Hollis Shaw interview recording, 1997 November 14
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Transcript
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Peter Messick | It's November the fourteenth, Friday. State your name on this. | 0:00 |
Hollis Shaw | Hollis Shaw. Good morning, Peter. | 0:05 |
Peter Messick | This is the second interview. | 0:07 |
Hollis Shaw | That's correct. | 0:10 |
Peter Messick | Just to get started, I need to back up and get a couple basics that I sort of ignored on the first— | 0:12 |
Hollis Shaw | Oh, okay. | 0:17 |
Peter Messick | Go around. So if you could recite your first, your full name. | 0:18 |
Hollis Shaw | Hollis. H-O-L-L-I-S, W, Shaw, S-H-A-W. | 0:23 |
Peter Messick | And your age? | 0:28 |
Hollis Shaw | Sixty-six. | 0:29 |
Peter Messick | And when were you born? | 0:31 |
Hollis Shaw | May seventeenth, 1931. | 0:32 |
Peter Messick | And where were you born? | 0:34 |
Hollis Shaw | In Durham. | 0:35 |
Peter Messick | Okay. And your current address? | 0:35 |
Hollis Shaw | 1709 Faison Road, Durham. 27705 in case you want to write— | 0:40 |
Peter Messick | And your occupation? | 0:51 |
Hollis Shaw | I'm retired. Thank goodness, I'm enjoying it. Well, I had two previous occupations, one as a clinical psychologist, and most recently as an administrator in the New York State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities as a director of a very large facility for the mentally retarded. | 0:53 |
Peter Messick | And could you tell me your spouse's full name? | 1:17 |
Hollis Shaw | Her name is Genora, G-E-N-O-R-A, middle initial is L, her last name is Shaw, of course. | 1:20 |
Peter Messick | And her age? | 1:28 |
Hollis Shaw | She is sixty-three | 1:29 |
Peter Messick | And her date of birth? | 1:31 |
Hollis Shaw | She was born March thirty-first. She's sixty-four, nineteen thirty-three. She's sixty-four. Right [laughs]. | 1:33 |
Peter Messick | And her place of birth? | 1:47 |
Hollis Shaw | Woodland, W-O-O-D-L-A-N-D North Carolina, which is in the Eastern part of the state. | 1:50 |
Peter Messick | And her occupation. | 1:55 |
Hollis Shaw | She's a retired physician, family practice physician. | 1:57 |
Peter Messick | And your mother's full name? | 2:04 |
Hollis Shaw | Her name is Catherine with a C, C-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. Maiden name was McDade, capital M-C, then D-A-D-E and last name is Shaw of course. | 2:07 |
Peter Messick | And her current age? | 2:20 |
Hollis Shaw | Mom was born nineteen oh-nine. So that makes her—she is seventy-seven. She'll be seventy-eight this year. Birthday is in December. | 2:24 |
Peter Messick | So we doing this for everybody, but place of birth? | 2:31 |
Hollis Shaw | Mom was born in Chapel Hill. Her birthday is the twenty-ninth of December. She was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. | 2:37 |
Peter Messick | Your father's full name. | 2:50 |
Hollis Shaw | Grover. G-R-O-V-E-R C Shaw, S-H-A-W. He was born in Garner, North Carolina, just south of Raleigh. | 2:51 |
Peter Messick | He's deceased? | 3:05 |
Hollis Shaw | He's deceased. | 3:06 |
Peter Messick | Awesome. And do you have any siblings? | 3:06 |
Hollis Shaw | Oh, yes. | 3:10 |
Peter Messick | Sort of do a quick run through. | 3:12 |
Hollis Shaw | Yeah, I have a sister, Naomi, she's the oldest. I'm the second oldest. I have a brother Robert. Robert's in New York state. I have a sister Marie and a sister Helen. So the five of us alive, one brother deceased that was Grover Jr. | 3:12 |
Peter Messick | And your children? | 3:36 |
Hollis Shaw | One child, Kathryn, K-A-T-H-R-Y-N. And she just turned twenty-five and she is a college student. Hopefully not forever, she should be finishing this year. | 3:38 |
Peter Messick | That's all the housekeeping and I think I forgot about that— | 3:56 |
Hollis Shaw | That's okay. Little demographics here. | 4:00 |
Peter Messick | Yeah. And now I have some follow up questions from your first interview that I'd just like to go in depth into. You talked about dropping out between sixth and seventh grade during World War II. Lots of kids tended to drop out because of negative influences and I was curious as to what you think those negative influences were. And secondly, are they still present in society today? | 4:03 |
Hollis Shaw | The community I grew up in, I think I told you was Lyon Park Community. We called it at the time West End. There's an elementary school in that area. That school went from the first grade through the sixth grade and at that point, students had to transfer across town to Hillside. We didn't take buses to school. We were not driven to school. We walked to school and that's probably a distance of—I don't know, three or four miles. A working class community, many of the families, both mom and dad worked and sometimes there were extended families, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, but going that far to school for a lot of youngsters walking to school each morning and I'm speculating on this, some were probably not adequately fed prior to going. | 4:30 |
Hollis Shaw | Walking to school itself became a distraction. The war became a distraction because parents were out really making money at that time and working hard at least because there are many jobs available. And so the kind of parental guidance that children should have gotten, the encouragement to stay in school just did not seem to be there in that community and I don't know why it wasn't there. I do know when I look at the statistics of who started school with me, there were three first grade classes. And in my class, I am the only boy that finished, something's wrong with those statistics. | 5:30 |
Hollis Shaw | So there were some negative influences there. Many of the students simply didn't have very good support system that I have to believe and need someone not only encouraging them to go to school, to stay in school, but really pushing them to stay in school. Males particularly dropped out. Quite a few of the young ladies finished school, but males particularly dropped out of school, just not finished. I think some of those kinds of negative factors are still in that environment because the dropout rate among students in that community still tends to be high. | 6:06 |
Hollis Shaw | And I think there are some things being done to provide support systems, to provide encouragement for students to stay in school. There's going to be a family center developed in that old elementary school that was there and it's going to be developed by a group called the West Indian Ministries, but it really originates out of the Cary First Baptist Church where I [indistinct 00:07:15]. Fred Davis, a young community-minded minister who believes not only in the traditional gospel, but a sort of social gospel, also, I would call it where you begin to reach out in a lot of ways and touching people. So I think that students will begin to stay in school more, become more involved in the environment. I think the other thing that did not help was that we grew up in a timeframe where we were constantly bombarded with negative messages. | 6:49 |
Hollis Shaw | We were bombarded with messages, had said that we actually were a little value and that we could not expect to achieve very much. And I think that part of the environment is rapidly disappearing. But when you grow up in an environment where signs are they're constantly reminding you that the least acceptable facilities are the ones that you're supposed to use, or you grow up in an environment which says that you cannot participate in society at the same level that the rest of the population is participating, that does not encourage one to finish school. | 7:51 |
