also some discussion about the difference in whether African
Americans of poverty particularly, because African Americans generally
spoke a different language from English, and that was a lively
discussion. And as you know, [unclear] go on in that group of about
thirty or forty of us, it became a national discussion, whether there
was such a thing as Black English or whether there wasn't; it was just
an aberration. And I believe I participated in that discussion quite
energetically.
-
Stevenson
- That's actually another one of my questions. I think I'll ask you about
that. I see that you were a consultant to the California State
Department of Education, developing a policy and program for proficiency
in English for Black learners. I'd like your views on what's called
Ebonics. Maybe give us a little bit of background on how that came
about, and what are your views on that?
-
Knox
- Well, part of it, and one of the reasons I participated in discussions
[unclear] is that in my perspective, I'm from the South. I am from a low
socioeconomic area in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and I knew that even
though my parents did have--well, neither of them graduated from high
school, but they had some education. They spoke English fairly well. I
knew that I spoke differently. I knew that what I heard and what I said
was somewhat different. And so I guess [unclear], I'm not sure about
that. But later on I did some reading, and I read some research on
language and language development and the like, particularly of African
American people, and I realized, well, I concluded that really we do
speak a different language, the language you speak, and I'm calling it a
language because it has all of the elements of any language. [NOTE: Audio problem increases; interviewee's microphone has probably
fallen off. He sounds remote and his audio is often covered by loud
scratches and scraping sounds until the end of the interview.]
-
Knox
- And then I did some other research on English and realized that what we
have in America is a dialect of English, even English, England, English
people speak a dialect that came about because of the different races
and the different groups that conquered that area, and all of their
languages they brought became what is now considered English, and
America spoke a dialect of that. And African Americans had a different
language. Although its base was English, it's different.
-
Knox
- And then I had one other thing that occurred to me when I was doing all
this research is, what is language? Well, I finally, and I have a lot of
definitions for what language is, but I made my own definition of
things, and I said, it comes something like this, I have an idea in my
head, and I want to transfer that idea to you. So what I do is I make a
series of sounds that you then, when you receive those sounds, you
construct those sounds in the way that I have then transmitted the idea
I had to you. I use as an example, if that's the definition of language
is that a language has sounds that transmit thought, then suppose we
take a sample of transmitting thought like, let's say, educators
[unclear] and they say to each other, "In the context to which you
refer, it occurs to me that I have a very minimum amount of the
substance to which you refer." That's one way to transmit a thought.
-
Knox
- Another one is, "I ain't got none." Now, I know someone may say, "Yes,
but that way is of less value." I say, not if you use that definition.
The clarity with which I transmit that thought is better and more
clearly transmitted if I said, "I ain't got none," than the previous way
of saying the same thing. So in that case, that Black language is more
valuable at transmitting thoughts than what we consider appropriate
oratory.
-
Stevenson
- So what were the two schools of thought, or differing views on Ebonics or
Black English?
-
Knox
- Well, one school of thought was that what you're doing by saying Black
language, that there's a Black language, what you're doing in education,
you were saying to young people, "It's all right not to learn how to
transmit thought with what is called the appropriate language." And my
answer is, no. You're not modeling Black language. The fact is, a
university even has a course in Black language, and I said, "It's
improper, totally improper to have a course in Black language." And
somebody said, "We ought to write books in Black--." I said, "No. The
student already is proficient in Black language. You don't need to teach
him Black language. But what you have to teach him, the appropriateness
of using any language, that is, in the setting, what is it appropriate
to do? Or if you're being interviewed for a job, it's appropriate to use
what you're calling standard oral English. That's appropriate, because
you don't get a job using Black language. But when you are not, it's
always, and to me it's not appropriate but it's comfortable for me to
speak the language that others in that group sitting with me understand
as well, and if I feel comfortable and they feel comfortable, they can
use it." And I said, "What has happened to Black people who are
successful in school is that they're bilingual when it comes to this."
They're bi-dialectal, anyway, because we have learned how and when to
speak the American dialect of English, and we have learned also the
appropriateness of using the African American dialect of English, if you
wish.
