Georgia Ryder interview recording, 1995 July 21
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| Mary Hebert | Now we're recording, you can say your name and tell me when and where you were born. | 0:00 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yes. My maiden name was Georgia Atkins, A-T-K-I-N-S, which leads to my present full name is Georgia Atkins, Ryder and living in Norfolk now since 1948. But having grown up, having been born in Newport News, Virginia and went through public schools in that city. | 0:07 |
| Mary Hebert | What were your parents' names? | 0:37 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | My father's name is easy to remember. It was Benjamin Franklin Atkins. And my mother's maiden name was Mary Lou Carter. And they are Virginians. | 0:38 |
| Mary Hebert | Were they— | 0:58 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No, coming from the James City, Charles City area up there. The family scattered primarily up in the area between Williamsburg and [indistinct 00:01:14]. Various arms of the families lived there. | 1:00 |
| Mary Hebert | What did they do for a living? | 1:18 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | My mother as in most cases in those days, was a homemaker, although that's a latter day term for what was then called housewife. My father was not a skilled worker, but he worked in the shipyard there in Newport News throughout his entire work life. He came to Newport News as a very young man and he got a job there and he worked there until he retired from there. So whenever someone says, what did your parents do? And I know with my having been seven of seven siblings, I know what my mother did. She did a lot. She worked very hard. | 1:21 |
| Mary Hebert | What was a typical day for her? | 2:18 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | First of all, my father had to report to work very early. I don't know now whether it was by 7:00 AM or even earlier, and I never knew exactly what time my mother got up because no matter what time I got up, she was already up. But I would suggest she must have got up about 5:30 AM every morning because she prepared a hot breakfast for my father before including baking the bread and the whole nine yards, full scale Southern breakfast. I guess it was more like British breakfast. And then for those who were school bound, who came down after my father had already left the house, there was a sit down breakfast. Nobody left the home without having breakfast. And my case, it was kind of a scramble because now that I've had a lot of years to realize that I never was a morning person, it was evident at that time that I wasn't a morning person. | 2:21 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | That did not sit well with my parents, who came out of an agrarian society, of which I considered myself not a part, and did not really enjoy getting up early in the morning. So my mother had to scramble with me every day. And so preschool hours were pretty consistent with my mother cajoling me or nagging me or scolding me or threatening me, whatever was most appropriate to hurry up and get done and get school on time. Elementary school was an easy walking distance of where I lived. It was just a few blocks. Booker T. Washington Elementary School was still stands and that's in Newport News. In Newport News still stands on Chestnut Avenue and so close in fact that we had not just lunch, but we had a lunch recess. It was so close that those of us who live that near could walk home and have lunch at home and get back to school. | 3:34 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | So during the lunch hour, my mother didn't have that much of a job on her hand because we were terrified to get back late because our teachers would not stand for it. But the older ones were in high school or beyond when I was in elementary school. And often during the summers they had various kinds of employment, but they might have been at home. My oldest sister, who still lives just— Her 90th birthday on Monday, was in college when I was born. And in the summertime she would look for summer jobs, wherever available. She was not necessarily there. My brothers were encouraged to try to get summer jobs near home because my father and an uncle who lived with us, my mother's brother raised a huge garden. So they needed all the hands that they could get to help with that since both uncle and father were full-time employed. So in late in the evenings, they had other hands on to take care. | 4:44 |
| Mary Hebert | Did your uncle work for the shipyard also? | 6:00 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yes, he did. | 6:03 |
| Mary Hebert | What was school like? What was your school? | 6:09 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Elementary school? It was school where the primary level— Well, entering that school as I recall, enrollment couldn't have been that large. One inevitably went into the classroom of a teacher whose name was legend. She was a tyrant. And this is not to malign her. She was a disciplinarian without parallel. I have to say that. She made us learn even if we didn't learn for the right reasons, most of the time we learned out of fear because we did not want to incite her wrath. But it was vivid. I have vivid recollections of my first grade. | 6:11 |
| Mary Hebert | She was the first grade teacher. | 7:19 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | She was the first grade teacher, and she didn't tolerate any foolishness at all. I mean, the fact that six year old children behaved like six year old children, notwithstanding, she just didn't have it. It was not allowed. | 7:21 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And of course, in those days, teachers had total support of parents. So one did not misbehave because if you did, you got punished in school. And when you went home, you delivered a note saying that you'd misbehaved in school and you got punished again. So it was that kind of an atmosphere. But I found that I was really beginning to read without a lot of help. I had started learning to read by being around all these sisters and brothers who were in school and because they shared the things with me. And I guess along the way they had taught me the elements, the basics of reading. And my mother had kept some of her school books. | 7:35 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And from back in the 19th century, my mother was born in 1881, which were just charming books. And she would— Mainly ESOP's fables. She would read, she would've read those. She was able to go to school through elementary school, my father wasn't, but was, and I found that I could make my way through some of the fables without her having to help me every step the way. And so that was the great part about being in the first grade, being in school now and come home and bore my siblings to death with all this knowledge that I had. But I remember that quite vividly. The second grade I remember because we had a second grade teacher who was also quite stern, but very, very strong in music. | 8:26 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And it was a certainty that we would have some nice experiences singing songs every day. Some of it was follow up on the assemblies that the principal had, assemblies that even he would conduct the singing in and so forth. So this was good because there was a lot of music made in my home. My brothers were playing in the high school band and my sisters played piano and my father had a parlor organ and all of this, so that was good. Third grade was when I had a teacher who taught us how to read music. So those three years kind of eclipsed the remaining. | 9:23 |
| Mary Hebert | Is that why you're interested in music was really sparked in those first three years? | 10:15 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I think it may have been intensified. I think it was sparked at home because there was music going on at the home all the time. As I mentioned, my siblings all but one, there were seven of us. All, but one of us played one or more instruments or were in some singing organization. My uncle that I mentioned was a very fine [indistinct 00:10:40] and had played in I think military band. And so that was a part of daily life. It was just that learning how to read it made me feel like I was going to get on a par with my sisters and brothers who would put the paper up, put those black dots on, and they would tell them what to do. And I couldn't understand that till I had Ms. Rose who taught us what that meant. She was petite, very charming, very sweet young lady who had complete control of her classroom without any of those terrifying tactics that we had been exposed to. | 10:18 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | So she was the darling of everybody in her classroom. But that was what— And to the extent that one of my classroom friends who lived a block over from it, and we were walk home from school, either she couldn't come and visit me after school. She wasn't allowed to. But since I came past her house on, I could stop at her house for a while. We would practice singing [indistinct 00:11:49] because we knew we were going to do it tomorrow. Excitement, and then the remainder of the period, especially when we were no longer taught everything by the same teacher, but started having the various teachers in various areas was very interesting. But it isn't as vivid in my memory that I skipped a grade, but what's left is not as vivid as those first three years in terms of daily experiences. And I remember who my teachers were and I remember some of the things. I particularly remember the writing teacher. | 11:23 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And I also remember that since my older sister was a teacher in that school, that all my teachers were her colleagues, which put another level of surveillance on. If I did something wrong, I'd get the class. The teacher in the class, I didn't do— I learned not to do anything wrong because if I did, the teacher in the class would get me first. Then she would report it to my sister who would lecture me, who would go home and report it to my mother and father, who would— So it wasn't worth it. But at any rate, it was the childhood friends that I for with whom I had a closest socio— Naturally at that age were those who lived in the neighborhood and they were very close. And we spent a lot of time together, not so much after school, but summers and went to high school at the same time. | 12:38 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | We lived in an area of Newport News, which is now described as the high crime area of the entire city. It is a section that has the highest crime rate in terms of drug related crimes of any area. And this is really hard for me to digest, although I know it's true. No, in that time, the East end was occupied primarily by families that were, I should say, moderate to low skilled workers. The professional people, the lawyers and the doctors and all of those tended to live further what we call uptown. I don't know why that is since. It was south of where we lived. | 13:42 |
| Mary Hebert | So you lived in the East End section? | 14:43 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I lived in the heart of the East End section and on 34th Street between Roanoke and Chestnut Avenues. | 14:47 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And the community was filled with, as I said, people that had just described nearly all of whom are homeowners. So there was a lot of stability in the neighborhood. The children grew up there and graduated high school, went off to college. And unlike college graduates and the president, they didn't have to come back home to live at mom and dad because they were able to find jobs. It has now become just unbelievable. So it was a close knit neighborhood, a stable neighborhood, rarely fences seen. Recently, everyone has taken to quoting the African proverb about it takes a village to raise a child. That was very much in practice, that was very much what happened. | 14:58 |
| Mary Hebert | So it was like community child. | 16:06 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | If you were a child, you belong to every parent in the neighborhood. | 16:09 |
| Mary Hebert | And if you misbehaved any parent, every— | 16:12 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Any parent knew that if someone at a block up the street saw me doing something that they thought was dangerous or that I just shouldn't be doing, felt perfectly free to come out of the house, grab me by the wrist and scold me and say, you stop doing that. You have to do that in the morning and tell your mother. That happened all the time. The mystery, and to this day, it's a mystery to me. Long before there was a telephone in my home, I never, never to this day knew how if any of us had been approached by any other parent about whatever. I guess my brothers more than I, they were allowed out more than I. How my mother knew it by the time we got home? | 16:14 |
| Mary Hebert | But she knew it by the time you got home. | 17:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | She knew it by the time we got home, no phone. I don't know what it was. They didn't have telepathy. They had a lot of other things. They didn't have that. But at any rate, it was that kind of a neighborhood where people, where it was a village raising its children and people— Most of the houses, they had front porches and backyards. | 17:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Also, that section of Newport News, and I don't know whether this was common throughout the city, there are alleys. | 17:29 |
