Interview with Haskell Ward, March 22, 2017

RBRL418GAA-010 Ward

JEWELL WALKER-HARPS:March 22, 19 -- 2017. We are at the University of Georgia Griffin Campus with our continuing interview session. We will be interviewing today Mr. Haskell Ward, a Griffinite who is going to tell our -- take us through his life and through the major events which have had some impact on African American history. Today we have sitting at the table --

BE-ATRICE CUNNINGHAM:Be-Atrice Cunningham.

JOHN CRUICKSHANK:John Cruickshank.

ELLEN BAUSKE:And Ellen Bauske.

RICHIE BRAMAN:And Richie Braman.

WALKER-HARPS:So now, Haskell, we will allow you to begin to tell us about your early life and whatever else you deem to be important that you would like to share with us, as we interject some questions along the way.

Haskell WARD:Okay. So thank you, Jewell, and those who are also here 00:01:00at the table. It's an honor for me to be here, and to speak a bit about growing up in Griffin, and the Griffin in which I grew up. Related to that, I have made a copy of a DVD of the Griffin series in the "In Search of the Dream" that I recorded off of the television; that in 1990, we did a six-part series on A&E called "In Search of the Dream," and Griffin was the first hour of that series, and by all accounts, the most popular hour of that series. It was nominated for best documentary of the year in 1990, and that also is related to how I came back to Griffin, as well. But this is a copy of it from the 00:02:00television, including the ads in it, that I think is worthwhile being a part of your collection here.

WALKER-HARPS:And we have your permission to --

WARD:Yes, yes. I don't have the copyright authority, but you can have that. It's recorded in 1990.

WALKER-HARPS:Okay.

WARD:I was born in Griffin in 1940, March 13, 1940, so last week, I celebrated my 77th birthday. On 429 East Solomon Street. Four twenty-nine East Solomon Street was where the old Louise's used to be, across the street from where the Louise's is today. I will show you a picture of the house that was from a product of my memory, because there were no photographs of it, but it 00:03:00was a product of my memory, and it was drawn by -- what's her name -- Joyce Perdue. This is the house, and it's from my memory, from right in Solomon Street, where the children's care -- the childcare center is. All of those houses were torn down. But I was born there in that house in 1940, by Miss Carrie Causey, Rodney, his great-grandmother. Rodney McCord's great-grandmother was the midwife. And most of the African American babies who were born in Griffin were not born in the hospital. They were born by midwives, and Miss Carrie Causey, who lived up on Taylor Street, was the one 00:04:00who did most of the deliveries. That was 1940. I lived in a house that was my grandmother's house, and there were two of us in there with -- my mother had two children, me and my sister Yvonne, two years older than me. My mother and father divorced a year after we were born -- I was born. He went to Cleveland, where he stayed the rest of his life, and she also eventually went to Cleveland, but we lived in that house until about 1950 with my grandmother, and then we moved up a few houses up Solomon Street, across the way from Richard Duke's and Miss Vera Duke's. Clifford Phillips and his family, the 00:05:00Phillips across the way. Next door immediately to us was one of the black funeral homes. Sometimes a funeral home, sometimes not. And most of the people who were around there -- George Reed lived around, down the corner. My fourth grade teacher lived two doors down, Miss Prothro, and many of my friends for the rest of high school were right on that little corridor. We went to -- when I was in school, to the Broad Street School. We walked under the bridge, which has been covered, under the railroad. And the Broad Street School burned down when I was in about the second or -- maybe third grade. And we built the -- we moved to a new school, Fairmont -- not -- Moore's Elementary School, in, I'd 00:06:00say, '47, '48. Forty-eight or somewhere around there, Moore's was built. I was in Griffin a couple of years ago, visiting, and I was -- I stopped in to say hello to Billy Reeves. And when I -- Billy and I were in Rotary. I was the first African American in Rotary in Griffin, and Billy was a very good friend of mine, and I would often say hello to him. We were very good, close friends. And when I finished talking with Billy, I said, "You know, I think I'll go over to the Board of Education and see Curtis, Curtis Jones." And it was interesting. When I went to see him, they were doing a recording for a promotional piece on the Griffin-Spalding County School System. And Curtis said, "Well, here, why don't you introduce one -- interview one of our outstanding graduates, 00:07:00Haskell Ward?" And I talked with them for about a half an hour. And at the end of it, I said to Curtis, "Look, I'd be interested in seeing my school records." And he said, "Well, I don't know. That's a long time ago," but he said, "I'll look." Before I got back to -- by the Atlanta Motor Speedway, he called and said, "We found your records."

CUNNINGHAM:Oh, wow.

WARD:These are the records that he sent me. And it was a startling discovery. (laughter) This is about two years ago.

CUNNINGHAM:Yes. I was thinking, this could be scary.

WARD:This is a startling discovery. I looked at my record, and I discovered something that, in -- and as I'm 75 years old, 74, 75 years old, I found out something that I never knew in that 75 years. The first was that I 00:08:00failed the first grade. You go through and look at my records, and you'll see all this, and the best grades were D's down there except for health, I got C's. And so I was retained. And you go through. So I repeated the first grade. You go to the second grade, and you find the same thing. All of the D's and F's, and I didn't even -- this -- the only grades I got beyond that were in health. And I was retained in the second grade. So when I graduated from high school, I often wondered why it was that I was 19 and everybody else was 17 or 18, and I never knew. I never knew until that day that I had repeated. Now, the end of that story really is, when I graduated from high school, if you look at my -- I was third. I didn't get to be number one or two, but I was third in 00:09:00my class. I was president of the junior and senior class, president of the district-wide 4-H club. I saw something about 4-H club in today's paper. I won the state oratorical contest, third place, best all-around student, assistant band director, outstanding bass, best all-around, best student in math, best student in English, best student in social studies, most likely to succeed. And I thought, what an amazing story. What an amazing story. Here, a kid comes out of that circumstance, illiterate mother, illiterate father, illiterate grandmother, and coming out of that circumstance. Now, that fits into a kind of conservative mantra about the -- one could make a very strong conservative case that is argued about the greatness that is the opportunities in 00:10:00the country. But it really, in my mind, had a very big interpretation that I placed on it. When I left the third grade, I became the student of Miss Corine Prothro. Corine Prothro had a reputation of being a very tough lady, a very tough teacher, and she lived two doors down. I worked for the woman that she lived with, Miss Ella Phillips. Miss Ella Phillips lived on the corner of Fourth and Solomon Street -- on Third and Solomon Street. And both of them had a major role -- played a major role in my life. My grandmother was a maid, worked for Miss (inaudible). My mother was a maid later, and worked for Harold McNeely And my grandmother would say to me, when she was away at work, to sit 00:11:00on the porch until she came home. And I would sit on the porch, because I know that if I didn't, Miss Prothro knew that that was what I was supposed to be doing. And so she would walk -- she walked from school over to her home, and not only was she my teacher, but she knew what the instructions were. There's an important questions about that, because I wondered in my later years in life why I sat on the porch and other kids didn't, and the impact of Miss Prothro and Miss Ella Phillips on my life during that period. By the time I finished the sixth grade -- my sixth grade teacher was Mr. A. C. Epps. Mr. Epps 00:12:00was my minister. And an important thing happened to me. If you look at my record from the first and second grades, I was clearly on the path to being a total failure in school. But if you look around the fifth and sixth grade, there began to be signs of excelling. And I trace those to the impact of my -- Mr. Reverend Epps was the minister at Heck Chapel. When I was in the fifth grade, Miss Ella Phillips took me to Heck Chapel and made me join, and I underscore made me, join the church there. Heck Chapel became a very important part of my 00:13:00life, because Reverend Epps was not only my minister, but he was my sixth grade teacher. And not only was he my sixth grade teacher, but the other members were the head brothers and other teachers in Griffin. So Raymond was there, Phillip was there, Otis was there, that I grew up with under their tutelage there, so I knew them. They knew me as a member of the church. When Reverend Epps left the church, Reverend Shropshire became the minister, and most of my later years in life, I was with Reverend Shropshire. Reverend Shropshire and his sons and daughters were contemporaries, and Reverend Shropshire played a very important part both in my life and in the life of Griffin as a leader. Those --

WALKER-HARPS:Excuse me. Is he the Reverend Shropshire who had to make 00:14:00a choice between teacher and the NAACP?

WARD:Yeah, yeah. And his wife was also a teacher.

WALKER-HARPS:Yes, Hester.

WARD:Yeah. Now, those descriptions of my growing up really was the way all of the kids grew up. We were all very poor. There were -- those who were not poor, they were the sons or the daughters of the teachers or the ministers, but there weren't very many, particularly because many of the ministers were not college educated. They were ministers, but they hadn't been formally educated beyond being called to the ministry. So they weren't very -- most people on Solomon Street were like me. Most grew up like me. Most were in the same economic circumstance. Now, a couple of guys behind me, Glen and Frankie 00:15:00Lee?behind me, lived in the house. They had a credit relationship with the Morrison Rowell grocery store right under the bridge where you go up. And so they would, on days when they went there, give me a nickel, and I could get a big wheel of cracker and bologna meat. In the third grade, I had a teacher who would give -- who would ask the kids who were in school to go and get her lunch, and she would give you an nickel if you did. And I was always excited about doing that. Anyway.