-
Knox
- We had lots of discussion. It came to a national discussion. But one of
the things that struck me was outstanding African American speakers who
spoke the most beautiful American dialect of English. When they're
speaking, sometimes when they really--they make the point for the
audience to understand, they were not--and they would do something I
think is also indigenous, would lean toward the audience and say
something in language [unclear] that the audience would respond to. And
I said, "In such outstanding speakers as a member of the Supreme Court,
I have heard him do that, and I realized all he's doing is using the
appropriate language to make his thought clearly understood and felt by
the audience."
-
Stevenson
- Okay. So was there ever a real movement in the community or even among
Black educators to have Ebonics considered in educating Black children
in the district? I mention that because I know in Oakland there was
quite a movement during this time.
-
Knox
- It was unfortunate. Some people got very enthusiastic about it, and I
think Oakland was one of the examples. It was maligned, by the way,
improperly to my way of thinking, because Jesse Jackson and several of
the national leaders spoke vehemently of the Oakland project of Black
language. What was misunderstood about what Oakland was doing is that it
was kind of promoting Black language in theory, and that's what I think
Black outstanding people in the country took exception to, and it was
not what Oakland was saying. What I read and what I believed Oakland was
saying, "Don't denigrate the person who's Black, the student who's
Black, by the language he speaks. Accept it and make the transfer." I
heard someone say and I picked it up and I use it in speeches I give was
that what schooling does for speakers of Black language, when a child
reaches kindergarten, that child enters kindergarten speaking the
language of his home. Then he comes into the school, and the
well-meaning, outstanding teacher really attempting to do what she
believes is the right thing to do in kindergarten, tells him, "No, don't
say 'dat.' Say 'that.'" So the little kid, all he knows is [unclear].
That's what he's taught, he's learned at home, and he'll say, "I said
dat." And she says, "No, say 'that,' don't say 'dat.'" And he says, "I
said 'that.'" Because in his mind, in his hearing, she is saying what
you are saying, but that's not teaching. What teaching is, when you tell
him, "Instead of saying 'dat,' here's what I want you to do. I want you
to put your tongue between your teeth and blow and say 'that.'" If you
put your tongue between your teeth, you've got to say "that," which is
the "th" sound. That's teaching.
-
Knox
- But just demanding that, "You do what I say do and the way I say it," and
I don't know how to do that, is not teaching. But what it is teaching me
is that this isn't the place for me. I was comfortable at home. I come
here and the first few days in kindergarten I'm uncomfortable. This is
an uncomfortable place. First thing, almost everything here is different
from my home. All the people dress, the people act, the people
talk--this is a foreign place to me. It's intimidating. So the child,
before he has even gotten through the first month of school, has found
school to be an uncomfortable place where I'm not appreciated, and
whoever I am is not the appropriate person to be in that setting, so I
hate school. By third grade I'll come on the weekend and throw paint
against the wall and otherwise desecrate the place, because it's an
alien place to me and I hate being here, but they make me come.
-
Stevenson
- How different was Ebonics from the calls, I think during the same
period--would this have been, what, in the seventies? Okay. You were
beginning to see calls for bilingual education, and really, I mean, what
were the differences? They were calling for bilingual education of
Mexican American children. Were there any attempts to say that this was
similar or the same as?
-
Stevenson
- Yes, there were a lot of attempts to say this was the same thing.
[unclear] that in bilingual education you accept the language and make
the transfer from that language, from Spanish to English, and you are
trained on how to have the student make the transfer. Even in university
courses there wasn't the training to say, "There is a language. Let's
make the transition from that language to this." The idea is, "This is
not a language, and so all you have to do is learn standard English."
Unfortunately [unclear] that I just described. But what did happen as a
result of all of that is what I believe is some general sensitivity to
the difference. It was not just language. It started off and [unclear]
language. But it had also to do with how you do your hair. If hair is
kinky, if your hair--fact is, several of us had to make speeches that
hair doesn't have character. It isn't good or bad hair. It's different
hair. It's curly or kinky or straight, but hair doesn't commit crimes,
it doesn't murder or steal, so hair isn't bad. Hair is different. Now,
what after--I don't think we made the difference, but after that became
part of the general national discussion, it became acceptable.
