Hollis Shaw interview recording, 1997 October 10

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Peter Messick	This is Peter Messick, recording Hollis Shaw on October the tenth.	0:03
Hollis Shaw	Good morning, Peter.	0:09
Peter Messick	Well, could you tell me about your community? You grew up in Durham, is that correct?	0:12
Hollis Shaw	Yes. I was born in Durham, and I grew up in a section that at that time was called the West End, and it is now called the Lyon Park section. As a matter of fact, it's a little smaller than it was geographically when I grew up, and I was right near the elementary school, within two blocks of the elementary school. And the elementary school was an all Black elementary school, Black teachers, Black principal, Black students, and the community abutted on two ends—I guess on four sides it abutted the White community.	0:19
Hollis Shaw	On one side there was Forest Hills, The other part abutted part of Kent Street and then there was a part that touched on the university, Duke University Drive, I guess. Of course when I grew up in Durham, there were probably seven or eight distinct Black communities. And to get from one to the other, you always had to go through a White community and West End was no different.	0:57
Peter Messick	Well, can you describe your family life?	1:31
Hollis Shaw	Well, we had a rather extensive family there in the West End because I had grandmothers, grandparents. My mother's mother was alive, and my father's mother and grandmother and stepfather were alive. I had aunts and uncles. No first cousins, but a lot of other relatives, and they took pride in their ownership. My grandmother owned a house, my uncle owned a house, a second uncle owned a house, three houses in a row on one street. It was Rock Street. Then my grandmother owned a house and my Aunt Laci owned a house. My Aunt Ember. As a matter of fact, I don't think—we may have been the only ones that rented, most of my relatives owned their own homes then. Small modest homes, it was a blue collar working community.	1:39
Peter Messick	Were you all in the same community?	2:41
Hollis Shaw	All in the West End. Probably about eight or ten homes owned by the family. A religious group of people who attended Sunday school and attended church on Sunday. We put a premium on education, believing it was a way to get beyond any kinds of barriers that you might face in life.	2:44
Peter Messick	Was your family—how long has it been in Durham? Can you me give your best idea?	3:09
Hollis Shaw	Well, on my mother's side, my grandmother moved to Durham with my mother and her other two daughters around 1912. They moved from Chapel Hill. On my father's side, they were in Durham by the time my father was eleven. I'm not certain when they moved to Durham, my father was born in 1898 so that by 1909, and probably 1907, they were in Durham. They moved from Garner. So neither family came from very far away, Garner's just on the other side of Raleigh.	3:17
Peter Messick	Well, let me see. What do you remember of your grandparents occupation?	4:16
Hollis Shaw	On my mother's side, my grandmother worked for a family that owned a florist. I think it was Rolls, R-O-L-L-S, Florist. My grandmother, my father's mother did not work. My grandfather on my father's side worked. He worked at Liggett and Myers, and I remember he liked to drink beer. It was a very interesting thing, on Morehead Avenue there was a grocery store, a guy named Wilkerson who owned the store, was this White store owner, and they had large barrels filled with, we call them soda crackers, they're just Saltines. And he always had a wheel of cheese on the counter. This is a little mom-and-pop grocery store. The men could go in that store and buy beer and stand there at the counter and drink it, and reach in the barrel and get crackers or eat cheese, et cetera.	4:21
Hollis Shaw	And it was an integrated setting. So anybody who walked in—it wasn't so much an integrated setting except that he didn't make any distinction between who put the hand in the barrel to get cheese, or I mean crackers or cheese, and everybody stood up at the bar. And my grandfather used to go there, and that was probably about six blocks from where my grandparents lived. And he would go there and have his fill with beer and then he'd come home on a Saturday afternoon and sit on the back porch and play his—I want to say harmonic, it's not that. The clarinet.	5:40
Peter Messick	Clarinet.	6:17
Hollis Shaw	Mournful sounds, I remember that, and both of them, one grandmother was very religious on my mother's side. And I think that if you talk to any family member, they would talk about her in terms of her goodness, she never saw evil in anyone.	6:18
Hollis Shaw	Now, the Rolls family she worked for, and I'm talking about 1940 maybe, as late as 1940, paid her five dollars a week and she frequently walked to work and walked from work. An aunt of mine lived with her and that aunt was a very assertive, very aggressive woman who could spend a dollar, could loan that dollar out and still have it. And she retired my grandmother, she didn't want her to work in that, because we as kids hated it. I don't think I ever heard my mother say anything about it. Even then, I know there was exploitation. I mean, sometimes they bring her home and she was, I don't know what, when she was retired she was probably in her fifties, and the little kids always referred to her by the first name.	6:37
Hollis Shaw	It started without any dignity, except that was a pattern. And my grandmother accepted it, but my aunt didn't. And so she said to retire, "I can afford to give you the same kind of money by staying at home." So she stopped working in the early forties. I don't remember exactly what year.	7:47
Peter Messick	How old was she then?	8:03
Hollis Shaw	In her fifties? And that's interesting because she didn't qualify for social security and neither did my father's mother qualify for social security. And there were a lot of people in the community, older people who I recall who worked and worked and worked until they just simply couldn't work. They had to be supported by family or kin because there was no support. And during the time there was in each county, I don't know that—in the county of Durham, there was what was known as a poor house.	8:07
Hollis Shaw	And I remember going to a play on a Sunday afternoon at Lyon Park school, and the name of the play was "Over the Hill to the Poor House". And didn't understand it then, but some of the older people came out of the play crying because it was [indistinct 00:08:53]. I thought it was a funny play, but I think it must have been a morbid play. But if you didn't have funds then that's where you ended up. The government took care of you by sending you to a place where older people who were indigent lived. And I suspect nearly every county in the state had it. I don't know that.	8:38
Peter Messick	And you would actually take up residence in the poorhouse?	9:12
Hollis Shaw	Very much like you do in a nursing home now when you're sick and can't afford to be at home.	9:18
Peter Messick	Well, can you tell me about your parents occupations or—?	9:23
Hollis Shaw	Both my mom and dad worked for the American Tobacco Company. My father was a semi-skilled worker. He was called a sacker. The American Tobacco Company, as you probably know, made Bull Durham tobacco. And that came in a little sack and people rolled their own. There was a machine that I guess extruded tobacco and you had to put the sack under there and pull it off and tied and just constantly working. But you had to have good coordination, hand eye coordination and stamina to work that job. And he worked the job, so he was making, I guess, better than the average worker's wage because of that occupation. My mother worked there, and I don't know what she did in her formative years as an employee, but eventually she was just a person who swept around various parts of the factory.	9:27
Hollis Shaw	During the war years, World War II, my father left and went to Sparrow's Point. He went to Baltimore and worked at Sparrow's Point, which is a shipyard, defense work. There was a great call throughout the nation for defense workers because we were producing equipment and elements for the war effort. So one might assume that a person who goes to do that is doing something that's honorable. Well after the war, when he came back the American Tobacco Company would not hire him because he left them and went away. So he ended up working at Duke University in the housekeeping department, Duke University Hospital.	10:30
Hollis Shaw	And my mom retired from the American Tobacco Company in, I guess '72, the same year my father died. Well, maybe she retired in '73 the next month. And incidentally they held a reunion, the American Tobacco Company, just a couple of weeks ago, I think it was October the fifth at the Duke Homestead here, of factory workers. Very interesting. I guess it's the age of nostalgia, everybody's having reunions.	11:17
Peter Messick	The current situation with tobacco, it may well be.	11:50
Hollis Shaw	And my father was a prolific reader and he brought home magazines that people didn't normally see in our community. Police Gazette, for example, recalled him bring it home. There was a plethora of Black newspapers. The Journal and Guide was one of the papers out on Norford. He used to bring that home. He also brought home the Carolina Times and something like the Sporting News. So we saw things I think that other kids didn't see. I had an uncle, his brother, lived in Philadelphia and he worked for the Naval Yard.	11:58
Hollis Shaw	And he used to send a lot of interesting things home that we had, I think other kids didn't have. Some simple things like a pencil sharpener, the kind you saw in school that you can mount to the wall and kids just come in next door, come and sharpen a pencil, those kinds of things. And an aunt who worked at Duke University in the dormitories. She was a great aunt. Apparently the dormitories had maid service years ago, I guess in the forties. I don't know if you have that now. Probably have to clean your own room now.	12:44
Peter Messick	Yes, they take care of everything else.	13:24
Hollis Shaw	But they used to do the rooms and everything and students everywhere, they would just leave stuff, so we always had plenty of school supplies. And the other things we got a lot of, quite a few tennis rackets and a softball glove, a baseball glove or a tennis ball. And every year she would come home with that kind of stuff. And we were not the only children, but we were the closest children to her. So my sister and I got a lot of stuff that came right from Duke University.	13:24
Peter Messick	Can you tell me, can you remember any important issues that occurred in your community while you were growing up? Community battles or—?	14:04
Hollis Shaw	Well, probably the one that most people would remember had to do with the church. Working class neighborhood, probably fully half the community living in rental houses and some of those houses, shotgun houses, but dual shotguns. Three rooms on this side and three rooms in their house on that side. And the way people would talk is that—we lived adjoining to the Grahams, if you lived in the left side, they lived in the right, they call it adjoining two houses. Adjoining rooms or something like that.	14:15
Peter Messick	Sounds like a duplex.	14:56
Hollis Shaw	That's what it is. A duplex. But they were shotgun structured, not necessarily shotgun houses, because a shotgun house, you could stand at the front door and look out the back door, but sometimes they set—	14:57
Peter Messick	[indistinct 00:15:09] Shotgun.	15:09