Hollis Shaw | A few people saw that as a challenge, say, "I'll aggress against the system and I'll beat the system." But most, say, "I'm not going to be anything." Self-fulfilling prophecy. Some of those same negative factors are there and people who are involved in what I call social engineering are constantly trying to overcome those kinds of factors. | 8:27 |
Peter Messick | And has it improved any? | 8:47 |
Hollis Shaw | Significantly? Yeah, significantly. And there are naysayers who say, in talking particularly about African Americans, we are not as well off today as we were in the sixties and people, I hear that a lot in Durham. And I think they look at some materialistic things, they look at the demise of Black neighborhoods, particularly as affected by urban renewal or development of new highways and not untraditionally, the thing that happened to Durham happens across the country. You move, you change, you destroy, physically, neighborhoods and of course destroy them socially and spiritually too, that are least able to protect themselves, are least able to resist the forces of the government that said, "We need to change this physical area by sending a new highway through it. Or we need to destroy to build new governmental buildings." | 8:49 |
Hollis Shaw | And people who have the least political voice, the neighborhoods they always go through, the poorest in the country, always poor neighborhoods that first of all are destroyed by that. No one's going to run a highway through the middle of Duke University, but when we run a highway through the middle of Hayti [Hayti District in Durham, NC], and that is literally what happened and that earlier was destroyed. People look at that and say, "Listen, we don't have the Black entrepreneurs that we had." I think that we probably don't have them in one central location, but they're spread out through the city. | 9:45 |
Hollis Shaw | Now I just met a man recently, who was a Black entrepreneur who owns a computer company. There are many Black doctors, Black lawyers, Black teachers, Black store owners, own a laundry, a printing company, florist, all those kinds of things I saw as models growing up and people who don't see those things in a circumscribed area now tend to think that we are not better off. And people tend to generalize from their own small environment. | 10:22 |
Hollis Shaw | But when you look across the country, we have more elected officials that we ever had before. We have more people voting than we ever had before. We had a large number of people who have moved into the middle class if measured that by income that we ever had before. And for the first time in American history, last year, we had Black students in this country finish high school at the same rate with White students. So we have improved vastly since the 1960s and since the time I grew up as a kid in the 40's and 50's. Doesn't mean that there isn't a long way to go. | 10:55 |
Peter Messick | That was the next question. | 11:30 |
Hollis Shaw | Yeah. | 11:32 |
Peter Messick | What do you think? | 11:33 |
Hollis Shaw | People in my field call efficiency experts and certainly there are people in business who are utilized. You go in and you take a look at a company and you look at the duplication and you look at the waste. Doesn't really matter whether you're looking at the Post Office or IBM, there's always the potential for improvement. And you send someone in who knows how to do a good evaluation of a workplace or an educational place. You can see things that can be changed. Does not mean what the naysayers say, that things are bad. | 11:34 |
Hollis Shaw | You look at who won Nobel prizes this year in medicine. And yet we say we have a terrible educational system in this country. We have an educational system in this country that can be improved, needs to be improved, but indeed things constantly need to be reevaluated, reorganized, re-engineered and improved. So I think some of the kinds of things that need to be done in this country in terms of race relations is what John Hope Franklin has begun to do. | 12:13 |
Hollis Shaw | And that is start a conversation between races. Some things are difficult to talk about. Very, very difficult to talk about race is one. Sex is another. People just are constricted when they try to talk about those two subjects, become very, very defensive and become very defensive when you talk about those two subjects and listen to parents talk about sex education, good Lord. Kids educate themselves more than the school system, but when we introduce that subject in public, those are two very, very difficult topics, but I think we need to have the conversations and we need not to literally translate conversations to mean talking to people. | 12:44 |
Hollis Shaw | We need to translate conversations to meaning involvement so that if Duke University wants to get involved in the conversation, they expand that tutorial program in poor neighborhoods, or in neighborhoods where there are Black students, or you expand the oral history. That's a conversation where you're involved with a different culture, different races. | 13:24 |
Hollis Shaw | First of all, I think we need to expand those kinds of the conversations and we need to, as we expand those began to look at some very, very difficult issues to look at. Housing's particularly difficult issue for people to look at. Although Durham, I must say, it has remarkably changed since I lived here, that one year in '59 and '60. Need to look at the educational system and need to look at the demographics in terms of how people move in and out of the city, related very much to money, but related, also, I suspect to race. You look at a city like Cary, that everybody talks about a growing city. | 13:47 |
Hollis Shaw | I think if you look at the history of Cary, you would see a city that exploded out of White flight, where people ran out of Raleigh and began eventually to run out of Durham as a means of moving away from the possibility of integration. I think we need to look at the educational system in terms of improving the public education system. And I think that when you begin to talk to people from different cultures, you get a different impression of some of the kinds of things that are happening. We are a country that is saying that, "Hey, we can't let religion creep into the public school systems, that we must separate the religious sector and therefore the private sector from the state sector." | 14:37 |
Hollis Shaw | But we're talking about chartered schools run by religious organizations. It seems to me, there is a conflict and that kind of reasoning. We're thinking of our thoughts dwelling in compartments and there they are not in [indistinct 00:15:43], you can't go from one side of compartment to the other in your head. You can't have it both ways. And chartered schools, without question are going to be beneficial. A lot of people are going to gain from them, but you're taking funds, it seems to me, out of the public school system. | 15:30 |
Hollis Shaw | So you look at the educational system when we need to look at industry being involved in the educational system, to the extent that industry and educators recognize that all students are not going to go to college and industry is going to need more and more well-trained people as they enter into employment, while industry could very well impact on school curriculums, recognizing that as a need in this new age of technology to start training and start aptitude development early so that people don't have to say, "If I can't go to college, I won't be anything at all." | 16:00 |