Dreadlocks became acceptable. Any hair style you have is a good hair
style. I don't hear people saying that's bad as they did back then, not
even Black people.
-
Knox
- Black people are the ones that I first heard say they had good hair and
bad hair. But what I think happened that at least partly was motivated
out of discussions of differences in language was difference in culture,
and that there is no good culture or right culture or bad culture, but a
difference in culture, and we have to recognize the differences in
culture while we're teaching, and if there are elements of a culture
that will keep you from being successful in life or getting a job and
making a living, then you have to understand, this part of that culture
will keep you from being successful. But it also keeps you from being
successful in school, because we have all of these ideas in school about
what you're supposed to look like, what you're supposed to dress like,
how you're supposed to be, everything that you're supposed to do. But
now we accept a whole lot of differences in behavior, because we
understand that differences aren't good or bad, they're just
representative of cultures.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I'd like to briefly go back to the Western Regional Council on
Educating Black Children. When I went to the website for the national
group there, I think there is mention made in maybe a mission statement
about Ronald Edmonds and his education philosophy on more effective
schools. Could you talk a little bit about that and how that may have
informed some of the philosophy?
-
Knox
- What Ron Edmonds did was he looked at many schools that were successful
in educating African American students, and then he made a list of those
things that he saw in those successful schools. I can't remember all of
them, but one of them was strong administrative leadership. Another one
was organized class and school activities, clearly organized, and that
organization understood by the students as well as the teachers and the
parents. But anyway, he listed a whole list of those, and then he said,
"These are more effective schools," so he became a more effective
schools advocate, and he said, "Schools should do these things."
-
Knox
- When Gus Hawkins called a group together, one of the first things he said
was, "What you need to know is what Ron Edmonds has done and what he has
found," and so he had us all read Ron Edmonds, because I had read it,
for the whole group to understand what Ron Edmonds did and why he was
doing it. You'll see in that quote of Ron Edmonds, where he said, "We
know all we need to know to educate all of America's children." How this
effects us depends upon how we feel about not having done it before, and
what that really says, "How do we feel about not having educated these
children?" And if you feel that we have not done something right, then
you will then change your behaviors to do something that does educate
them. And he said, "That isn't new, it isn't difficult. We already know
that."
-
Knox
- One of the reasons I, along with other things about Ron Edmonds' research
in more effective schools, but the fact is if we know all we already
know, and that makes me uncomfortable when I go to a conference or a
lecture, when somebody wants to tell me all the problems, because Ron
Edmonds said, "We already know everything we need to know. All we need
to know, do, is take some action in those areas that we already know,"
and that's one of our problems. It still remains one of my problems. The
national council is having its conference in April in Washington, D.C.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Now, I know that there were some attempts to use that
more-effective-schools philosophy in L.A. Unified. Could you talk a
little bit about that?
-
Knox
- Well, some administrators came to say how closely the schools were hewing
to what Ron Edmonds said, but the first effort was one called Children
Can No Longer Wait. A group of us went to the school district and said
just that. We had a document that showed the failures, and what we said
then, and we were loosely basing it upon Ron Edmonds' research, is that,
"Here are some things you should do. And what we are saying, the school
district should take a school or group of schools and try to implement
those ideas that we've gleaned from Ron Edmonds' and other research. You
should do this in school and see--even call it experimental and see if
it does work." There was a lot of discussion and the school district
said yes, and it produced documents. It was never implemented.
-
Knox
- Another one was the Ten Schools Program. Ted Alexander became the head of
that group. At that time those ten schools in South Los Angeles were
predominantly African American. They are now predominantly Hispanic. But
in those ten schools they were saying, "This is a laboratory, these ten
schools, where we're going to try all these different ideas," and a lot
of them came out of Ron Edmonds. "We're going to try these different
ideas," and the purpose was, "and those that work, I want the school
district to observe that, and those ideas that are successful in
increasing the education of African American students, then use that in
other schools throughout the district."
