John Price interview recording, 1994 July 14
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| John Price | Oh, I've been in Tuskegee since 1981. I came as a Portia Washington Pittman Fellow in music, which covered music history, ethnomusicology and composition, in honor of Booker T's daughter. | 0:04 |
| Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. Oh, Portia. | 0:20 |
| John Price | Yeah. | 0:23 |
| Stacey Scales | Where did you come from? | 0:26 |
| John Price | I came from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. | 0:28 |
| Stacey Scales | Where did you grow up? | 0:34 |
| John Price | I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. | 0:34 |
| Stacey Scales | Was it different from Tuskegee? | 0:38 |
| John Price | No, because I had quite a few teachers who had been Tuskegee students. I always said it's sort of ironic, I went to Booker T. Washington Elementary School, Carver Junior High, Booker T. Washington High, and then went off to school at Lincoln University. | 0:39 |
| Stacey Scales | You remember your grandparents? | 1:07 |
| John Price | Well, I remember my grandmothers. I never knew my grandfather. I heard about one grandfather who was my mother's father. And I knew about her grandfather, who was my great-grandfather. On my dad's side, I only knew his mother, who had come from the Carolinas, South Carolina. Said that she had nine boys and one girl. And so frustrated, I suppose, she just walked off and left all of them and wound up in Texas. And then she came on to Tulsa. And then my grandmother was from Texas. | 1:09 |
| John Price | My mother's mother was from Texas, Brenham, San Anton, Somerville, that whole area of Texas, who said that her dad was a Blackfoot Native American. Her mother said that she had come from Madagascar at the age of seven years old. She died when she was a hundred. And then after slavery, she swam across the Brazos River. Now these are stories I remember as a child, I don't know where she was going, the Brazos River, that's in Texas. And whatever clothing or whatever things she had, she wrapped up in her little sack and put it on her back and swam across the river. | 1:55 |
| Stacey Scales | Did they ever talk about slavery? | 2:54 |
| John Price | I have a documentation of my grandmother starting two letters in defense of the Republican Party at the time, as to why she should be, or why Black people should be Republicans. And her view was that Abraham Lincoln of course had freed the slaves. And then she went on to tell a story about her daddy who had come from South Carolina, telling her that the last remembrance of his mother was her behind one of the cabins, washing clothes and raising up her hands and crying as he was being given away, taken away in a wagon, being given away to somebody as a wedding present. She also said that he told her that he had to go out in the cold, in his bare feet, to bring in the cows at times. | 2:54 |
| Stacey Scales | Did they ever talk about any cruelties of slavery? | 3:53 |
| John Price | No. I never heard I'm sure that there was some, but I never heard any of that from them. | 3:54 |
| Stacey Scales | How about your early experience with— | 4:05 |
| John Price | Slavery? [laughs] | 4:08 |
| Stacey Scales | No, Jim Crow, when did you first recognize [crosstalk 00:04:15] | 4:11 |
| John Price | I guess in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa was a city, but I remember we moved. I don't remember when they moved. I was only, must have been one or two years old. We moved from a place called Greenwood, which is in the African American area in Tulsa. Gone, now. We moved out into the suburbs, out into the farm area. And I remember growing up in the wilds of North Tulsa because it was considered country at that time. And then the city of course moved as I grew up, the city land began to move. I can remember going to town with my— I guess one of the vivid memories I remember, my uncle took me out to a store. This is out in the White area. And coming back, someone had taken us out there by a car and he wanted to ride back on the bus. | 4:14 |
| John Price | So coming back on this bus, the bus was very crowded. And we got on, he paid the fare. And I remember the man stopping the bus saying, "Will those Colored people move on back to the back of the bus?" And I assumed, now that I think about it, he was talking about us. So my uncle said, "Come on, baby. We have to go on back here in the back." And I remember growing up on buses. I mean, riding on buses that said, "Colored passengers, use rear seats." That was in the back of the bus. Always. You got on the bus and you moved to the back. | 5:21 |