| Mary Hebert | Alley City. | 17:35 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. Say if I lived on this street and you lived on this street, then our backyards didn't adjoin. There was between the property and my property an alley, which was city property. And you put your trash out there and the trash collectors came down the alley and that kind of thing. So running around for kids was a lot of fun. The people had fruit trees and grape arbors and all that kind of things. And so the pear trees, apple trees, cherry trees, grapes, you name it. The summertime was a delight. We just had fruit salad every day. Yeah. | 17:36 |
| Mary Hebert | Where was your father's garden located? | 18:16 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Well, she was closer to the elementary school than it was to home. I would say four or more blocks from home. And it used a great deal of space. He would've been able to say the acreage. I had no idea. But it was a huge garden not fenced in right on an intersection. And they were growing things in like corn and melons and whatever and whatever. And it never crossed their mind that it would be stupid to be growing all this fruit at the intersection of these two streets. And it's not even fenced in, nobody posited. They would go out there in the evenings, come home from their day jobs, go out there, come back home with sacks full of fresh corn or big green— No, green beans were my mother's favorite. She had her own kitchen garden. So next, right there to the house, right behind the flower garden, she had her kitchen garden, her herbs and her vegetables that she used frequently and all of that right there. | 18:18 |
| Mary Hebert | Did he own the land the garden was on, or was— | 19:32 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I really don't know. I can't tell you that for sure. He must have. This went on for years. And I know that he had an enough orange to rent rentals, but it may have belonged to my uncle. See that, I don't know. But I'm very certain it wasn't rented. I just can't say whether he owned it or not. And even when he died, I really don't know. He had apportioned his properties among his children. My brothers inherited certain properties. My sisters and I inherited certain properties. That was not included in what we inherited because he believed in only real estate. | 19:37 |
| Mary Hebert | Did he own a lot of real estate? | 20:22 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Not a lot in today's standards, but I think for someone who was a day laborer and a sole supporter of a family, including a wife and seven children to have built and paid for for his own residential lot and built a house on it. I mean, literally, I'm told that that size of the house represented his, having expanded it twice its original size because he was a pretty good carpenter. And then he bought property next door because he had a sister who lived in Newport News and she lived there. It was a duplex, and he let someone else rent out the other apartment. That was my aunt, my favorite aunt, because she always had bananas and cookies when I went over. | 20:25 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And so it's possible. I will say that it was in the family. I can't be more precise than that. And I wouldn't want to tell you something that sounds precise because when you are writing, when you're researching, inaccuracies are very troublesome and they come back to haunt you. Somebody starts looking at legal documentation and can't find it. So that was a very important element in our life because it provided us with so much food that— | 21:22 |
| Mary Hebert | Did they sell some of the food? | 21:58 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No. At one time, my mother's mother had moved in with our family before I was born, year before, two years before I was born. I was born in 1924. Her husband had died in 1922. And my mother shortly after that, I think, brought her down within a year or so from the country as we call it, because they didn't think she could take care of the house living way out and without transportation. And they needed horses or something. And so she was already a part of the household when I was born, and she lived until I was 12. Then my parents, my siblings, until they started peeling off the go away school and my uncle. So at one time there were probably 11 of us living in that home. So if you're feeding 11 people dinner every day, you don't need to sell any produce you have, especially when most of them are males. | 22:00 |
| Mary Hebert | So y'all used everything they produced? | 23:04 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah, it was all my mother canned it. She canned a lot of stuff so that all during the winter we would have homegrown produce. She had a pantry full of canned goods. I can still see the shelves, floor ceiling with all kinds of fruit and vegetables that she canned. | 23:06 |
| Mary Hebert | Did she teach you how to do those things when you were growing up? | 23:24 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I think she tried once or twice. It failed due to my total lack of interest, which I guess led to a certain ineptitude. She didn't have much patience with that. So her attitude was, if I know how to do it, why don't know how to do it? And she wasn't going to spend a lot of time showing you how to do it. You better catch on right away because she was a busy lady. But at any rate, it was a busy household. The activities in the household were almost standard practice, right throughout the neighborhood, extended families or large families living in a single family residence, probably owned by the residents, trying to keep the neighborhood looking as well as they could by keeping to the edges of their property. My grandmother went out every morning and swept the front. Not just the front walk, but any part of the front yard that didn't have grass on got swept every morning. | 23:27 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Now, we didn't know what it was to have paved streets, dirt streets, and to which dirt sidewalks ran down because without any paved streets, there were no curves. The children played and ran pretty much. | 24:41 |
| Mary Hebert | What did the dirt streets make your walks to school like on rainy days? I mean, were they muddy streets? | 25:06 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | It wasn't a low ground, but most of the home properties had foot paths that cut across where sidewalk would've been anyway, from the yards. So you could sort of make your way through just following the footpath before you got out into the middle of the actual street. On the other hand, our parents loaded us up with so many slickers and galoshes and umbrellas and stuff that it didn't matter whether it was muddy or not. You hardly got a drop of water on you anywhere. We went thoroughly because say you might catch a cold. This could have been the 25th of May, but you might catch a cold. So we paid no attention to it. It was the norm. We had no frame of reference. And when we went from the neighborhood to shop for clothing or things like that, because the little grocery stores that sold produce, and they were more like general stores, the old fashioned dairy, really general stores. | 25:14 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | When we went like to purchase clothes or something of that kind, you either would take the trolley streetcar, or in many cases, our parents would walk, especially if they were going to be taking more than one child, because they didn't pay all those fares. They just walked, what do they call Overtown. That was the phraseology. Now for Black people, that meant primarily Jefferson Avenue shopping area. You could go over to Washington Avenue, which was the main business street on the west side of town where the upscale stores, you weren't prohibited from going to Washington Avenue. | 26:24 |
| Mary Hebert | Those are mainly the White owned stores? | 27:21 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yes. Well, Jefferson Avenue as well. Jefferson Avenue as well. But it was a matter of which was more upscale than the others. So it was clear which clientele was being catered to, the distinction between Jefferson Avenue and Washington Avenue. Many store owners were Jewish in and out of the neighborhood. I remember patronizing one little general store that was Black owned, none of the rest. Fortunately, that was very close to where my family lived, so I could go over there. | 27:22 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I was in the days when if you had a penny, you could buy something with it. You could buy a lollipop or slice of pickle or one cookie or something. So we lucked up and got a penny. If we got a nickel, we were rich that day. We invited a friend and we'd go over to Mr. HomeStore and we could buy two things because we had a whole nickel. See, that was back— I started elementary school in 1930 on my sixth birthday. So I'm including preschool and early childhood. | 28:09 |
| Mary Hebert | You went to preschool? | 28:47 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No, I didn't. No, I'm just saying I'm including preschool experiences along with early school. But most of what I'm talking about now, I was actually a school child. | 28:48 |
| Mary Hebert | How did you get the money? Would your mother or father give you a penny? | 28:59 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. Oh, my uncle. Or however somebody in the family. | 29:03 |
| Mary Hebert | Did you have to do chores? Was there an allowance? | 29:09 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Well, everybody did chores. Allowance, we didn't know. We didn't know from allowance, no such thing. And a family in those days, in a family of that size, everybody was assigned chores. And that's what you did. Because the whole family contributes some work efforts to keeping everything going. So I have been asked. You were the baby, were you spoiling? I mean, I find that question hilarious. Given the experience that I had. I could have been spoiled by my grandmother a little I guess if she had had half the chance because she was my best friend. | 29:11 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | We were buddies and we spent time sitting in nice, cozy corners looking at picture books and things that she would explain to me because my mother didn't have time for any of that. And so kept my grandmother from being lonely, and it took me off my mother's hands when I was a young child. But no, my parents were stern and strict in their way in which they handled their children. Their expectations were clear as crystal and well known. And by the time I came along, firmly established. | 29:59 |
| Mary Hebert | Expectations for behavior. | 30:40 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | For behavior. | 30:41 |
| Mary Hebert | Did they also expect you to get an education? | 30:42 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yes. Now, that was the driving force I think regarding my father's— At least, he was more vocal about it. My father's greatest regret, it seemed to me, and like, well, he had two, one over which he could not have had any control. He stuttered very badly, and he would say if he hadn't had the speech impediment, he would have wanted to be a preacher. But the other was that because his mother died when he was very young, and I mean his natural mother died. He was very young and his father remarried and started another family. | 30:45 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | All of the second family progeny, as far as I know, were still of minor ages when the father passed away and my father found himself the oldest in the family and felt that he was responsible to look after all of them. Until then, he had been living with the father. But that was when he came to Newport, who was looking for work in the shipyard. And as he could, he brought his stepsisters. He had two full sisters, and the rest were his family, father's second family to Newport News. And he worked from that point on. So his great regret was that he was not educated in school and he was determined that that wasn't going to happen to any of his children. | 31:46 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Whatever he had to do, he had to do. But that wasn't going to happen to any of them. So it started, as I said, my older sister was already in college when I was born, so all I ever knew in the family was who was next to go college? Well, by living in Newport News, we were very close to Hampton Institute. My brothers began to reach college age, just— Well, one was before the thirties and three of them around between 30 and 33. I had three brothers. Hampton Institute at that time had a work year program whereby one could go and spend the entire first year on a job. And you may be acquainted with this already. Are you? | 32:50 |
| Mary Hebert | No. | 33:50 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Oh, okay. All right. The student could take work year program and be placed in a job on campus, live in the dormitory. The earnings from that would be deposited, I guess you might call it an escrow account toward the tuition that they would need. | 33:51 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | They took a few classes while they were doing the jobs. It was a five year program because they didn't get to take many classes during the first year. They were earning the money to enable them to stay and go the rest of the time. And then the parents had an easier time of it after that. Am I hearing rain? Yes. Okay. So my brothers did that and because their ages were close together. This is very important to the family. There's no way my father could have supported three boys in school at the same time. | 34:11 |