-
Knox
- Well, with a lot of fanfare the school district opened the Ten Schools
Project and only the schools that--well, they were somewhat successful.
The school district never used that as a kind of laboratory and used
that to attempt at getting the school district to reform itself in
educating African American students. But Ron Edmonds' research was used
[unclear], neither of which ever actually was used as it was intended by
the people who presented it for use in the school district. More
recently, a group of people, a kind of coalition called the Summit of
African American Leaders on the Crisis in the Education of African
American Students went to the board and requested that they improve the
schools, and this time--those other two efforts I mentioned, we went
with a plan. This time we didn't go with a plan. The idea was, these are
your statistics. Your African American students are learning least well
of all schools in the school district, even those students whose home
language is not English. Even they achieve at a higher rate than African
American students in the school district.
-
Knox
- Our question this time was much like the one Gus Hawkins had. "So what
are you going to do about it?" So we presented this to them with their
statistics at a board meeting. The superintendent then turned to
assistants and said, "Meet with this group and let's see if we can come
up with a plan," and we did. I've forgotten how many weeks or months we
gave them, but we gave them a period of time at which they should come
up with a plan, and so they organized a group, and that group got
together. But the big difference this time is this is not the
community-demand plan. This is supposed to be their plan, and somehow
they came up with a "culturally relevant pedagogy."
-
Knox
- It started off for African American students, but with the board somebody
else--I assume somebody's influence, it became for "African American
Students and All Others," and that's the one that is presently being
evaluated. I listened to an evaluation the other day which says that the
superintendents, assistant superintendents [unclear] have been briefed
on this program, that the regional superintendents have been briefed on
the program. The problem was the schools and teachers had not
sufficiently been trained on using the program. But people have asked
me--what they were assuming was that the summit made this plan, and I've
had difficulty getting people to understand, no, that's the school
district's plan. So they ask me, "What do you think of the plan?" I
said, "It's not what I think. It's their plan to improve education, so
it's easy. Has it improved the education of African American students?
That's all. It's their plan. Have they used the plan that now has--."
And obviously when they look at the statistics, no.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I'd like to talk about your role in curricula development during
your career. I see that you developed a multicultural pilot to implement
the state guidelines on multicultural education. Tell me more about
that.
-
Knox
- What I was asked to do, I was asked to work on a commission for
multicultural education at the state level, and I did. On that
commission all the different ethnic groups were represented on the
group, and what we were saying is that the state in all of the schools
should have some program that improves the education of all of the
ethnicities and racial groups represented in the school district. So our
argument, mine in my discussions was that they have lots of languages
and lots of cultures and that any program, not just a separate program
but in everything you teach, that is, in math, in English, in everything
that you teach there should be an understanding of the culture that
contributes to whatever that is. In math, well, at that time and
currently really, there is very little mention of the African influence
in the development of math. I say Africa's influence is the influence
that helped Rome and Greece, that's the same--well, there is no mention,
even very little mention of math in any textbook I know now of the
origin, much of the ideas and mathematical formulae that the Greeks and
Romans gave down to the rest of us really.
-
Knox
- We seem to go back and say, well, this originated there. Now, and this is
just one little piece of what we discuss statewide, and even now it was
unsuccessful in getting a lot of this understood, it says that in almost
all math books, math started with Europe. Math did not start with
Europe. There were mathematicians--in fact, the ideas in much of science
of that note. What we were trying to say is, "There are contributions to
the culture and to the success, to the politics and to whatever America
is, that came from other than European people or European influences."
We were saying that, "If you're going to talk multicultural, you've got
to be multi. You've got to say contributions--and if I am Japanese and
I'm sitting in the classroom, and you're only telling me what happened
in Europe prior to the time--and your books are all, and your literature
is all about Europe, and your history is all about Europe, simply
because the Europeans came to this country, and it's not about anybody
who was here already--there was a culture here when the Europeans came,
and there are contributions to what America has become, whatever our
culture is, from the whole world of people."