| Stacey Scales | So [indistinct 00:05:58]. | 5:55 |
| John Price | You moved to the back. That's what I'm saying. You see here? | 5:57 |
| Stacey Scales | What did White folks say when you were on their seats? | 5:59 |
| John Price | Well, I don't know. I don't know if it would happen. What happened with Miss Rosa Parks, I don't think that White people—there was no getting up unless you were in supposedly the White area, but you sat down where you were sitting. And I don't remember anybody asking any Black person to stand up for any White person, but I know that Black people always sat. Now. What was interesting is that there was, when you transferred, I remember there was a lot of transferring. Tulsa was a large city at that time. You transferred downtown and you got on a bus and you rode the bus all the way out to the Black area. But if you got on the bus going further out into the White area, you still had to get on the back of the bus, you see, because there were White people in the front and you got on the back there if you could to find a seat. | 6:00 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you ever used to travel down south growing up? | 7:06 |
| John Price | The first and only time that I can remember, well, 1939, I was five years old. And I remember waking up in my mother's lap. I had my head in her lap. It was early in the morning and I looked up, blurry eyed. Because I don't remember her saying anything to me about this, but she and I were sitting in the back of the seat, and her husband's, my daddy's mother was sitting in the front, and my first cousin was driving. And I remember her saying, "We're going down to Dallas to visit your uncle." It was a wonderful trip, except on that trip I can remember, oh, my grandmother had bought this new car. I think it was a brand new Plymouth. And we were driving down to Dallas. I can remember. | 7:07 |
| John Price | It's funny. I don't remember going to the bathroom, but I know I did, but I do remember my grandmother going to the bathroom and we parked on the side of the road. And I think she had on pink pants, pink slacks. And I can remember these slacks going down into the woods, watching. I was still sleepy, you see? And then coming back. Because you couldn't go to in the bathrooms along the way, couldn't eat anything, you had lunch and breakfast and everything else in this beautiful basket full of food. | 8:07 |
| Stacey Scales | How would you get gas? | 8:44 |
| John Price | Gas? You were buying something. They didn't mind you buying gas, but you just couldn't go pee. [laughs] As late as 1965, '66, somewhere in there. I think this was Lake City, Florida, and my uncle was coming back. I was working in St. Augustine over at Florida Memorial College. And we stopped for gas at this kind of old gas station. And the fellow came out and like so many, would fill it up. And my uncle said, "I would like to go to the bathroom." And the man kind of smiled and said to him, "Well, I don't have the key. And my boss is not here." He says, "Take the nozzle out of the car." | 8:48 |
| Stacey Scales | Oh, so now take the money. | 9:34 |
| John Price | Yes, yes. Just take the gas, we pay you for that gas. So we paid him and went on down to another filling station. | 9:35 |
| Stacey Scales | Was it much difference in those experiences in the South than where you were from? | 9:43 |
| John Price | I don't remember having, no. I don't remember having, because everything was segregated. Everything except there were three or four movies on the Black part of the town, but you could not go, it's different in the South. In the South, you could go up in the balcony around in the back. But in Tulsa you did not go to the White shows. No, you couldn't go. No. | 9:50 |
| Stacey Scales | They have a district for Black, like a Black business district? | 10:16 |
| John Price | Yes. That's what I'm saying. Greenwood. | 10:20 |
| Stacey Scales | Okay. | 10:22 |
| John Price | They call it Black Wall Street. It was an extremely—in fact some friends made, I don't think a book is out, but there's a documentary which you might have seen on PBS some time ago about Greenwood. It was wonderful. And they had to destroy it. They finally destroyed it. | 10:23 |
| Stacey Scales | Were you there when all these different— | 10:45 |