Hollis Shaw	Right, right. They would set the doors apart. But essentially that kind of housing, about half the community lived in that kind of house. So it was not a very affluent neighborhood, but at some point in the early fifties, part of the church, Second Baptist Church which was on a corner of Morehead and Kent Street, had a schism. Half the membership wanted to retain the minister, another half wanted to get rid of the minister. Big controversy, families stopped speaking to each other. Some families moved their membership to a church outside of the community. As a matter of fact, the family that lived right next door to my grandmother did that, just went all the way across town to church.	15:09
Hollis Shaw	The police had to be called and eventually the church was padlocked for a day or so. And that's critical because the church is the center of the Black community. Even today it's very, very influential in the Black community. And eventually half the population moved four blocks down the street and built a church equally as large as that church that I come from. That was probably the most controversial thing that happened in the community when I was growing up.	16:05
Hollis Shaw	Some of the other things I would not necessarily know about. For example, I came back here 1959 I went to grad school, so I was here for the first year of the civil rights movement. But that wasn't a controversial thing in the community, that was like a unifying factor, pulled people together. But this pulled people apart and some families that are still estranged from each other because of that split up in that church.	16:43
Peter Messick	Well, you mentioned this elementary school in your neighborhood. Did you begin your education there? And I know that you attended some type of boarding school.	17:16
Hollis Shaw	The elementary school, Lyon Park is still there and the church that my family belonged to, that Second Baptist Church has just recently acquired that school because the school has been vacant for a number of years and they're going to make a community center out of it. But I went to that school the first through the sixth grade, and then the process was to transfer across town to Hillside.	17:27
Peter Messick	Can you describe differences between your education and your parents' education?	18:01
Hollis Shaw	My dad only went to about the third grade, even though he was a prolific reader. And he used to do things like, he kept a diary too. Not after he got married, but before he got married he kept a diary. We found some of the diaries where he has sporadic interest in. He didn't write every day, but one of the cryptic things in a diary we saw not too long ago said something like—he was in Baltimore at the time, woke up this morning with five big ones, had a quarter at sundown or something like that, indicating that he—we don't know whether five big ones were five one-dollar bills or five five-dollar bills. But another entry talked about the time he purchased a fish and cooked it for breakfast, ate half of it, left it on the table, cat got fish. That kind of stuff.	18:07
Hollis Shaw	So he had an interest in writing and I don't know if you even heard that kind of stuff, but you certainly learn it from your parents. And he knew the words to many songs, he made up songs. He played a ukulele. Sometimes he would sit and sing, and he would have the right tune but he would just didn't know the words, so he'd simply make up words to songs. But in third grade, and my mother probably went to the sixth grade, but by far he was the more educated one. But neither one went to junior high school.	19:20
Hollis Shaw	And I guess that's why they believe so strongly in education because they believed that education was a way of getting out of the level of poverty that we were in. And the most admired people that we knew were probably the teachers over at that little school. And my mother and my aunt, I guess were intelligent looking and very good dressers, and they were frequently mistaken for teachers. And that would just make their day.	19:52
Peter Messick	So you went to Hillside and that was a segregated school time too?	20:26
Hollis Shaw	Hillside was segregated, yes. I went a year there. Then I went to boarding school.	20:36
Peter Messick	Now what boarding school was this?	20:40
Hollis Shaw	Lincoln Academy. It was twenty miles south west of Charlotte. Almost on the South Carolina, North Carolina line. Little town called Kings Mountain. Famous for revolutionary history. You know, you're a history major.	20:43
Peter Messick	Nice little park down there.	21:00
Hollis Shaw	That's right.	21:02
Peter Messick	What made you decide to go to that school?	21:02
Hollis Shaw	I didn't decide. It was decided for me. It was during the war and people talk about working class families or working moms. That was the norm in my community, for mothers to work if there were jobs available. I can't recall a time when mothers in my community didn't work, but somehow during the war there were many more negative influences impacting on the environment, on the community and a lot of kids were finding jobs too, they'd drop out of school. I think there were three first grade classes that when I started to Lyon Park, and those classes probably averaged twenty-eight to thirty kids.	21:09
Hollis Shaw	I'm the only boy to finish high school out of those three classes. So the dropout was just simply devastating. And they were dropping out during the transition from sixth grade to seventh grade, tremendous number of youngsters dropped out. It's a new environment, there are new people to meet, mom and dad are away working. There's no one pushing the kid, no support, so my family wanted to get us out of that.	21:59
Hollis Shaw	So my sister had gone away to boarding school a couple years before me and my mom had a child when I was in the sixth grade, seventh grade, I had been an honor student and I went to Hillside and I just fell apart. I made straight Fs or Ds and my parents said, "Out of here." The boarding school the next year, I made straight As. So it was an effort to salvage us, both my oldest sister and I.	22:27
Hollis Shaw	In addition to that, they really believe that was the gateway to success, and I think we thought of success in terms of material things. It certainly was a way out of what they saw was working hard, doing manual things. To get us off the streets too, because my sister particularly, she was associating with youngsters that my parents felt were not going to go anywhere. There was always this great fear that your daughter might get pregnant, a great fear that your son might do something to irritate someone White and get hurt.	23:12
Hollis Shaw	And Black parents, a lot of them practice what I would say, teaching kids survival skills. You teach them how to make the adjustment in an environment that was not very, very friendly. And you teach them to gather to themselves whatever skills they can to get past that environment. So I think they sent us the school to help us move beyond the level we were born into.	24:02
Peter Messick	Your older sister went to the same school?	24:27
Hollis Shaw	Yeah, And we went there forever. I mean, we were there for six years each. And indeed, when we leave here, we're going to go to Kernersville to visit some friends that we knew from boarding school. Our closest friends today are not college friends, but those who we grew up with in boarding school. And we have a friend in Kernersville who retired as Warden of the Hudson County Jail. He used to be warden of Essex County Jail in New Jersey, and he's been in Kernersville four or five years. And just this week his cousin who also went to boarding school with us and is from Brooklyn, born and bred in Brooklyn, but went to boarding school with us. She just bought house in Kernersville. So they're still out sort of tight little knitted group.	24:28
Peter Messick	How did your family manage to work out all the logistics of getting you down to Charlotte?	25:28
Hollis Shaw	Well, it's an extended family, so that it was not only my parents who took responsibility for the cost, it was my aunt, my grandmother, my uncles. And to be away in school and doing it successfully was like being an athlete. Even the kids in the community began to look at us differently. One of the things that happened initially is your speech pattern begins to change, as much the influence of the educational system, but probably more the influence of the students who were there.	25:37
Hollis Shaw	Fully half of the students who were in that boarding school were kids who grew up in Washington and North of Washington. So suddenly we are speaking like them. Kids who are dropping out of school suddenly begin to look at you differently, not in awe but in appreciation. "Oh, well he's going to do something in life. He's going to be somebody."	26:25
Hollis Shaw	And we had experiences that they didn't have. For example, we went to boarding school by way of train. There was this train, Southern Railway, I guess it was. Go from Durham to I don't know where, I probably made it up. Probably goes from Durham to Greensboro—change. We'd meet the kids coming down from Washington and we'd go to our school. Trains are so important to us that if you talked to someone who went to that boarding school, forty years out of that boarding school, they could tell you the time the trains left.	26:49
Hollis Shaw	And I did a survey when we had our first reunion, and we didn't have class reunions, we had had school reunions because boarding schools have small classes. And in the newsletter, I asked the people if they remembered the train schedule and everybody remembered it. There was a train going home in the afternoon at 3:18 p.m. and one going home at night at 8:12 p.m.	27:32
Hollis Shaw	We took over trains the same way students take over planes today. I mean, if there were fifty of us on that train, you can believe we're making a lot of noise. We were irritating a lot of people. We were petting out in the public and we were just sort of running wild I guess but we had a good time. But that's how we traveled for the most part, by train. My aunt had a car, the one that lived with my grandmother that she retired her, and they would come down to visit us occasionally. We'd go in September, we'd have a break at Thanksgiving and sometimes the family would come down. We did not usually come home at Thanksgiving.	28:06
Hollis Shaw	Then we'd take the train home at Christmas, go back in January and again the year. As a matter of fact, it is such a nostalgic thing to remember, a pleasant thing to remember what we did that five or six years ago, probably twenty of us took a train from New York City down to Washington just to relive that spirit of having grown up as we were on the trains.	28:44
Peter Messick	Same atmosphere in the train?	29:13
Hollis Shaw	Well, much different, much better seat. I mean, we were on coal stokers. You could open the windows of trains then and cinders would blow right in on you. And of course, again, the cars were segregated and the dining cars were segregated and vendors came by selling sandwiches, et cetera. And people who travel always packed a lunch, at least Blacks who travel always packed to lunch and almost invariably it was a fried chicken. But that's how we got to school, and I don't know what the cost was. It wasn't very, very much at the time.	29:15
Peter Messick	Well, how did attending boarding school affect the rest of your career?	30:00
Hollis Shaw	Well—	30:03
Peter Messick	You already said—	30:04
Hollis Shaw	Parochial schools are, and it was parochial school, are always different from even just plain private schools because parochial schools believe that you should do something in your life to improve the human condition. Really say what it is, and they're so adamant about it they literally are—well, not literally, but they figuratively say to you, "Well, if you don't do something, go out and do something good, we'll break your leg." I mean, you have to go out and do something good. You have a responsibility beyond yourself.	30:04