Hollis Shaw | "If I don't have a manual trade like electrician or plumber, basically I can't be anything." It's a vast array of opportunities in the new world of telecommunications out there and we can begin to train people early on. And this area is has vast new opportunities in the world, in the pharmaceutical world. I'm certain that we could, if industry got involved with schools, that could not only put money into those schools, but they can pour more than that. They can put pour personnel in those schools. They can set up mentoring situations where students really move from a work-study, kind of concept, right into industry. Start it in the ninth grade. You don't have to wait until people get to be seniors or juniors, because people make up decisions or their performance tell you about their decisions early on in life. So industry could in influence the school curriculums and supply some of their own special needs and thereby begin to change their workforce because all these things are tied together. | 16:45 |
Peter Messick | Would that hurt the development of the humanities? Would the curriculums become more science-based? | 17:48 |
Hollis Shaw | No, because you still have opportunities for selection and I don't think that one should go in and influence the schools to the extent your turn school into a area for technocrats to influence what happens in your life. But Durham has an unemployment rate now something like 1.2. That is incredibly low, cannot get enough people. Our whole economy is moving towards a service economy, but service doesn't mean only Burger King and McDonald's of course, telecommunications is a service also, and that's where people can earn significant income to support their entry into the American stage of the dream. | 17:56 |
Hollis Shaw | I think the humanities are always going to exist there. The humanities are going to exist in part also because industry is going to support that. As a matter of fact, I would be willing to bet you that industry supports the humanities at a higher level than they support education right now, in this area, in terms of the contribution they pour in here. So I think that's going to be there because there's a kind of elitism towards the humanities and the arts and people dressing up in finery and going to the opera and listening to Italian when they still speak Ebonics. I shouldn't be that cynical, but that's the truth. | 18:45 |
Peter Messick | It's pretty funny, I guess this is sort of changing the subject, but there's a big debate over at Duke about Duke's role in Durham and what they should be doing to help the community that they do take quite a bit from, and one of those things is perhaps expanding community service. What you've talked about, tutoring programs and having conversations, what types of community service would— | 19:35 |
Hollis Shaw | Let me say this, Duke is no different from psychiatric center or prison in the sense that it's an enclave. These large institutions tend to wall themselves off and it really doesn't make any difference what area you're looking at. They all function pretty much the same in terms of feeding on themselves, tremendous amount of academic incest in terms of program development. And the same thing, if you look at a prison, you can say the same kinds of things, not reaching out to the community. | 20:04 |
Hollis Shaw | I think that that Duke can do a lot of things in terms of reaching out to the community besides the mentoring program and those obvious things that people talk about like basketball or programs, where they are out, trying to show a physical press. And I think that the biggest thing that Duke can begin to do in Durham is to get involved in the planning in various communities, not to come in as the grand planner, but to come in as an adjunct, to the kind of plan that already exists in the communities. | 20:36 |
Peter Messick | Do you mean funding? | 21:22 |
Hollis Shaw | No, by participation, by physical presence, by utilizing this vast academic resource in terms of both students and faculty, say, "We'd like for you and the social service department to become involved in the politics of Durham." I mean, there are four political pacts in Durham. The Friends of Durham, the Durham Committee, the Political Alliance, the Voters Alliance. How do you get involved in those kinds of organizations to begin to influence change in their behaviors? | 21:23 |
Hollis Shaw | So that if you really believe in a liberal kind of education and all of that purports, you try to get the environment to function in a way that the principles of truth and beauty and love and loyalty are actually practiced by people, not things that we just talk about and not talked about at a distance, began to try to influence industry. If you look at a major player in all of our communities, you'll have to look at the banking industry. | 22:05 |
Hollis Shaw | And then you have to say, "How have those boards been composed and how are they comprised?" And all those boards, things that can be changed, you have to look at the pharmaceutical industry, you have to look at the chamber of commerce and you have to utilize the strength of Duke to pull people in that represent the community. So there's not enough for a Duke to have a department of criminal justice if it's not involved with the police department, if it really understands what community policing is, it isn't enough to sit back and look at what they call community policing in Durham, isn't even a shadow of community policing and not do something about it. You need to get involved in all of the institutions in the community to influence that change. Not to dictate change to them, but to influence that change through association. | 22:40 |
Hollis Shaw | That's how we change. We begin to change because you introduced an idea to me in a non-hostile environment that I can examine, I can turn over, I can expand on, I can subtract from, I can utilize from my own particular world. Duke can get involved in that way in a whole host of things, but to get people to come in, it isn't enough to say the door is open. You literally have to go out and grab them by the hand and say, "Let us be a part of this." And you will be seen as intruders. They will suspect you're trying to set the agenda as opposed to being an assistant to them. But that's what social change is about. | 23:35 |
Hollis Shaw | Duke needs to make a commitment. And I think it's trying to what I, again, call social engineering. And they need to be involved in the school systems at the policy level. They need to try to influence the school system to bring in more people. One of the great things I think about the 1960s was the concept of the indigenous person. There are people who exist in every culture, in every environment who can make the swing from the street to the boardroom, with [indistinct 00:24:54] no problem at all. They could just make that swing. Those people need to be constantly identified, energized, and trained. | 24:17 |
Hollis Shaw | Harvard University had a program where you could get a master's degree. And I want to say social planning, community action, kind of degree. You could have a master's degree would ever having gone to college because they were pulling people in who had been identified as indigenous people who could move, as I said, from the street to the boardroom, and they give them that sort of academic kind of training, which created mobility for them because you can get into that position and they would be able to move. But if you have some mobility you want to move to Texas from Vermont, you can make that move and still get involved in the same kind of work. | 25:02 |