| John Price | Yes. I didn't worry about, yes. Barber shops, beauty shops, grocery stores, department stores, bowling alleys, theaters, one long, long, long street. Barbecues, restaurants, churches. They tore down all the churches, no, they tore down everything except the churches. I went back, my sister and I fuss about this all the time. What if we had stayed there? Would it have been different? I said, "Carol, I don't know." I know that they, they tore down Booker T. High School, because here you have John Hope Franklin graduating from Booker T. You had 6, 10, 20 people, prominent people, graduated from Booker T. They had to destroy the place. So they tore it down. | 10:46 |
| Stacey Scales | Black folks put up any resistance? | 11:40 |
| John Price | From what I heard they did, but it was too late. And then when they wanted some of the bricks, they wanted to sell them, so I went back, it was clean. I said, "Wait, where's Booker T.?" They did move a house from on the corner of a street, which would lead you into Booker T. They moved a whole brick house down the street, and they put a conglomerative university there. There's University of Tulsa, University of Oklahoma, Langston, all in this beautiful, and put swans out there. It is very beautiful, but it's a slap in our face. They just tore down our neighborhood to improve. And then they tried to rebuild a little part of Greenwood. They restored some of the buildings, which is now owned by the city. Sort of a museum, but Greenwood as a—my church is still there. | 11:41 |
| John Price | In fact, all the churches are still there, but the rest of it is gone, in everybody's memory. Before that time, in 1920, 1919, 1921, there was a riot there. One of the largest in this country's history. Because, well, there was a whole rumor about why the riot started, and a Black man had been going with this White woman in downtown Tulsa. I heard so many stories. I still haven't gotten them straight. And they were on the elevator. When the elevator door opened, they were either kissing, or she said that this guy was trying to rape, I don't know what it was, but it got into a fight. And eventually it erupted, after a week, into a wholesale burning down businesses and burning them and killing a whole lot of Black and White people. I mean, chopping heads, and—it was a bad riot. | 12:35 |
| Stacey Scales | Have you heard any of the accounts of lynchings? | 13:37 |
| John Price | Hmm? | 13:40 |
| Stacey Scales | When you were coming up, were there still accounts of lynchings? Still lynchings? | 13:40 |
| John Price | No, there were some, but not in Tulsa. Not that I knew of. But I do remember my uncle said to my mother, or to somebody, they were in there talking, saying that they saw a cross being burned on Reservoir Hill. We were living in the Valley, and Reservoir Hill was up where we could see all this. And they were telling us that, I heard him say to somebody in the house and they saw a cross being burned on Reservoir Hill, which, you know what that meant. It's a wonder they didn't come over there and try to burn us out. | 13:45 |
| Stacey Scales | So was the KKK very visual? | 14:24 |
| John Price | No. The only time I heard of anybody in my family talk about it was my mother said they were sitting in church in Texas once. And they came through the front door and put some money on the table and kept going out the back door. [laughs] But I never heard them signal anybody. | 14:28 |
| Stacey Scales | They put money on the table? | 14:46 |
| John Price | Yeah. Now why they did that, I don't know. There's probably more to the story. They all, my mother and her sisters and my uncle, had all followed my grandmother's youngest sister. My mother, the lady I told you had come from Madagascar had nine or 10 children. And the youngest one had married a fellow who wanted to start a business. And he started a restaurant in Tulsa. This was before the riot, because oil was prominent in Tulsa at the time. So they started this restaurant, which they had lost during the riot. But in the meantime, all of my family started migrating from Texas up into Oklahoma. And that's what led them up there. | 14:49 |
| Stacey Scales | So about what time period, would you say? | 15:36 |
| John Price | Mm, 1920s, 1919. | 15:41 |
| Stacey Scales | This relative of yours from Africa, did she remember Africa? | 15:44 |
| John Price | I don't know, because she was gone before, she died in the '20s. See, she was 100 years old. I've only seen pictures of her. | 15:49 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you have them? | 15:57 |