BAUSKE:Why were you on the porch? Why did your mother tell you to sit out on the porch?

WARD:So that I wouldn't go out anywhere.

BAUSKE:Okay.

WARD:So that I wouldn't go running around the street, and getting in trouble. Just, "You sit here on the porch, and then when I come home, then you come in. But don't go running around the neighborhood and doing anything." And 00:16:00it was reinforced by Miss -- also down the street from me, who also was my fifth grade teacher, was Miss -- what's the name, whose husband was the Atlanta Life Insurance -- Miss McDowell, Miss Prudence McDowell. She had two daughters, and they were very close to me. Miss McDowell had a practice that if you went to school each year, and it was -- she did it on a monthly and a yearly basis -- if you went to school without being late or absent, she would give a party for you. And I had never had anybody who would ever give a party for me, so my 00:17:00aspiration was to have a party. And she -- that was a very, very big deal, that she had a party for me when -- because I otherwise wouldn't have had a party. And so -- but it had the effect of keeping you in school. Those were important elements. There was an important element of Reverend Epps's influence on my life. When I had gotten to the sixth grade, I was the captain of the school safety patrol. And the captain of the school safety patrol was different from the regular school safety patrols, in that you didn't have to stand on one spot. You went around and saw whether the other ones was standing in the spots where they were to be. And then one day, one of the guys was late, and I 00:18:00asked him why he was late, and he didn't tell, and I slapped him. And as a result of that, Reverend Epps demoted me from a captain to a private. That incident had an enormous impact on me and my attitude toward power and responsibility. It had a -- all through the rest of my life, his having done that, I could cite for any number of things as not -- how not to abuse power and responsibility. It was a huge, huge thing, because being a school safety patrol was a real, real, real big deal. I mean, it wasn't -- I think I had a picture. I think you saw the picture, Jewell, online, of me with the school safety patrols.

WALKER-HARPS:Yes.

WARD:So anyway, I could go on like that. But what was life like? Life 00:19:00was -- Griffin was two different communities. Not just two different communities, but Griffin was a community in which we lived on our side of town, even from -- different from the south side of -- we stayed away. Blacks on Solomon Street didn't hang out with blacks on Boyd Row. We didn't have gangs, but we didn't -- we were very, very different, from the interactions. They had elementary schools over there, Cora Nimmons, and we had our school over here. They didn't tend to come over here. We had little or no interaction, except my mother, when I -- my mother worked for Harold McNeely. Harold McNeely had two sons, Jim and Harold Jr. We saw them now and then. But we had no interaction with whites. Zero. We didn't play sports. We didn't -- nor did we see 00:20:00any great yearning to play. I can remember, and before Brown vs. Board of Education, we had begun to hear rumblings that we would have to go to school with white kids. And I underscore, we would have to go to school with white kids, because it was not the general desire on the part of us as black kids to want to go to school with white kids. That was not an aspiration. We knew that we were not getting the same treatment, because in our school, we had the desks that came from Griffin High School, we had the books that came from Griffin High School. We had all of the things that came from Griffin High School, and we didn't ever get new things. We got whatever there was. But we didn't 00:21:00-- we were -- it was not a general yearning for trying to go to Griffin High School because we wanted to go to school with white kids. It was more the reality that there were all kinds of things that they had at Griffin High School that we knew. They had different machinery. They had different shops. They had different kinds of things that we knew they had over there, but we didn't want -- that we didn't see it as something that we were aspiring to, just because we wanted to go to Griffin High School. There was a benefit that most people did not understand about the segregated system that I thought was one of the great strengths of the segregated system. Our teachers appealed to our racial aspects, and they could in a way that today would be illegal. So that our teachers, from very early on, they were not -- they were not 00:22:00advising us versus white kids. They were saying, you are good, you can achieve, and you -- if you are going to achieve, you will have to excel. There was always a sense from my earliest years that if you were going to succeed, you would have to excel. It would not be good enough for you just to be good. You would have to be better. And that -- and they were also aware that at some point in the future, life is not going to be as it is now. And so in order to realize the possibilities, you've got to prepare yourself. And so -- and it often took a, sort of, racial encouragement. You are as smart as the other kids. 00:23:00You are -- you can do this, and you need -- but in order to do it, you're going to have to work, and you're going to have to work very hard. And that was a drill that -- you can't really do that in schools in the same way today, but it was a very important aspect of our growing up. And then there were leaders. One of the most important school leaders in my early years was Horace Tate. Horace Tate actually came from the same city as Miss Prothro. They knew each other from Elberton. They knew each other from there. Graduated both from Fort Valley. Tate was the first really strong, firm man that I -- leader that I had -- that I experienced growing up. And he saw in me the potential, and he used 00:24:00me for getting the water out of his basement, for picking up golf balls. They couldn't go to the golf course, but he went way out on North Hill Street. There were big pasture, and he would hit golf balls, and I would be on the other side getting his golf balls. But he did something that was very important for me. He forced me -- and I say force, underscored -- to read. And he would give me a book, and he would tell me to read this book, and he said, "Come back tomorrow, and I want you to tell me about it." And he would give me another book, and he'd, "Come back tomorrow," and then read about it. And then he was the only person who did. He just gave me book, after book, after book, after book. This is very important, because I grew up in a family that, I was in my 40s before I knew somebody like Dr. Seuss, or, you know, things like other 00:25:00childhood -- there was nobody sitting around reading books to me. There were no -- my -- there was none of that. And it was Horace Tate who introduced me to the literature as a young kid. It didn't come out of the home. It didn't even come out of the church. It came from someone looking and saying, you know, this is -- you need to start reading, and reading needs to be a part of your life. Horace Tate. And he was very important. I would say from the -- 1950 to 1957, when he left, he was a very strategic part of my life.

BAUSKE:What kind of books did he give you to read?

WARD:General kid -- you know, the --

BAUSKE:Was it kids' books?

WARD:-- Huckleberry -- yeah. Huckleberry Finn, history books. He would just take -- he would go and get a book out of his library, and give it to me, 00:26:00and he'd go into -- and so some of the first books that I read that were beyond school, he was the one who introduced me to reading. Those are important things. This picture of me when I was here, this was in the projects. We left Solomon Street and moved to the projects. We were the first people to move into the projects. They're now called Fairmont Homes.

WALKER-HARPS:And that's Fairmont Homes.

WARD:Now, we were the first. In this building, that was the first time we had ever had running water in our house, a bathroom, a toilet, central heating and air. It was like we had died and gone to heaven (laughter) That we had electricity. On Solomon Street, we didn't have electricity. I don't 00:27:00have the pic-- do I have the picture? Yeah. This picture, when I showed this picture to my mother -- my mother died some years ago -- when I showed it to her, she looked at it, and she said, "That's not right." (laughter) And I said, "What's wrong with it?" She said, "It doesn't have the pecan tree in the back." Joyce did another picture. This is a duplicate, and she put the pecan tree in it. This house had no electricity, no running water, no anything. We sat there, and that was the life. We didn't know any other life. This was the outhouse, the house that's in the back right here. That was the life. That wasn't different from any other kid on the block there. So when we went to the projects, this was an enormous change in our life circumstance. It was a major advance 00:28:00for us. Most of the people who I knew -- Phillip Hood and his family, everybody that I knew in my generation who were lucky enough to get there. The interesting thing about this, though, this is 220 Blanton Avenue. I have a -- I am a judge, and I am in my chambers, and there is a young black woman who comes in bloodied. And I ask her her address. And she says, "220 Blanton Avenue." (laughter) And I thought, my goodness. I just sat. Two twenty Blanton Avenue, apartment C. That is the middle apartment next door to Annie Stephens and her daughter Gertrude Stephens. Now, down the hall from this is Kilitha Daniel and all 00:29:00of her kids, Keith Daniel and that whole group, right there on the corner right there. This was the -- right here in the middle of this building was Joseph Harris and his family. This was like we had died and gone to heaven, that we had those homes. And so when they asked -- they wanted to name a street after me, I said put it out there, as the kids, they can see that the kids who were -- when they were -- these were all -- this was a wonderful advantage for us, that we had housing. We never dreamed that we could have a house with a bathroom inside it, with a toilet inside it, with heat that you didn't have to put in the fireplace. And I had -- when I was a little kid on Solomon Street, in the morning, I had to get up and go and find some lighter wood, so that we could start a fire in the stove, so that we could get the whole stove 00:30:00started. We got a wagon. The wagon wasn't for fun. It was to put the coal on, and to run around the neighborhood and see if you could put things in it, to bring the wood back to start the whole fire. And here we were with a house that had heat, and all you had to do was to put -- and it had lights. Because we had lamps. We had a little kerosene lamp on Solomon Street, and we had to put our clothes on us to keep us warm there. And so that was an enormous -- this is 1952 that we had this. And it was one of the best things that happened in our growing -- we were so proud of that. It was just, sort of, like Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, that's growing up. By the time I got -- I had begun to realize that I was a little bit more serious in school that other 00:31:00kids, but I was -- and so I tried to differentiate myself. When I was in school in the seventh grade, I start playing the tuba in the high school band. And I didn't -- and I tried not to do athletics and other things that other kids did, because I wanted kids who were not interested in being athletes to know that you could be popular or significant without doing that. And these are deliberate decisions in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, that I decided. That I wasn't going to sing, even though I had a good voice. My voice was a very -- there were two things that my mother was responsible for. One, I had a good voice. Early on, I knew that, because people told me. It's, sort of, like, enough people just keep saying it. And the other thing that I knew was that people 00:32:00thought that I was serious at an early age, and they began to encourage me. My success was a Pavlovian success. It was the reinforcement of positive, positive, positive, positive reinforcement. So that when I was in school, I wasn't a teacher's pet, but what I realized was that if you did your lesson, the teachers treated you better. And if you did your lesson, you -- they started to acknowledge you. And that was the sort of reinforcement that you got from -- that if you were doing that, the teacher would ask me to go and get her lunch, so I would go and get her lunch, and she'd give me a nickel. So there were a lot of things like that that I began to understand that a certain kind of 00:33:00behavior carried with it certain kind of rewards, and vice versa. There were other kinds of behaviors where you didn't get any rewards. That was probably a product of my teachers, because -- and my minister, but my teachers. It was not a product of the home. It was a product of my teachers, where it was very critically important for values. And so the value structure in my life came from my teachers.

