Ira Lee Jones: I was born in East Lake area, Birmingham, what is commonly called 77th Street. That's what everybody referred to it. But originally, it is East Lake. See, I stayed in East Lake until I was 58 years old, off and on until I was 58 years old. Most of the time, I was there, I was going to school and stuff. 

Ira Lee Jones: I went to school in Woodlawn, a school called Patterson School. It's still standing. I don't think it's being used for a school now, but it's still standing, and to a Industrial High School, which is now Parker. 

Paul Ortiz: Now, East Lake, was that an area where people who worked in the steel industry might've lived? 

Ira Lee Jones: There were a few who worked in Sloss's. Not Sloss but one of the furnaces downtown. One or two people worked in that. Most of the people—It is a very small place in the first place. And most of those people that I think worked at Steel Plant on 10th Avenue, and I can't remember the name of it right now. 

Paul Ortiz: I see. 

Ira Lee Jones: Stockham Pipe Shop. That's what it is. 

Paul Ortiz: Oh, okay. And what did your parents do? 

Ira Lee Jones: My mother basically did laundry, brought in laundry for White people. She did that. My daddy worked at a coal distributor company. 

Paul Ortiz: Would your mother go and gather laundry and bring it back to the house? 

Ira Lee Jones: Uh-huh. My mother, my brother and me, all of would go in a different place and pick it up, bring it home. 

Paul Ortiz: So you did that kind of work as a child? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yeah, as a small child, until I finished high school. 

Paul Ortiz: Do you know the name of the company that your father worked for? 

Ira Lee Jones: McKinley Coal Transfer Company. And by the time I was in college, he started working for the Board of Education. He worked at the warehouse for Birmingham Board of Education. 

Paul Ortiz: I see. What were your earliest childhood memories of East Lake? 

Ira Lee Jones: My earliest remembrance? Oh, let's see. I was a tomboy. My earliest remember was climbing trees and my daddy would cut them down as fast as I'd get used to climbing. Well, it was going to school and getting to and from school was not the greatest thing. It was a mile away from our house. And mother didn't want us to walk, so most of the time she'd put a quarter's worth of gas in the car and take us. A quarter's worth of gas at that time was a lot of gas. And she would take us back and forth to school and it was fun to see her learn to drive. 

Ira Lee Jones: And she also bought us a piano. Taking other children back and forth to school, they'd pay a quarter. She would take them and she paid for a piano like that so we could take music lessons. 

Paul Ortiz: And you said that your mom was really learning how to drive? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yeah, she learned how to drive during the time we were 'bout fourth or fifth grade. 

Paul Ortiz: Do you remember the kind of car? 

Ira Lee Jones: We had a Whippet. 

Paul Ortiz: A Whippet? Now I haven't heard of it. 

Ira Lee Jones: I bet. I don't think they made, but a few of them. We had what we would call a Whippet because every time it'd get cold you'd have to push it, because it was not the very best car in the world. But it would run fine after it'd get warmed up. But you'd have a hard time warming it up. But I don't think they made but one year. We had it was brown Whippet. 

Paul Ortiz: And you had sisters and brothers? 

Ira Lee Jones: I had one brother. 

Paul Ortiz: What was the neighborhood like at East Lake? 

Ira Lee Jones: The neighborhood, the street that we lived on was dead end street, and it was very quiet. About two blocks over was what they called Brown Springs. It was a spring with a brown clothing around it. And people would come from everywhere in Birmingham and have a picnic out there, especially on Saturdays. And they would be very noisy and squabbling and what have you. But otherwise East Lake was very quiet, small entity in Birmingham. 

Paul Ortiz: Would those be church organized picnics? 

Ira Lee Jones: They were supposed to be, but they weren't organized in East Lake. They would be coming from other parts of town. 

Paul Ortiz: So they would just be big gatherings of people? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yes, big gatherings of people. 

Paul Ortiz: Did you have fun at those? 

Ira Lee Jones: Sometimes, yeah. Being a tomboy, one of the things I did enjoy doing was going up on the mountain. About a mile from our house was a mountain. It wasn't very high, but they had the light up there to guide the airplanes in. Because I remember when they built the airport in Birmingham. I was a little girl. I remember that. And I would like to go up there and climb up in the light and you could hear my mama calling me all the way. She'd get down there, and we'd come down the hill and everybody be saying, "Your mama call you, your mom call you." But it was a lot of fun to just go up there and see how fast we could climb up those rungs and they'd be about that far apart. It was a lot of fun. 