-
Knox
- And one of the strengths and beauties of America is that it has taken all
of that together to make us who we are, and we are now standing
historically, we are now standing--contribution to world history. But so
far, we are concentrating on the contributions to that culture from
Europe, and that's what we were doing on it. Well, at least in some of
the schools and school districts and classrooms there is that
understanding and that message, but not to any great extent.
-
Stevenson
- Could you give me an example of one of those early African influences on
mathematics?
-
Knox
- Well, I wish I was prepared. I was prepared a few years ago, but I can't
think of just one major--I'm having trouble trying to get a mathematical
concept that I know was developed in Africa, and I don't want to be
quoted on this one, but it seems that I am being quoted. But it seems
the Pythagorean Theorem in geometry was developed in, it seems to me, in
Mali, and was transferred to Europe much later than that. But I don't
[unclear]. But there are books around that show that it was the early
civilizations in Africa produced a tremendous amount of knowledge in all
areas now being attributed to Europeans, particularly as the Romans
conquered so much of Africa at the time, even to the time of Jesus
Christ, and the Greek civilization adopted whatever it already found
that existed and became an outstanding civilization, particularly in the
sciences and mathematics.
-
Stevenson
- How successful were you in implementing the state guidelines, or having
some input? Maybe, what were some actual changes as a result of the work
you did?
-
Knox
- The unfortunate result is not nearly as dramatic as I envisioned it at
the time that some of us worked on it. I didn't do it alone. In every
case, I was part of a group. But one of the ones that I helped develop
that I am proud of, I did work, was that the Los Angeles Unified School
District was organized when I entered, into three distinct entities,
one, elementary education, second was junior high schools, and the third
was senior high schools, and there were superintendents of these
different groups. There was head superintendent and superintendent of
the secondary and superintendent of the middle and elementary. I was a
secondary teacher in the beginning, so I knew a little about that
hierarchy. Then I became an elementary teacher and administrator, and I
knew about that hierarchy.
-
Knox
- And one of the things that occurred to me and to others, too, was that
that wasn't the progression that students went. They went through, but
not in separate groups. What they did is they went in a flow. So it
seemed to me the school district could be organized like the flow of
students through it, so that there's the integration of all of this as a
succession group of those three entities. So I worked with a group and
we sought federal funds--at that time they were called Title III
funds--we sought some federal funding to organize what they called
complexes, that is, an elementary, middle, and senior high school, and
that would be the hierarchy. So students entering an elementary school
might even have a teacher at the middle school who also taught at the
elementary school.
-
Knox
- But as a result, one time when decentralization was just beginning, I
mentioned to the superintendent in a meeting that--and I was wrong in
this, but I'm glad I said it anyway--that decentralization was going to
be a bigger issue than desegregation. And he said, "No, not hardly." And
he was right, because desegregation, because it went into the courts,
suddenly became a tremendous issue, but desegregation (sic) is the
remaining one that went from before desegregation--decentralization has
gone through all of that. Now the school district is decentralized in
the way that we organized it back when we did the complexes. We had
Garfield [Educational] Complex in East L.A. and the Jordan Educational
Complex in South Los Angeles, and I think that that has become one
success of groups that I participated in.
-
Stevenson
- In connection with that, I see that you developed a successful Title III
proposal for decentralizing an urban school district. Maybe first you
could talk a little bit more about exactly what Title III was.
-
Knox
- The federal government had not, well, let's go back. Historically,
education of students is a state responsibility, not a federal
responsibility. It's not stated in the Constitution that it is a federal
responsibility. But a lot of politicians over a long period of time have
been trying to get the federal government to take a more active role,
and so, by the way, Gus Hawkins was involved in it. So in federal
funding there was an inclusion of funds for schools and local school
districts to do several different things. Title I was for the schools
that served children of low socioeconomic status. That gave them lunches
and gave them additional assistance in reading teachers and the like.