__: (audio glitch)

WARD: We had a stereotypical upbringing of kids being reared by grandmothers. What made the difference, I think, was the community. And this is where the African proverb does kick in, that it takes a village to raise the kid, because the other people did take a responsibility and saw a responsibility 00:34:00for seeing you. When I read this thing about my first grade, my first grade teacher was still alive. And I asked her. She said she didn't remember retaining me, but what she did say (laughter) was -- what she did say was that, "I remember that you were walking around with no shoes on. I always thought you were my grandkid, and I put you in school there." So there was that kind of circumstance. Then there were -- so I never saw -- in fact, when I was at Clark, Sam Cook wrote a letter for me, for going to school, and he said, "For a kid, like Haskell, from a deprived background, he 00:35:00has been remarkable successful." And I thought, that was the first time I'd ever heard that I was deprived. (laughter) It really was quite a remarkable thing. In 1962, I was on a panel at Atlanta University. Haskell Ward, Clark student; Robert Allen; and Howard Zinn. Some of you may know Howard Zinn.

BAUSKE:Oh, I do, yeah.

WARD:Howard Zinn was a sociologist that had a -- I was on a panel with them. This is February 8, 1962. The next day, February 9, 1962, Sam Dubois Cook wrote me a letter. He said, "We were so proud of you last night. You did a magnificent job. Your presentation was instructive and stimulating. You were poised and articulate. Please accept my deep gratitude for a job well done. You have genuine abilities. I only hope that you will work hard and develop them. You have the making of a distinguished person. Please keep up the good 00:36:00work. I am very proud to be your homie. All good wishes." This is Sam Cook. This kind of encouragement I started to get in the sixth and seventh grade. But that was the other side of the admonition, which also became a part of my character, and that was, don't get the big head. This was very important that teachers would say that they would -- and character building. They would encourage you and compliment you, but they would also say very quickly thereafter, don't get the big head. Don't get arrogant and don't let your ego take control. And so if you look at my life, as I have gone through my life, you will see a characteristic of me that I have never thought that I was better than other people. And a component of my behavior in life, public and 00:37:00private, has been to never appear that I was better than somebody else. This was a very important value that was instilled in us as kids. You are not better than somebody else. You're not worse. You're not less. But you're not better. And those values were very, very, very significantly imbued. And you have a responsibility that is larger than your individual self. Now, people who were important had characteristics like that. Tate, for example. Tate's interest was in social justice, and he didn't call it social justice. He wanted us to achieve, and he knew that if we were to succeed, we would have to work. So he pressed us to work. So did C. W. Daniels. He pressed us to work. But 00:38:00they -- we didn't have class divisions with us. If we were poor, it was never something that I ever found was used as some reason for not getting attention. I think that that was an important element. When I was in -- when I was at -- a member of Reverend Shropshire's church, I was the president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. His son, James Shropshire, who is now a PhD, he didn't put his son above me. He allowed my leadership to be a part of the church family, even while his son was a year or two younger, because of this thing, you see. But he treated me with the kind of affection that he gave to his kids. He had five or six kids, Reverend Shropshire. Raymond was very 00:39:00attentive to me, and to other kids, but he was attentive to me because I was in his church, and I was around them. And if they ever saw me doing anything untoward, they would call me on it. But these were reinforcement mechanisms that were in the community. So when I see this girl from 220 Blanton Avenue, and she's got blood coming off of her, she's getting a -- we didn't have that. I mean, I'm not creating an idyllic life, but we didn't have kids on cocaine. We didn't have kids on marijuana. We didn't -- geez, this is stuff we heard blacks in New York did, but not in Griffin. But then when I was a judge in Griffin, I see, whoa, this is stuff that they do in Detroit, and New York, and other places. We had so much of that. That's the texture of the change that 00:40:00had occurred. When I was a judge here in Griffin, the impact of drugs on our city and our county was so substantially different from anything that we'd have heard of. We would have just completely died of thinking if somebody -- that this kind of behavior would have been anywhere tolerable or acceptable. Those are the school years. My wife said, "Don't talk too much about these -- your early years. There are other things you've done in your life." But that's the -- those are some of the observations that I had. I was different only to the extent that, in terms of objective outside measures, I achieved more than many. But it wasn't different. If I look at my high school and my college, 00:41:00we were the generation that came. And I went to -- when I went to Clark, we started the sit-ins in my freshman year. And that was a whole -- that was a chapter that -- we could have. When I was in the eighth grade, Herman Talmadge came to our school here at Fairmont and said, "You know, we know that you little negro children don't want to go to school with whites, and you know also that blood will flow in the street." He's telling us this in our auditorium. He spoke to us in our auditorium here. This was the life that it was. That all changed when I went to college. Almost overnight, the circumstances of our life changed. But I think that when you look at where we came -- from what -- from where we came in the period of the '40s and the '50s, the lives were so 00:42:00separate that it was almost as though we were living on two different planets. And yet, the curiosity about the South -- and it's always -- I spent 30 years in New York. But the curiosity about the South is that, in the South, blacks and whites have always been very close, for circumstances that are very obvious. My mother worked for Harold McNeely.

CUNNINGHAM:Right.

WARD:She was right there in his house. She raised his kids. She put -- she buried his mother. She was there when Harold McNeely's wife died. There was a fire in the house. We were the closest people to them. You had this paradox in the South of very, very close relationships with blacks and whites, and yet it was a hierarchical relationship. In some towns -- we didn't do it 00:43:00here, but in some towns, blacks went to church with the whites. And so -- we're going to be -- I'm going to buried. I wanted to be buried here, but I'm going to be buried in the cemetery in Atlanta with my wife, Oakland Cemetery, where Maynard Jackson is. And there was -- we were on a little tour. My wife is on the board of Oakland Cemetery. And we did a little tour. And one place in the white section of the cemetery, there is the black nanny in the same burial family plot. And this is, sort of, the paradox of life. They were so close, that when they -- even though blacks were not allowed in that section of the cemetery, they insisted. She's going to be buried here with us. And then that's 00:44:00where she's buried. You have that kind of duality in the South. You have this. And of course, you have the brutality of the relationships. That is the well-known and well-deserved opprobrium. But the other side is that if you had -- now, I've lived all over the country, east and west. Blacks probably are closer to whites in the South than they are in any other part of the country. I spent 30 years in New York. I was deputy mayor of New York. I was in -- I saw, when David Rockefeller -- David Rockefeller was a friend, when I saw that. But that's very unusual. That's very unusual. The relationships are way out. And so you'll see in the duality here. There's an interesting thing. 00:45:00I was in the State Department. Jimmy Carter was president. I was living in Lagos, Nigeria. I was with the Ford Foundation. And my friend, classmate, Ben Brown, was Jimmy Carter's deputy campaign manager. And he sent me a note. He says, "I think we're going to win, and you'd better come home." And why did he tell me that? Because I was the only one from our group who was in international affairs as opposed to civil rights. And he said, "You'd better come home." And so when Carter became president, I was Secretary Vance's Africa advisor in the State Department, the first African American in the secretary's office at that time. We were dealing with some very important African issues in the 00:46:00first year. Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique. I pressed for the president to meet with the delegation from Angola, the first time the president has met with what they call the freedom fighters. When they came to meet, this is a big deal. And Carter was meeting with them. Carter had never met with -- no president had ever met with these freedom fighters from Angola and Mozambique. The guys from the Angolan African side began the meeting with the statement that, "We heard the shot fired around the world at Bunker Hill, and we took our inspiration from the shot fired around the world from Bunker Hill." He started very much 00:47:00like this. "And yet you have been arming our oppressors." He's telling the president. I think, oh, my God, this was a mistake. This was a great mistake to go through -- (laughter) to put this meeting, you know, then. And we looked. And we were arming Angola -- I mean, Portugal. We were the major arms supplier for Portugal. Portugal was in charge of Angola and Mozambique. Portugal was the first European country in Africa and the last one out.What did Jimmy Carter say when he finished talking with him? This guy is -- Carter said to him, "We, too, were surprised that you stayed under the Portuguese for 500 years. It was not for us to fight your war. It was for you to fight your battle. And when we saw that you were succeeding, then we would assist you." And that's very 00:48:00interesting. This is very interesting throughout, throughout, because we were led to believe that the Africans didn't want -- they -- the ones here, they were better off. They were better off. They were better off here than they were -- even in slavery, they were better off. We never -- we always knew that was just propaganda. But the reality was that when you decide to act, things change. Providence takes over. And things began to act. All manner of things began. The moment you say that you can, you will. Then providence takes over, and things began to act in your favor. Whatever you think you can do and believe you can, begin it. Begin it now. That's one of my speeches, that things change. Carter, a Southerner, telling these guys, "You guys were dumb to be 00:49:00under the Europeans for 500 years." And so the same thing here. When we decided to act -- one day, it just started. We were -- in fact, in Atlanta, we were embarrassed that the guys at A&T beat us to it. They beat us to -- because we thought we were the top of the roost in Atlanta, and then when they started sit-ins in February in A&T, we thought, that's something we should have done first. So when we looked at, were we just going to repeat? We decided not to just repeat, and start sit-in right that -- we --