Ira Lee Jones: We played softball a lot. That I didn't like. I was the child who stayed in the house most of the time. And to keep from doing a lot of work, I'd play on the piano. Get me a church book and sit down and play all the songs in church book. As long as I played the piano, nobody didn't bother me 'bout doing no work. So that was great for me. And that was also a way for me to make little money. By the time I was in high school, I would play for Sunday schools, churches and get paid for it. So I had my own little change. 

Paul Ortiz: And did your parents approve of the fact that you were a tomboy? 

Ira Lee Jones: No, they didn't. That's why the trees get cut down so fast. But I just like to climb the trees, and I'd climb. They'd holler, "You got to get out of here and go somewhere." They look around, I'd be up in a tree. So it was better for me to stay in the house than to go out there and climb the trees. We had a pecan tree. I'd go out and shake the pecan area because my brother wasn't going up the tree. But I would. 

Ira Lee Jones: I am trying to think of something that happened in the segregation area. East Lake wasn't so bad about being segregated. I guess we kind of knew where our boundaries were and we stayed there. My grandfather was one of the earliest settlers in that area and everybody knew him and just we had no problems with segregation. 

Ira Lee Jones: The only real segregation that I can recount of my early years was going to school because we had to pass the White high school to get to the Black, where the Negroes went to school. And from where I lived to where the school was was nine miles. And we had to ride the bus, not a school bus, but the city-owned bus. And if it was snowing or rain or whatever, we had problems getting to and from the bus. And the White kids didn't seem to have that problem. They were at school while we were trying to sludge through the snow to get there to our school. 

Ira Lee Jones: And we used the books, but they were always what we call the hand-me-downs. They were raggedy books. They would put another back on the books, but they never replaced the pages that the White kids had torn out. So our teachers always had problems filling in the parts of the lesson that was missing from the book. And had we not had good teachers, I don't think we would've made it at all. But they were all kind, thorough, and ready to do a good job. 

Ira Lee Jones: I don't think any of my classmates had any problems getting into college. And most of us did go to college. Some went to Alabama State, some went to Fisk, some went to college in Talledega. I went to A&M in Huntsville. Quite a few of us went to A&M in Huntsville. That's a state school. And most of us came out and went into the classroom. That was not my biggest aim in life was to go teach, but that's what I did. Because I wanted to be a seamstress. I could sew, but I didn't try to make a living doing it. I just went into teaching. 

Paul Ortiz: And was that a decision you made because of— 

Ira Lee Jones: Well, there wasn't too many opportunities for Blacks to go into business at that time. I thought my mother had worked enough and I had an opportunity to be offered a teaching position in the county, in St. Clair County. So I took it, and from that I finally did get a decent job in Birmingham. 

Paul Ortiz: Now when you and other students were going the nine miles to school and riding the, now was this a bus you were riding or was it a streetcar? 

Ira Lee Jones: It was a bus. It was what was known as a streetcar, but it was really a bus. 

Paul Ortiz: Oh. 

Ira Lee Jones: Uh-huh. They had buses. But it was a city bus and we had to pay carfare. That was pretty tough on most of us. Most of our parents, they have to pay carfare. We could buy a book of tickets. The tickets would last a month, but they were also pretty expensive for what our parents made. 

Paul Ortiz: And these were segregated buses? 

Ira Lee Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah. They were segregated buses. We had to stay in the back of the bus. And most of the time after we passed 68th Street, it was always crowded. But the White part would not be crowded, but we couldn't sit up there. 

Paul Ortiz: Would you or anybody else complain about that when you [indistinct 00:14:35]? 

Ira Lee Jones: There were no complaints. I guess we hadn't really thought of it at that time about complaining. This was in the late thirties or early forties. We used to laugh about the fact that there were people that we knew as Black, people who lived with the Black people, who maybe had a Black husband or they were really Black themselves. But they looked White and they would get on the bus in the front and it would be funny to us because the bus driver wouldn't know that they were not really White. And that was a lot of fun. We just laughed about it. Being young, it didn't bother us to stand up. The only thing that we didn't like was being all crowded up together. But we made it. 