| John Price | Yeah, somewhere. Yeah. I have pictures somewhere. My grandmother would tell stories about Africa and Texas and all kind of folklore which is going on, and as a child I was just absorbing all these things. | 16:00 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you ever talk about spirits? | 16:26 |
| John Price | Oh yes, indeedy. And seeing folks in the fog, and— | 16:28 |
| Stacey Scales | Really? | 16:32 |
| John Price | Oh, yeah. | 16:33 |
| Stacey Scales | Still got some of them? | 16:34 |
| John Price | Oh, well, I can't remember them all at the time, but talking about seeing people, she went out one morning to do something. And there was, I don't know if it was an entity, standing out there in the middle pointing to something and I've forgotten what it was all about. I heard so many of them. I really need to write them all down because they were so prominent, but the good luck and bad luck and spirits and wasting salt and all of that was prominent in the—oh, you don't put your hair in the trash can, because somebody could get it or the mice will get it. And if the mice get it, you'll get a headache. If a person gets it, you can have a problem. Don't sweep the dirt out of the front door because you know— | 16:35 |
| Stacey Scales | Oh, really? | 17:25 |
| John Price | Oh yeah. It's quite fun. | 17:27 |
| Stacey Scales | Coming up. Did you ever learn African American history or pride? | 17:35 |
| John Price | Yeah. There's a book that, I'm afraid to have it bound. In fact, I don't even want to open it up. I have it wrapped up, which is belonging to my—undoubtedly during Reconstruction they were passing these books out to Black people and talking about how to write in, and various things. But I heard a lot of stories, I had good teachers talking about African American history and African history. I had African and African American history in 10th grade. | 17:40 |
| John Price | But before that time, there was quite, as I said, these Tuskegee folk, they saw to it that you heard and that you would preclude into African and African American stories and ideals. At least you knew where Africa was located. And my mother told me that my grandmother wanted to go with Marcus Garvey. Said that she had talked about preparing to go back to Africa. That was always on her mind. She was just going, she's always ready to go back to Africa. And for a long time, they thought that they were going to pack up and go to Africa, but they came to Oklahoma. So I heard it all the time. Plus we were AMEs and the Bishop would always go over and bring back, I still have quite a few baskets and artifacts, which the Bishop brought back, at that time, Cape Town, Johannesburg. | 18:10 |
| Stacey Scales | They would travel all over? | 19:21 |
| John Price | Yeah. Would bring her back things. | 19:22 |
| Stacey Scales | Was your family educated? [crosstalk 00:19:30] | 19:26 |
| John Price | I'm not sure how far my father got, my mother finished high school. The oldest aunt went to college. I don't think she ever finished. And the youngest son didn't go. The aunt went to high school, but that's as far. And then the cousins of course went off to college somewhere. But though they didn't finish college, they were very college oriented. They knew master's degrees and PhD degrees and fraternities and sororities. | 19:26 |
| Stacey Scales | What did they do? | 20:22 |
| John Price | Mainly they were cooks. I don't know if that came from that aunt who was the restauranteur, but my mother's youngest sister was a cafeteria manager. My mother was a citizen cafeteria manager. I had an aunt who worked for a lot of rich White people in Tulsa. My uncle was a butler. He and his wife, his wife was an excellent cook. He was a butler and yard man. I'm guess all around a real English, kind of, he did everything. | 20:22 |
| Stacey Scales | So how would you describe family gatherings? How would it be, like on Christmas? | 21:06 |
| John Price | Usually? Oh, well that was always a big thing. Christmas is full the house. Full of people. Easter was full of people. Thanksgiving was full of people. And you constantly had people coming from Texas or Chicago. I still have folk in Chicago and folk in Texas. My mother's daddy had two families. My grandfather went off and married a woman who was a school teacher. So he had two families at the time. And so I still have uncles in Houston. But most of my mother's immediate family is gone. The grandfather's other side is still prominent. | 21:12 |
| Stacey Scales | Did they have a hard time [indistinct 00:22:13]? | 22:07 |
| John Price | No. You know, I kept asking and I don't know why they never discussed it. I kept trying to find out what they did during the—uh, huh? | 22:13 |
