Beatrice Stanley interview recording, 1994 July 13
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| Kate Ellis | — Then— Oh, first we need to do a sound check. That's the most important thing. Would you state your name? | 0:01 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Beatrice Perry Stanley. | 0:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, just [indistinct 00:00:12]. This is Kate Ellis with Beatrice Perry Stanley on— Shall I pause it? Oh, okay. On July 13th in the morning, is that right? | 0:08 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes, yes. | 0:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Today's Wednesday. Okay. And would you tell me where and when you were born? | 0:24 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. I was born February 15th, 1944 in Flint-Goodridge Hospital, which was the Dillard University affiliate. It was a hospital where the nurses were trained, and it was the only Black or Colored at that time hospital. | 0:29 |
| Kate Ellis | And that shut down in the 80's, didn't it? | 0:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes, it did. Yes, it did. It's a nursing home or a home for senior citizens now. | 0:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Yeah. Well, can you tell me, I guess, just starting from when you were very young, what you remember of your childhood and of the community you grew up in? | 0:51 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. I grew up in a community where neighbors were very supportive, where we—Well, the people who lived two doors down for us, for example, the lady name is Bernadette, was the watch person for the community almost. She was a seamstress, but she had put her sewing machine—She'd positioned it in such a way that she looked out on the street as she sat and sewed. And so when we walked on our way to school, Miss Bernadette was there and we always said, "Good morning," and it was a part of the whole thing. And if we did not say, "Good morning," I can remember my father walking us back one day because we had passed without saying, "Hello," or "Good afternoon," and he walked me back by and said, "Don't ever pass us without saying "Hello," to Ms. Bernadette. Ms. Bernadette had reported that I had not. | 1:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | There was a real cohesiveness in the community and we had—Well, my parents were both educated, so we were middle class in terms of our socioeconomic level and we did not want for anything material that I can be aware of. My father was a photographer by Javi. He was a principal of a high school by profession, but I really believe that the early years of his taking pictures of us doing all kinds of things were very important for the self-esteem thing. I think we would've known that we were good people anyway, but there's something special about a 2, 3, 4 year old who is posed all the time, the object of somebody's affection in that way. It made for a very special environment. | 1:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I had aunts and uncles who loved and nurtured and just had a really, really good grandmother here, good extended family. And so, the fact that we walked to a segregated school 17 blocks, and that sometimes children through rocks at us on the way and called us names was just a part of them. That was their problem. It did not affect me notably inside. I mean, I still knew who I was and I was a valuable person because I learned that from my home. We had a very good church and so that really was our social outlet. We had a youth group where we had a lot of fun activities. And again, there was the nurturing and the support that did not allow me to think there's anything wrong with me because I wasn't a part of—You sat in a certain place on the bus and that you didn't go in certain places to eat and so forth and so on. These were things that didn't demean me personally because I knew who I was and I got that from my home. | 2:29 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I remember in high school that it was in—It seems to me that it was in 1953, but that could be absolutely wrong. That history, you may have to check those, but when the signs came off the buses. There were these signs, and when the signs came off the buses, we all thought about it, "Wow, isn't that something?" And people were taking the signs and then you would get on the bus and you'd sit in the front or sit wherever there was a vacant seat, and the European American, or the White person would jump up and you'd say, "What is wrong with this person?" You don't want to sit by me? I know who I am. Again, it was never an offense that damaged me personally. The problem was within that person, and it was an unfortunate one. | 3:30 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | My sophomore year, well, I went away to college. There was never a question in terms of family, whether we would go to college. It was just what college, because our people were educated and that was what we do. I went away to a predominantly—Well, an all female, predominantly African American college. | 4:16 |
| Kate Ellis | What was that? | 4:33 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. It's a Methodist school. My sophomore year, I was involved in the civil rights movement because I was there in Greensboro, so I was in the sit-ins. And so, I was really actively putting my body in a place where I could feel I would make changes in the structure of segregation and Jim Crow and that was important. Again, it was never question of whether I would do it. | 4:33 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It was just how was I going to work it out so that I didn't miss too many classes or because I was an honor student, I was there on a scholarship and I graduated second in my classroom high school and I wasn't going to shame my family. I wasn't going away, but this was an important thing for me. I can remember the first time I was arrested. We were demonstrating in front of a cafeteria. It's called S&W Cafeteria, and there came a time when they closed the paddy wagon doors and we couldn't hear anybody sing. I remember not being able to hear people sing anymore and that was frightening to me because I didn't know— | 5:02 |