Hollis Shaw	You have responsibility to try to succeed, but beyond that, you have a responsibility to do something that benefits humanity. So that was probably the main thing in boarding school that was a change in my life, I think in the lives of a lot of people, is that you'd not only have to try to reach as high as you can on a ladder, but you ought to be pulling somebody up behind you as you go up the ladder.	30:39
Hollis Shaw	And it was drummed into your head, drummed into your head. This school was run by the American Missionary Association, AMA. Congregational Church is what it was called, and there were a number of schools throughout the country that were congregational schools, are sponsored initially by that organization. Both boarding schools and colleges and they all had that service orientation to them. They all had—	31:06
Hollis Shaw	The boarding schools had for the most part, a college preparatory program. And most of the colleges were liberal arts colleges. So you almost had to go beyond a bachelor's degree to do anything. That probably is the greatest influence. The second, probably greatest influence is that it tied us into my lifelong friendship base with people who had other kinds of experiences than we'd had. People who grew up in various parts of the country that we could only dream about at the time we met them.	31:37
Hollis Shaw	So we had the advantage over the kids in our community. We had the advantage of experiencing things vicariously, so that I knew about the subways in New York City years before I ever saw a subway. I knew how cold it was from the youngsters talking in Chicago long before. And I knew that in [indistinct 00:32:41] Michigan, there was a house for the mentally ill because of a guy who came from that area. So we got a lot of kinds of things and experienced a lot of things through the lives of other people. And that's an enriching kind of thing, and sometimes an ennobling kind of thing depending on what the experience is.	32:13
Peter Messick	Sounds like you had kids from all over the United States. Is there a specific geographic area that school serving?	33:01
Hollis Shaw	No, from all over the United States.	33:09
Peter Messick	That's a little bit of a fun question, but what is your most memorial experience from school? Something that really sticks out in your mind.	33:10
Hollis Shaw	From that school?	33:19
Peter Messick	From that school.	33:19
Hollis Shaw	Oh man, there's so many. One of the things that we did my senior year, it was sort of a negative thing. Well, let me tell you a very positive thing. We didn't have a gym. We had a very small campus. We hadn't had a gym. We played basketball practice at the gym of a public school and our senior year, the team that was the host for the tournament, and it was probably the best team in the conference. My senior year, we had developed a habit of chewing orange peelings during a game, and I think that came from the fact I used to have terrible stage fright before a game or any other kind of thing. And I had started eating oranges and one day I just accidentally started chewing orange peels and it sort of settle my stomach and by the end of my senior year, the whole team was doing that.	33:20
Hollis Shaw	And we got to the gym for the tournament and I had forgotten the oranges. And some kid ran to the store and bought a dozen oranges and we just got out on a court in time, but everybody was stuffed with oranges and we had just a fantastic game. I mean, throw the ball up anywhere you want to, the ball would go in the basket that night and that's one of the kind of sports things they still talk about, the guys	34:33
Hollis Shaw	I went to school with. But a number of other things happened, we used to have a lot of social activities at the sporting school. As a matter of fact, there were a lot of private clubs very much like you have fraternities, except there was no secret handshake and it wasn't Greek. But we had a number of private clubs and organizations, and for some reason the administration prior to a new one coming in allowed us to have parties any night of the week.	35:05
Hollis Shaw	You could have a dance any night of the week, and our teachers literally lived with us, so you saw teachers twenty-four hours a day. And we had a new director who decided this was inappropriate, he was not going to tolerate it. And he just summarily stopped it. He didn't talk to the students or anything, he just stopped it. The students decided to strike.	35:35
Hollis Shaw	So we had flyers going around the campus and everybody decided on this particular day they would not go to school. Now we had a little business venture on the campus and that was a canteen, a room about the size of this room here where you could buy sodas and candies and cakes and pies, et cetera. And my roommate and I knew that the guy who ran—the students ran it, who ran the canteen, was not going to go to the school that day. He decided he'd be a part of the strike.	35:58
Hollis Shaw	So he and I decided we were not striking. So when that kid went on the strike, of course he was fired, we applied for the job and we got to canteen. So we were rolling in money, we had all kinds of money. Those were good experiences. Eventually our senior year, we also were able to talk a guy in town of giving us the cleaning concession. So I think I made much more money in high school than I made in college. I think the other thing that stands out about that school is that we had a relatively large number of people coming into that school from the outside for cultural activities and indeed the board—Peter, this is my wife, Dr. Shaw.	36:37
Dr. Shaw	Good morning.	37:36
Peter Messick	Good morning.	37:36
Hollis Shaw	Peter's a student in Paul Ortiz's class.	37:38
Dr. Shaw	If there's a Robert Finch calls, I'll be back within half hour.	37:45
Hollis Shaw	Who is Robert Finch?	37:52
Dr. Shaw	Someone calling to get some information on the board, of Connie Johnson.	37:54
Hollis Shaw	Oh, okay.	37:57
Dr. Shaw	So I'll be back.	37:57
Hollis Shaw	Okay.	37:57
Dr. Shaw	Okay. Good meeting you.	37:57
Hollis Shaw	The board of directors was for the most part, Northerners. I don't know anybody, any southerners on the board. You've heard of the NAACP, right? The executive director of the NAACP at that time was a man named Walter White. And Walter White's brother was on the board and there was a Mr. Brown on the board. And the Congregational Church was centered of course in New England. So other people were from—but I remember those two people distinctly, I remember Walter White's brother because—no, it wasn't Mr. Brown, it was Mr. Black. Walter White's brother was indistinguishable from anybody who was White.	38:12
Hollis Shaw	And Walter White during the '30s attended a trial in Scottsboro, Georgia of four or five Black guys who were accused of raping a white woman on a train. They were all transients, hobos I guess, but Walter White sat in that courtroom and observed that trial, kept notes, sent them back to the northern press and no one in that town ever knew that he was Black because he was biologically White, but culturally Black.	39:18
Hollis Shaw	And that has played an important part in the history of Durham that few people know about, that scenario. There is still in surrounding Durham, I don't know if you know this or not, surrounding Durham there are a number of little pockets of populations that are indistinguishable from the White population in terms of the way they look, but they are Black. There's a place outside of Burlington called Little Texas, a place here outside of Durham by Hamer, Rougemont.	40:01
Hollis Shaw	And a place from near where my wife comes from, Ahoskie, where you find that kind of ethnic thing. But what I started telling you, I remember those people coming from New England and I don't know what I thought New England was, but I thought it was a different country. Because it didn't say it came from Massachusetts et cetera, these people came from New England, said, "Jesus, why are they over here in our country? They came from New England." I remember that very well.	40:38
Hollis Shaw	But I also remember we used to have all these—we had a Lyceum committee and they brought in the cultural kinds of things, roaming troubadours and other kinds of artists who came to the place and we had something once a month. I guess the thing that really stands out by mind and stands out in the minds of a lot of the people who went there was the social decorum that we were taught. You had to, at least once a year attend a formal dance, and so the school gave one and you had to dress, It was black and white tie affair. And you had to really get dressed up and the girls were in gowns and the large dining hall would clear, set all the tables aside and decorated. And when we had our first reunion—and when you went to dinner at night, you had to wear a tie.	41:06
Peter Messick	There were some group dinners, I'm assuming.	42:13
Hollis Shaw	In the cafeteria. You had to wear a tie, and before each meal, the bell board would ring a large bell and it was a hand pull bell from the bell tower. And that bell would ring, I don't know, in the morning it'd ring at maybe six o'clock and then it'd ring again maybe at six-thirty, And then five of seven it would ring for five minutes. And if you were not in a dining hall when that bell finished, you could not have breakfast. It was that way for each meal, but in the evening it was the same way. We had to dress for the evening meal. When we had the first reunion, we had a dance in a building that the air conditioner had died in. And it was very, very hot. We were in Gastonia for that first reunion dance, I think.	42:14
Hollis Shaw	And everybody was dressed in shirt and tie, et cetera. And not a person, according to one of the instructors who made a comment from the floor, took that tie off. And it seems like a small kind of thing, but it was that kind of social decorum that we were taught that there's certain things you do properly and that certain kinds of dress identify you as someone. So that becomes a badge and a symbol.	43:10
Hollis Shaw	And that carried over for me when I was here in Durham in the summers. People in small towns have a tendency, at least in poor communities, not to mail bills in, but to go downtown as it were, and pay the light bill and the phone bill and the gas bill, what have you. And no matter how hot it was, when my mom sent me downtown I always wore shirt and tie because that was a symbol that you were different, you were somebody.	43:39
Hollis Shaw	And then in downtown Durham, of course there was a North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance company and there was a large number of Blacks there who were dressed as businessmen et cetera, so that social decorum became a kind of badge of importance also, for most of us. So we cloaked ourselves in those things, and even now you may go to church, I don't know this, but you may go to church dressed as you are now.	44:12
Peter Messick	Pretty close.	44:48
Hollis Shaw	A large number of young people do this. You won't find it at hardly any Black church in Durham, you will find the shirt and tie, et cetera. Not only tradition, I think historically it may have been probably the only time most of us had a chance to wear a shirt and tie is going to church because most of us did manual kinds of labor.	44:48
Hollis Shaw	But that formalism was one of the things that we were taught in boarding school and it became more than just a matter of decorum, it became sort of like a badge of distinction to be dressed like that. So there just a whole lot of things in boarding school that changed the way we thought and the way we acted. And it's experience that I wish more people had because it was certainly a motivating experience. And I'm certain that could have occurred in—	45:12