Paul Ortiz: Was there in Birmingham during those years, and I guess you would only see this as you matured, would you say that there was a difference between, say, East Lake and other predominantly Black neighborhoods such as Ensley? 

Ira Lee Jones: Oh, yes. Ensley was more densely populated and it was a rowdy little place. They always had something going in Ensley. It wasn't so much a race business going on, but the Negroes didn't get along with each other. East Lake was a different kind of place because most of those people were either homeowners who had lived there for years or they were relatives or very good friends who had moved into almost side by side. You had very few people arguing with each other, and no community fights. Ensley was not like that. 

Paul Ortiz: Oh really? 

Ira Lee Jones: No. You had people who were working in the mines near Ensley and in Ensley. And they would come in on weekends and it would always be some problem, that something had happened, somebody had gotten cut or killed or shot, or had a big fight, or something like that had happened in Ensley, in North Birmingham. North Birmingham where the railroads, most the fellows worked on the railroad, and they were tough. But East Lake was not that. But we came in contact with all these kids though when we got to high school. 

Paul Ortiz: Oh, okay. 

Ira Lee Jones: They came from all over Birmingham to go to that one Black high school. 

Paul Ortiz: What were the kids like from, say, North Birmingham? 

Ira Lee Jones: They were tough, but they were not nearly as tough as those from Ensley. Now Birmingham was a rowdy little place. That was the railroad area. Yeah, they had an elementary school over there. Lewis School was over there. It's still there. But they did not have a high school at that time. They do now, but they didn't then. 

Paul Ortiz: Now you said that one of the things that made East Lake different than Ensley or North Birmingham was that there was more of a sense that there's a community. 

Ira Lee Jones: It was more community, yeah. We had two churches, the Methodist Church and the Baptist church. And either you went to the Methodist church or you went to the Baptist church. Very few people did not go to church at least once a month. Most of them went most of the time. And they were neighbors. You could go to anybody's house. If you needed help, they would have to help you. Say your car wouldn't start, somebody'd come along and help you push it off and this kind of thing. You didn't get that everywhere because so many people didn't know each other. But in East Lake they did. 

Paul Ortiz: The Methodist church, was that a United Methodist church? 

Ira Lee Jones: No, it wasn't. It was an A M E. That was not a United Methodist church out there. 

Paul Ortiz: And which church did your family go to? 

Ira Lee Jones: We went to the Baptist Church. 

Paul Ortiz: The Baptist. One second. Oh, I know. Now, were your parents born in Birmingham or had they? 

Ira Lee Jones: My mother was born in St. Clair County, that's the next county from Jefferson County going toward Gadsden. And my daddy was born Birmingham. Really he was born in what they call Pleasant Hill. It's really out in the country from Roebuck. 

Paul Ortiz: I see. So they were [indistinct 00:20:38] really. 

Ira Lee Jones: Mm-hmm. 

Paul Ortiz: And did they own your house? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yes. 

Paul Ortiz: Did you know or do you have a remembrance of your grandparents? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yes, I do. I remember I lived with my grandmother and grandfather for about four, maybe five years. When my grandmother died, my grandfather moved back with my mother. I said back because I wasn't going until he did. So we both moved back in the house with my mother. So I knew them real well. My grandfather was not a church-goer for a long time. But my grandmother was sure that the doors couldn't open until she got there. 

Paul Ortiz: So it sounds like your grandparents that they had quite an influence on you? 

Ira Lee Jones: Well, they did. They did. I was my granddaddy's biggest baby, because I was his only granddaughter. He had one grandson and one granddaughter, and he was a spoiler. If he thought we needed it or wanted it, he would see to it that we got it. So that made it easier on my mother. Sometimes it made it difficult on my grandma because she didn't want him to do quite all the stuff he would do. But it was fun. I enjoyed it. I loved him for it. He was quite a grandfather. 

Paul Ortiz: What kind of activities would he or things? 