Hollis Shaw | That's the kind of thing that the university can do. University has to be very, very creative. Universities are creative in the sense that they will bring in people who have expertise in the absence of degrees and make them faculty members. I don't know if Duke's ever done that, but certainly in universities on the East Coast, Northeast Coast, do that. There's a tremendous amount of expertise in each of the communities. I don't know what Duke has done in terms of looking at what's happening to Latinos in this area. | 25:52 |
Hollis Shaw | I don't know how successful Duke is going to be in terms of identifying "X" number of communities surrounding them and pointing a lot of dollars. Dollars are always helpful, but you need to have people in there and a massive infusion of people can make a change that's almost unbelievable. There used to be a program called patterning that you use for brain-damaged people, someone who was injured in a car accident, and you surround that person with 240 people. And as long as that person was awake, there was six or eight people working with that person, moving his arms or moving her head or raising the person up to standing or forcing them into a walking like motion, because that kind of massive infusion of people begins to make people improve because you can bombard people with activities and with ideas that begin to make them change. | 26:24 |
Hollis Shaw | And that's the kind of conversation, kind of teaching, I think at Duke ought to be involved in, but it means doing something special to encourage students. The students like new activities if they're challenged by them. If you will allow them to do what I would call [indistinct 00:27:46] feeding, you say, "Here are fifteen kinds of community activities if you like to get involved in one," make it a condition for graduation. Some schools are now making ownership of a computer, a condition for admission. Make a community service condition, but do something else to it. Reduce the tuition by number of hours you work in community service. So make an incentive for the students to do that. Not just tell them. Colleges have done that. Marist College did it, a small Catholic college in Poughkeepsie, New York to encourage people to become involved in community service. | 27:23 |
Hollis Shaw | You did "X" number of hours, you got to reduction in your tuition of "X" amount of dollars. Now I don't know what the formula was, but just the idea that there's a quick quid pro quo here. It isn't just me as administrator saying, "You have to do this," but really opening the door for people to want to do it because everybody does not fall into the category of being do-gooders. Some people are very, very practical. If you want me to spend my thirty hours a week when I could be out snoozing with the fellas and drinking beer, well, give me an incentive to do that. And that's a fair kind of thing, but Duke needs to send out its major players and Duke's began to do that. I mean, there's a good move. He just hired Jean Spaulding, who is a psychiatrist, the first Black to attend med school at Duke. | 28:21 |
Hollis Shaw | She was just hired as a vice president at Duke and her job is going to be an outreach job bringing people in. Just hired the first Black faculty member as an advisor, Dr. Johnson, to again, try to attract minorities to Duke, because Duke has a history that will still be seen as a negative long after they make all the improvements that they can make. It's called by Blacks at all levels in this city, the plantation. And if that moniker is placed on anybody, it's a negative. And I think the current president is working to overcome probably some of that. | 29:14 |
Hollis Shaw | One of the ways you find out what to do is to bring in people who are in policy making positions and do a brainstorming, where people are not allowed to criticize an idea, where people are allowed just to give an idea and let someone ask, give another idea that may add to it. Maybe it's totally different. And then categorize those ideas and see what kind of new and innovative kinds of things, because a lot of things that Duke and all institutions will do, that'll be the traditional kind of thing, if you go work in a nursing home, what the shit good is that? I mean, that's okay, but isn't how you change a community. | 30:08 |
Hollis Shaw | You don't change the community by coaching the little league team either. You do change the community if you are somehow involved with the men's big business league, you do change the community if you're able to get people on the boards of banks that continue to do red-lining, they do change the committee if you're able to change the way banks are willing to gamble with their funding, Congress has tried to do something about it, but it has to be done at the local level. | 30:53 |
Hollis Shaw | Those are the kinds of things I believe that Duke can begin to reach out and do that are not as visible as giving sixty-thousand dollars to somebody who wants to develop a community center. People who need to be involved in academics spend that damn time playing and that's what it does. Hey, let's make it happen, let them play. Change the way banks do business, change the way insurance companies do business and you can do that with the influence of Duke University. | 31:09 |
Peter Messick | You mentioned the first Black attend attendee of the medical school? | 31:54 |
Hollis Shaw | Yeah. James Bowling. | 31:59 |
Peter Messick | And you've been in medical field, I guess, as your career, but how do you think race affects healthcare? I mean, over the years that you've practiced, have you seen a change? | 32:00 |
Hollis Shaw | There's a change. First of all, there's a change in the number of Blacks who are accepted at med schools across the country. When my wife went to medical school, she went to medical school and at an all Black medical school in Tennessee and North Carolina sent her a check every month. Ostensibly, that was loan. Realistically, that was money that would bribe her to prevent her from applying to UNC and bringing a suit against the state of North Carolina for not permitting her to go to school there. And it happened to Blacks all over the South. You can talked to any Black physician in his sixties, there's a good likelihood you would find that he had a cash stipend each month from his state. | 32:11 |
Hollis Shaw | And that was essentially a private, and you paid that back in some states and other states, you could get it written off if you practice rural medicine or practice medicine in an institution and Blacks were not readily accepted into major medical schools across the country. Most Blacks came out of Howard University in Washington D.C., or came out of Meharry in Nashville, Tennessee. And prior to that, there was a medical school right here in Raleigh, at Shaw University that they came out of. But there are many, many Black physicians going to a variety of schools now. After World War II, I have a couple of friends at after World War II who could, because there's a backlog of everybody going professional schools at the World War II, who ended up going to school in Geneva because they could not get med schools in the states. | 33:07 |
Hollis Shaw | I don't know if people still do that or not. The increase in Black professionals at all levels has drastically increased physical therapies, speech therapist. I saw more Black speech pathologists in the last fifteen years and probably existed in the country thirty years ago. So I think the healthcare field has changed except it hasn't changed in this regard, but we just reaching the point where women and Blacks are being able to get the same kind of care that the general population gets, a lot of that's related to race, I think, but a lot of it's also related to economics, but economics is related to race. So poor people get significantly poorer healthcare, new procedures are not open to poor people or to Black people. It's no wonder that the first heart transplant was not done on a Black person, but a Black heart was used. | 34:07 |