Peter Messick	Okay.	0:00
Hollis Shaw	I was saying you probably could have learned the same kinds of things, gotten the same kind of motivation in public school because many kids did go to public school and were motivated just as highly as we were motivated. But one of the difference is that in private schools, and you go to Duke so you know this to be a fact, the student body is more selective and probably more homogenous than it is. Duke is certainly more homogenous than UNC. I would be willing to bet that without doing a survey. But that's—	0:06
Peter Messick	Economically.	0:36
Hollis Shaw	Well, intellectually also. There's a relationship—	0:38
Peter Messick	That's true.	0:41
Hollis Shaw	—between those two. So, same thing happens in private boarding schools, there's a selectivity of kids going there so that one tends to get more motivation because of that, I think. We had that experience so even though eventually you have a spectrum of friends, when you go to a little boarding school, there's more similarities than there are differences. There's not that diversity of economics or of intellect that you would find in public school.	0:41
Peter Messick	And this made you interested in excelling?	1:14
Hollis Shaw	Of course. Because as I said before, you learn vicariously also. Durham had plenty of Black models when I was a kid. There was no shortage in terms of models of teachers and lawyers and doctors in Durham. So we knew about that. But there were other kinds, but that wasn't something that I was able to touch first hand. I could touch some of those things through friends, however, and I could learn a little more. I could not have learned those things from the kids in my community because they didn't have those experiences either. So, it was not only the education, it was exposure, cross-cultural exposure, to the United States that you got in boarding school, at least in this boarding school. And yeah, I think that made a difference.	1:22
Peter Messick	And after boarding school, you went to college and what college did you go to?	2:10
Hollis Shaw	I went to Howard University in Washington, D.C. Initially. I went to Howard probably because I had a football scholarship. And also because my family wanted me to go there, Howard, probably considered by many Blacks, as the most prestigious Black college at the time. I don't know if that's true today. But I stayed there a couple years and I was drafted by the army because I didn't get up one morning to take the test. And I think I was happy to be drafted because I never really liked that school. It was too large and too impersonal.	2:15
Hollis Shaw	And then, I spent four years in the military, went to work in New York City as a printing apprentice. And some of my schoolmates had already finished school, college, and they were working in various entry level jobs in New York City. And before meeting them at the bar or for dinner, I would always have to go home and shower and change and scrub all that ink off my hands, et cetera. And some of them I began to look at said, "Geez, I was smiling at that guy in school." It was just crazy. And part of looking at the achievement of my schoolmates from boarding school sent me back to college.	3:07
Peter Messick	Did you return to Howard?	3:53
Hollis Shaw	Did not return to Howard. Returned to the school that was like the high school I went to. It was a school founded by the Congregational Church, the AMA Church. And that school was Talladega in Talladega, Alabama, which is probably most famous now for a race track when anything else, very small school. Again, highly selective. I mean valedictorians were a dime a dozen, they were all over the place.	3:54
Hollis Shaw	And there were kids who were going to go someplace, they were going to do something. And that's something you hear I think more from the Black community than you hear from the non-Black community. And that is the constant repeating of the fact that, "I'm going to be someone." And one would say, by definition, if you're in college, you're going to be somebody. But I think that by verbalizing that incantation becomes part of a possible belief system there, part of a possible motivation. It's like a religion.	4:24
Hollis Shaw	If you declare something publicly, you begin to practice it no matter what it is. That's part of a marketing concept. So, you hear a lot of people saying, "My kid is going to school. He's going to be somebody." Never specific. He's not going to be a lawyer or doctor or something. "He's going to be somebody." I think you hear that from a lot from poor neighborhoods because that tells you what the self-image is. That "poor" is really nobody that I want to be. I want to have my child go to school, become educated and become somebody. It's like a sad commentary on our society but that is probably something that's common to all poor areas. People want you—	5:01
Peter Messick	When you returned to college, did you have a specific career goal in mind or were you just trying to finish?	5:41
Hollis Shaw	No, I knew early on what I wanted to do. And I think I discovered that when I was overseas. When I was at Howard, I thought I would be a pre-med student. But coming back from service, I had become more interested in human behavior, more interested in psychology than anything else. And I knew I was going to major in psychology, so it wasn't a question for me, it was just going and do it. I was still tied into the concept of medicine. I got a minor in biology, didn't need to do that but that was where I was pretty much headed. And that's what I did. I got a degree in psychology and later on got a master's degree in psychology.	5:48
Peter Messick	Why didn't you use those degrees? And Paul told me that you were some type of medical administrator.	6:56
Hollis Shaw	I worked in North Carolina as a psychologist. I also taught at a college in Greensboro. And I worked in New York state and in Connecticut as a clinical psychologist, in all instances working for the state. And in New York state, I moved from psychology into administration for its head of the department. And later on, into other areas. There's a cricket. [Muffled microphone] I'm sorry, did it break loose?	7:02
Peter Messick	It's still going.	7:41
Hollis Shaw	I got into administration of a facility for the mentally retarded, developmentally disabled, some twenty years ago. And so I moved from psychology. One of the things about human service work, if you get involved in that, you don't necessarily find people always in charge of those facilities. Even the general hospitals who are necessarily trained in hospital administration.	7:41
Hollis Shaw	You find somebody excelling in his area and he's identified on a team and suddenly he's in another supervisor position. There were twenty centers state-operated in New York state. I think I knew two people out of that who were trained as hospital administrators. Most of us had come up through the clinical side and in the little town I lived in, the hospital administrator there was trained as a pharmacist. So, he came up through the clinical side also. But yeah, hospital administration for I guess the last twenty years.	8:15
Peter Messick	After you came out college, I guess, for the second time you worked in Durham in North Carolina for a while?	8:58
Hollis Shaw	Worked in Goldsboro.	9:02
Peter Messick	Goldsboro?	9:03
Hollis Shaw	Worked in Goldsboro. First psychologist at a new facility they built only for Black retarded people. This facility was open in 1958 or '59. I became a psychologist there in 1960. 600-bed facility. And a mile down the street from that facility was a psychiatric facility, Cherry Hospital. And I met my wife there. She came to work at Cherry Hospital and when she interviewed there, she had informed the administration that she would come there, but she wouldn't work in a segregated setting.	9:04
Hollis Shaw	And she got there in 1960, the dining rooms were segregated and the housing was segregated so she wouldn't live in a segregated housing. Now the facility a mile up the street, Oldbury Center where I worked, was built with Hill-Burton funds, a hospital construction fund. Federal legislation passed in the fifties. And you couldn't segregate people in those facilities.	9:59
Hollis Shaw	And even though this facility was built only for Black—it was built to house Black, mentally retarded people, theoretically they could take anyone in. And in the employment section and the housing, they did not segregate so that the dining rooms were integrated and the administration was quasi-integrated for the most part. The top positions were White, but there were some upper level positions like head of personnel or head of social service, head of psychology, head of education were Blacks.	10:28
Hollis Shaw	And my wife refused to live on a campus at the psychiatric center. Whites were given brick cottages, professionals, I mean, and she was qualified for a house, but they didn't have one for her. She wouldn't live in one of the little wooden cottages, she wouldn't live in the nursing home, so they moved her to the campus where we were because she had a private room, private bath, that wasn't segregated. And she didn't drive.	11:10