| Stacey Scales | Depression? | 22:24 |
| John Price | Yeah. During the Depression. And all they talked about was, well, there was soup lines. And I suspect that they were out with these White folk, all that they had. I never, even during the war my uncle had, and I don't know where, I don't even like to discuss it because I don't know where he got it, but my uncle had a, I don't know if you've ever seen one, a huge crock. You ever seen one of those crocks? | 22:27 |
| Stacey Scales | A big crock? | 22:48 |
| John Price | Yeah. | 22:49 |
| Stacey Scales | Yeah. | 22:50 |
| John Price | Out in the garage. Had it full of sugar. And he kept it up in the loft of the garage. And whenever we needed sugar, he'd go out and get a pot and go back. Now, I never asked him, "Where you got that?" That was my mother's oldest sister's husband. He worked at the post office. And he always had plenty of sugar. We always had plenty of meat. And when they discussed the Depression, they talked about soup lines, but I don't know of anybody whoever was in a soup line. I do know that this grandmother had always had a garden, and my uncle, they always had a garden in the backyard. Had a huge backyard, and they always had a garden back there. And then eventually they started raising chickens and rabbits. | 22:50 |
| Stacey Scales | Did the community ever share with the family, helping the needy? | 23:52 |
| John Price | I never knew. I do know that there were some large families and my grandmother was always talking about taking clothes. I know that they took clothes over to people. I think what my house was at that time, was that as people left Texas, they came to this house and got themselves a start. And then they moved somewhere. But I always heard my grandmother talking about taking some food over to Miss So And So's house because she's got a lot of children. And I know that clothes at home were taken to Brother so And So's children because he'd got a whole lot of folks. And I'm not so sure if that was through the church, or if that was just out of good will. But I know that there was a lot of sharing going on at that time. | 23:55 |
| John Price | And the man across the street who was an itinerant preacher, Mr. Alexander, was, I guess it was integrated too. He'd go out every Sunday and preach at what was called the Poor Farm. Now I remember my dad and I went out there more than once, and I can't I remember, I think I saw White people and Black people. I'm not so sure what that was all about. Because I haven't heard the term used since that time. But I know everybody, I'll put it this way. I don't know of any. I'm sure that there were some, and there were some people I didn't know, but I don't remember too many people starving because they didn't have any food. Everybody shared something with somebody. And then if you had a garden, you would offer somebody something. If you had some eggs, somebody else could use them. You see? And I guess they did it either through this community or through the church, but there was a lot of sharing. I don't think it's going on there now. I know it's not, because most of those people are dead or gone. | 24:45 |
| Stacey Scales | Did most people own their house or rent their homes? | 26:07 |
| John Price | I think most people owned their houses. Yeah. Most people owned their houses. I do remember two rent houses, a block down from us, and our house had a little bitty tiny house, which served as a rent house. But there were three rent houses that I know. And everybody else owned their house at the time. | 26:07 |
| Stacey Scales | Was there any place in the neighborhood that you weren't allowed to go? | 26:30 |
| John Price | There was a place that I used to pass by every day, which was, I'm not sure what the place was because I was a child. I just know, I was talking to somebody, they were doing a dissertation, on how I heard certain sounds. I'd always hear blues guitar coming out of there, and people in there having a good time. I'm not sure if it was a nightclub or if it was a store or what. Eventually it became a store, but the door was always open. Especially in the summertime. You hear people there and they're just having a good time. Well, I wasn't supposed to go in there period. You see? But I could hear it from outdoors. Further down from the—this is almost predominantly a housing area. Down into the city there were places, you wouldn't be caught dead living in there too long. | 26:30 |
| Stacey Scales | Like where? | 27:35 |