Hollis Shaw | It's no wonder that just now we're reaching a point where poor people and Blacks are offered bypass surgery, almost as a kind of routine that they have heart blockage, as opposed to treating them. I don't think we can ever have, again, a Tuskegee situation where Blacks were given placebos when they thought they were being treated for syphilis, or some of them didn't even know they were being treated for syphilis. | 35:26 |
Hollis Shaw | As a matter of fact, one of the guys in that study, is ninety-two years of age and I keep threatening to look him up because his last name is Shaw, although I had no people coming from that area, he was one of the spokespersons who met with President Clinton that is according to the latest study, a need for more Black physicians in Durham. And I think Duke is in hiring Dr. Johnson and in hiring Jean Spaulding, who's going to make her run at doing just that, trying to recruit more in the health professions in general, but it's changing, but it is not—Blacks certainly don't get the healthcare in this country that non-Blacks get. And part of it that is related to the insurance industry also. | 35:58 |
Peter Messick | It's changing the insurance industry. | 36:47 |
Hollis Shaw | Of course, of course. I mean, we need a national health program and we probably—we dote a lot on saying the private sector, at least those in government who have heard this so much, private sector should do that. If government doesn't create a national health plan, we will not have one. Medicaid's a national health plan. Medicare's a national health plan, and Medicare even millionaires qualified for Medicare because it's available to anyone who is sixty-five years of age. I think we need a national health program that will embrace healthcare services for the poorest people in our society that does not exist and the government I believe will have to do that. I don't think private industry will do that. What you—go ahead, ask me. | 36:49 |
Peter Messick | Don't worry. The mic's off. | 37:46 |
Hollis Shaw | Oh yeah. I want to go to the—[INTERRUPTION]. | 37:48 |
Peter Messick | Don't want you to walk off. | 0:53 |
Hollis Shaw | Yeah. | 0:55 |
Peter Messick | It would be bad, I think. Let's see here. This is from the last interview. You stated that you had learned to see whites as individuals, and I think you stated that you used to, you hated them when you first saw them. Just did. | 0:56 |
Hollis Shaw | Oh, of course. | 1:17 |
Peter Messick | Why did this change? Was there a specific incident? | 1:19 |
Hollis Shaw | I don't think it was a specific incident. I think over time I got to know individuals. And I'll tell you something else, I used to think that all White women were pretty. And one of the reason I thought that is because I was taught not to look at them. And nobody said to me, "Don't look at White women," but you knew from the way the environment was structured, that you didn't look at White women the same way, or White girls, the same way you would look at a Black woman. So you never really got a chance to see. There's some ugly White women. There's some ugly Black women, but you know, you're locked into that vise. Now the world was Black and White. That was race, not ethnicity. That's a sort of new kind of watered-down, more detailed approach. Now you have Greeks, and you have French, and you have English that no, there were Blacks, no White. That's race, that's anything else. | 1:22 |
Hollis Shaw | So I saw an environment that was hostile to me, and that environment was a White environment. And so I generalized, I believe then that all White people were opposed to me. And it never occurred to me, the years later, that many Whites were trapped in the same political system we were trapped in, and they were not necessarily in favor of segregation, but they didn't have the wherewithal to change the system. They didn't know what to do about it. It was just something they accepted. So Blacks don't vote. So doesn't really bother me that much. Or they have to go to a segregated counter, where at least they're still able to buy goods. They didn't see the economic, and the psychological, emotional impact of segregation. And those who saw it, and wanted to do something about it didn't know, because they were subject to the same kinds of atrocities that Blacks would be subjected to if they had intervened. | 2:19 |
Hollis Shaw | So I saw, for the most part, Whites has all been a part of that anti-me world. And my first experience with an integrated setting was in the military. And in the military, my first response was pretty physical response, because I was an athlete, I played football, and basketball, and ran track. And there was a need for me to prove that I was equal to, or greater than, the Whites who I competed against. And through athletics, through any kind of close relationship, you develop personal relationships. I began to meet people who really were not opposed to me as a Black person. And I think I gradually began to see them as different, began to see that it wasn't a totally Black and White world. There was some shadows of gray in between. So I think that's how I began to change, but I still see a lot of things that are just pretty racial. | 3:25 |
Hollis Shaw | And you look at outcomes, because you don't always know motivation. You don't always know why a person is acting a certain way. But the results, if a person injures you, you don't really think so much about why he injures you. But if he injures you, and your cousin, and your sister, and your brother, he injures all people who are like you and he's different from you, you begin to feel that if he is not consciously doing it, he is nevertheless creating an effect. That's the same as if he had consciously decide to hurt all of your family. So you have to believe that he's opposed to you. And that's the way I see a lot of things exist now, that people do things that are injurious to Blacks, and who will be the first to tell you, and their friends will be first to tell you, that this person is not prejudiced, but his behavior over and over is injurious to Blacks. | 4:43 |
Hollis Shaw | So you have to deduct from that, that he is prejudiced, and you have to begin to accept that the world is not what it used to be. It used to be in the South, that people who were bias were very clear about it. This door's for Blacks, and this doors were Colored, as they said, and this door's for White, and you knew people's motives. Now the people say, "Oh, both doors are open," but when you walk through the door on the left, you fall into a damn bottomless pit. So, wow. And all of us are going through that door, so you have to figure that people are doing things that are anti-Black, and maybe not even be aware of their biases. If you go to a psychological dictionary and look up the term bias, you'll find the definition is that a bias is an unconscious determinant of behavior. | 5:49 |
Hollis Shaw | So people are biased without even knowing they're bias. You have sometimes situations where your bias hits you full flush in the face and you realize it always is. You look at the world differently, but now you got a great insight on it, and that unconscious bias determines your behavior. So I think a lot of the bias that exists in the country now is not at the conscious level. It's at the unconscious level. And when a guy like Senator Orrin Hatch gets up and talks about you can't have Lee as Head of Civil Rights Division, because he believes in affirmative action and quotas. He may academically and intellectually believe what he's saying, but the effects of what he was saying is anti-Black. I mean really, seriously anti-Black, and people who talk about not doing preferences and set-asides, and say intellectually "Well, isn't what the American story is about, that we're supposed to have equality for everyone." | 6:41 |