Hollis Shaw	The administration of Cherry Hospital would pick her up every morning and take her to the large dining room to eat, which was not segregated, wait for her, bring her back to her room and she would tie it up and do whatever she wanted to do. Time to go to work, they would drive her to work because she wouldn't even segregated dining hall down there. They would drive her back to Oldbury and she would have lunch. They would wait for her, drop her back to work. The other day they dropped her back to Oldbury because she refused it to eat in segregated facilities.	11:49
Hollis Shaw	Now she had a contract with the state, North Carolina, like many southern states, made special financial provisions for Blacks who wanted to go to professional schools, particularly medicine and law. And they could get stipends, they could borrow money.	12:24
Hollis Shaw	They literally were paid if you look at it, the position that the state took, they were literally paid, so they would not apply through the courts to go to White schools like UNC. So, she went to med school down in Tennessee, all-Black med school. And she had an agreement with the state that she would either practice in rural medicine or practice in a state facility. So, she elected to practice in a state facility, but she was going to practice only if it was not segregated. And since it was segregated, she worked there I guess six months and walked away from it and set up a private practice.	12:49
Hollis Shaw	But the whole era of segregation was not as people simply think separate facilities, but there was a concerted effort legally and socially to dehumanize Blacks. And the impact of that was really devastating because there were many Blacks who didn't believe they could achieve, who got all the negative messages from the environment saying that you can never be anybody and who met that self-fulfilling prophecy couldn't be anybody. And these little boarding schools were set up initially because there were no public schools you could attend. And they stayed long past their need because by the time most schools closed, there were many public schools for Blacks. [phone rings] Let me get that phone.	13:31
Peter Messick	Were oral histories in—	14:36
Hollis Shaw	We did oral histories at the institution where I worked. And we were unable to get oral histories of any previous residents. And that would have been interesting because New York state admitted people under the poor law. So, if you were indigent and you were picked up on the streets of New York City, and we accepted people mainly from New York City, and it happened that you were also a person who didn't test well or had a low intelligence course, so you could very well end up in the facility for the mentally retarded. Although you may be dull, normal in intelligence.	14:42
Hollis Shaw	And so, there were people who could have given us a lot of information about the facility. But this concept of all history is interesting because frequently people don't get a chance to write their own histories. And when they do, it turns out considerably different.	15:21
Hollis Shaw	Churchill says something to the effect that "the world would look kindly upon the British empires' involvement in World War II because I will write the history." And the history of Blacks is seldom written by them. So, this project makes a lot of sense in terms of hearing it from that perspective. Of course, oral histories don't have the same level of verification as written histories, but perception may be more important, sometimes a reality anyway.	15:43
Peter Messick	Written histories are based on someone's perception so it all goes back to a certain amount of—you have to verify everything.	16:18
Hollis Shaw	But if you look at the sixties and talked to Whites who were in Durham at the time and look at the sixties and talked with Blacks, I think you get a vastly different point of view of what the world was like. I mentioned to you that very fair-skinned Blacks played a major role in something that happened in Durham. The sit-down demonstration started in February, 1960. February first, 1960. Students sat down at that counter, Woolworths, in Greensboro. I was fortunate enough to have one of those students, again, in my class, a young fellow named Ezell Blair, who was one of the original four students. I taught him psychology at a college a year after the demonstration, not the year it happened.	16:29
Hollis Shaw	But the thing that happened as a first in Durham, Durham was a first place where the counter seats were taken out of. And the perception, I think, was that the seats were taken out to prevent Blacks from being served. That's only partly true. That wasn't the real reason they took the seats out. Students would come to those places at lunchtime and just mill in trying to get seats, pushing and shoving, et cetera. And the cops were out there.	17:30
Hollis Shaw	North Carolina Central College had a relatively large number of students who were very fair. And the procedure at the county at Woolworths, and I think the other store was Silvers, was that young White kids would occupy those seats, males, early. And when a White woman office girl came downstairs or came to have lunch, she would sit over the lap of the White kid and he would slide out and she would plop down the seat.	18:09
Hollis Shaw	Enter these very fair, complected youngsters who are Black, they would sit over the White kid's lap, he would plop down, give her the seat, she would relinquish her seat to someone of my complexion. The seats were taken out in Durham when they could no longer distinguish between who was Black and who was White. Very, very interesting. Now I told that story to a guy who published the Amsterdam News, which is probably the largest and probably one of the most prestigious Black newspapers on the East Coast.	18:49
Hollis Shaw	And he is from Durham. And he had never heard that story. And a lot of people have never heard that story. So, I said to myself, "Is this is a real story? Did I make this story up?" So, last year I talked to some people who also were here during the sixties, doing that through the sixties, the early sixties, and they said, "Yeah, now I remember that, but I had forgotten that." But I think in a place where segregation was a big factor, that's very interesting to me, that first of all, obviously there has been some relationship going on between the Black and White community to produce a population that's indistinguishable from White except by tracing the paperwork and seeing that there must be some Black blood involved.	19:27
Hollis Shaw	And secondly, people who believe in discrimination can't even tell who they discriminate against because there's so much alike. Very interesting thing happens. A lot of contradictions in the south about segregation and a lot of misunderstanding.	20:17
Hollis Shaw	I literally hated White people. I mean if you were White, that was it. And it turned my life around, I guess, in a lot of ways in terms of different kind of motivation. I recall, in boarding school, back to boarding school, we were going to a movie. We were on the school bus. We had a bus, Black and White bus. The bus was called Black Beauty. And we were getting ready to go to the local theater in Kings Mountain. And our coach came by and he was a man's man. All the fellas wanted to be like coach. I mean, he was a big guy. He was from New York City, had made All City in football in 1933. And he was really rough and tumble. He had been a lieutenant in World War II, he had been wounded, temporarily blind, temporarily crippled.	20:39
Hollis Shaw	He overcame that and he walked with a high gate and had a huge voice and he came by as we were sitting on the bus with our girlfriends, he says, "Where are you fellows going?" "We are going to the movies coach." "Going to the movies now. Where is that?" I said, "Oh, that's King's Mountain. You know that?" He said, "Oh yes, I know that. That's the one where you pay your money and then you walk up ten staff flights up to the balcony and you watch the movie there. "Is that right? That's where you pay to be segregated." He really gave us, humorously, hell. Went to the movie that day, could never go to the movie again. My wife has difficulty even having me go get the movie now. Just couldn't go.	21:34
Hollis Shaw	Because here's a guy who gives you some insight that here you're paying to be segregated. Worked at Duke University when I was sixteen, probably frightened my father to death because I sit in an empty seat on the bus, would not be segregated. And if I couldn't sit where there was an empty seat, I wouldn't ride the bus. I remember walking home with a suit, I had come downtown to pay a bill and had a suit on, just gotten out of the cleaners, hot as hell. At that point I decided I wasn't going to ride a segregated bus, walked home, soaking in a rainstorm.	22:21