| Mary Hebert | And this was during the depression? | 34:53 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yes, exactly. During the depression. My oldest brother, I had four. And I say had four. I still have three, but I lost one. My oldest brother had gone to Virginia State College where my sister was, the oldest sister was. | 34:54 |
| Mary Hebert | That's in Petersburg. | 35:14 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | That's in Petersburg. And she finished. He didn't, because midway, I guess after his second year there, he got a job at Abram Straus in New York City and went up there during the summer and stayed. I don't know whether it was the nightlife, the salary, or just being in a big city. I think all of the above. He decided that he didn't need to go back to school right then. Well, he never did. But anyway, he did come back eventually to Virginia. | 35:15 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But then the next brothers, and a sister worked in there too, who went to a business school in Richmond. But the three brothers all went to Hampton and they were in quick succession. Now at the time, they got to the third brother, who's my youngest brother, and there was a gap between him and me of seven years. It wasn't that much pressure on my father to support them. They also, in addition to the work year, they were able to get certain kinds of jobs on campus to help sustain themselves. Then during the summertime, the CC camps, at least one of my brothers participated in that. | 35:52 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | He was a great advocate for and promoter of FDR. And I heard many wonderful things, not only on the radio, but by the way of that program about all that Mr. Roosevelt was doing for us. And I think that was my introduction to any knowledge about presidential politics. And it misled me to believe that we would always have great presidents. But at any rate, I can't say that's beside the point, but that's not why you're here. The atmosphere, and by the time, as I said, by the time I got in elementary school, my oldest sister was back in Newport News and she lived with us for a while and was teaching at the school I attended. So there was this attitude, no one threatened us or pushed us or said, you got to make all excellent grades, or if you don't, you're going to be punished. | 36:45 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Nothing like that. It was just that it was a force. It was just a force. And my father would point out to us anytime something happened to not necessarily our peers, but not excluding them either that was unpleasant or unfavorable. Now see, if he had gone on to college, that wouldn't happened. If she had done like her parents wanted, that wouldn't have happened because it would've been educated. It would've been educated. So education was the big thing in the house. It's full of books and magazines and things like that, that my sister and brother. And so when I went to high school in 1936, I went into what was then a brand new experimental academic program that was not so interdisciplinary as, I guess unified, I've forgotten exactly what they call it at the time. But they had trained teachers to be especially skillful in handling this kind of instruction. | 37:54 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | So there we were again with the same teacher teaching maybe four, talking about high school during that period. The school was— This was Huntington High School, which is now Huntington Middle School, but it's the same facility. It was brand new, went into Virgin Plant in that year. It was even closer to where I lived in my elementary school had been so still easy walking distance there. I was thinking that I had one regret and one thing that I felt pretty cocky about I guess. The regret was that up until then, Latin had been taught and I had picked up enough of the [indistinct 00:40:08] and all of that basic Latin by listening to my brothers. | 39:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | So I said I'm going to get Latin taught. They dropped it from the curriculum. The other one was that I found out that I was going to be starting algebra, and I already knew my way around with algebra pretty well because I kept bugging my sister. She was a mathematics teacher about her algebra books and problems and things. So finally she showed me quite a bit. So I thought that I was hot stuff, knowing some algebra going in. I don't think it impressed the algebra teacher for one minute. But anyway, it was it— That experience in high school, I think, I won't say phenomenal, but it was exceptional. And this, I'm sure you have found in many communities that you have visited. The high school principal occupied a position of high esteem throughout the city. | 40:12 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | It wasn't a matter of all the Black people thought he was great and nobody else did. He occupied a position of high esteem. He deserved it. | 41:23 |
| Mary Hebert | So even White community held— | 41:32 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | He was very well respected. His name was Dr. Luttrell Fleming Palmer. He was a man of integrity and dignity, but he was— To this day, I'm not sure how he managed to— He ran a tight ship, but he was invested personally in all of his students. He was personally invested in his students. It was amazing. And he felt free to come without calling for an appointment or an announcement, anything. Or if he had some time, especially during the summer, he would just walk over to your house and chat with your parents and talk about you and what he expected of you coming back the next year and so forth and so on. | 41:36 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | He was a leader, I think, by instinct, because he didn't bully people around. He didn't have to. He was a literate man, but he was able to talk to everybody. He was to communicate at whatever LE level made the other person comfortable. But he didn't talk down to the students. And we all knew he had high expectations of us in terms of not only behavior, but what would happen in the rest of our lives. So he was one of the biggest inspirations to many of us who felt like it must be great to be like that. The parents respected everything he said. He had to be very careful about advice that he gave because advice that he gave to parents, they took almost as though an order. If he says, well, I think something should happen, they interpreted to mean it must happen. | 42:36 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | That's how much they thought of him. And he encouraged the students. He scolded them when they needed it. He knew what you'd been up to. He knew which little clubs and things you were in. And it wasn't that small of population. He just made it his business to do that. There were several hundred students. Yes, I had, my activities were very full. I play by that time. I was not only play, I would've took lessons from the time I could sit on the bench I guess. I remember not being able to reach the pedal playing for BYPU and the church, but I was starting violin by that time. I played in the orchestra, which rehearsed before school. I was in the choir and I played keyboard for concert band during concert season after school. I was a busy little beaver, but I enjoyed most of my classes. | 43:51 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | The only classes that I didn't enjoy. And in retrospect, I think it's because I found them totally, not only just not stimulating, but non-productive because— I guess it's because the teachers didn't understand how important it is to make students know the reason why you're taking this course. And I had the dullest history class. I was 40 years old when I discovered how absorbing anything of an historical nature could be. I mean, just truly absorbing. I think I came to that through biographies pretty much. You can't do a lot with musicology and music history without reading a lot of biographies, but it was just an exercise in whether you can match the right year with the right battle. | 45:00 |
| Mary Hebert | So you never learned any American history? | 45:59 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Oh yeah, in high school there was a teacher, his name was Dr. Rupert Picot, who instituted a course in which I guess the name of it was Negro History, and later became very active in the society that promoted and published articles as well. But at that time he was at the high school, but it was only one class and only he taught it and it was— | 46:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | The question about why I didn't take the Negro history class in high school, I didn't get it fit in. I think there was one period that something— I don't remember all the details now. It could have been flexed in my senior year, but one of the English teachers who wasn't teaching me any classes but became a mentor. He was the editor of The Crisis magazine, which is the official journey at that time, Mr. James Ivy. I should say an editor. I'm not sure the editor is correct of The Crisis. | 0:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And again, a very literate person, and he knew that I liked to write a great deal. My senior year, I was editor—in—chief for the yearbook. And he asked me one day did I know what that the responsibilities would be. And I said, "No, I really don't," and he decided that probably before the yearbook came out, somebody better take me under their wing or it would be a disaster. So he did. I spent what free time I had with him. Didn't take Dr. Picot's course. While I was at Hampton, Dr. Picot was on the summer faculty there. I had a chance to take his course. | 0:49 |
| Mary Hebert | His course. | 1:33 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. This applied to history of any kind when I was in high school. All the tests were true—false or filling in the blanks. And I said it was an exercise in matching up battles in the year of same or the general, and— | 1:34 |
| Mary Hebert | They never made it interesting. | 1:51 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | We don't even know why the wars were fought. All we know is that a war happened then. And you had to remember all that, and it was no rhyme or reason to. I think that's why mathematics so much because it's always working itself out. You know you got it. You're going to get to a destination. You're doing it for a reason. There's a solution out there somewhere. And it was interesting. But at any rate, the high school years provided me with some very strong teachers. Very strong teachers. | 1:53 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I mentioned the principal who was a stellar personality, but that was quite a faculty. And my English teacher, whom I recall very fondly, who was a Czar, I called my first grade teacher tyrant. This one was a— I don't know what to call her. But she was a grammarian par excellence to this day. Puts my teeth on edge when somebody violates one of things Ms. Pannell said you must never do. And it's the music teachers, the French teacher, our secretary of the French club. And the faculty sponsor made me take the minutes in French using mainly memorized phrases. I couldn't listen to French that fast, but then I had to report them at the next meeting also in— | 2:35 |
| Mary Hebert | [indistinct 00:03:43]. | 3:42 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | This was high school. I was in high school from 1936 to 1940. | 3:43 |
| Mary Hebert | So this prepared you for college. | 3:49 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I was fully prepared for college. Strong teachers. Mm—hmm. | 3:50 |
| Mary Hebert | Were the books new books? I hear stories of people— | 3:55 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | We got what— | 4:00 |