| John Price | Well, in a pool hall or a night clubby place, you know, a lounge. You weren't old enough to go in there. But you saw people going in and out, and some of your friends whose parents own these places, you see? | 27:36 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you have a sneak in and attend any of these places? | 27:59 |
| John Price | Only if I went in with my dad. Because see, they were too far away from where we lived. They were down in Greenwood, this place I was telling you about. | 28:06 |
| Stacey Scales | Was church mandatory? | 28:16 |
| John Price | Yeah. Church and Sunday school were mandatory. You had to go. | 28:21 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you ever skip? | 28:27 |
| John Price | Well, that wasn't even considered. That was not even considered. You went. Well, it was church and school. Movies. My uncle would dress up, this uncle, the one I told you, at the post office, and the garden and everything else. Household man, had two uncles like that. He'd dress up on Saturday, because I think working in the post office, this is when you couldn't tell if we were yard men or what, because on Sunday, everybody dressed up. You don't know what those persons were. The ladies was down, you know, hat on, everything. So Uncle Ward would dress up on Saturday and we'd go to the earliest show nearest the house, get popcorn and soda water, and then walk up all the way down Greenwood to the next showing, I guess six or seven, o'clock. You had a chapter picture, you had a cowboy movie, you had cartoons, you had the news, and the place was full. Full of folk. | 28:31 |
| John Price | And you had popcorn, and you had some soda water, which probably a bag like this was a dime. I went to see The Lion King last week—$4, a box of popcorn this large. And here's the soda. [laughs] I said, "Darn!" And growing up thinking Saturday—and you didn't get but one movie. But here you had, we'd start out on Saturday going to The Rex, it was called, and then walk down to the Dreamer. In those days, people walked a lot. Because folk didn't have a lot of cars. They were there. Or you rode the bus. See, they had a good bus system too. | 29:48 |
| Stacey Scales | What other things did you do for entertainment? | 30:31 |
| John Price | Oh, they had dances which would come in and out. People would come in and give a dance. And you had the dance hall. Huh? | 30:31 |
| Stacey Scales | Would they be segregated? | 30:43 |
| John Price | Oh yeah. Well, I'm talking about, this is Black Tulsa. This is Black Tulsa. This is African American Tulsa, which is no more, as I would know it. Everything was there. They had movies. They had, let me see. 1, 2, 3, 4, they had four theaters there. Umpteen churches, umpteen dance halls, pool halls, barber shops, grocery stores, drug stores. It just went on and on and on and on. And of course the other great entertainment was what everybody had in their house. It was a radio. I remember, I was saying to somebody not too long ago that if Joe Louis was fighting, everybody at school knew it and you couldn't wait to get home and eat your dinner and get that radio on. And if you were late getting home, everybody had it on their radio. And you'd pass by, listening to Joe Louis fight. That was a big activity. | 30:43 |
| Stacey Scales | Did they have Black newspapers? | 31:59 |
| John Price | Yeah. Still have one. There were two, but they ran one of them out of town. He was— | 31:59 |
| Stacey Scales | What were their names? | 32:01 |
| John Price | Oklahoma Eagle, which is still prominent. And then there was a Black Dispatch, and I was trying to think of the Oklahoma City paper. You had a network of Black people. Tulsa, Muskogee, Oklahoma City, Sand Springs, which is next door to Tulsa, Claremore. It's just people, and you saw it in the school system. | 32:04 |
| John Price | You would have festivals, music festivals. Chorus festivals. Everybody's from all over town, all these Black people, I hadn't seen a White person, you see? The tragedy of all this, is that all of this is gone, you see? They had scholastic meets, which would be at Langston. That was a predominantly Black school. Where you could go out there and compete in biology and music and whatever. They had band festival. And you met all these people. You didn't see any White folk. And they were prominent. These were some super people. Some of them have really gone on to politics, and you name it. But I think we thought that integration was going to let us go into Burger King, the movie, through the front door. But what it did for us was to destroy this camaraderie that was going on spiritually, intellectually, and morally, which was going on between Black folk at the time. | 32:45 |