Hollis Shaw	In the military, I was a guess a fairly good athlete. I played football, basketball, ran track, I played softball. But my highest motivation came if I was playing against a White kid because I don't played against White kids when I was growing up except a little bit in Farris Hill, that almost always ended up in a fight. And that was sandlot football. You got to play for a few minutes and then suddenly some adult male would come by and we would all scatter back across town, across the street as it were.	23:06
Hollis Shaw	But highly motivated to play against and to work against. And this went on for a long time before—it was a long time before I accepted the fact that just like all Blacks aren't alike, all Whites aren't alike. And it was a long time before I accepted that there were Whites who were not in favor of segregation but who were caught up in a system that they couldn't change and one I could change, and who didn't necessarily hate me but who went with the flow. And I think that's what people normally do. You go with the flow.	23:42
Hollis Shaw	It was just a few people willing to stand up and say, "Hey, I'm not accepting this." And it doesn't make any difference whether it's smoking marijuana in the dorm or drinking beer in the car. Just a few guys are going to say, "Hey, forget it. I'm not going to do this." And it doesn't mean that everybody who is there believes in what's going on. It means that they just don't have the anatomical structures to stand up and say, "Hey, we're not going to do this anymore. I'm not going to participate in this."	24:17
Hollis Shaw	But even in my work life, New York state is a state where the state system is for employment. It's a competitive system. If you want to be a psychologist in New York state, you have to take a written exam or oral exam. If you want to be a social worker there, you're going to come on as a pharmacist, you're going to have to take an exam because it's what they call a merit system.	24:43
Hollis Shaw	And I took the exam there, we were hired provisionally before taking the exam, I took the exam and one of the fellows who worked with me who had a degree from Cornell took the exam and the other guy had a degree from Columbia, he took the exam and both of them failed. And I went to the North Carolina Central University for a master's and I passed the exam. But that was still racial to me [laughs]. You see my school is just as good as they is. I mean, I didn't just think of it as individuals though. When you have been involved in a segregated system, it takes a long time, at least it seems to me, for most of us begin to see people as people. And it's not part of a monolithic group. Hard to see individuals. You just see. And I think Whites suffer from the same thing.	25:15
Hollis Shaw	They see Blacks and we see Whites and it doesn't change until you begin to look at people individually and have some experience with people individually. And that is probably the sad legacy of segregation, is that still isn't happening. We still are not touching base with people on an individual basis. It just doesn't happen in this society. That's why John Hope Franklin is involved in trying to start a conversation with people and people don't understand the term "conversation," I'm convinced.	26:12
Hollis Shaw	They think conversation is like this talking, conversation is simply communicating between people. If White students are tutoring in the ghetto, that's a conversation. If White parishioners and Black parishioners are exchanging visits to the church, that's a conversation. That's the kind of thing that we may move to. We tend to be so separate and so set apart. But race is as definitive an issue today as it was when there was legal segregation, maybe even more.	26:44
Peter Messick	It's just not acknowledged, I think.	27:26
Hollis Shaw	We don't talk about it as much. We don't talk about it as much. And that's part of—	27:30
Peter Messick	It would be politically incorrect to talk about it.	27:33
Hollis Shaw	And part of the movement at places like the college level where you have Black studies, a Black center, there is not only certain protectionism there, but there's also a certain kind of reluctance to live in an integrated world. And all it is inevitable. I mean if you want to be a banker, you're down well ought to be trying to aspire to be something at the level of the best bank in town. If you want to be a broker and you live in New York City, you will try to be good enough to get down to Wall Street. So, an integrated setting, it's inevitable. Only have to look at the population trends up to year 2050, you can see that the world is going to change not only from immigration but simply because of the growing populations. And so, how are we going to face the diversity?	27:35
Hollis Shaw	That's going to be an interesting problem. I think experience that you're getting through Paul's class is not only the experience of learning to interview people and learning how to do oral histories and to put that together. But it's also for many students across cultural experience that normally wouldn't occur. I don't know how big is that class. I think you have a small class. What do you have, twelve people? Twelve or fourteen?	29:00
Peter Messick	I think it's about fifteen actually. It's pretty small.	29:32
Hollis Shaw	It is an elective.	29:36
Peter Messick	It is, yes. I don't think it's required for any—	29:38
Hollis Shaw	Why did you decide to take it?	29:41
Peter Messick	Why did I decide to take it? I have always been interested in talking to people rather than—history books are great, but people tend to be a little bit more interesting. I have also heard a lot of good things about the Center for Documentary Studies, so I wanted to try to experience one of their classes, which is what this is. And it looked like it was an interesting subject material. I have family from Durham. In fact, my father grew up in Durham so my grandparents live down the road from Hawthorne Drive, right up Cole Mill Road.	29:43
Hollis Shaw	Oh, okay.	30:16
Peter Messick	I thought it would be interesting to learn a little bit more about Durham's background and therefore learn a little bit about my own.	30:16
Hollis Shaw	Was that part of your motivation for selecting Duke?	30:24
Peter Messick	Duke was the best school closest to home.	30:27
Hollis Shaw	You're a homebody?	30:32
Peter Messick	No, close enough to home—[indistinct 00:30:35]	30:35
Hollis Shaw	Okay. Not against supervision. I understand. I understand.	30:35
Peter Messick	Both of my parents went too so I guess I'm sort of a legacy. I'm not sure what that means, but—	30:42
Hollis Shaw	Well I can tell you what it means, in part. It may not be something that has impacted by you, but we talk about, "You got to throw out preferential admissions. No affirmative action." But legacy is a situation where people get preferential treatment on that basis alone. So, if your parents went to Duke, your parents went to Harvard, and this particularly for a graduate school and professional school, and no one seems to understand that as part of an affirmative action thing. Well, it's not affirmative action that is, that's sheer preference. That's sheer preference. Affirmative action is preference but from a different point of view.	30:49
Hollis Shaw	Debbie Davidson is in personnel at UNC and she's going to be running for the city council. She is running for the city council out of ward one in Durham. And I have been working with the Durham Committee on the [indistinct 00:32:01] of Black people since I have been here.	31:41
Hollis Shaw	Because I came down last year and volunteered for five months in the GANT campaign. So, I got to know a lot of those people. That's a pack, but a very strong pack. And one of the things all the packs in Durham seem to do is to invite candidates in and interview them. And Debbie indicated that she was opposed to affirmative action. And I think it's interesting because she's in personnel, she doesn't know what affirmative action is. She thinks affirmative action, like a lot of people believe, that affirmative action is where you give preferential treatment to Blacks because they are Black.	32:05
Hollis Shaw	I ask her if she had or if she was familiar with the GI bill and she perked up and she said yes. And I believe she indicated to me that she is a veteran. And I then ask her if she believed in the GI bill. She said yes. And this is from the floor because we had a chance to—I asked her if she understood that the GI bill was affirmative action process. "Oh no, no, no." And I explained to her that the purpose of the GI bill was to help people catch up with their peers, that the GI bill was developed because GIs have been taken out of the mainstream of life and life passed them by.	32:50
Hollis Shaw	And here was a boost to get them to catch up. Most of them have been taken out of the mainstream of life only three or four years. So, you provide them with the GI Bill. Not because you ever went overseas, not because you were ever in combat, not because you were a very good soldier, but only because you have been taken out of the mainstream of life and didn't get a dishonorable discharge. And we will give you a GI bill, we will send you to college, we will help you buy a home, we will set you up in business so you can catch up with those people who you were away from for three years and they were moving ahead of you.	33:44