| Mary Hebert | Schools were leftovers from the White school. | 4:00 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. Oh, after they got new books, then we would get. We didn't have to buy our books. And I really can't recall. See, at that age, you're not sensitive to— Those things are subtle too. They're not in your consciousness unless someone picks it out, and I couldn't tell you save my life if my book was new or not new. Also, we would not have known because nobody asked us to examine the copyright date whether it was current or probably out of use and that somebody else had gotten a third edition and you just getting the first edition or anything like that. At that age, those are not the things that interest you, especially when there's a cute guy sitting in the next row. | 4:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But it was the teaching that made the difference more than the books because I couldn't tell you the name of a book in any of those classes, but I remember the classes. And I can tell you the teachers. Yeah, I can see them. They still exist in right in front of me because they insisted on accuracy. They would not forgive you for not doing your best. And were we pushed? Yes. Some resented it. Some didn't. I don't think I can say truthfully that any of us appreciated it then but later because getting into college, I found that I was fully prepared for it. I started there feeling that whatever they said do I was going to be able to do. Thanks to Miss Ethel Pannell, my English teacher, by that time I was in love with English. | 4:50 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And also, I had all this affinity for mathematics, as I told you. So when I applied, I stated that I wanted to major, majors and minors in those days, major in English and minor in math. I changed my mind almost over one weekend when I let a young lady who was going to be my roommate persuade me that I should take the same major that she was taking, which was elementary education. And so I got down there and then changed and went into elementary education. Stayed there a couple of years. | 6:11 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Was enjoying it. I'm like, okay. All the events in my life seem to point to the fact that they are reorganizing the music department and I should get over there where I belonged. See, Dr. R. Nathaniel Dett left Hampton, and he had been director of music there. And he had gone to Bennett College in North Carolina. I think he left there in 1935. No, he left there in 1930. I'm wrong. He left there in the early '30s. He left Hampton Institute in early '30s, after which that department was rudderless. | 6:56 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I entered there in 1940. In 1941, the decision was made to reactivate that department, revitalize it. The choir, which had had international fame due primarily to Dr. Dett, the European tours and the national tours and his publications had gone down somewhat. So they wanted to call back one of their graduates to take over the choir and not to be director of music but certainly to do some heavy teaching in the department. And it was he specifically who just went up to visit my parents and said, "Your daughter doesn't know it. Apparently she doesn't realize that she's in the wrong major, and she needs to be over in the music department." And they, strangely enough, left the decision up to me to make— | 7:52 |
| Mary Hebert | They told you [indistinct 00:08:58]? | 8:56 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No, I was there. | 8:56 |
| Mary Hebert | Oh, you were there. | 8:58 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. I wasn't allowed to say much by him or them, but I listened. I thought he made a pretty good prism. His name was Noah Ryder. He was my faculty advisor, and he took it upon himself to go up and advise me at home in front of my parents. So at that time, he came in '41. Now, this would've been spring of '42. Many of the male students were being drafted and going off, so the college decided to try to accelerate their matriculation and put in intercessions as well as summer sessions, speed everything up. So they told me I could start with an intercession and if I thought it would work out all right and if I liked doing what I was doing to continue, which I did. What happened at Hampton is that it was my first experience with White teachers. | 9:00 |
| Mary Hebert | Mm—hmm. So Hampton had White teachers? | 10:05 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Oh yes, yes. The president, the chaplain, many of the teachers, especially the older ones and some other staff people. Mostly New Englanders still. I don't know if you know much about the history of Hampton Institute, but it began out of a missionary effort initiated and promoted by people from New England. And that attitude was still very prevalent at that time, and so that was a first experience to me. And I had been asked, how did I adapt to it, or did it feel strange or anything? I don't have an adjective for it. | 10:07 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | The interesting thing to me is that I don't remember having to adapt to it at all. That's strange because in Newport News where I had been my entire life up until then, we had no intermingling whatsoever except with merchants. That's all. All the White people that we knew were owners of something that we needed, so we had contact with them. And as I said, I think most of them were Jewish, and we found those that we knew in our neighborhood very accessible anyway. They were part of the community. A lot of them lived above the stores. So we didn't see a distinction. | 11:01 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Sometime during my college years, it occurred to me that we were so segregated that we never felt discriminated against because we had our own everything in the community— | 11:52 |
| Mary Hebert | So you didn't have [indistinct 00:12:08]? | 12:06 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | — our own churches, our own little— The community was so locked in, so tight. There was never a thought or an expectation in our 1930 heads that Black people would ever live any place except in Black neighborhoods or all the other kinds of things that began to emerge after the civil rights movement, as early as the '30s or '40s even. We just didn't think about it all. | 12:09 |
| Mary Hebert | So you weren't even aware? Were you aware of it at all that there was this whole White community [indistinct 00:12:49]? | 12:44 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Oh, of course. We knew that. We went near some of the areas going out of town, for example, because they were on the west side, and we knew they lived in fine houses and beautiful neighborhoods and everything like that. We didn't feel jealous or envious or anything. It's all we knew. That's the way it was. Apologies to [indistinct 00:13:17]. That's the way it was. And I don't recall young college students of my generation, we had aspirations, any expectations that it was ever going to be different or aspiration to change it. That's why when the Young Turks came along, as they're called, and sat down at the lunch counters and said, "We are going to change it." I have no end of admiration for them, not just for their bravery, but because they were thinking. I don't know what we were doing. | 12:49 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | We were just accepting the status quo. You were going to be a teacher. You were going to spend all that money. You were going to go to school for four years, and then you were going to be allowed to teach where? Only in a Black school if somebody told you, yes, you can teach there. If you wanted graduate study, you were going to have to go out of state because the Virginia institutions weren't going to let you come there, the White ones. So even when I finished college in 1944, as recently as that, and I went off to University of Michigan the following year with a grant from the Commonwealth of Virginia that in effect paid me to get out of dodge. | 13:56 |
| Mary Hebert | So that you wouldn't challenge the segregation of higher education of the graduates? | 14:49 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yes. Actually, cash money. Call it a scholarship. You can call it whatever you want, but it was intended to get you out of the Commonwealth of Virginia because we are not going to let any Black people in University of Virginia and the rest of our schools except Virginia State College in Petersburg. | 14:54 |
| Mary Hebert | You didn't have a graduate school or graduate school in music? | 15:18 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Well, yeah. No, they did not. Mm—mm. Or in many other areas as well. Hampton started graduate programs in their school of education early, but that was a private school. They could take who they want up to a point because the faculty being integrated helped them a little bit. The board was heavily loaded with people of the same mentality as those who started the school in the first place. But state school, no. And I recall that very much, that someone explained to me that I could do this. Think it might have been my sister, that you can do this. You're going to go to the University of Michigan. They are obligated by law to provide this for you because they established law that said, "You can't go here, but we will send you there." | 15:19 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And while I was at Hampton, also, the Navy began to station units on that campus. I went one Saturday afternoon, which was one of the few times we could escape the scene of women and get over town without being in trouble. Walked over there with a sailor who had become a friend of mine because we would both spend a lot of time on Saturdays up in the music department in the listening room. And I was very interested in him because I was a college music major, and he didn't call himself a musician. And even though he had been to college, he hadn't made any music, and he knew a lot more music literature than I did did. And we would sit there and listen to— We had the, not Rockefeller— What was with the philanthropist who had established the whole music series of listening because most Black colleges couldn't afford to buy those records? Anyway, that's beside the point. But we could listen. | 16:15 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And then one day on Saturday, he said, "Why don't we go and get ice cream cones or something?" Okay. So we went on and walked. We walked out. I walked down Queen Street, walked over the bridge even and so forth and so. On Monday, I was called in, and I was scolded so severely that I was stunned. And I was scolded by Black people, not White people. It wasn't that I should not be friends with him. No problem with that. It wasn't that we couldn't listen to music anywhere on the campus whenever we wanted to. No, it was that, how could you have been so stupid as to walk through city of Hampton with a White sailor? You would certainly, had you been reported, been picked up for prostitution, and nothing would've happened to him. I had no idea. I had— | 17:20 |
| Mary Hebert | Never crossed you mind? | 18:27 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | — never nothing in my whole background to have made me even think like that. I just know you don't ever go off this campus with a White [indistinct 00:18:42]. She said, "If it's a White woman, that might be different because they're going to think you're her maid, but if it's a man, they going to think something else. And you going to be in trouble." Well, I learned not to ever do that, but that must have been '43 or '44, I guess, in there somewhere. | 18:27 |
| Mary Hebert | So the Navy was housing White sailors that at Hampton? | 19:03 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Mm—hmm. Mm—hmm. Oh, I don't know. Well, I can't tell you now whether only the officers were White. That had to be it, I think, because I was graduated from Hampton and had been to graduate school and was teaching in Alexandria when they commissioned the first Black ensigns, when the Navy commissioned the first Black ensigns because one of my childhood friends who grew up around the corner in Newport News from me, when they commission 13 Black ensigns, and he was one of them. And so I guess that must have been the way it worked. | 19:08 |
| Mary Hebert | [indistinct 00:19:45] officers. | 19:45 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Must have been. At that time, segregation— | 19:45 |
| Mary Hebert | You want me to [indistinct 00:19:52]? | 19:51 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | My point that I started making, going all the way back to childhood, segregation and discrimination did not make much of an impact on us not so much because we were docile as we were simply accepting the status quo, not expecting it to change. That's what it was. | 19:52 |
| Mary Hebert | Did y'all ever challenge it in small ways, like refusing to sit on the floor? | 20:12 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No, not while I was going there, not before. In 1940, I was 16 years old. I don't recall any incidence of that kind that occurred while we were growing up. And our parents would have been furious if they knew that we were even playing such because they considered that ultimate danger. | 20:17 |
| Mary Hebert | Did they teach you how to behave around White people? It was just [indistinct 00:20:46]. | 20:42 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No, because we had no consort with them. That's what I'm saying. It's like being poor and not knowing you're poor until later if all of your primary needs are met. We were segregated to the point that we didn't understand segregation. It was just the way the world was. It probably was as natural to us as the fact that some of us are male and some of us are female. | 20:46 |
| Mary Hebert | Not when you went to Michigan? | 21:19 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | When I went to Michigan, I had some unpleasant experiences. First of all, at that time, the university did not allow Black students, graduate or otherwise, to live in university residences. But there were homes over in town. I chose to live at international house because I thought that was a great opportunity for me to expand my mental horizons, so I had a wonderful time living with people from 9, 10 different countries and so on. But couldn't live in the dormitories. | 21:21 |