Hollis Shaw | Anti-Black rhetoric, people who, coming out of the regular administration, paint a caricature of the welfare mother who looks like Aunt Jemima on the pancake box, did tremendous disservice. And most Blacks, I think, who were aware of that, saw it as racist. Although the intent may have been really honestly to redesign welfare, to create welfare reform, and welfare reform is probably is needed. But to take those anecdotal stories about the welfare mom who was getting two checks and always portray her as a fat, unkempt Black person, or to talk about generations or generations that have lived on welfare first generation, second generation, third generation. | 7:49 |
Hollis Shaw | Never going to Appalachia, never saying to the public that eighty-five percent of the people on welfare children, never saying that most of the people on welfare are White, not Black. I mean, those kinds of things may be designed in somebody's mind intellectually to reform welfare, were probably motivated by biases, unconscious biases, which you can't change much. They're there, but the late system attitudes are there. | 8:44 |
Peter Messick | In the past, it was conscious bias, and now it's unconscious bias. | 9:12 |
Hollis Shaw | Well, I think it was unconscious before too, but you were permitted. So you're not permitted now to say exactly how you feel in racial matters, if you are anti-racial. It's very popular now to be anti-affirmative action. You can cloak that in the terms of saying that the Constitution says everybody should have the equal rights. Intellectually, it's okay, but they operate on a bias, I believe, but they have a cover for it. The cover used to be legal segregation. You could say before, because it was legal segregation. You say it now, because the constitution says that equal rights and protection for all citizens. And therefore, if you give preferential treatment to this group of citizens, that's wrong. Well, that is rhetoric. That's anti-Black. And if you look at some real good politicians who were good wordsmiths, look at— | 9:16 |
Hollis Shaw | Analyze the work of George Wallace. George Wallace learned very early not to say things that were very blunt and clear. Republican party has learned the same thing, that when you say law and order every damn body in the world knows you're talking about putting Black people in jail. I mean, everybody knew when Tennyson talks about crime in this city, he hasn't really talking about crime as much as he's talking about Blacks. And that's what mobilized White vote coming out this time. Really the mobile, the white vote came out just tremendously higher, much, much higher, in the general election than in the primary. And I had the analysis of every precinct in the city, so I know that his constantly talking about crime as an issue, mobilized unconscious racial feelings in people. | 10:23 |
Hollis Shaw | One of the things I hope we are beginning to learn is that those biases are such strong elements of the personality, such strong, probably, unchanging elements. You can mute them for a while through experience, but those biases so strong that probably we should never try to concentrate on changing attitudes, should probably never concentrate on changing biases. It's probably better to consciously accept a person with his or her biases, and say, "Since that's such an important part of your personality, hold onto them. You can dislike Blacks. You can dislike Puerto Ricans. You can dislike people from Ecuador. You can dislike Whites. | 11:24 |
Hollis Shaw | However, we will not permit you to act as if you dislike them. You must treat them with respect. You must treat them with dignity. You must not rob them. Whether you like them or not, doesn't make any damn difference to us. We're not going to bother your attitudes and your belief system, but we can legislate your behavior." So politicians stand up and say, "Well, we can't legislate social change." That's bullshit. It's just bullshit, and then they probably know that. | 12:10 |
Hollis Shaw | You can say that everybody will ride on this bus. This group will not walk, and this group will ride. That's legislating social behavior. You can do that. You can't make them like each other, but you can prevent them from fighting. Or you can institute such stringent restrictions when they fight, that they will not want to fight. So that as we begin to talk about change in the environment, we need to change behavior. So you don't make the risk any less for the insurance company, when you say that this guy lives in a poor neighborhood and he needs fire insurance. | 12:39 |
Hollis Shaw | But you do change his behavior, and say, "You must nonetheless overcome that risk of providing with insurance." You don't change the facts, you change the behavior. And when you talk about what a university can do, that's the kind of influence the university can have. You can get people to act in a different way. You may not get them to think in a different way, unless you're teaching inventors, or physicists, or something, but you can get them to act differently, yes. | 13:21 |
Peter Messick | Good count. I've met some pretty stiff business— | 13:53 |
Hollis Shaw | But I mean, you can teach people to think scientifically, more innovatively, but in the social realm, you can get the public-funded orchestra to include in its repertoire rap music. They don't understand rap anymore than they understand Italian. That change can be affected. And that's the kind of way. So Duke University has a large choral group, or a large orchestra. You can get that music that they present to the public altered and changed. And if you do that, you will offend some people and they will leave, and then some people who like that new kind of music will take their seats, but you have affected some change in society. I think that's what you have to do. You have to force change. You can't stand by and say, "This is going to happen gradually, with all deliberate speed." As a Supreme Court said in the 1954 Supreme Court decision— | 13:59 |
Peter Messick | Deliberate speed is pretty subjective, so it turns out to me. | 15:29 |
Hollis Shaw | Precisely. It's different from saying, "Let's do this by the third of May." I mean, you don't pay your income tax at all delivered speeds. You pay your income tax, or we going to punish you, and we're going to punish you very, very severely. | 15:30 |
Peter Messick | This question was related to the negative influence of this question I asked at the beginning, but you talked about survival skills that you learned as a kid that you were taught by your parents. | 15:48 |
Hollis Shaw | I just told you one of them, you didn't stare at White women, and part of that survival skills still exists. I mean, I can walk rapidly in the evening behind a woman, and she will turn around and see me, and just almost take off running. But you learn as a kid that you didn't do that. You learn as a kid, that if you had to take a shortcut to get home, and you had to walk after dark through this White neighborhood, you walked around that and came a longer way home, even though it was raining. Those are survival skills. You learn not to put yourself in the position where people would be permitted to aggress against you with immunity. And I think that Black mothers did a good job in teaching their sons particularly, because they seem, for some reason, to be more of a threat than women. | 15:57 |