Hollis Shaw	That bill and the affirmative action bill is designed to do the same thing. Affirmative action is designed to help people catch up with the mainstream American life, except they weren't taken out of mainstream for four years or three years, they were taken out for a hundred plus years. So, it's the personnel not understanding that. And that's why the bill is being destroyed, because people think it's just preferential, based on color. They believe that—I don't know how people can believe this. They believe that unqualified people would be admitted to Duke. Jesus.	34:27
Peter Messick	The argument again?	35:06
Hollis Shaw	But based on legacy, you can get in Duke with scores less than your roommate.	35:07
Peter Messick	I think, well this is just what I was told in the admissions process, that if you have relatives who went to Duke, then if you're equal with someone and they have the exact same scores, then the fact that you had relatives who went to Duke would put you slightly above them, which was to say that you would be below everyone who had higher scores still, but you would be slightly above the person's equal scores. But that's just what they say.	35:17
Hollis Shaw	And that may be the way they work it. But nonetheless it's preferential treatment based on legacy. And Duke and UNC and a lot of other schools across the country have gotten caught up in this damn score thing. It's sad that the president's advisors are saying to him, "Let us develop a national test for third and fourth grade." Just it distorts the meaning of tests. I mean you get—what do you get on the SAT for writing your name? 200 points?	35:40
Peter Messick	Something like that.	36:22
Hollis Shaw	Is it 200 points? Is it 400? Is it 200 on each section? I mean, and people who know test construction know that you get a California achievement test. It's not standardized on people who grew up in Mississippi. And by definition the test is not valid. It can tell you something when you start treating it as if it's a—when you start treating 1045 on a SAT as if it is significantly different from 1040, we have got a problem. And that's the way it's treated. And it is not significantly different.	36:23
Hollis Shaw	And the scatter may be such that one that combines score may be high for verbal for one person and high for math for another. But we are caught up in this testing thing. And those of us who I guess lived through the era of segregation have a justifiable suspicion that borders on paranoia. That we believe certain things happen to people because they are Black and Black alone. And people say, "Well there's no motivation for that. We didn't do that because the person is Black. It was done for some other reason." And I will give you an example.	37:03
Hollis Shaw	In the National Football League, a penalty was developed for celebrating in the end zone after running a touchdown. Are you familiar with that?	37:54
Peter Messick	Yes.	38:05
Hollis Shaw	But when that penalty was developed, at the same time, a tackle or a linebacker could sack a quarterback or stop a play at the line, and could celebrate all he wanted to. If you look at who most of the tackles are in terms of race and look at who most of the running backs are in terms of race, you see that the time and he was celebrating, I'm thinking of a guy particularly who was on the Jets at the time. The large, big tackles tend to be White and the fast [indistinct 00:38:53] tend to be Black.	38:10
Hollis Shaw	And when the rule was put in place, people said, "Dang, they are discriminated against Blacks." I don't think any Whites would have perceived that, would have said it that way. I think most Whites would not have said that. But Black fans all across the country convinced that that was designed in a manner to punish Blacks. And we have a lot of examples of that kind that tend still to separate the races. And I don't think that—people began to talk about them, they would be understood.	38:55
Hollis Shaw	George Thompson, coach at Georgetown, basketball coach, was very much opposed to the imposition of a grade point average to permit people to play basketball. And we are doing it or football. So, if you don't have a certain grade point average, you can't play ball. Now the people that hurts most are Blacks and people who believe in standardized tests, they say, "Well, they don't measure up." I don't think most Blacks believe that. Exactly. Now, we have some research to support it. Are you familiar with a piece of research that came out just a few days ago regarding doctors?	39:36
Peter Messick	I don't think that—been a busy week.	40:29
Hollis Shaw	It says in a nutshell that those doctors who got into med school through an affirmative action program, who made their—made space for in the professional medicine, have done equally as well as those who had high grades. Yet, high test scores, sorry, not high grades, high test scores. And yet we are going to use those test scores. All the research, all the educational research. You can talk to other psychologists, the school.	40:29
Hollis Shaw	Educational research shows without doubt that the best predictor of college success, high school teachers' opinions and high school grades. And I don't think it makes a difference whether you went to a great high school or a bad high school. Because achievement is based on study habits and motivation, et cetera. And yet we use the SAT as a determinant again for in colleges and out colleges.	41:03
Hollis Shaw	The young fellow got a Morehead scholarship—Black kid—to UNC this year, and he also got an offer to play with the Yankees for 1.8 million. Valedictorian in his class. A 4.22 average on a 4.0 scale. That always blows my mind, that we print shit like that in the paper. Excuse me, print stuff like that in the paper. I mean that's just insulting. But anyway, they ought to say, "He took extra courses." But you can't have a 4.22. Well, anyway. Hooker praised this youngster, he was very laudatory about the fact that he chose to go to college to take the Morehead scholarship, which is a lot of money. I don't know what it cost to go UNC, probably a thousand dollars. No, it doesn't cost so much. It's a state school. Doesn't cost what it does at Duke.	41:36
Peter Messick	Morehead has got excellent fringe benefits. They do stuff during the summer. Honors. The programs that they are given are excellent.	42:33
Hollis Shaw	I think he made a very unwise decision.	42:42
Peter Messick	You do?	42:46
Hollis Shaw	Oh, yeah. In a capitalist society, you shouldn't decide to pass up 1.8 million to go to college.	42:46
Peter Messick	That is a lot of money.	42:56
Hollis Shaw	You can go to college at any time. I think of a person like Allen Page who went to Notre Dame and then played football for Minnesota. And in the off season, he went to school, got a law degree. He's now a judge, a Black guy, I think a Billy County who went to LSU, a White guy, who finished college, all-American, like Allen Page was. He went into the pros, he took that money. On the off season, he went to school. Today, he's a dentist. This kid gets his leg broke out here, he wants to be a doctor. I just think it's a bad decision in a capitalist society to pass up that kind of money to go to college. And Hooker just praised him because we have been sold a bill of goods. That's important for athletes to finish college. That's just bullshit in my opinion.	42:56
Hollis Shaw	In Connecticut, I live next door to a theater, it's just a summer playhouse. And for four years they had a contract with the University of Miami. And the woman who was president of the theater group loved musicals. And she loved Neil Simon, she loved comedies, and they put on musicals. These students they brought from the University of Miami for the most part were students who majored in song and dance. That's a major. Now, I don't really think there's a significant difference between majoring in song and dance and majoring in football and basketball. But then, I have a bias of being an athlete. But I think our society locks us into images and we begin to believe them because we have such a good propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine is not the newspapers or the radios as people think. It's a political machine.	44:04
Hollis Shaw	We have welfare reform today, not because of anything that was done by Clinton as such, he put into place. But the real person who created the concept of dead beats in the welfare system was Ronald Reagan. He painted a picture of the welfare norm that looks very much like the picture of Aunt Jemima on the pancake box. That is purely racial. Without question, I think that's racial. Although, the overwhelming number of people in welfare are not Black. And the overwhelming number of people who are going to be hurt in welfare are going to be White children, not Black children. But once these decisions are made—	45:20