Title I, which still does that, was for that purpose, and I think Title
II was for libraries and other institutions similar to that. And so
schools and most of the schools built libraries.
-
Knox
- And Title III was for innovative ideas about improving education, and so
we took the Title III money and used it to organize the Jordan
Educational Complex and the Garfield Educational Complex. I was asked to
write the proposal, to assist in writing the proposal to get that
funded, and then when it got funded I was asked to be the head of the
Jordan Educational Complex, and through that we developed some ideas
about how to integrate the schools, elementary, middle, and senior high
schools. And so now the school district is organized in local districts
they call it. Prior to that they called it areas, but they are organized
as we indicated and had some success in operating in the Jordan
Educational Complex.
-
Stevenson
- Maybe as the last thing for us to cover is to tell me your philosophy of
insuring school effectiveness. How do you identify and maintain quality
teachers, administrators, and how do you ensure that children are
excelling academically?
-
Knox
- Well, from all the things I've discussed here you can see that it says
that schooling itself is a problem, not that-- this is my philosophy.
It's not the parents and not the students, but it's schooling itself
that has been the problem with everybody's education, with our lack of
being able to be competitive in the students we turn out in the United
States, competitive with other people in the world. We keep tampering
around with getting parent councils. That's great, that's good, but they
are not responsible for the education of students. The students are
not--I know we say that, "You're responsible--." Even in the Blueprint
it says, "You're responsible for your own education." But students don't
have a certificate for learning. Teachers get paid and have a
certificate for teaching.
-
Knox
- I go to college, I get degrees, I learn a whole bunch of stuff. I then
take an examination that gives me a credential. The state says I can
teach. By this certificate it certifies that I can teach. Then I go to
the classroom, I am expected and I am paid to do what my certificate
says, teach. Now, you have to define teaching. Well, everybody can have
their own definition. I have mine. You have taught when someone has
learned. If someone didn't learn, you did not teach. Now, my background
is in science, and in physics it says a definition of work is the weight
of the object times the distance through which you move that object or
foot-pounds, so many feet, so many pounds. I took so many pounds and I
moved so many feet.
-
Knox
- Now, that's a formula. Now, they use that formula like this. I pushed
against a wall. I pushed all day against the wall and at the end of the
day the wall didn't move. Now, with that formula, that's a thousand
pounds of wall and zero feet. Multiplied, a thousand times zero is zero.
You did zero work. I say when a teacher stands before a class and
lectures and uses PowerPoint and the computer and all of that, and I
plan, go through my whole plan, and then when I finish I evaluate it,
and if the children did not learn, then I did not teach. I know that
isn't very popular, but I'm saying if the teachers did not teach, the
children got F's, the teachers did not teach. If the students cannot
compete in the world of science and mathematics and literature, then the
school district, which also has a certificate for running schools and
gets paid, and administrators and the superintendent, they all get paid
to see that the teacher teaches. If the teacher didn't teach, they
didn't do their job. So it's schooling that's the problem. It's not the
students.
-
Knox
- Somebody said, "Students should come prepared to learn." No. Teachers
should come prepared to teach whoever it is, the student who arrives.
Well, you say, "Well, some of these students don't want to learn." Well,
do we have a program that gets these students who don't want to learn to
want to learn? That's what teaching is. We don't teach because you
already learned something. We teach whatever you haven't learned, that's
what we teach, and that's what teaching is. So my conclusion is our
schools are failing our students. Our schools are failing our society.
Our schools are failing America for that matter, and we cannot continue
that.
-
Knox
- What we need now is a means by which we learn how to do what we're not
presently able--we're able, but not presently successful at doing. Now
sometimes through all of this I know it sounds negative, and like
there's a lot of my spiritual nature, but I want to complete this by
saying I have had a wonderful life. I have enjoyed myself, and the most
traumatic, racial or other kind of difficulty I've gone through has
taught me a whole lot about being successful and about being happy. So
what I want is a school that then takes students wherever they are when
they arrive and moves them as rapidly toward what the idea would be is
that they become successful adults, happy, successful adults and
contributors to a happy society.