(break in audio)

WARD:-- listed our grievances in that document, and we started the 00:50:00sit-ins after that. And the sit-ins started in March 1960. The results of that were very significant in the history of our country.

WALKER-HARPS:You had just left Griffin, or you probably had gone about a year. So you are part of the sit-ins at Clark in Atlanta.

WARD:In Atlanta. Right.

WALKER-HARPS:Let me ask you what you think about the fact that the relationship of blacks and whites in Griffin, as described by you earlier, impact the civil rights movement. In other words, the people who had to participate in the action were a part of those families. Many of them had mothers or sisters who worked in the homes of the whites that they were rebelling against. How did 00:51:00that play out, or was there -- are you aware of it -- the relationship among the blacks and the whites, I would think, would be different in Griffin than it would have been in a larger area.

WARD:My grandmother and mother were often asked what they thought of all of this. It was most often framed as outside agitation. Well, you know, you're not in favor of that, are you? My sense is, there is a long, well-known history that blacks who were working as domestics or in subservient roles knew that it was not in their interest to tell whites what they were thinking, even though they were thinking just the opposite of what they were saying, in many 00:52:00cases. It was not uncommon for blacks to say, do you expect me to say X, Y, and Z? Well, that was not to their economic advantage. There was not any -- it was not in the interest of blacks to have an open dialogue with whites about their feelings, because otherwise, they would be -- they wouldn't be working. And that was a part of a system of control that played out from the earliest days of the slave period. And it played out into -- I think, probably, if anything, even many of the blacks were surprised. We were surprised at the unity, 00:53:00because blacks had not -- had been often criticized for not being unified. But we were surprised. And I think it was a big impact, the Montgomery bus boycott. I was, I think, in the tenth grade, or in the ninth grade, when the bus boycotts started. And we were really very proud at the fact that the blacks in Montgomery could stay together for over a year, and develop a system of transportation and getting about. And I think it would be very important to not underestimate the impact of the Montgomery boycott. I think it would be very important 00:54:00to not underestimate the impact of Emmett Till's death in 1955. It was such a brutal thing. I was 15. I was -- I think Emmett Till was about the same age. That that occurred -- and so we began to see that we needed to move away from the reticent behavior, and to move more aggressively for our own wellbeing. I think that when we were in school, it was also very important for us that we all acted together. I know that it was very difficult for the leaders at 00:55:00the colleges, and President Brawley called me in several times about being too aggressive. But I think it was important for us. I think it was important that people such as Reverend Shropshire, Mr. Tate, some of the older blacks who were not threatened, who didn't see this as a threat to their own commerce. Now, in Griffin, we didn't have a lot of commerce. Raymond and his brother owned the sandwich shop. They called it Triple-H Sandwich Shop. And they --

WALKER-HARPS:Raymond and Phillip Head.

WARD:Yeah. They had a sandwich shop. It was a lunch counter and booths. Raymond owned the Press-- , they called it, and -- Dry Cleaning 00:56:00and Tailoring Shop. Raymond went to Tuskegee. Raymond was a veteran, and social life with blacks was at the -- what everybody in Griffin called the club, and that's the VFW. The club. Now, this is an aspect of my life that most people didn't know. I played drums in the club, in our band. We had a swing band. We used to play at white fraternity houses, and different -- that's how I got money. At the club one night, James Brown comes in, and he comes right up to the stage, and he says to me -- he had a hit song called "Please, Please, Please." (laughter) And he comes up to me. I'm playing drums. And he says, "When I say hit it, I want you to hit it." And he started saying, this is -- 00:57:00"Please, Please, Please." That's about '55 or '56, somewhere around. But we played all around. And everybody in the club -- Aretha Franklin, James Brown, B. B. King, Sam Cooke, you name it -- they came to the club. Raymond was in charge of the club. It was the big -- it was --

BAUSKE:Is this the VFW?

WARD:Yes. Yeah.

BAUSKE:Right through that little --

WALKER-HARPS:Yes.

BAUSKE:Wow. (laughter)

WARD:Etta James. Dinah Washington. B. B. King. I played directly with James Brown, when James Brown had his first hit. This -- and they would come to Griffin. We had -- they -- we had the big stars all the time. And they would play in Atlanta, and when they weren't playing in Atlanta, they'd come down to Griffin, and they'd come to the club. The club was full. It was always -- this was the one big social thing for people around there. And I don't 00:58:00know. They probably still do it, but I don't --

WALKER-HARPS:So Raymond Head and James -- Jimmy Holland were the leaders, the musical -- well, Jimmy was music, but Raymond was just business.

WARD:Yeah, Raymond was the business. He was in charge of it. Raymond's dad was a businessman before. I remember Raymond's dad died. But Raymond's dad used to bring -- Raymond brought -- right where I was born, right across the street was an open field, and Raymond's dad brought Joe Louis here. He would bring stars here. They were enterprising guys who introduced us to different people. Right in the middle of what -- Miss Clara Lovett's stands. She had a 00:59:00little stand that Oscar Calloway's dad bought, snow -- Dewdrop Inn. She had a little stand there. We used to go over there and get a hot dog. She was -- you ate hot dogs and pig feet. (laughter) And she had it so clean that you couldn't even go in there. She was very particular about how you kept it. But Raymond -- Miss Clara Lovett owned the stand on the corner, and Mr. Evans was a white guy who owned the grocery store right on the corner, across Third Street. On the Third Street, right across from Trinity Church, there's two businesses. One is a black restaurant. The other one is a white grocery store. And I used to carry grocery -- deliver grocery in my wagon for Mr. Evans, Bill Evans there.

CUNNINGHAM: So you mentioned the Heads. So who were some of the other 01:00:00prominent black business owners around that time?

WARD:The significant business professionals -- probably the most significant in terms of assets was Lon Touchstone. Lon was an officer with Atlanta Life, and so was Miss McDowell's husband an officer with Atlanta Life. But Lon began to buy lots of property. In fact, even to this day, his estate under Frank Touchstone is probably the largest individual property owner in Spalding County. And he was very, very big. I remember seeing him once, back early '60s, and I was telling him I wanted to buy some property, and he said, "Well, it's a good time to buy. You could buy an acre for a dollar back there." But he was very big. Miss Clara Lovett's stand was right there. There was a very popular 01:01:00club in the middle of -- on Solomon Street, all the way down before you get to First Street, there was a place, there was a nightclub, right in the middle of the place, where they had a jukebox, and a lot of people hung out there. Most parents -- mine didn't know good from bad in terms of telling you what to stay away from, other than don't get out in the street. They drank a lot of beer and wine down at that place down there, and so if you had any admonition at all, it was to stay away from places like that. Now, most of the black businesses were right up in behind Raymond --

WALKER-HARPS:Slaton Avenue?

WARD:Slaton Avenue. So that was a little strip that on Friday -- there were a couple of beer saloons, they call them. There was the black movie theater there down on one end of the corner, and on the other end of the corner was 01:02:00a barbershop. What's-her-name and her husband owned the barbershop.

WALKER-HARPS:Stinson.

WARD:Mary and Ralph, yeah.

WALKER-HARPS:Ralph and Mary Stinson.