| Stacey Scales | What was your early experience with music? Did you ever have to experience discrimination? | 34:03 |
| John Price | Oh, well, sure. Discrimination was and is still living on in the Black part of Tulsa. And I had super teachers, but whenever I wanted to go to a concert or something downtown, we always had to sit on a certain side of the— except for Marian Anderson. And that's when we could sit on the front row or wherever. But if you went to orchestra or band concert or a ballet or something, you had to sit on the right. They had a little cubby hole for you. | 34:03 |
| Stacey Scales | When did you start singing, or when did you become a musician? | 34:47 |
| John Price | When I was five years old, I guess, playing the piano. Well, I heard cousins playing the piano all the time, and I suppose I wanted to do it, I started mimicking them. You see? And then I had a grandmother who loved music. She listened to everything. I heard everybody's music, from opera, bluegrass to blues. They had records all over the place, I heard the most prominent artists at the time. And they discussed these people. | 34:47 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you ever have to go perform in front of a White audience? | 35:20 |
| John Price | No. The only time I remember performing for a White audience was, I had played at a concert in my church and a lady from the Tulsa paper had asked me to go down, there was a prominent artist by the name of Joseph Batiste in town who was going to play with the Tulsa Philharmonics. She gave me a note and told me to go down and let him hear me. So we waited until after the concert and he waited and I played for him, but that was not a full audience. It was just orchestra members. It was a friend, I must have been seventh grade, eighth grade, something like that. | 35:30 |
| Stacey Scales | How'd you feel about it? | 36:04 |
| John Price | I don't know. I just thought he was a pianist. Because I had sat through the rehearsal. He was a pianist, and she wanted me to play for him. I think now when I look back, you could have been [indistinct 00:36:21] and they would've said, "Oh, that's nice." But nobody was interested in helping too many Black people. They're not even interested in doing that now. I wanted to go to University of Tulsa when I graduated from high school. | 36:08 |
| John Price | Well, it was still segregated. So I went to Lincoln in Missouri. My sophomore year, I had friends in Oklahoma City who were breaking into the University of Oklahoma. I had friends who were going to the University of Oklahoma and they were interested in integrating the University of Oklahoma, so I was told that I should send in my application. So I talked with my folks about it and they said, "All right." So I sent in the material and I got into the school of music, but the general administration said they weren't ready at this time to accept me. So my mother said, "Okay, go on back to Lincoln." So that I let that go. | 36:37 |
| Stacey Scales | Who made the decisions in your family? | 37:29 |
| John Price | I don't know. I sort of charted out what I wanted to do and discussed it, and we agreed or we disagreed. But that was made from my mother's point of view. No, you don't go. I'm glad going back to—when I had to ride on a segregated train of course at the time. | 37:30 |
| Stacey Scales | How was that? | 38:06 |
| John Price | Going to get on and going to Jefferson City, Missouri, the train station was segregated. Everything else was segregated. | 38:09 |
| Stacey Scales | How'd you feel about the water fountains? | 38:22 |
| John Price | Oh, that was stupid. | 38:23 |
| Stacey Scales | Was it the same water, or? | 38:26 |
| John Price | I don't know. I just know one said Colored and the other one said White. | 38:27 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you ever try the White? | 38:31 |
| John Price | No, I wasn't interested. I didn't even try the Colored. [laughs] I could get water at home. I know that I hated sitting in those little cubby holes waiting on, and that lasted right up until the mid '60s. When I was in the service, going back and forth to Fort Benning. You had to go on the Black side, and folk would frown at you when you buy your ticket. | 38:33 |
| Stacey Scales | When did you go into the service? | 39:13 |