-
Knox
- The reason I find so much to like in my life is that I have seen that
happen. In different cases I've seen that happen. Presently I'm on the
board of the Watts Learning Center, and I'm one of the founders of the
Watts Learning Center, and the philosophy is so simple. When a student
arrives--and we are in South Los Angeles, the highest-crime area in the
city, the 77th Street Precinct, one of the lowest, perhaps the lowest
economic areas in the city, and we're one of the highest-performing
schools in the city. And people come and ask me--the other day I took a
group of people to see the school, and they said, "Why could you
succeed? Because the schools right around you are not doing well, and
you've done so well. Why is this school doing so well?" It's so simple.
I mean, people seem to think it's such a huge and difficult thing, and
like Ron Edmonds says, "We already know all we need to know."
-
Knox
- But what we need to know is little things like this. When a student comes
from our area where this school is, in this high-crime area where there
are shootings and maybe even he's lost members of his family in one of
the shootings, and joblessness and all kinds of problems, and generally
in schools we think, "Oh, that poor kid, he has such a hard problem in
his life. I'm sure that we're going to have to be very kind to him in
school." You don't need to be kind with him, because he's already
learned to live the worst life you can live in this city and find joy in
it. I mean, those kids are skipping to school. But what happens in
school is we think it has traumatized him in some way, and as bad and as
awful as poverty is and should be eliminated, the good thing about it is
he comes to the school, and we should look upon him just for having
survived his first six years or five years in life and still happy, and
he comes with that much. That means he has developed a tremendous amount
of intelligence, use of intelligence, that all we have to do is transfer
that to those few things we try to teach in school.
-
Knox
- And if you realize that, if you think that when he walks in the door--I
say this to my teachers, "This little kid who walked through the door is
gifted. He's gifted, because middle-class kids never learned all that
stuff. Those kids, parents take them to Little League and to little
hockey and to little ballet and everything, and parents do all the work.
The kid doesn't have to think. The parents think for him and have him go
through those--this little kid coming from a poverty area, he has had to
think to survive, just to get from home to school, from home to the
store, from home to the park. He has to know all of what's out there and
know how to develop a plan to avoid it, so that I can be safe, and if
I'm safe I'm happy." And all we have to do is say, "He's gifted." "Come
on in. You're gifted. I know you can do this. This stuff is easy." And
it is if we thought it, but the fact that we think he's traumatized
means that we've already planned for him not to succeed.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. One last item. Yesterday, President [Barack] Obama gave a talk on
education. What can we expect from the president in terms of addressing
nationwide inequities in education?
-
Knox
- I have no reason to believe that the president, so far I have no reason
to believe that the president shares my philosophy. What I do have
reason to believe is that he's open to ideas about how to improve the
country in every area. He has not said, "This is what you do, because I
want you to do it." He has called together people who have had
experience and knowledge in that area and asked them. Out of that he
develops a plan. He is just tremendously capable in taking a lot of
diverse ideas and making a program out of it, in every area, in areas
that sometimes shock me. There's no way for him to have known that much
about the economy that he knows now. There's no way for him to know
about any of those other things. He's never even been to war, and he's
talking about how we organize the world economically and politically,
how we organize the world. So he's open to ideas about how to do it.
-
Knox
- The only problem I have with him--who's going to give him the ideas on
education? That's my problem. I'm afraid he's going to go to most of the
traditionalists in education, and they're going to tell him such mundane
things as, "This is the unions' fault." I'm not sure about that, and I
hope--but I have to depend upon his ability to separate the truth from
fiction, and I believe given diverse ideas about education of children
of poverty, he would be able to--
-
Stevenson
- No, we're still picking up.
-
Knox
- He would be able to come up with a plan, but the major plan has to do
with how we train teachers to be successful at teaching, and how we
train administrators to be successful at helping teachers understand how
to teach, and I have great hopes and I have great expectations that the
president will be able to do that.
-
Stevenson
- All right. Well, thank you very much for this interview.[End of interview]