WARD:Ralph and Mary Stinson had a barbershop. There was a taxi company on the other side. There was a pool room that most good boys didn't go to, because everybody thought pool rooms were bad, and so you didn't go to that. But the business strip, the Griffin version of Auburn Avenue, was a one-block strip between Hill Street and Eighth Street. That little strip in there was bubbling with activity in the '40s and '50s and '60s. It was the center of activity. Beyond that, there really weren't any commerce of any note there, if you had anything at all. Now, the way a lot of blacks got money in commerce 01:03:00was in fish fries, and selling moonshine. They would sell little things of little -- and they would have -- Friday night, they would have house parties. In fact, when my mother came back on the scene, she would have fish fries and things like that. This was a -- and people would come and sit in the house, and they would drink, you know, and they would sit, and that was a very popular kind of activity. Enterprising people learning how. The other thing -- the other way that blacks made money was in putting people up who were traveling. Because the hotels and other public accommodations were not available, blacks who had a room had people in as rented -- you know, like this modern version of --

CUNNINGHAM:Bed and breakfast.

CRUICKSHANK:B and B.

WARD:Bed and breakfast.

CUNNINGHAM:Sure.

WARD:This was very popular amongst blacks throughout the country, but especially in the South. And people knew where you could stay.

WALKER-HARPS: At Miss Connolly there on Solomon Street.

WARD:Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. They had places like that. They would put you up, and they had a room. And the word went around as to who could take them, if guys came in. For example, one time, Bobby "Blue" Bland stayed with us on Solomon Street, once we moved from our -- and now we were living with our mother. The word went around that there are places where you would stay in. Somebody's going to be in town. If Ray Charles is going to be in town, and he needs a place to stay at night, (laughter) they would stay. The Heads often had -- Joe Louis stayed over at their house when he came into town. That was how you 01:05:00were accommodated.

CUNNINGHAM:Can you tell us a little bit more about the other types of economic opportunities for the folks in the black community?

WALKER-HARPS:Perhaps the funeral homes and...

WARD:The established places that you had that were necessary was, you always had to have a funeral home. And in many communities, you also had associations that were established to accommodate death, so that you had burial societies that were, sort of, ad hoc associations that were put together. You always had a funeral home. You always had a barbershop. If you were lucky, you had a cleaners. When I was growing up, Griffin was more centrally strategic economically. Places like Fayetteville and McDonough were way, way in 01:06:00the boondocks, so everybody in those places came to Griffin. Griffin was the center of commerce. It was -- for just as a general proposition. Even when I was in high school, the black kids from Pike County and other places went to school in Griffin. So they tended to come around here. But from a business standpoint, blacks as late as my late '60s were still doing most of the work on yards, most of the work on repairs. I remember Danny Kane, for example, who was the last of those who could do cane in chairs. That was an area of skill that 01:07:00blacks had, that they still have in Charleston, for example. You had a thriving industry. It never was a thriving enterprise here, but you had that kind of thing. Manual semiskilled labor, semiskilled to unskilled, was basically that. Anything that required an infrastructure or financial activity was usually behind. Blacks in comparison to whites, in terms of the economy, were always a half to two-thirds less, and that continues to this day. If you look at the median family income, for example, in Spalding County, you're not much beyond $20,000 in your aggregate income, and if you looked at the aggregate 01:08:00income for blacks in Spalding County today, you are still under $20,000 for the family of four, for blacks in the town. (coughs) The disparity continues, the economic disparities continue. And to be disproportionately the case with the African American communities in the city. One of the disturbing things about small towns, in small towns -- a lot of people deliberately want to live in small towns. A lot of people don't want to live in small towns. But the economic disparity and inequality in small towns, especially black versus white, continues to be a very striking difference, and it -- the 01:09:00circumstances -- for example, I was active for a while in trying to get sewer service in the northern part. I dare say that if whites were impacted the way blacks are impacted in the northern part of the city, this issue would have been resolved 15 or 20 years ago. So that even today, when you talk about economic development, it isn't economic development that is designed to lift all boats equally. It is more designed to accommodate whites than it is to accommodate -- and if you raise that, it's usually an adversarial issue when you raise it, so that the economic parity continues to be a matter of business as usual in our small towns, and I think that's one of the unfortunate things here. I 01:10:00think most ambitious kids want to leave and not stay, because of the circumstance. And when I was growing up, my teachers advised me to leave Griffin if I wanted to succeed. And they said it would be in my interest to leave, because you will not have the opportunity here. And so you have this anomaly of a kid growing up in my circumstance, and he goes out and becomes the deputy mayor of New York City, where everybody is saying he's really quite one of the significant leaders in our city, and I had been a significant leader in New York before I was deputy mayor. But this is the price that the South was paying for the exodus of its citizens. There were people like me who were fully 01:11:00capable of making a contribution in the best years of my life, in Georgia, in Griffin, even, but who didn't have the opportunity here. If I wanted to make a mark in life, it wouldn't have been possible here. And that's the great tragedy of the South. The South produced the better part of our national leaders, especially African American leaders. And I think that there are parts of it -- and there some really interesting sociological issues involved here. But I think the coherence, the cultural coherence of being from Africa was very important. I think it's more important even than African Americans understood, 01:12:00and even today, fail to understand the significance of the cultural impact of Africa on our lives. Now, these are people who were wrenched out of Africa and brought here, and who are deliberately divided, and said that anything African is bad, and you are better off here than you would have been there. And you have -- my friend Basil Davidson said that the cultural dispossession of African Americans is one of the great cruelties in human history. That they brought here, were not allowed to learn English, began to speak English but didn't speak it the way the King spoke English, and were ridiculed and laughed at their ebola -- or what is the language pattern --

WALKER-HARPS: Ebonics? Ebonics?

WARD:-- that you went through. Not allowed to learn, because it was a crime in the earliest years to learn. And so you go through this cultural dispossession, and yet what people say is Southern hospitality really is a African hospitality. It is the remnant of -- I'll tell you something. Everybody notices, if they come from outside of the South, that Southerners speak to each other. Black or white, they speak to each other. And that's not Southern. That's African. It comes from -- and if -- one of the greatest slights that one could visit of one person to another is to walk by somebody and not speak. And you would hear the 01:14:00person say, "He didn't even speak to me. Didn't even even speak to me." That's African. I was doing a lot of research, and I was talking to the former prime minister of what was then Southern Rhodesia, a guy by the name of Garfield Todd. We had been talking. I was staying at his house for about four or five days. And he -- and I said, Garfield Todd had been in Rhodesia for 50 years at the time I was talking with him. And I said, "You've been here for all these years." In fact, he went on his honeymoon -- he was originally from New Zealand and went to Southern Rhodesia. "You've been here all these years. What has Africa taught you? I mean, what have you learned from being out here?" Just as 01:15:00he was about to answer it, his house lady, who is managing his house, an African lady, came in, and he started telling her what she is to do during the day. And she says to him, "Good morning, Mr. Todd." And he says, "Damn it!" He says, "This is what I've learned here. And yet I fail every time. The humanity of the African, the relationship on a personal level. They would never begin the day without greeting. They would never engage you without greeting." And he says, "This is what I see." So what we see, despite the centuries of 01:16:00separation, there is a lot of the humanity of Africa that went over the oceans with the African American -- into the African Americans. And it's that humanity that you see, because if you look at the way in which Africans, by and large, were not disloyal. By and large, stayed. By and large, took care, even in the war. Even in the war, they were staying with the families in the war period. And it is a kind of loyalty that mystified people. How could you do that? Now, having spoken about the war, my family, as far back as I can determine, was always from here. And in 1867, we traced my great-great-grandfather 01:17:00to an Ira Ward. Died in Lynchburg in 1865 or somewhere around that period. We didn't trace my great-great-grandfather until we were able to look at the estate records from his estate. And you will find my great-great-grandfather Louis Ward in his papers. And we can't go back before that. We can do DNA in my record, and I have done DNA in my record, and on my father's side, you will find my mother from the Yorubas in Nigeria, and -- my mother's side the Yorubas, and my father's side the Igbo in Nigeria. Most of the African Americans 01:18:00in this area came from Nigeria, right along the coast, so it's not uncommon, that. But I didn't know this until about a year and a half ago. I'd been doing genealogical research to try to figure out, where did the Wards come from, and where am I? I don't know where Haskell came from. I think that -- I was about to say that the gift my mother gave me, one of the best gifts that she gave me, was my name, Haskell. It's usually a Jewish surname. It is not very -- the first first-name Haskell I ever met was in New York, and it was the first first-name Haskell he ever met. He was in charge of the New York Jewish Committee. But that was a -- it was interesting, because it has always been significant in my life to have been born with a unique name. And I am aware of that, that it is something that -- it's like Cher, you know? You could have one name like that. So my mother, I could never get clear where she 01:19:00got it from. I think it was a white guy who she knew, and she named me Haskell. But it was very important in my own sense of self, and distinctive, because throughout the rest of my life, I've never met another black Haskell, for example, and it's very rare that I've met another Haskell altogether. Now, this is a little bit, sort of, off the path, but I think there are things like this, when you look at the composition of your life, that if you look at all of the aggregate elements of your life, it mattered. My name mattered. I was gifted with a voice that people liked. So it was something that was an attribute from the earliest. My first speech was at Trinity Church, right down on Solomon Street, here, and my -- I was a little three-year-old saying, What 01:20:00you looking at me for? I didn't come to stay. I just came to say today is Easter Day." (laughter) This is down (overlapping dialogue) I forgot that -- my sister had to repeat the lines for me, this sister right here. Anyway, you know, there are some things -- and so there are some attributes that I have that are Southern. One is storytelling. This is Southern. It's also African, but it's also Southern. It's Southern. And Southern speakers are very good at weaving in different stories and coming back to the original story. And it's very, very -- it's a very intricate kind of thing. Southerners are very good at this. The best ones are very good at it. And I can notice now, in the last several years, I'm losing the ability to start off on one story and take it a long way around and come back to the original point. That's where I can begin to see the 01:21:00effect of aging. But I've always been in speaking. I started the debating team at Clark College. If you ever saw that movie The Great Debaters?