| Mary Hebert | So even a northern school practiced segregation? | 21:58 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yep. This was University of Michigan in 1944, fall of '44. I was told to arrange to live at the B House, B standing for Brit, which was the name of the lady who owned and ran this boarding house for graduate women, for female graduate students in Ann Arbor. And there weren't that many of us, so just about most of— I went there. I think I spent three days and two nights there. And by that time, I had found out about the international house, and I moved out because I think I was waking up a little at that time. I didn't need to come all the way from Virginia just to resegregate myself when I had an opportunity to do something I'd never done before, which was live with good people from different cultures. | 22:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Then also while I was there, I received an invitation and a couple of other communications about becoming a member of Sigma Alpha Iota, which is a prestigious music— Okay. There was no follow—up, and I really didn't pay a whole lot of attention. One day, my piano teacher asked me if I had received anything, and I told her yes. And she said, "What else did you receive?" And I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "You receive anything else since then, telling you when the rush activities?" And I said, "As a matter of fact, I didn't." | 22:53 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | She sat down. She said, "Georgia, I'm ashamed to tell you this, but you need to know this." She was one of the faculty advisors, I think to the chat. She said, "Those girls found out that you were not White, and that's why you didn't hear any more from them, because they aren't going to invite you to become a member." She said, "I don't know if it's ever going to change, but that's the way it is now." She said, "I wish I could change it. I would change it if I could, but I think at least I owe it to you to let you know that that's the way it is." She said, "It's [indistinct 00:24:20] White and intend to keep it that way, and I can't change it by myself." So I said, "Well, I didn't come here to be a member of SAI. I came here to get a master music degree. So that's not going to bother me a whole lot." | 23:42 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | See this was not long after the famous 1941 riots in Detroit. A friend of mine who at present lived right in Virginia Beach, our lives have circled each other many times. We arrived at University of Michigan same time. We were roommates there. And the second summer, I think, we went over to— We used to go to Windsor. Rationing was in effect. If we went over to Windsor in Ontario, we could buy hosiery and leather products because Canada was not rationing. And we decided to stop in Detroit after having done our little Canadian shopping. We did. We went into— I think it was just a drugstore or something. We ordered a meal. We sat there for a very long time. Nobody came. | 24:36 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Eventually, a waitress came, very sullen attitude, and said, "What did we want?" And we said, "Well, we haven't been given a menu so we can't tell you what we want." The next thing to arrive was a three—panel screen. They put it up around the table. Then they sent the waitress with the menu. At that point, it was very clear what was happening. We decided to go ahead and order, and we did. We ordered elaborately. We had another friend with us by that time who [indistinct 00:26:22]. All three of us ordered very elaborately, and as soon as they delivered the food, we got up and left. But those kinds of things were happening. That's why I'm not too astonished now when I realize that Michigan is probably the state with the heaviest concentration of these ministry groups. | 25:47 |
| Mary Hebert | So they put a screen around you [indistinct 00:26:45]. | 26:41 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Around our table. Mm—hmm. | 26:44 |
| Mary Hebert | Had you ever done anything like that before? | 26:48 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Nope. That hadn't happened to me in Virginia or anywhere else, but it happened in Detroit. | 26:49 |
| Mary Hebert | Well, restaurants in your neighborhood were not segregated? | 26:55 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | At all. No, the segregation rules in Virginia were vicious. There was no thought whatsoever of you— First of all, you weren't going to be allowed in the restaurant, so didn't get to a table. So didn't needed to put screens around. | 26:59 |
| Mary Hebert | You ordered from the back window if you ordered. | 27:16 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Didn't have back windows in those days around where I lived. I know in some of the rural areas, you could do that. Yeah, they had a Dutch window, door type thing. But I don't remember any places where we could do that. And the fast food places didn't exist. We didn't have any 1930 McDonald's burger. | 27:17 |
| Mary Hebert | But if you wanted to go out to a restaurant when you were living [indistinct 00:27:43]— | 27:41 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | If somebody Black didn't have one, you didn't go to one. | 27:43 |
| Mary Hebert | Okay. | 27:46 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | That's what I'm saying. Yeah. | 27:47 |
| Mary Hebert | What about when you were living in Virginia, having to try on clothes and things like that? Were you allowed to? | 27:49 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | We were allowed to do it in Jefferson Avenue stores and some of the Washington Avenue, I think. I don't remember being rejected, but see, then my mother would've known which ones. I think universally, hats. There may have been one store on Jefferson Avenue. What was it called? Beskins? There was one store that was my mother's favorite store there. I think there you were treated as though you were a whole human being. I don't think that was replicated in many places, none that I can name right now. | 27:54 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But I can't say that was the only one because she bought a lot of things from Rosa Department store. She bought a lot of things from there. But if you went on Washington Avenue, forget it. If you saw a hat, they might let you buy it. But if you got home and it didn't look well on you and didn't fit, that was your problem because you couldn't try it on in there. There was no crossing over. It was rigid. It was distinct. It was rigid. It was firmly entrenched to the point where nobody really thought about it, no more than if you go out on the street, you aren't going to give conscious thought to why you are driving on the right side of the road. | 28:35 |
| Mary Hebert | Because that's just [indistinct 00:29:21]. | 29:19 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | That's just what's done. All the whole system track lights and everything, all the road signs, everything. I get that. It isn't going to impact your consciousness in any way unless you go to Holland or Great Britain. [indistinct 00:29:36]. It becomes a matter of consciousness with you. Hey, it didn't come down from the mount that everybody has to [indistinct 00:29:50]. | 29:20 |
| Mary Hebert | Did going up north make you challenge that, where you could go to all these places? | 29:50 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | [indistinct 00:29:57] to visit other relatives who lived [indistinct 00:30:05] Brooklyn or Bronx. And I think the occasions like a world fair or something, everybody was mingling anyhow. But I think I did observe that, it might go up there and be there for less than a week or something like that, a lack of all that strict separation. But New York then is like New York now, which is a collection of villages. | 30:02 |
| Mary Hebert | Neighborhood, right. [indistinct 00:30:38] rigid segregation [indistinct 00:30:42]? | 30:36 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Not in living. But the university was still— As I mentioned, residential they were strict about. I lived in a Michigan residence once, and that was in the 1960s when I went back up there for some summer study. And I stayed there 9, 10 weeks, I guess. I had an option to sublet an apartment or live in one of the residence houses, and I chose to live in the residence house purposefully just to offset that memory from 1944 when I wasn't allowed to, you see. Ann Arbor is a university town, so there was no— All the places near what is now central campus because north campus has exploded. | 30:43 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But all the places where you would eat, buy books, do anything like that, completely open. Completely open, no pressure on nothing, the theaters and so on and so on. When I was a student at Hampton Institute, there was a movie house in Phoebus that we could go to, but we had to sit in the balcony. The Lee Theater, I think, is the name of it. You never were going to be allowed to sit down, but you could sit in the balcony if you paid the same amount of money for your ticket as anybody else. But you could only sit in the balcony. | 31:43 |
| Mary Hebert | Was the balcony uncomfortable? Were the seats uncomfortable that time? | 32:17 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I don't recall that. For someone who's a teenager, it's hard to provide an uncomfortable seat. They don't stay still that long. [indistinct 00:32:35]. We did. We were sensitive [indistinct 00:33:36] that kind of thing. But [indistinct 00:33:42]. And there was no air conditioning. All the windows were opening from one end of the block to the other. What you heard coming out the window was Amos Manning. | 32:25 |
| Mary Hebert | Mm—hmm. So they all listened to him on the radio? | 33:54 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | They listened to Amos Manning, and they were devoted fans. That was hilarious. That's what was available. The thrust of a mentality from that period was so much an emergence from what had come immediately before that— See, now, my father, I told you he was born in 1877. His parents were freed. And I remember, emphasis, my grandmother when I was little. And I don't know whether that ever occurred to her, but anyway, she never needed to. She never explained to me why she kept making the distinction between the fact that her people were freemen and my father's people were freedmen. | 33:57 |
| Mary Hebert | So on your mother's side, they had been freed. | 35:07 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | My grandmother said they were freemen, and she didn't all that fond of my father. So every now and then, she would make a little dig and mention that his people were freedmen. Okay. And when you have memories of that and a generation or two immediately preceding you, the fact that you even own a house and land seems like that is a progress to you, which in fact it was. The fact that you can make a conscious decision to send your children to college, it overshadows your concern about, yeah, but I can only send them to certain colleges. And I remember telling my own students that I am third generation down from slavery. They couldn't believe it, but I am. | 35:10 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | You see, my father was, I think, a visionary. I think he was foresighted, and I think that's why I kept stressing get as much learning, knowledge. I don't think he ever used the term learning and student. I don't think he ever talked about learning and student or even education. He talked about knowledge, and the people who acquired it were scholars. And he would pat me on my head and say, "You're a good scholar." So in those years, I think the chat— It's W.E.B. Dubois and some other distinguished, Frederick Douglass even, going back that far and all those distinguished people who had put forth some really magnificent thoughts. It hadn't caught on with the general population who was struggling for day—to—day existence with not a lot of assets and resources to go on. And I guess I began to feel ashamed in my generation after a while that we didn't have the guts and the sense to do what these youngsters did who started the ball rolling when they did. | 36:25 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But it was not something that we dealt with on any lingering basis, not where I grew up. I certainly cannot generalize to the universe, but not where I grew up. It was called to our attention very sharply after I left high school. The principal whom I mentioned, Dr. [indistinct 00:38:16] Fleming Palmer, that teacher of Negro history, Dr. Picot, Rupert Picot, and a few other teachers, including a couple over here in Norfolk, whom I did not know at the time, instituted a suit that was successful and resulted in equity in teacher's salaries, which cost some jobs. Picot was one of those, for example. | 37:48 |