Hollis Shaw | I mean, I don't understand the minds of people who serve as a President. Imagine George Wallace, with all of his rhetoric about why Black shouldn't be able to vote. They shouldn't be going to school with us, et cetera, et cetera, all that rhetoric. He has a Black cook. Is he a fool? I mean, that is just stupid. That's the kind of things that exists side by side in our head. Well, she's a different Black, and she trusts me, and she loves me. I'm good to her, but the rest of the Blacks are no good. And he puts himself in a position where a woman could literally poison him to death, in a way that no one could ever detect. I mean, you could detect if you put arsenic in the food, but if you mix feces with the beans, can they detect it? Probably other more powerful kinds of poisons. | 16:51 |
Hollis Shaw | It's very interesting how our biases allow us to do irrational kinds of things to ourselves and to people. And that example is a good illustration that when you are very, very biased, you put yourself in harm's way. And when you're very, very hard-nosed about any position, you put it up in harm's way, because you set yourself up to be attacked by other people who are zealots also. And people like Wallace, and Bilbo, and people like Orrin Hatch right now, you begin to liberate. You give permission for less stable people to act. See, Hatch is working from a very intellectual point of view, where he is making a very salient argument that makes sense to people, but he will liberate a crazy who has the same rhetoric, but not the same reason. That's why all extreme positions can be dangerous to people. | 17:45 |
Peter Messick | So can Black kids walk through the White neighborhoods tonight, in the present day? | 18:53 |
Hollis Shaw | Oh yeah. And I can live in the White neighborhood. I will still get stares. People walk—it's just like that. If they drive by, they see me walking out with the garbage, and I guess some dismiss it as—and there are Blacks who will say, "Jesus. I mean, how can you involved with us, you move into a White neighborhood?" I didn't move into a white neighborhood because it was White, I moved in the neighborhood because I found a house wanted. We looked at a hundred houses. All those houses in Black neighborhoods. We found this particular house, and we were about ready to build. We found this house and we bought it. | 18:56 |
Hollis Shaw | Durham probably one of—is a very integrated city, in terms of housing. Durham is also a city where the border realtors need to be influenced by someone outside, because they steer people who are in subsidized housing to certain locations of the city. If you go to Long Island, I can find you a person who's in subsidized housing, in a house that costs 250 thousand dollars. You don't find that in Durham. | 19:32 |
Peter Messick | And from the readings that we do for this class, there's a lot of discussion of the, I think, 1960s, '70s, the housing debates, and how I think the term Durham Board wanted to build a new public housing center. And they were going to put it in a Black neighborhood, and the Blacks did not want it in Black neighborhood. They wanted in a White neighborhood. There's a lot of controversy over that. | 20:06 |
Hollis Shaw | Mm-hmm. | 20:36 |
Peter Messick | Has it become more integrated in how, in Durham? | 20:36 |
Hollis Shaw | Well, I think housing is more integrated, but I think poor people are still relegated to substandard housing in large measure because they are steered. The housing is certified in certain locations. Now the Head of Housing Authority in Durham is Black. And there are a lot of public housing residents in Durham, but other government agencies of funds to provide that subsidized housing are very small. For example, Durham Housing Authority will tell you that they are in need of repairs to bring housing up to standards. They need twenty-one million dollars to do that. They'll also tell you they get about three million dollars a year. | 20:39 |
Hollis Shaw | So then when you prioritize that you do the worst kinds of infractions of housing standard code, but you don't do some of the kinds of things that really increases the quality of life for people, so that you are Band-Aiding issues. So that if someone has sewage backing up through their sink, that becomes an emergency, but a hole in the wall, or three or four walls, may be something that may take much to repair, because it's not high priority, although none of us would tolerate that kind of thing in our own living arrangement. And because they're poor people, they don't always understand the rules under which they live and survive. Because they have poor people, they don't have the kind of self-advocacy people who are not poor have. | 21:30 |
Hollis Shaw | They have to pin in large measure upon outside advocates are artificial systems we set up to say we advocate for them, but we're not really much voice, not much vote. It's really terrible being poor in this country. It's probably the greatest failure in this country, and that is the large number of poor. If this robust economy changes, we are going to see people in the streets like we haven't seen since 1930s, because the welfare reform that says that no matter what you're going to have two years of support financially from the government, is going to hurt a lot of people if this world-class economy drops. | 22:31 |
Hollis Shaw | My sister volunteers with the homeless, and she was telling me about a family where the mom and dad works, and there are a number of children, I've forgotten how many, and they are homeless. Now, there is something really wrong with that picture. Given that they don't have high-level marketable skills, but if two people are working, they should be able to afford housing of some kind. They are homeless people, and they're moving from one temporary shelter to another, because the churches here have arrangements where they got people stay in that shelter for a week or so and move to another shelter, as they're classifying homes. If you're working full time— | 23:15 |
Hollis Shaw | See that's where government, I think, needs to play a role. Government should take care of the least of us, so that maybe Medicare should be for those people who can not afford health services. Medicare now, is for anybody who's paying for social security. If you paid forty quarters into social security during your working life, you can qualify for Medicare. Even your income is 100 thousand dollars a year. There's something about that picture that needs to be examined, seems to me. | 24:08 |
Peter Messick | In order to change that, you need to go through all the people— | 24:36 |
Hollis Shaw | Who are benefitting from it, of course. | 24:37 |
Peter Messick | Make money— | 24:41 |
Hollis Shaw | Of course. | 24:41 |
Peter Messick | Have the power— | 24:42 |
Hollis Shaw | Right. But that can be changed. It would take a lot of work to change. It'd probably take maybe a few years to change it, but it needs to be changed. A child who's born to that family that's homeless has limited chances from the very beginning, and there are millions of those people. And the American Indians, I don't know what statistics are today, but not too many years ago, they were losing hundreds of thousands of children each year for starvation. And the American Indian reservations, there are still some that are run where the children are literally taken from the home and placed in the residential school during the school year. | 24:42 |
Hollis Shaw | Not offered this opportunity, not offered a choice, but simply placing in our schools. Those things still exist for people who have limited voice, and poor people have limited voice in this country. They speak, but they speak softly and people don't listen. And as relationship between poverty, and race, and probably number one crime in this country is probably the government committing people to live in abject poverty. | 25:46 |