Ira Lee Jones: He liked to whistle. You could hear him two blocks away whistling, and he gambled, he'd shoot dice. And when I was a tiny child, I'd follow him, sit on his shoulder while he'd shoot dice. He was lucky, so he would always win. And then he would stick his money everywhere—In his shoes, in the leg of his pants, down his bosom, anywhere he could find to stick it—so people wouldn't know how much he had won. And when he'd get home, we'd have a good time unloading his money. But he was a kind man and he didn't have a bad temper or anything. But he just liked to shoot dice, and that's all he would do. He didn't play cards anything, just go wherever they were going to shoot dice, and shoot. And then he'd come home. And he worked in the same job that my daddy worked in. 

Paul Ortiz: At that McKinley plant? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yeah, and at the Department of Education warehouse. 

Paul Ortiz: What kind of a person was your grandmother? 

Ira Lee Jones: My grandmother was kind, beautiful Black woman, really Black. I think, Blacker than me sometimes. That liked to dress. She sewed really well, and she made all her clothes. Mine too. And she would always be dressed down. She'd dress in her satins and all this kind of thing because Black people would put on stuff like that. She would be pretty, a lovely lady. Wasn't loud. I don't know of any vices that she ever participated in. She didn't drink, smoke, anything like that. She was just church-going. She'd go to Bible classes. She loved the circus. 

Paul Ortiz: Circles? 

Ira Lee Jones: Circus. When the animals and stuff come to town. She loved that. I don't ever remember her going to a movie, but she'd go to the circus. 

Paul Ortiz: And now where had your grandparents came from? Were they also from—? 

Ira Lee Jones: My grandmother was from St. Clair County and I really don't know where my grandfather came from. But they met in Birmingham, so I don't know where he came from. 

Paul Ortiz: Would they ever tell stories about their upbringing or their younger days or? 

Ira Lee Jones: My grandmother came from a farm. They farmed in St. Clair County. And her first husband was part Indian. Excuse me. 

Paul Ortiz: And your grandmother was, you were saying that she grew up farming? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yeah, she grew up in a farming community in St. Clair County. And her first husband was part Indian. That was my mother's father. I don't know too much about my grandfather. I don't know where he came from. I know he had sisters and brothers and his mother, I remember his mother and sisters and brothers lived in Birmingham when I was small. I remember each of them. I don't remember when his mother died, but I can remember several of his sisters and brothers when they died. And they were all living in this same area, in the East Lake area. 

Paul Ortiz: Was it common in East Lake when you were growing up there for families or for kinfolk to live in the same area? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yes, most of them did. 

Paul Ortiz: Oh really? 

Ira Lee Jones: I think maybe that helped the East Lake community stay as calm as it did because it was always somebody nearby that was related. Or they had been there for so long, you were still calling them Aunt So-and-So, Uncle So-and-So. They just felt close. So the children were told to do what Ms. So-and-So said do, because they were Ms. So-and-So's old lady. Now she don't want to have all that stuff out of y'all. And we would do what they said. They say, "Go home," and we go home. They'd tell us too, "Y'all been out there with that screaming long enough now. I'm tired of it. Go home." We'd go home. 

Ira Lee Jones: But most of them was related. Most of my daddy's folk were in Zion City. That's north of East Lake, across the First Avenue. If somebody told you, "This is First Avenue," you take that street and go all the way downtown. Well, north of that it was called Zion City back up on the hill. Most of my daddy's folk were there, and from there. My mother's people, she didn't have too many relatives because she was the only child. She had two uncles and they didn't live in that area, in the downtown area about 18th Street and 10th Avenue in that area of Birmingham. 

Paul Ortiz: How old were you when you began attending school? 

Ira Lee Jones: I was six. 

Paul Ortiz: Six. 

Ira Lee Jones: Mm-hmm. 

Paul Ortiz: And was that a grammar school that was in East Lake? 

Ira Lee Jones: No, it was in the basement of a church. And I went to grammar school, went to Patterson, at eight, when I was eight. 

Paul Ortiz: Oh, Patterson Elementary. 

Ira Lee Jones: Mm-hmm. 

Paul Ortiz: And this would've been in the early thirties? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yes. 

Paul Ortiz: And was Patterson a county school? 

Ira Lee Jones: No. A city school. 

Paul Ortiz: A city school. 

Ira Lee Jones: Mm-hmm. 