CRUICKSHANK:Yeah.

WALKER-HARPS:Yes.

WARD:I did something. By the time I get to Clark -- this is very interesting. By the time I get to Clark, President Brawley was our president. And I went to the president. Now, look at this little kid who failed the first and second grade, and I tell the president of Clark, "I don't like the academic environment here. This place doesn't look like a college. I mean, it doesn't feel like a college. Everybody's out joining fraternities and sororities, and they're not studying." What did the president say to me? He says, "Look. I'm raising money to run this school. Why don't you improve the academic environment?" (laughter) So I said, "I don't know ", and we started the Clark College Forum and 01:22:00Forensic Society. Exists to this day. Exists to this day. We beat Harvard. We beat Emory. We beat NYU. We were all over the country -- it's The Great Debaters. That still exists to this day. But it taught me something. Don't just criticize. Go out and do that. That I started the -- I never joined a fraternity, but I understand from Rodney that the Bogarsuns still exists. I started that at Fairmont when I was here.

WALKER-HARPS:Oh, really?

WARD:Yeah. Me and Phillip Hood.

WALKER-HARPS:Phillip Hood.

BAUSKE:What is that?

WARD:It's just a men's social organization. I never joined a fraternity in college. I had already moved away from that. But I was always very keen to not just complain about things. Just go out -- just go ahead and do it.

WALKER-HARPS:What other changes did you make at Fairmont? You're 01:23:00right. The Bogarsuns and Bogarsettes still exist.

WARD:Yeah. I think probably when I was a student, by the time I had got -- so we went to the sixth grade in Moore Elementary School, and by the time you got to the seventh grade, you were already at Fairmont, so that it was seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. You were quite young in that. But I think by the time I was already in the ninth or tenth grade, kids started calling me Head, and they were alluding to my intellectual preoccupations there. And so I think it became possible for kids to be interested in studying without being -- without it being a problem.

WALKER-HARPS:We're going to take a break.

WARD:No, we can -- as you can --

(break in audio)

WARD:-- sort of intellectually directed, that I was more cerebral. I was never antisocial, asocial, in school, but I deliberately didn't do -- I didn't play around a lot. I think I was -- by the time I had gotten to high school, I'd realized that life was pretty serious, and that I had a lot of work to do if I was going to get on in life. And that -- I figured out very early on that school was a time to learn and not to play, and that if I did play, it should be subordinate to learning. And that -- that took place all the way 01:25:00through. When I graduated from high school, my ambition was to be a psychiatrist, and I think that was part of a trend. People tended to confide in me when I was in high school, even older people. In college, the same thing. There was some advice that I was given by teachers in the early years, elementary school, to not gossip, and to not involve myself in other people's lives and other people's -- the things that could be detrimental to your own growth, to stay away from interacting about other people's lives. Especially in small towns, it could be a liability, that everybody knows your business. Stay out of people's business. So I grew up with a very strong animus 01:26:00toward engaging myself in gossip and things like that. We had a reputation for being -- we, as blacks, had a reputation for being envious of blacks who succeeded, so much so that we were often compared to crabs in a barrel, that blacks would pull you -- once they saw you going up, they would try to pull you down. And so the way to avoid that is to stay out of engaging in a lot of -- what are the TV shows, the reality TV type stuff. The less you put that in your life, the better. The less you tried to be like everybody else, it also would be better for you. If you tried to emulate other people, that you'd probably be better off following your own star. The fact that I did not go into 01:27:00civil rights, as most of my -- I was contemporary with Julian Bond, with John Lewis, with Jesse Jackson, with -- in a different time period, but I was with Martin Luther King when he was in Atlanta. I made a strategic decision there. We don't need another Jesse Jackson. I couldn't be another Martin Luther King. Julian Bond was very good. So I took a different path. Ben Brown was very good. Lonnie King was very good. It wasn't that I thought I was better than them, but how many do you need? They were very good, very good people. It was looking at what trends there were, so when I went to Africa in 1962, it completely transformed my direction in life. I went to Kenya.

BAUSKE:Was that in the Peace Corps?

WARD:It was before the Peace Corps. I went on a program called Operation Crossroads Africa. I went into Kenya having met President Kennedy. And President Kennedy came up to me and said -- he saw my name -- "You're going to see Tom Mboya. Tell him we're going to bring another group here." Tom Mboya and Senator Kennedy started something called the Kenya Airlift, and they brought over students to study in American universities. In the first group, my first year in college, 1959, they brought Barack Obama Sr. He went to Hawaii. I did meet Tom Mboya. In fact, his daughter works as a senior person at the Coca-Cola today. Her husband, of Mboya's daughter, is the governor of Nairobi 01:29:00province. I met a lot of significant Kenyans. And when I came back from Crossroads in 1962, I wrote Sargent Shriver a letter, saying that I would like to go back. And he wrote me a letter. It's somewhere in my papers. "We don't have anything in Kenya, but we do in Ethiopia." So I went to the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. That was a huge impact on my life. It was a direction that I think -- it was unfortunate that more African Americans didn't do it, because I think it expanded our horizon of the world, in a way that we are now seeing the impact of the globalization in the world. But I spent two years in Ethiopia, teaching. Then I left Ethiopia, and then I went to UCLA, and I spent two years at UCLA. I was at UCLA when I saw Lew Alcindor play his first 01:30:00basketball game. I think he stayed Lew Alcindor until after he graduated. But I got to know him. I lived next door to Arthur Ashe at UCLA. Arthur Ashe is in this video that I left here. When I was there, I said to Lew -- we used to send basketball teams to Africa. And Lew and -- they had two other guys. UCLA won 10 straight. Ten straight titles. And this was the beginning of that run. He had the other two guys, Mike Warren, who became a TV star, and Lucius Allen, and then Lew Alcindor, who, later, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But I saw them in their first game at UCLA. I came back to UCLA, and I talked to the 01:31:00basketball coach, the world-famous Johnny Wooden. And the athletic director was J. D. Morgan. And I talked with them about letting them go to Africa. And they said no. You know, they might get sick. I was invited back to UCLA in 2011, and this was because they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, and they invited what they considered outstanding UCLA graduates to be on a panel. There's an interview with me on -- put my name and UCLA, and there's a half an hour interview with me on that, the impact of UCLA, and my having come from Griffin, Georgia. There is a discussion that's relevant to this 01:32:00discussion, because I talk about the impact of going from Atlanta, Griffin, to Westwood. That's a very interesting interview. And I've been very much involved in UCLA activities in the years following. I've been very much involved in the Peace Corps. We give a lot of money to the Peace Corps, just because we believe that it's a very important organization. Those are, sort of, the parameters in our life. And I would say the city has a -- has underappreciated 01:33:00the role of people like Jewell in our civil discourse. And Jewell and I have now known each other for 25 years or so. But without the work that she does personally and that she does institutionally, life would be a lot more difficult, and the society would be under even greater strain. She takes a lot of grief. What most people don't know is that she takes a lot of grief from blacks, as well. And it's a, in many ways, a thankless job. But it's one of the remaining jobs that, until our society is more equal, you've got to 01:34:00have somebody who is pressing the point, and you've got to have somebody doing it in a way that carries some force with it. And so I've always respected and admired her, because it's a job that I know from years of living what a thankless task it is.

WALKER-HARPS:We can see that with you now, in your life, and you can't -- you've gone all over the world. You've traveled all over the world, and you held most prominent positions here and abroad, but when you came back to Griffin to spend some time, and you became a judge and whatever, you -- I would think, in my opinion, that you, too, discovered that Griffin was not receptive of 01:35:00you as it ought to have been. Was that your impression?