| Mary Hebert | He lost his job? | 38:47 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | They wouldn't renew the contract because he was one of the litigants, but the suit was successful because the inequity was just astounding. They knew they were putting their heads on the block. They knew their jobs were on the line, and they did it. So that was an outstanding incident of inspiration for us that called our attention sharply to something that we should have been paying attention to all along, but we hadn't because we had accepted things on Tuesday that we had on Monday and on Wednesday because we had accepted them on Tuesday and Monday. So it was that way. | 38:48 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Our learning capabilities were not restricted, but our learning experiences were rather confined. I think that's what it was. And it was a reason why I think my parents were wise enough to understand when I went off graduate school— Some of my sisters and brothers, apparently didn't. They were in, and they advised my parents that, "Well, you put her through college, now let her get her job. If she wants to continue the school, let her do it." And my father said he'd been paying tuition, room and board for so long that you need a year to coast to a stop anyway. So he would support me for first year, and then I could get a job, pay me enough to finish up what I wanted to do, which is what happened. | 39:38 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But I think they were wise enough to know that I needed some other experiences that I wasn't going to get if I continued to swirl around in the same patterns that my teachers had by necessity, if not by desire and get in some kind of vortex. I guess I was the most restless of all their children. And the other reason might have been that they wanted to get me off their hands for a while as well. I even remember my father say one day— I was talking to him about a month before it was time to go off to Ann Arbor about it and some of the reasons why I was going. He said, "I'm looking forward to that. I'm looking forward to you going up there." I said, "You mean you'll be glad I'm gone?" I think he didn't have a heart to say yeah, but that's what he meant. | 40:35 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But it was gradual coming to our senses thing. The rudest shock I had had before getting to Ann Arbor, before preparing to go, I knew it before got there, and running into that you can't live in our dormitory thing with the scolding and the lectures I got for walking across into Hampton with Bill, a White friend. But there were incidents there. The professors did not all subscribe to open admissions or whatever they called it, and I could tell. | 41:36 |
| Mary Hebert | Did they treat you differently? | 42:23 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Only two. | 42:26 |
| Mary Hebert | How did they? | 42:28 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | The first one, we were assigned faculty advisors, and my advisor wrote out my prescription for my enrollment, the first term courses that I would be strongly advised to take because they would move me toward completing my degree requirement in the right chronology. And one of them was orchestration. I remember that particular. I had just completed a course in orchestration my senior year at Hampton, and I made an A in it. So I looked at that, and I thought, I just had it. Why come here and take it over again? Right away, even if it's more advanced, I'm not an instrumental. | 42:29 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I'm in vocal area. My advisor said, "Well, you can go and talk to the professor." And I said, "What will I tell him?" She said, "Well, if you think you're that strong in it, maybe he'll give you an examination, and on the outcome of that, we'll see what we can do." And I said, "Well, thanks," and I did. And I went to him, and he listened. And he said, "I'm not going to make up any examination just for you." And I said, "Well, my advisor suggested that I should at least talk to you to get some input as to what might be possible." | 43:15 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And he said, "Well, I'm not your advisor. I have to tell you. Where'd you graduate from anyway?" I said, "Hampton Institute." "Why didn't you go to Howard?" I said, "I don't think I can answer that. Fortunately, my parents were able to send me to Hampton Institute." "Well, I'm not going to make an exam." So I said, "So that means I am required to take the course." I said, "Am I required to take the court or required to pass the course?" He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Would you allow me to take the exam now?" He said, "Yes, my exams are posted on the bulletin board out there with [indistinct 00:44:55]. You see what time that exam going to be given. You come in and take it if you think that's what you can do." So I did, and I passed. | 44:04 |
| Mary Hebert | You passed it? | 45:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. When I showed up for the exam that day, he looked like a [indistinct 00:45:12]. He'd forgotten. And the other people in the class had never seen me before. So they thought, stupid girl made a mistake and wanted into the wrong exam. And I sat down. He really didn't want to give me the exam to take. | 45:08 |
| Mary Hebert | But he did. | 45:27 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But he did. But those were the kinds of things. You couldn't nail it to the wall. Maybe he was rude to all of his students. I don't know. That again, was between 1944 and 1946. | 45:28 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. Yeah. Because I went there in the fall of '44, and I stayed through the summer of 45, and went and started teaching in Alexandria, Virginia, went back following Sunday and finished up that program. | 0:02 |
| Mary Hebert | So you finished up your masters at Michigan? | 0:20 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | At Michigan. | 0:21 |
| Mary Hebert | Did you make many friends at Michigan? Were there other Black students there? | 0:23 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah, I did. I had good friends, and maintained some who came either about the same time I did, or after over there when I got there, or even in one or two cases were residents of Ann Arbor. | 0:29 |
| Mary Hebert | Did you make friends with some of the White students in the classes also? | 0:47 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I did. I haven't maintained those. I did one for a while, Sister Gilbert. She was a really dear person who was working on her doctorate when I got there. I was working on my masters. But she asked me to edit her work, and we spent a lot of time together. And we kept in touch for quite a while, and I don't really know what happened to Sister Gilbert. I think of her. And I also had friends who took jobs and went here and there. It's been an extremely mobile group. I retain my membership in the alumni association, mainly because I can get publications that give class news from time to time. I know sort of— | 0:52 |
| Mary Hebert | So you can get where they've gone? | 1:36 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. Yeah. I was a member of the U of M alumni chapter here for very briefly, maybe less than two years when I discovered that their main interest was watching football on rear projection screen. That's not my main interest, so that didn't— And I met one who was at Michigan around the time I was, but we never— | 1:39 |
| Mary Hebert | Connected. | 2:02 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Because I was in School of Music, so that effectively isolated me from anybody who was not in the School of Music. | 2:03 |
| Mary Hebert | I know. I'm in the history department, so— | 2:10 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah, that's it. That's the universe. | 2:14 |
| Mary Hebert | That's the only people you meet. | 2:17 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. But I had friends there, and I made friends out in town. Now at that time, I'd been there a few months before I found out that— I had to be directed toward that part of the community where the Black families live. It was an entirely separate area. And a lot of people in— You had to find a Black person to tell you where that was. Other people, I'm sure, who lived in Ann Harbor had no idea. | 2:18 |
| Mary Hebert | Where the Black community was? | 2:49 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Mm—hmm. But I did. I found out, because I wanted to visit a church. I think they were having a program with a singer that I knew or something like that, and I found out about that. And I had been going to a nearby church because it was easy walking distance, and I made my way over there. And it was a different country. It was a different country. They'll didn't have blue spruce and fur trees in the front yard over there. But Michigan has not been a progressive state anyway. Still is not. And there have been major problems, as you know, at a university, more than one actually, and up on the UP. One of my White friends that I met while I was a student there was from a family that lived on the upper peninsula, and she told me one time, she said, "Guys—" I was living [indistinct 00:03:57] experience. | 2:51 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Three of us were sharing— Well it wasn't really a suite, but it was a little more than a room. I'm Protestant. There was another, she wasn't Panamanian, she was from one of the Caribbeans, she was Catholic. And Claire, whose family was Orthodox Jewish, but she was unbeknownst to them. She was not orthodox. That was an interesting situation. We all celebrated everybody's holidays. Claire helped us celebrate Christmas, we helped her celebrate the Jewish holidays, but I digress. | 3:59 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | When we were doing that, we met Ethel— I think her name was Ethel, who was from UP, and she found that whole thing fascinating. And she found it interesting that all these colors and races were mixing together. And she said, "I'd like to invite you guys up to the farm sometimes." She said, "But my folks would never understand. My folks would—" She said, "Georgia, I'm sorry to tell you, but they would never understand. And I'm not going to let anybody insult you. And that's why I haven't invited you all to come up there." And she said, "If I can't invite you, I can't invite the others either." That's the way it was. | 4:44 |
| Mary Hebert | That's the way it was, and probably still is in a lot of places. | 5:26 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I think maybe. Especially where Black residents are in such a small minority, it's probably that way. But then I also remember growing up and hearing the merchants who were Jewish, who owned most of the little stores that we patronized, being referred to in derogatory terms by Black people. I hate to think it's human nature, but when we know too little about the other person, we manufacture a lot of negative stuff and pass it around. And certainly I heard terms about, don't let him Jew you down. It didn't have much impact on the ear, but then we heard nigger all the time too, and we knew that that was a term that was used commonly. Now you feel hackles on your neck rise if somebody says that, but we didn't respond that way then. It was out there. | 5:31 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I'm in the process of evacuating my sister's home in Williamsburg, who was prone to keep clippings of everything that was ever printed, and I find columns, especially letters to the editor in old newspapers or obituaries of her contemporaries. She just turned 90 on Monday. And this goes back a long way, but I don't know how long. Every reference, even after I moved to Norfolk and well into the '50s of course, every reference, obit or whatever would be Georgia, a rider, Negro, so on. Well, vernacular was not Negro. The vernacular was what educated people said. The vernacular was nigger, which we don't tolerate anymore. We don't tolerate— If I had heard one of my children say something about, don't let them Jew you down, they would've been in some trouble, because we don't do that. We just don't do that. | 6:40 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | You don't malign another person's race. You don't malign another person's religion or whatever. But we are much further beyond the 1950s than the numbers indicate. In terms of the history of the country, we're much further beyond that. My concern now is that George Allen wants to take us back there as soon as possible, but I don't think he's going to be totally successful, because too much has changed really. | 7:49 |
| Mary Hebert | He's the governor of the Commonwealth? | 8:26 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. Too much has changed now. And if you ask me in passing did I have an unhappy childhood or a happy childhood, I probably would not choose to describe it either way. I had what to me appeared to be a regular ordinary childhood in my neighborhood at that time. I have no horrible recollections. I have not harbored anything that I resent or any of that. And I can judge what I now know to have been a product of the times. But the fact is, above and beyond, in addition to everything else, I understand that we were so segregated there that we didn't even experience a sense of being discriminated against. | 8:27 |
| Mary Hebert | So you never felt like a second class citizen while you were growing up? Did you feel that way? | 9:39 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No. We didn't have the frame of reference in terms of economic and political parameters, you see. We knew that the Black people lived over here, and White people lived over there, and a lot of them lived in better houses, but we didn't understand that they're going to get the better jobs, they're going to get the better this, that the politicians' rules are going to be made on their behalf. And so we didn't understand that growing up. | 9:47 |