Item Info

Title:

Hollis Shaw interview recording, 1997 October 10

Date:

1996 to 1997

Creator:

Shaw, Hollis

Contributor:

Messick, Peter

Description:

Name: Hollis W. Shaw; Date of birth: 1931-05-17; Place of birth: Durham, NC; Occupation(s): clinical psychologist; medical administrator; Residence: Durham, NC
Informant ID: 1258; Interviewed by Peter Messik.

Format:

Language:

English

Digital Collection:

Behind the Veil

Source Collection:

Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South interviews, photographs, and project records, circa 1864-2011, bulk 1990-2004

Series:

Related Resources:

See below

Provenance:

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired the Records of the Behind the Veil Oral History Project from the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies in 1997, 1998, 2000, and 2002.

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

Copyright for content created by the Behind the Veil project is held by Duke University and made available to the public using a Creative Commons Attribution / Non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) license.

Identifier:

RL00170-CS-0028
353abda9-d8f1-4230-a358-03fd36727422
behindtheveil
2c6abf2d-3a3a-4321-9805-a2ba55be905c
ark:/87924/r41r7085m
2c6abf2d-3a3a-4321-9805-a2ba55be905c

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Hollis Shaw interview recording, 1997 October 10

Transcript

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1. Hollis Shaw administrative file, 1997

2. Hollis Shaw interview recording, 1997 November 14

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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Hollis Shaw interview recording, 1997 October 10

Transcript

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John Hope Franklin Research Center

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