Paul Ortiz: What were your favorite subjects? 

Ira Lee Jones: I think my favorite subject was English, until I got to the fifth grade and then it changed to home economics. Anything that had to do with the home economics class was just what I was looking for. 

Paul Ortiz: Was that in terms of, was that sewing? 

Ira Lee Jones: Sewing, cooking, setting up housekeeping. Anything but cleaning it. And I didn't want to clean it. But to pretend I'm setting up this room for a party or whatever. Whatever they were going to do in the home ec class was fine with me. And the discussions. 

Paul Ortiz: And then from Patterson? 

Ira Lee Jones: To, at that time it was Industrial High School and now it is Parker. 

Paul Ortiz: So you finished out the eighth grade in Patterson? 

Ira Lee Jones: In Patterson, yes. 

Paul Ortiz: What was family life like during this time? 

Ira Lee Jones: It was the same. It hadn't changed any. It was just a little more activity because we had to go to school more for activities. I sang in the choir, and my brother played football, and we had activities at school. It was always somewhere to go and something to do on that basis. But just family life in itself, it had not changed. 

Paul Ortiz: Did things begin to change a bit later, when the Depression hit the air? 

Ira Lee Jones: During the Depression—I told you I had two uncles. They lived on 10th Avenue about 18th Street. One worked for Hormel Packing. And, see, if they had the meat and it didn't sell that day they couldn't sell it as fresh meat the next day. So they would give it to the men who worked there. And he always bring us a supply of meat. And my grandmother and my mother had gardens. 

Ira Lee Jones: And I guess it did change a bit because they lived next door to each other by this time. We had food and my mother still was taking in those washing and ironing, so we'd have a little money. And I can remember several times I've gone to the grocery store and had a list and I knew exactly how much everything was going to cost. You had to worry about that, what it's going to cost. And when I'd get back home and sit down and look at it, I'd have too much money. And I often think now that they did that on purpose, the men who worked in the store just know we didn't have no money at start with, so they just didn't charge us full price for everything. Because it happened too many times. I know they could count. And I said, "Well, maybe that was one of our blessings." 

Paul Ortiz: Where would you go shopping at? 

Ira Lee Jones: On First Avenue and 77th street, there was a grocery store, drug store, shoe shop. Just everything that you would need in any small town. That was six blocks from our house. 

Paul Ortiz: Six blocks? 

Ira Lee Jones: Mm-hmm. 

Paul Ortiz: Were there Black businesses or were these Black-owned? 

Ira Lee Jones: White. 

Paul Ortiz: White-owned. 

Ira Lee Jones: No Black-owned businesses but beauty parlors and there were none down there. 

Paul Ortiz: Now, when you would go with your mother to collect laundry, what neighborhoods would you go to? 

Ira Lee Jones: We would still be in East Lake area, but see where we lived, we lived from Fourth Avenue back to the mountains on the south side. And that was where the Black people lived. From 73rd Street, down that way, that's where the White people lived, all around that. We lived up here. 

Ira Lee Jones: So we would go all around, from 80th Street all the way back. I don't think we went to 68th Street. The Ku Klux Klan and all those folks lived in that area. And maybe in some of your research you heard of the place called, what's that place named where they had all those segregation meetings, where they had the White Citizens Council and all that was 68th Street and Second Avenue South. 

Paul Ortiz: Oh really? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yeah. So we didn't bother with those dynamics, those people. 

Paul Ortiz: That was on 68th Street? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yeah, 68th Street and Second Avenue South. 

Paul Ortiz: How would you find out that that was an area that was unsafe for Black people? 

Ira Lee Jones: Well, the first time I remember my mother told me a lady that she had been washing for told her that a lady in that area needed somebody to sit with her father while she went to work. But she only was going to be gone for three hours a day. So my mama said she could do that. So she went in to stay with this gentleman and he wanted her to move his dresser drawers because he had a belt back there that he wanted to get. And she said she thought he needed the belt to put his pants on. So she moved the dresser and got the belt. And it was this wide belt and very thick. And she wondered how was he going to wear it? Said, but he didn't want to wear it. He just sat up there in the chair doing this with the belt, saying, "This is the way I used to whoop niggers." 