WARD:I think people underappreciate the impact of white privilege. That's a concept that we're hearing now, and we're hearing it more because of the direction of the country. But I think it is axiomatic, automatic, the hierarchical relationships that have existed, that are difficult -- we still -- let's see. It was 1863 that the Emancipation was proclaimed. 01:36:00And there has, in our region, and not just in our region -- my wife would be the first to point that out, throughout the country -- a resistance to equalizing opportunities. So, yes, in Griffin it is difficult. It's easier for Griffin to accept me, but it is still difficult for the city. I think the city is proud. I'll tell you, speaking about Griffin. When I went to the Peace Corps, you had to have the permission of the Selective Service to leave the country. 01:37:00We had the registration. The Selective Service draft boards had to approve your leaving the country. And when I -- there was a woman in charge of the draft board. It was a long time ago, so I don't know who it was. Nineteen sixty-three, 54 years ago. She was very proud. She was very proud that I was going to join the Peace Corps. And there was a civic Griffin pride that transcended beyond race, that you were doing this. There is a paternalism that people who are not the object of the paternalism don't even know that it's paternalism. 01:38:00So that there's a lot of behavior from something as innocent as, where'd you learn to speak English, that people will ask you. They think it's a very nice and generous thing. And I'm -- Southern -- the part of the South that is Southern in me is that we don't try to insult people, just as a rejoinder. And a lot of that comes from Africa, as well. Africans don't want to insult, and we don't insult, and so we don't try to insult. And if you do insult, it's deliberate, and it's aggressive, and it's intended that way. But by and large, my sense is that there was a place that was -- that you were supposed to stay in, and if you moved outside of that place, then you got into 01:39:00trouble. I don't think -- there is a part of the South that is also out of Africa. People don't believe in being straight and telling the truth. They talk around issues. They talk around issues. They don't say what is really -- they mean. They talk around, and they say -- that is something that is less the case in the East, where I spent 30 years. People will go right straight to the heart of it. And so you don't get deliberate. You don't get deliberate. There is an obfuscation in the communication system in which people don't tell you what they really think, and they are proud of the fact that they didn't tell you what they -- didn't tell you the way it was. And in some ways, the South thinks 01:40:00it's insulting and revolting -- not something you do, when you are directly, quote, honest with somebody about something, so that there is a lot of missed communication in the way in which people communicate, because we don't want to be direct in the way. This goes back to the question about whether or not -- what did blacks tell whites when they were working for them and the civil rights movement was going on? They don't tell you what it is, because it's a threat to their own person that you can do that. So a lot of the things are threats like that, that people just don't want to visit. I think that, by and 01:41:00large, racial communications overall are probably better, but there is still very significant barriers to communications in the South. I think it's less with me. I think that it's less with my wife, for example. I think that there is a role that she can play, that I could play, that's different than we could have played when I was growing up, but the inequality is there. And the glaring disparity in the way in which the justice system treats African 01:42:00Americans and whites is really one of the most difficult remnants. In some days, I wake up, and I think that the justice system was designed as a way to control the behavior of blacks and nothing else. And that the system wasn't meant to apply to whites. And that's a pretty strong statement.

BAUSKE:Especially for a judge.

WARD:Yeah. But as I've seen the assumptions that accompany the 01:43:00system, the assumption -- I was on a jury in New York. And there were a couple of black guys who had been charged with selling drugs. And when the police came, they had -- in New York, there are air spaces and air shafts in buildings, and all around, you can actually look out, and you can see all the way down to the bottom. They were on the ledge on one of those when the police came, but the drugs were inside. They didn't have the drugs with them. So the case is in court, and the jury -- and I'm on the jury. And the jurors said, 01:44:00several of them, that as soon as the defendants walked into the courtroom, they said, as soon as they looked at them, they said they were guilty. And we were talking about this. And they were saying -- they said, he's guilty. I could tell when I looked at him that he was guilty. That attitude that you are automatically guilty if you are -- and unfortunately, what plays into that is the dress that a lot of black kids walk around with now. It almost advertises that, you know, that I am somebody who is an automatic target. But the jury was -- the jury decision was leaning in the direction that this guy looks 01:45:00like he's guilty because of the way he looks. And I can tell the way he looks. And so much of that ingrained attitude in people's minds that this kid is this way because he is dressed that way. And so, having said that, I am aware of people's attitudes, so you will see me dressed like this. And I have dressed like this all of my life. So that my wife says, "You don't have to dress like this." I said, "I know I don't have to dress like this, but if I don't dress like this, there is a perception that you are something else." And so if I can be responsible on something as simple as dress, to change people's attitudes and behavior toward me, that's a compromise that I am prepared to make as 01:46:00I negotiate my way through life.

WALKER-HARPS:It's interesting that you would say that, because that's a message that we're trying to send now in the community. And when Leah, your wife, came and spoke, she alluded to that, to the traditional values and necessity of the role that you play, and how important it is. I intended to send her a note to indicate how I appreciate her reinforcing the kinds of things that we are trying to instill in young people today, that are -- there is a certain way that you need to, or you almost must, carry yourselves in order to be recognized for who you really are.

WARD:Yeah. Well, I began to learn that here in Griffin early. And so 01:47:00my -- even though I would defend the right of any person to wear a dress, or their hair, their clothes, their whatever. This is America, and that's what we stand for. You can do that. But if you are an African American, and you decide that you want to dress in a very expressive way, that's your right, and then society shouldn't penalize you for it, but society does penalize you for that. And you have to be aware that society penalizes you for that. And you will get people such as myself who will defend you in a court of law for your self-expression, but you also have to realize that that behavior carries with it subtle penalties against you. And if that's okay with you, and it 01:48:00doesn't matter, then that's fine. And if you can afford the penalty that you get, then that's fine.

CRUICKSHANK:But you can't say that as a judge in a court of law to a defendant.

WARD:You can't say that any more than I could say to a student in a classroom that you are as good as white kids. That's against the law. You can't say that to a black kid in a white school, in an integrated school, you are as good as a white kid, and you should behave this way as opposed to that way. No. You don't say that, nor should you be making racial characterizations of that kind. But I think that it's important for people to know that there are perceptions that become a part of an operating system of thought where people 01:49:00judge you before they hear you say anything. And if you are already a millionaire, and if you are already a billionaire, it doesn't really matter what people say. But if you are an aspiring person who wants to go somewhere in the business world, there are certain kind of business habits -- and even mimicking the behavior or dress codes of young white professionals may not be the thing that you want to do, because the dress code in businesses is changing significantly, and it's not as formal as it was 20 or 30 years ago, but the standards are not applied equally with respect to behavior. And that's just something --

WALKER-HARPS:That's a fact, yeah.

WARD:-- that you have to recognize as you negotiate your way through 01:50:00life. You have to decide, where is it that I'm going to challenge the system behavior-wise, and what is it worth for me in so challenging the system? This is something that is something that you learn, that we begin to learn, that I learned as I was growing up here in Griffin. Where do I challenge? At what cost do I challenge? What's the reward? What's the penalty? And those are decisions that can often make the difference between success and failure in life. Where do I challenge behavior? It starts in the home. When do I say know to my parents? When do I say -- when do I acquiesce? In the school, when do I 01:51:00challenge the behavior? When do I acquiesce? Where is it appropriate? Those are decisions that occur in almost every aspect of life. In some cases, people get into a fight on the highway, one driver to another driver, and it leads to death. Somebody challenging somebody else's behavior in a car. And that's one of the things that makes for one's growth, in a sense, in society. How does one accommodate? When does one say, I'm sorry? When does one say, excuse me? When is it necessary? Can one defuse by just saying, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that? These are aspects of our civil society that I think are very 01:52:00important for us to gauge as we negotiate through life. And they are things that I've always -- I've always had the advantage of very, very, very wise people, I've thought, advising me, from my earliest years. Because I thought, if I had wanted to, I could have made my birth circumstance my justification for being a drunk on Solomon Street, and saying that it wasn't my fault, it was my dad who didn't stay with my mom, my mom who didn't stay with me. And I could have made up all kinds of reasons why I had failed in life, and I chose not to.

WALKER-HARPS:What do you consider your most valuable -- what would 01:53:00you consider your most important achievement? And I know there may not be just one, and it also may not be just one area.

WARD:I think, as I look back in the totality of my life, I think surviving the first and second grade, and the way in which I survived the first and second grade, was a testament to -- not me, but people who saw in me a worthy investment of their time and counsel. I've been very, very blessed with people who have given me the benefit of their insights on life, and 01:54:00it started here. My most important learning took place here in Griffin. It was expanded by my experiences around the world. Almost 200 trips to Africa alone, for example. But my most important years of learning about life occurred here, and it was with people who were not the richest, not the smartest, but in many cases, the wisest people that I've run into. The greatest satisfactions were the early years here. I was prepared. I never blamed the world for my 01:55:00circumstance, and I've challenged the world and a lot of its suppositions and attitudes. And I think the ability to do that I can see in different people. C. Eric Lincoln, for example, at Clark College.

WALKER-HARPS:Oh, yeah. He was my teacher.

WARD:Was a huge influence --

WALKER-HARPS:He was great.