| John Price | In '59. And I was there until '61. So I didn't, as I mentioned to you before, I could not see, cut through, segregation. I didn't think it was going to ever be over. It was just anathema, a sickness, which pervaded the country. | 39:13 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you ever protest with anybody? | 39:38 |
| John Price | University of Tulsa, Lincoln. I'm trying to remember all those places we had. I was never struck, and I was never put in jail. | 39:46 |
| Stacey Scales | Were you in the [indistinct 00:40:11]? | 40:06 |
| John Price | Yeah. You went to meetings about what to do about all this stuff. I think when I really ran into it was when I went to St. Augustine, and I got off the bus, this was 1964. I got off the bus in St. Augustine, and Mrs. Peabody, still smell of smoke in the air. Mrs. Peabody and Martin Luther King had just left from down there. And I heard about all the things that the students had gone through. The Klan blasting loud music and talking rough over the speakers, but then it so happened that I had charge of the choir, and the choir would sing downtown. The St. Augustine folks were embarrassed. So they would go down and sing, and they'd have the police dogs down there and the Klan acting ugly. And I really missed a beating once though, because I was in choir rehearsal. | 40:07 |
| John Price | A man—we had an exchange program with Bates College. And so the White students had come down to go to classes for a week at Florida Memorial. Well they decided to go to a Burger King—no, they decided to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. This was somewhere near the bridge in St. Augustine. And they said that when they came out, they were surrounded by people, some guys with sticks, blue pants and white shirts. Now I suppose that they were Klan members or that they were the White Citizens Council or whatever. | 41:32 |
| John Price | But whatever it was, they started beating on the students and the faculty members, and they ran and jumped in their cars and went over the bridge, around the island, over the bridge. And finally, when they got to our dean's house, they all ran and got into the house in time. But then they started throwing Molotov cocktails at them. | 42:07 |
| Stacey Scales | Really? | 42:28 |
| John Price | Yeah. | 42:28 |
| Stacey Scales | In the house? | 42:29 |
| John Price | Yeah. At the house, yeah. Didn't burn him up, but throwing Molotov cocktails. And I know that his children, who were White, got into it all the time because they knew that their daddy was a dean at a Black institution. | 42:29 |
| Stacey Scales | Oh. So they got it because their father was— | 42:49 |
| John Price | Yeah. | 42:59 |
| Stacey Scales | Okay. Do you have anything else you'd like to share? | 42:59 |
| John Price | No, except to repeat that I did not think segregation was going to ever be over with. I mean, I lived through it enough to see that, I think what we were interested in doing was being able to be free to go anywhere we wish to go. Because we were human beings, and that our history is older than anybody else's in this world, that is socially and politically and artistically and humanitarianly. And that we should have been—we should have felt much better in this country. I'm not so sure how good we feel now. It's all a fake business going on now. | 43:03 |
| John Price | Money has a tendency to make people think that they feel good, but I'm not so sure. Well, we look at what's happening to our 13 year olds shooting each other. They have no feeling for life, no reverence for life. Killing up older people, killing up each other for a silk shirt and a pair of shoes. What can you do with it? We've lost our great history. Well, we've lost talking and having reverence for our great history, and reverence for life. And if we don't pull something together, we're going to be gone. Automatons. Bodies with no place to go. And somehow we've got to filter it down to the younger people to realize that Burger King and McDonald's didn't just appear. | 43:52 |
| John Price | And that this great history that we have must be fostered, nurtured and continued, whether we have money or not. And we must nurture our own people in order to make ourselves sane. And that it cannot always be done through the bank. We've got to pull ourselves together and deal with this, or we are going to all wind up plastered up against the wall with numbers underneath us. | 44:51 |
| Stacey Scales | All right, well, I'd like to thank you. | 45:27 |
| John Price | Well, thank you for letting me talk, rattle off at the mouth. | 45:29 |
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