Peter Messick | That brings me that question, is economics, or is it race, a bigger problem in America today? Is poverty or is the color of your skin going to make more of a difference in where you can go— | 26:17 |
Hollis Shaw | Race is number one problem for African Americans. And you don't have to go back many years to find PhD chemists, PhD physicists, who could not get into private industry, and who therefore had to go into the only kind of thing they could go into, and that is teaching profession. And that is suddenly one profession you shouldn't be forced into unless you're really in for it, want to do it. There are still Blacks who can't get into positions for which they're qualified. And one of the things that was beginning to be talked about in the '60s would be, we were talked about equal opportunities. They would say, "Show me a qualified Black, and I will hire him or her." That obviously is not true today. And we saw that example in the hiring of the School Superintendent in the State. I mean, in the city. | 26:31 |
Hollis Shaw | That people apply those rules—first of all, when there is one position, and it's Attorney General of the United States, you say, "I've hired the best qualified person." That's just sheer rhetoric. That's just bullshit. I mean, you don't even have a way of measuring it. And when you hear a person who has selected a candidate said, "Well, we hired the best qualified candidate." Not true. We actually have no way of measuring whether or not the President elected to Duke was the best possible person for that job of all the available candidates. That was the person we chose for a lot of other reasons, besides of academics. And we do the same thing about the superintendent of the schools, or about any other kind of job. But when we do those kinds of choices, we frequently still tend to exclude Blacks, whose credentials, if that's what we are judging best qualified on, outstrip the credentials of other people. | 27:39 |
Hollis Shaw | About fifteen years ago, there was a study done in baseball, on a racial basis between Blacks and Whites. They used as the single criterion, I believe, batting average, and it was easy to demonstrate. There were Whites who were playing in front of Blacks who had better batting averages. And you will hear Blacks say, if you interview enough of us, saying that you have to be twice as good to get a job as White. So that may not be precisely true. It's probably over statement, but Blacks frequently have to bring higher-level credentials to a job than a White bring to the same job, in order to qualify for it. And you will hear people who say that the reason we shouldn't use affirmative action is because unqualified people are being put in positions that they should never be put in. Well, it happens all the time in the White world, where people are put in jobs, and they learn the jobs on the job. | 28:41 |
Hollis Shaw | But not withstanding that, the argument is so ludicrous because they say things that would imply that unqualified people are being admitted to Texas Law School. And it's absolutely not University of Texas Law School. Absolutely not true. I mean, you can't get into Texas Law School, whether you're Black or White, unless you have the credentials that permit admissions. Now you may not have the grades that character "X" have, but you have the qualification in the school. So people distort the things. So I think race is a more consideration than economics, because I think race, for Blacks, drives economics. That people are poor because they are not permitted to have certain opportunities, or people are not rich because they're denied certain opportunities, or people are not employed as professionals because they're, not denied, they're not given certain opportunities. | 29:51 |
Hollis Shaw | And the issue for me is not about integration. The issue is about equal access to resources so that people who look back at the '60s, they're a large number of people who believe in and support integration, but a large number of people who supported integration, supported integration as the vehicle for getting access to resources. So integration becomes a byproduct. Well, some people they see that as these single product, so that if we can both have new buses, we both have renovated classrooms, we both have heated schools. That's what the issues were about, not that we both need to share the same building. | 30:52 |
Hollis Shaw | All over from an economic point of view, if we only needed one building, in terms of economics, it would make sense to close one, and all of us go to one building. And the racial segregation running very, very deep in this State. You're North Carolinian, aren't you? | 31:47 |
Peter Messick | That's correct. | 32:06 |
Hollis Shaw | Do you know how many forms of segregation they had, legal segregation, in this state, right? | 32:06 |
Peter Messick | Vaguely. | 32:11 |
Hollis Shaw | I mean in terms of race—three. | 32:14 |
Peter Messick | Okay. I'm not sure what you're talking about. | 32:18 |
Hollis Shaw | Well, you had Black schools. | 32:20 |
Peter Messick | Okay. | 32:22 |
Hollis Shaw | White schools, and school for Indians. Public schools. Black water fountains, White water fountains, and Indian water fountains. I mean that's ridiculous. You had Black colleges, White colleges, and an Indian college. Pembroke College, all Indian college [indistinct 00:32:46]. I mean, we wouldn't anyone who could think that that was economically feasible. | 32:23 |
Peter Messick | Well, at least you're not giving any money to the Native American worker— | 32:52 |
Hollis Shaw | [indistinct 00:32:56]—yeah. | 32:56 |
Peter Messick | Probably for you. | 32:57 |
Hollis Shaw | Maybe economically viable for— all I have to do is ride around the country. We were up in Boone last weekend. And so I happen to see Appalachian State, a contrast Appalachian State with NC State, and you think it's not the same system. Look correct contrast NC State with UNC. You know it's not the same system. So maybe you're right. Maybe it was economically feasible from that part of view. So I'm going to spend 400 dollars a year at this school per student, over here I'm going to spend 150 dollars per year. Yeah, okay. That makes sense. | 32:58 |
Peter Messick | I think they've corrected a lot of those problems, as far as money goes. | 33:46 |
Hollis Shaw | They corrected some of those problems. Some of them still exists. The chancellor for UNC lives around the corner. I'm sorry, from NCCU, lives around the corner. And he says very clearly that the distribution of funds to historically Black colleges is far below in percentages per for student expenditure. Far, far less than what goes to the state-supported college that are still predominantly white. And part of his agenda for the last four years has been trying to close that gap. And it's closing, but it's still in an equity there. | 33:46 |
Hollis Shaw | It's like the earning difference between men and women. That gap is closing, but that there's still a vast inequity. Women don't get paid in this country for the same. They don't get to pay the same thing for the same job. You find some that get paid the same thing, but by and large, if you make your end large enough, you'll find there's a vast discrepancy when you do a standard means of it. | 34:44 |
Peter Messick | Well, it's getting to 11 o'clock, and I do have to go. | 35:13 |
Hollis Shaw | Okay. | 35:17 |
Peter Messick | But thank you very much. | 35:18 |
Hollis Shaw | And if you need— | 35:19 |
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