WARD:-- in my life. He's the one who told me I had to go to Africa. James P. Brawley, who was of huge import. Benjamin Mays, who was not my president, but I looked up to him. These were people -- James H. Robinson, who started Crossroads. Huge, huge influence on my life. Mandela. Martin Luther King. I could see in them examples of conviction that were very, very 01:56:00important. And my wife. Leah has been a very big inspiration. She has been a very courageous woman. We are very different. We come from very, very different social backgrounds. Her dad was a colonel at a time when there were no black colonels. She was born on a military base. But for her to have withstood the slings and arrows of being the first woman in so many different categories, and to have been so successful in doing what she did, and to walk away 01:57:00from it and play a different role, I think, is going to be a very, very important lesson for other women. She is a very courageous woman. And I'm also proud of the way I've helped her as we have spent the last 20-some years together. We met in Griffin, which is also a part of the Griffin legacy.

WALKER-HARPS:At the post office.

WARD:Yeah. (laughs)

BAUSKE:The downtown one or the experiment one?

WARD:No, the -- it's actually the Rotary Club. (laughter) We've gone on. Those -- you've tolerated my musings.

CUNNINGHAM:It's been fascinating.

WALKER-HARPS:I did not know that you could sing. Were you inspired my 01:58:00Mr. Tucker, or you were not in the band with Mr. Tucker?

WARD:I was with Mr. Tucker. That was -- I could have listed Rufus Tucker as one of the inspirations in my life.

BAUSKE:Miss Jewell, has he covered the period you wanted covered?

WALKER-HARPS:Basically. You have -- one of the questions that you might be able to answer me now. You left Griffin, but during that same period of time, we had a few professional persons other than those you've named, like doctors, or -- particularly doctors. I don't know if there were other professional people here in our community other than the teachers and the principals.

WARD:I'm told that Dr. Blanton was actually distantly related to 01:59:00me, and he was my doctor. In fact, he used to want -- when I was born, I didn't have a birth certificate, and he had to certify my birth later on when I needed a birth certificate for getting a passport. Dr. -- what's his name, you mentioned him -- lived out on my street.

WALKER-HARPS:Dr. Atkinson?

WARD:Dr. Atkinson I did know. Dr. Atkinson was a dentist here. He lived on our street further down. He lived on Solomon Street. His wife was a second grade teacher here. Very dignified person. And he died early, as I recall. Now, I left Griffin in 1959. The real civil rights work in Griffin occurred after 02:00:00that. In fact, some years after that, in terms of activity. And Dr. -- Reverend Shropshire was one of the leading figures in that period.

CUNNINGHAM:How do you spell his name?

WARD:S-H-R-O-P-S-H-I-R-E.

CUNNINGHAM:Okay. S-H--?

WARD:R-O-P-S-H-I-R-E. His son James Maynard is still alive. We were classmates at Clark. He was a year behind me, but we went to Clark together. The first black policeman, Marvin, was in my class. B. J. was a year or so ahead of me, B. J. Jackson. B. J. died. B. J. lived on Solomon Street. Marvin lived on Taylor Street, Marvin Barrow. Marvin lived on Taylor Street. And then Reese Colbert. Reese was in my -- and they were the first three black... The interesting thing about the first black policemen in this town, they could not 02:01:00arrest whites, and that was the same in Atlanta.

WALKER-HARPS:Yes, I remember.

WARD:When the first -- the first black policemen in Atlanta could not arrest. And the interesting thing about that, as well, is that a lot of blacks didn't think that they were real police, so they didn't want to arrest them, either. So that was not an easy -- you can't arrest me. You can't arrest me. They wanted only white policemen to arrest me. But that was a difficult -- I'm not sure that I would have taken that job at that time. I think the other people, other than Reverend Shropshire -- Reverend Epps had already left here. 02:02:00Reverend Epps became significant in the north Georgia district of the United Methodist Church. But Raymond was, I'd say, probably the closest thing -- Raymond had a difficult role, because not only was he the first black on the council, he had a mediating role of troubleshooting. And when the Klan came, they came to his shop. When they wanted to take out grievances on blacks, they came to Raymond's place. He didn't have unified black support. But he was, in my judgement, a very sober and solid citizen, and I always had great 02:03:00respect for him, for each of them. And the third brother is still alive. You ought to talk to him. He's a great -- they were -- I always liked them, Raymond and Phillip and Otis. I interviewed both of them in that TV program.

WALKER-HARPS:Yeah, I've spoken to Phillip about coming, but he's not going to do an interview. He's going to leave that to Cheryl. Cheryl is his niece, and she's going to take his place. But Raymond wasn't available. We cannot underplay the role that Raymond played, because he was really prominent during that most turbulent period. And you're right, he was a mediator. He worked with -- what was it -- the human relations, or that biracial group, that was so 02:04:00sobering for the community at that time.

WARD:Raymond was a very, very solid person. He was -- I always thought he had very good judgement. And you could count on him. If he said he was going to do something, he would do it.

WALKER-HARPS:We did not -- and perhaps we won't, now -- but Raymond and those persons who sit in political offices now are all there as a result mainly of a political change that occurred after the NAACP filed a lawsuit that outlawed at-large voting to a single member district. I guess you were gone 02:05:00at that time, too. Yeah. You were gone. But we -- it's one of the areas that we don't want to ever leave out. We want to pass on the significance to our children, because the people who are sitting now in offices, who maintain positions, have no clue as to the shoulders upon which they rest, and the turmoils that came about during that time, just as we don't want to overlook the period of time when we were trying to consolidate the governments, when you worked so hard -- along with me, too, I guess, because I was put out there on a limb, to get the city and county consolidated. And it didn't happen, and has not as of this point happened. It creeps up in conversations once in a while. So I'm sure the issue will come back.

WARD:When I was in college, I majored in psychology and English. And my major professor was Wiley Bolden. Wiley Bolden's father was the leader in breaking down the at-large voting system in Mobile, Alabama, and was a very important person in Alabama politics as a result of that. One of the big issues in the consolidation program here -- effort -- was related to the participation in the governance structure. Griffin has now a majority African American population in the city lines, and substantially less than a majority in the county wide. There were some things that were important in the consideration of the 02:07:00governance structure, and many of them had to do with code issues. For example, out in my property in the county, I could have cows and chickens, and shoot my gun if I wanted to. I remember in 1947 or '48, the city of Griffin passed an ordinance that you couldn't have chickens in the city. We used to have chickens right there on Solomon Street. We used to have pigs here. And they outlawed that, '47 or '48, somewhere around that. So there are certain kinds of lifestyle issues that are more important in the county than they are 02:08:00in the city, and I recognized that, when we were going through this, that they mattered a lot. Who was going to be the police chief, who was going to be the law enforcement chief, was an important issue. And that always is. Who was going to be in charge of the government, the final power position, was important. The county is really too small to have two separate functioning governing units in it. And at some point -- and I don't know if race is the overarching issue. It was an important issue. It was more important, I think, in terms of the representation of African Americans in a consolidated 02:09:00government, and it would have had to be worked out. But eventually -- we have 159 counties. There's too many counties. And we don't need that many counties. What we need to be doing is consolidating some of the counties, not just the internal consolidation, but the consolidation of some of these units. Some of them are very small, throughout the state. But if you deal with politics, once somebody gets in power, you start having to deal with that reality, and so it's very difficult to deal with it. Race is an interesting element in the whole equation. I think that -- my wife, for example, demonstrates that you 02:10:00run statewide. And even though she's a judge, and judges have a sort of built in advantage, an African American woman running statewide in Georgia is still an African American woman running statewide in Georgia. And that she won three or four times statewide is a significant indicator that if you got the right kind of person, with the right kind of appeal across different kinds of sectors -- I think that Georgia is probably moving in a direction. Somebody will get smart enough. Somebody will get smart enough to know how to have appeal, and it's going to take push, and it's going to take appeal. And then, push, and then somebody's going to come (overlapping dialogue).

WALKER-HARPS: Perhaps one day it will. Anyway, we're going to have to stop.

WARD:You guys are going to push, and the all of a sudden, somebody's going to pop up. And they'll take care of...

WALKER-HARPS:Okay. We're going to have to stop. It's the end of the workday for some of us, anyway. Is there any last word that you would like to leave with us before we say our thank-yous?

WARD:No, I thank you, Jewell. It is not a thankless job. I do thank you.

WALKER-HARPS:Well, thank you, and thank you for always being there and having my back, and answering my needs when I have those, that I know that I can call you and you will answer, and that's needed. Last year was a pretty rough year. And I almost called on you two again, but I didn't. But anyway, we 02:12:00got through it, and we're here, and we want to stay thanks to UGA and my partners in crime who are always so willingly to say, yes, we will help, or we will assist, or we will take it over, or whatever needs be. We deeply appreciate you. We're going to look at what you said. It may be that we will ask you to come back, and maybe -- we certainly want to see, do you not want to see some of the documents that we will probably want to scan. But on behalf of myself and the NAACP, we say thank you for taking the time out to come and participate. Are there anything -- are there other things that we need to say?

BAUSKE:Thank you.

CRUICKSHANK:Thank you very much.

CUNNINGHAM:Yeah, very much.

END OF AUDIO FILE