| Mary Hebert | What about later when you came back to Norfolk? | 10:17 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Oh, I understood it then. Oh yes. When I came back in 1948, it was after having taught in Alexandria in public schools for three years, where I learned a lot. I won't go into a lot of details there, but it was so open, it was so patently discriminatory in so many ways. And I took advantage of being [indistinct 00:10:54], the new kid on the block to make requests that my colleague scorned, but in some cases they worked. I did it on a basis that they would be accepted as she doesn't know any better. I knew what I was doing. | 10:22 |
| Mary Hebert | What kinds of things? | 11:06 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Well, I was hired as a music consultant. I went and took the job, and the first thing I discovered is that I was not going to be a music consultant. There was nobody to consult with. I was going to be a floating resource music teacher, which meant that I was going to— And there were not middle schools. There was elementary school and high school. That meant I was going to teach every Black child in the city of Alexandria between grades one and eight, because I had first grade, second grade, third and all up through seven to teach music to every week. | 11:07 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | By the time my seventh graders, I'm trying to prepare them and encourage them to participate and what they were going to get at Parker Gray High School, which was the Black high school. Not much, I found out, because there the teacher who was responsible for what assets and resources they had was too chicken to ask for much. And I asked him about— I couldn't believe when I saw the instruments. | 11:50 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | They were beat up, all of them needed repair, [indistinct 00:12:26] music, not much of that. And so, "Well, superintendent, we can't get it. They get it at George Washington. GW gets everything." I said, "What did you ask for?" This is nearing the end of my first year. And they had hired a new assistant superintendent. Praise Lord for Mr. Richardson. He was a great guy. First off, he told me I was to report directly to him. Secondly, he told me that I was to make requests directly to him. I was sent and supposed to find out what was needed and make my requests accordingly, and I did. | 12:20 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I went into one of the elementary schools, they had one victrola for the whole school and a cart for me to roll it around on. This is ridiculous. So end of that year, I asked for a phonograph for each classroom, because classroom teachers were told to work with me, and I had to write evaluations on all of them per month. I said they could get much better evaluations if they would be able to do the follow up. I'm only in here once a week and all like this. So they laughed. They laughed. You did what? And even the principal of the school. She threatened not to approve it, and I said, "Well, Mr. Richardson told me to report it directly to him." Anyway, so I did that. That turned to 19, I got 16. | 13:03 |
| Mary Hebert | You got 16? | 13:57 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I got 16. Asked for 19, they laughed, but I got 16. Following fall, I had phonographs in those rooms. Now, I called Pat— We call him Pat, the high school director. And I said, "Look, how come I can get equipment in the elementary school, and you're still not getting anything over there?" And I asked Mr. Richardson, "What did G.W. get? And what they're doing is petitioning off part of the gymnasium, because they got so many new instruments that they can't house them all, and you're still playing their cast off horns. Why are you not asking for something like that?" So anyway, it was a struggle. It was a struggle. Mr. Richardson didn't last long in Alexandria. He was too liberal. But he went over to Arlington, and he made the right kind of waves over there, such that Arlington, I think even to this day, remains the best paying county in the whole state for their teachers. | 13:57 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But the city was really, it was rigid. It was a deep south town. It was really a deep south— | 15:04 |
| Mary Hebert | Alexandria? | 15:13 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Alexandria. Yeah. And the Black population had interesting conceptions of themselves in terms of who were the gentry and who were not. And I finally concluded that I didn't worry if I wasn't going to be accepted as an insider. Don't worry about it. Because what I think is, you not only had to be born in Alexandria, you had to be conceived there as well with documentation thereof. So I wasn't conceived there, and I wasn't born there, so I was going to remain an outsider. And I stayed there three years, and then I came down to Norfolk. But it was very, very strict, and I didn't adapt to it all that well having just come back from the university. | 15:14 |
| Mary Hebert | How was it strict? I mean— | 16:01 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | The separation, the allocation of resources by the city government. | 16:02 |
| Mary Hebert | To the neighborhoods and to the schools? | 16:08 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | To the schools in particular. I didn't know a whole lot about the neighborhood, but I did know a lot about the schools, because I was in and out of them all the time. | 16:10 |
| Mary Hebert | Well, who's considered the gentry? | 16:17 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Old family. Old family. Those whose parents and grandparents had been born there, and they'd lived there and established their homes and— | 16:20 |
| Mary Hebert | The generations? | 16:30 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah, they had generational advantages over the rest of us. And they were the top people. That was a spillover from Washington DC where it was very prevalent for a long time, first families. The birds of Washington, DC, the whatever from Washington DC. | 16:31 |
| Mary Hebert | So even you coming in as a professional, as a school teacher, you couldn't have been part of— | 16:55 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No, that didn't qualify me for admission to the "elite." And it didn't upset me, because they thought of themselves as elite, and I didn't. So it didn't deprive me of anything. But coming to Norfolk from there was a revelation, because I walked right out of an unfriendly, insulated atmosphere into a very warm reception place where I never saw so many people at one time that wanted to help you and be your friend. | 17:00 |
| Mary Hebert | That's just within the community, or within the school system? | 17:47 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No, I didn't come into the— I came here to teach at the college. | 17:49 |
| Mary Hebert | So you taught at Norfolk State? | 17:52 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Which was their Norfolk division of Virginia State College. Because my husband had come. We had married the year before, so he was then my husband. And he had already been working here for a year, and I stayed in Alexandria. And dual residence is not recommended for first year marriages, and I found out the reason why. | 17:53 |
| Mary Hebert | When did you move back? When did you move down? | 18:18 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I was invited to join the faculty here that next year. But here, I found that, I think probably at the business level, there was much more interaction among Blacks and Whites than I had experienced in Newport News and Alexandria, which I categorized as cold cities. Norfolk is a warm city. I found Black businessmen who were succeeding and had the support of White community. I did not see so much hard and fast separation going on all the time. But it was something atmospheric about it that, it was a very welcoming place and it made you feel comfortable to do a lot of things in the community. This community had a thriving business life among the Black people. And I'm talking about now social life— | 18:21 |
| Mary Hebert | [indistinct 00:19:39]. | 19:38 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | — The church. Yeah. There, plus businesses like newspapers and mortuaries, and not necessarily just merchants. Banks, the college, although it was an infant at the time, all of that. | 19:38 |
| Mary Hebert | What was the social life like? | 19:57 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Very, very active. Very active and very elegant. | 19:59 |
| Mary Hebert | Parties? | 20:04 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Parties and or balls or just at homes, can you call up, and I'm having a few friends over on Friday evening or Saturday, and we'd like you and your wife to— Usually call my husband and ask him. But the Black newspaper, which still exists, [indistinct 00:20:38], the social activities took up a whole page every week. And these were people who were busy people. A lot of them were well—traveled or whatnot. They were living real lives. I didn't experience a sense of being confined so much. I did run head on into the laws of the land. For instance, as soon as I came here, I became active with the Norfolk Symphony, because my husband and I wanted all of our music majors to attend the subscription season. | 20:05 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | They didn't have that many concerts in those days. We'd see maybe about five the whole year. But at that time, the Virginia law said that there were only certain places that we could sit in the hall. We required students to come, but I had to ask the faculty. They said they wanted to sit in the loads, they don't want to sit in the balcony. I didn't blame them. It's uncomfortable up there. | 21:23 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | It's kind of a crow's nest in that building. Couldn't breathe. Something was wrong with the air system. But anyway, I was told by the director of the facility that the only way they'd ever get to sit in the loads is if they bought up a whole section, because he wasn't going to jail behind having Negroes sit in where the law said they're not allowed to sit, and if he mixed them up, he would get fired. And he was right. I just hated to see him enjoy telling me that so much, but he was right. | 21:52 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | So that existed. You couldn't escape that. But the arts community here was certainly not as active as it is now, but it was revving up, and I met many of the practicing musicians, and I later on worked with— I was on the [indistinct 00:22:47] board and one thing and another. Those activities had nothing whatsoever to do with what color you were, or where you were if you were— Most of the time the board meetings were at somebody's home or something like that. So that was an atmosphere that was on a much more personal level, and so I think I could describe that as an error when most of the limitations that we felt were, if not all strictly legal, strictly imposed by law. And when I say we, then I meant my husband and I— | 22:23 |
| Mary Hebert | Like the segregation in the symphony hall and those kinds of things? | 23:35 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. Those were the things that were imposed by the Commonwealth Law, but not because it was the will of the people with whom we were affiliated and with whom we interacted socially or otherwise. And found it to be very pleasant that— And as I said, very different from having come, as I did, from Alexandria, which was— I don't know if it ever changed, but it was one place that I was glad to leave. I'll put it that way. | 23:38 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Then staying here at the college, which till this day, not as desperately and not as intensely as before, but till this day has to fight an image problem that Norfolk State University has an outstanding faculty. Now, people never take two catalogs, put the faculty section together and see from school A and school B, how many people have terminal degrees from the same universities. They had the same kind of training. They got a PhD from University of Minnesota or LSU or Michigan or you name it. This one is inferior. This PhD from Harvard is inferior to this PhD from Harvard, because this one is at a Black school. | 24:24 |
| Mary Hebert | And so it's still viewed as an inferior school. It was at the time. | 25:29 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Oh yeah, we haven't gotten out of that yet. We've come a long way, a long way, but it was not just by White people, but just viewed that way. Now, part of it had to do with the fact that it came literally from nowhere and developed. It has developed very rapidly. But in order to be a just critic, you really do have to play the flip side as often as possible. Let me take it from the point of view of parents who lived here whose children were nearing college age, and these parents had themselves attended college, and nearly all of them had gone to boarding school colleges. Very different than a public commuting college, as you know. They would look at a struggling little school that is a division of a college in another city in donated space still. In 1948 when I came, we were located in an abandoned nurse's home on the premises where they had been a hospital, and the hospital had relocated on the west side of town. That was the division. | 25:32 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And they would've looked at that and said, no, I'm not sending my kid over there. So we did get students who did not have financial resources to go away to school, but that does not mean that they could not have been admitted elsewhere. | 27:04 |