Ira Lee Jones: And my mother said she had to stay there with him till his daughter got home. But she left then and she told her, "No, I won't be back." And then we started to be suspicious that things weren't quite right in that area. And then by the time Martin Luther King started the movement, then we would see more and more cars there when we'd come from school or going to school. And it was supposed to be a like a resort, swimming pool. What was that name of that piece? I can't think of it to save my neck. It'll come to me maybe. 

Paul Ortiz: Was it a hotel or? 

Ira Lee Jones: No, it was like a nightclub or something. But they had a swimming pool and served food and a whole lot of stuff. And all the time that Martin Luther King was marching, there would be more and more people there and with tags from all over Alabama. And it just got so it would just be crowded with people. And we would hear policemen. They didn't try to hide it either. You would go to the grocery store and they would be in the store talking to the White men, asking them to come to the meeting and asking if they wanted to be auxiliary police to ride around at night and see that the niggers don't get into nothing. Now that was the conversation. 

Ira Lee Jones: So we just stayed out of the area because we knew it was dangerous for us to be there. And finally they broke themselves up. See, they was making money. They paid dues and stuff. They had a lot of money. And they had little groups. This was the executive group, and this was the executive executive group. And they got squabbling over who was going to handle the money. And they were in a movie house downtown in Second Avenue and 19th Street having one of those meetings. But they had the lights out because they did not want each other to know who they were. It was the most secret thing. Nobody wanted to be known as a Ku Klux Klanner. 

Ira Lee Jones: And they got to arguing about the money and they got to shooting at each other. Several of them got killed and most of the ones got killed was the ones who lived in that 68th Street area. And then after that, those that didn't get killed, all of them moved out. Moved out and left town. And that's what broke the Ku Klux Klan up so bad because it was hundreds of them. And they'd parade and they had their conversations on the radio. Television wasn't that prevalent at that time. And they couldn't get the WBRC too well, so they could talk on the radio. They'd talk on the radio. Nobody know who it was until they started killing each other. Then everybody knew who they were. It wasn't funny. 

Paul Ortiz: And now this activity, when they were killing each other, that was during the sixties? 

Ira Lee Jones: Yeah, that was during the sixties. 

Paul Ortiz: But you remember when they were? 

Ira Lee Jones: When they were organizing, it was during the forties when they had started having their meeting down there. Gosh, I can't think of the name of that place. That's crazy. That's one of those blocks you pull from the heart attacks. You know you pull blocks. You see, when you have a heart attack, you don't get all your air to your brain and that part just deteriorates. And sometimes your mind don't click right there. And sometimes it come back to you and sometimes it doesn't. So that's one of those things that haven't come back yet. It maybe will. 

Paul Ortiz: That already happens to me. 

Ira Lee Jones: It is not funny either, because sometimes it just frustrates you. You know what you're talking about and can't say word. It just kind of gets you. 

Paul Ortiz: But you remember even as a young girl that there was Klan activity? 

Ira Lee Jones: Oh yeah, there was Klan activity in that area. Not in this area up here where we lived, but in the other area near that 68th Street area back in there. On Second Avenue, Third Avenue North, it was Ku Klux Klan lived down there. But you couldn't say that these are Ku Klux Klan because you couldn't put your hand on them. And you know the police was recruiting them. The police recruited them and they did not hide that fact. They'd just come right out and ask them in the stores and on the street, or whatever. 

Paul Ortiz: I mean, would they do that even when they knew that Black people were there? 

Ira Lee Jones: Sure. That's why they did it. I have heard any number of them ask. That's why I know the police recruited them because I heard it with my ears. I saw it with my eyes. 

Paul Ortiz: Uh-huh. And was this during the forties? 

Ira Lee Jones: During the forties and the early fifties, they were recruiting. 

Paul Ortiz: Did it seem like it might've been—Well it sounds like even during that recruiting it was kind of they were trying to intimidate. 

Ira Lee Jones: They did. They were trying, yeah. They always tried to intimidate you. Now I've been down in the main part of town. You wouldn't know it was activity down there like it was in the forties and fifties and early sixties if you go down there now, because it's all dead. All the stores have moved out and everything. But it was the most active place. And if I went into a furniture store— 

Paul Ortiz: Okay.