| Mary Hebert | They just didn't have the money to? | 27:21 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Didn't have it, yeah. The parents couldn't— And when they finished the two years— We only provided two years. When they went to other, I don't recall— I know none that I taught was ever rejected. They transferred right into their junior year and kept on going. So some teaching was going on, but visibly in every other what was visible looked so poor, so inferior in every way that how else could people construct it in their own minds? We knew that it wasn't inferior teaching going on there, but these people were not in our classrooms every day. | 27:22 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | They passed by that dilapidated building every— That's a college? They got nerve to call that a college? Now, this was as recent as— As I said, I started in '48. Now, we remained a division of the college in Petersburg until 1969. By that time, we had four years approved teaching and we became Norfolk State College. 10 years later became Norfolk State University. | 28:10 |
| Mary Hebert | So not until '79? | 28:40 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Not until 79. In 1969, I became head of the music department. I remained in that position and worked as hard as every other department and everybody else there at the college, because we had an inspired leader in those days. In 1979, the state approved university status and we reorganized into schools rather than colleges, and I became Dean School of Arts and Letters, and kept on working very hard, because that school still has to push itself up in public esteem, you see. We get a lot more out—of—state students now that we have dorms and so forth and so on, but there's still an image problem that has to be lived through. It's like a virus. You have the best physician and the most sophisticated antibiotics, and if it's a four day course that is going run, and you on day two, you just going to have to deal with it for two more days. | 28:41 |
| Mary Hebert | So Norfolk State's just going to have to deal with the image problem? | 29:50 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Until eventually it dies out. | 29:54 |
| Mary Hebert | And they'll be accepted as— | 29:57 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I think eventually. Maybe not even in my lifetime, but it's come a long way. One of the things that did help us is, history has paralleled to great extent. The history of Old Dominion University, which began as a division of William & Mary, and then became independent, and then became a university and so forth, they had an image problem similar, but it was not compounded with the race issue, you see. So it was an experience. People ask me sometimes, "Why did you stay there so long? Why did you stay at a bad college all that time?" And I said, "Your question has provided part of the answer. Because it was to me an incomparable experience to be where no year replicated a previous year." | 29:59 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | The total history of that school has been development, and I like to see things develop. Also, I can't tell you how many hundreds of youngsters I know would not have had a college education at all if they could not have gotten it or at least started it there, because families couldn't— And to this day, I could go to a commencement, I look out on those 12, 1300 graduates, and I know probably half of them still are first generation college graduates in their respective families. That means a lot. | 30:54 |
| Mary Hebert | And that's what it provides for— | 31:29 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | That's what it provides for this community. And you can't buy a community, but you live in it. You got to pay your rent some kind of way. That has been the compensation that goes beyond any remuneration that anybody who works at a public institution is ever going to get. And having stayed in the hood, as kids call it now, since I'm still in the hood, I can't go anywhere without my former students. The interesting thing now is, they're showing me snapshots of their grandchildren. But they come and they remember and they call, and all the way back to the '50s. I had a call last week, one of my friends, one of my former students that I taught back in the '50s, and he's now head of music department at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and he called to give me— "I want to update you on something that happened since you were out here." | 31:30 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I was out there during the winter doing— The university asked me to come as an evaluator for the music programs, and I made some very strong recommendations. He said, "I don't know what you told them, but some things—" But he said, "I told them they just had to have you. They want to know who to bring. I don't want you to bring but one person out here." And I said, "Well, who is she?" "Nevermind. She taught me back in the—" "You still remember her?" "I'll always remember her." This I get all the time. In this community, we see the contributions of the students to— Not only from Norfolk State, but any college. There's a lot more [indistinct 00:33:25] great colleges, are making to what was made possible once the civil rights movement took place, that these are people who have— Well, we've all capitalized on it. | 32:39 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | We've taken whatever advantages out of it we could, but these are people I think who are trying to put something else into it and make— If there is such a thing as a Black community or a White community or any other ethnic unclad, to make it the best it can be, to make it so it will not resent or derogate or be insensitive to the fact that yours is not the only community, this is what I think our young people can understand better now, that there's some choices. You can choose where you live if pocketbook lets you. | 33:43 |
| Mary Hebert | And that's what guides people now more [indistinct 00:34:46]. You have to live in this community. | 34:44 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Exactly. If you can buy that property and maintain it, you can live there. But that being said, if you're going to live there, live that right. Be a part of that community. You can't let your property get run down, never get your grass cut, play loud music, any ordinary little things like that. Keep up, be a part of that neighborhood. You move into a neighborhood, be a part of the neighborhood, wherever it is. If you can buy a half million dollar house, fine, but then you got to live like you lived in a half million dollar house neighborhood. Well, it's those kinds— We didn't have options, now there are options. This is the beauty of what happened with the civil rights movement that it provided. This is cause for the fury and the desperation that we are feeling since Justice Thomas engaged in what is being almost universally called an act of betrayal. | 34:48 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And it's increindistinct that that should have happened. It happened. As I'm in a incurable optimist, I hope something good comes out of it. I don't know what that can be. I read the headline this morning. I just turned the paper over. Did you see the pilot this morning? | 36:09 |
| Mary Hebert | No, I didn't get a chance to read through it. | 36:25 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | [indistinct 00:36:28] Affirmative action swept aside because the California regents voted yesterday to throw out affirmative action. Why? I think they made it until after Clinton made his speech the day before. So this would be another smack in the face for him, you see? But things that have happened, you at LSU, I'm thinking— My God, why wouldn't his name come to me? He may have retired already. Went to LSU from Southern University. | 36:29 |
| Mary Hebert | Huel Perkins? | 37:00 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Perkins. Thanks. He would kill me if he knew his name didn't come to the surface of my mind. If you know it— | 37:01 |
| Mary Hebert | [indistinct 00:37:11] To my mind. | 37:10 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I bet it did. If you know him, you will know that he couldn't even imagine that his name would not come right away. Need I say more? I've known him for quite a while, but even when he was over at Southern, and he was one of the early ones to go to a different kind of institution, and he felt he had an obligation to do— | 37:11 |
| Mary Hebert | To go onto LSU? | 37:35 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Oh, something similar. Because we talked about it, because he couldn't understand— See, in the '70s, I I called myself a [indistinct 00:37:49], and I got invitations to join, you name it, all the— Florida, Missouri. Because Black female PhD, I can meet all three quotas with one salary. I can put her by the door, she'll never get tenure, she'll never get promoted, but we can use the other two salaries to hire somebody that will get promoted and will get tenured. That's the way the game worked. I knew that. A lot of my friends moved around. Their opportunities for mobility were greater than mine, because I had three minor children that I was responsible for. My husband died in 1964, and I had to be very careful about moving a family around like that, especially for something that was obviously intended to use you, and I finally decided I need to stay where I am going to make a difference. | 37:37 |
| Mary Hebert | And that's why you stayed here? | 38:45 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yeah. So it's a long road. I'm talking from my earliest recollection, which is before 1930 to halfway through 1995, many, many, many changes. I guess the best way to end it would be to say often nowadays it occurs to me how unbelievable some of the things that have been made possible that didn't just happen. This is what I try to get young people to understand— | 38:47 |
| Mary Hebert | In your lifetime. There's a third generation [indistinct 00:39:27]. | 39:24 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | Yes. Yes. That if they can keep remembering— They can't remember all the history or the details there are. If they can keep remembering that these things were made to happen. They didn't just happen. They were made to happen. And now there's an opportunity to tell them, you have to be ever vigilant, and there's some fights you have to fight over and over again, but still, look where you are, and look what you can do, and look— My father, just being so frustrated about being deprived of an education, and he wanted you to go as far as you can. He would encourage you, [indistinct 00:40:10], you can study, you're a scholar, you're this, that and the other, and I sometimes think— We don't have family reunions that much. That generation down from me is so mobile that half of them are out of the country or somewhere we can't get together. | 39:27 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | But he has four grandchildren with PhDs. He has an engineer, a lawyer. This family didn't go into physical health services at all, I think, but all that kind of thing as a result of something that passed down from that household and transmitted through his sons and daughters to their children who just want to keep on going, keep doing what you're doing, keep studying, keep— And in their households, it is very clear what the values are. And someone asked me did I push them. I didn't have to push my children. They didn't need pushing. They were in an environment where I guess they expected of themselves certainly as much as I expected of them, but their lives reflect totally, in my opinion, things that I at their ages could not have dreamed of, because the laws changed, because people made them change. | 40:24 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | I think we should never allow people that we are responsible for to forget that, and that laws are organic, and that they can change back again. Be vigilant while you're celebrating that, I can live anywhere I want to because I can pay for the house. Remember that what it took to get there, and that job you have may not last as long as you thought now because of some other kinds of things. I'm kind of glad I lived during that period. I'm glad I lived of course. I guess everybody did during the periods that I did, because the span included real monumental changes in the history of this country that established certain milestones in my life, which are in a sense secondary to the fact that they were milestones in the history of the country, what you could be, what you could do. | 41:54 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | And then we know that what you can be often results from what you're allowed to do. I think that when I get a chance to read your project, that you will have heard this story over and over again from so many people about what they have recognized as the monumental steps in their lives and how it's impacted the various people, but I'm just so glad to know that it's going to happen. | 43:02 |
| Mary Hebert | Yeah. Well, I'm finished with my questions. Do you have anything else to add? | 43:27 |
| Georgia Atkins Ryder | No, I don't think there could be. | 43:31 |
| Mary Hebert | Okay. Well— | 43:33 |
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