| Kate Ellis | You said they were singing outside? | 5:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, we had been singing the freedom dongs and going up and down and then suddenly when the arrests started, there were some of us who had decided we were going to go all the way through and go on and get arrested, and there were others who had said at that time they would not. They were outside singing, and then they slammed those doors and I remember, here I was 17, 18 years old, not having shared any of this with my family, and here I am, and not knowing what was going to happen. | 5:38 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But at any rate, my junior year, I went away. I was an exchange student to a predominantly White school in Salem, Oregon, which was Willamette University and it had gotten to my mind that my college, the education I was getting there was not up to par. I mean, nobody told me that, but I had that sense that although I was making A's, and I was a very capable student, that I would not fare well out here in the big— | 6:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Out here in the world? | 6:31 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | You're right, at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon because it's a big university because I was really concerned, but the president of my college didn't have any concerns for me. I mean, she sent me because she felt I would do well and it was an even exchange. A student came from Willamette and my father paid the tuition at Bennett. Her father paid the tuition at Willamette. We just switched. And so, I was one of only two Black students at that college. I lived in an independent dorm but I didn't understand at that time, of course, because the sorority dormitories would not accept a Black person. I decided I was going to do my schoolwork well. It didn't matter if anybody spoke to me, if they didn't like me. Unimportant. I was there to be a student and I did very well. I got in Mortar Board. I had straight A's. | 6:31 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It proved to me that although I'm saying that the desegregation, the thing didn't get inside me because it didn't affect my esteem, I still somehow had gotten the message that my college was not what it should be, which was not true. The psychology classes that I had had at Bennett before I came to Willamette adequately prepared me. It really was. It was just that myth, the kind of thing that gets in your head that you're not aware of, you see, and if you don't have anything to bounce it up against, it can really destroy. It can really destroy but it was a good year. It was a good year and I've probably gone far away from where you asked me where was I born and where I grew up. | 7:25 |
| Kate Ellis | No, that's fine. That's fine. | 8:06 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I went right along. | 8:08 |
| Kate Ellis | Let me go back and follow up and then we can keep going with that. What church did you belong to? | 8:10 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Central Congregational Church, okay? It's now the United Church of Christ. In 1959, we combined with the Evangelical reform and it made the United Church of Christ. | 8:13 |
| Kate Ellis | That's why it's got that really long title. It's— | 8:22 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, United Church of Christ. Central United Church of Christ. That was our church and wonderful, wonderful church. Also, my family was a member of the club called Jack and Jill. Now, this was a club of African American, usually middle to upper class in terms of socioeconomic level, people who provided a social outlet and a cultural outlet for their children because these things were not open to us. And so when we'd go on trips or go to conventions or something, the intent was to be sure that, to the extent that we could, we experienced a normal development. You could go to museums or go as a group and it really was an important organization. It still exists, Jack and Jill does, but it was really important for us then, because in the segregated society, there were some things that were just not available to us. | 8:25 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The little things like being able to try on—That was one thing when I went away to college, when I came back after having been in those sit-ins, when I came back to New Orleans and someone told me something about, "You can take this home and try it on but you can't try it on here," I said, "I don't want it." See, there was a whole different perspective then. I wasn't going to put up with that. It didn't offend me to the extent when I was coming up that I even noticed it. I just pushed it off or away from me, although my mother, when we would go shopping and the White salesperson would try the stockings on her hand, you see, rather than my mother's hand, and say, "Here, this is how the shade looks," my mother would say, "No, your hand is a different color from mine. How can I tell how it's going to look on me?" | 9:20 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Or we would go in a place and there would be many people standing up to be waited on, and we would've been first, but they would wait on every White person who was at that counter and my mother would say, "My daughter and I were here first," and I would say, "Shh, momma, don't say anything." | 10:08 |
| Kate Ellis | You would tell her to hush up. | 10:21 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, right, right. Don't say anything. Don't say anything. As I had matured and as I had been away, and as I had been involved in the civil rights struggle, in that sense, I was a member of CORE. I was not silent anymore and I didn't want to just—It'll change or we'll go along or whatever, or just say, "Well, I can just push that off because I know it doesn't affect me." I just didn't let it go by. I didn't let it go by. I really hurt my father's feelings one day and I felt if I could have taken the moment back—We were traveling. This was again, probably my sophomore year in college. We were doing a short motor trip, and Daddy was telling us about this Exxon place where you could stop and you could get sodas. It doesn't sound like a big deal now, but you couldn't go to McDonald's. | 10:22 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I mean, you couldn't. There was nothing. You go to this, big deal, and you could get gas and you could go where the restrooms were clean and all. And so, we got ready to get out and the man—There either was a separate place, a very much smaller place for Black people, or you had to just stand up and eat, and everybody else was sitting. I don't know what he was but I went back and got in the car and my father, he was crushed because from his perspective, this was a big deal because when we used to go on motor trips when I was small, because my grandparents lived in Georgia, the first thing you would ask before you put any gas in your car was, "Do you have facilities for Colored?" In other words, if you don't have a bathroom for us, we're not going to buy your gas. And then if you found one, they would've White ladies, White gentlemen, and Colored. They'd have one bathroom. | 11:12 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | This was a big deal from my father's perspective, you see, when you have come that far, that at least these people had a clean restroom and then they did have a place to get sodas— | 12:04 |
| Kate Ellis | But there was still a separate restroom— | 12:13 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right. | 12:14 |
| Kate Ellis | —but it was clean. It was sort of— | 12:14 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, right. And you could get sodas and they were glad to see you kind of thing and they weren't so apparently rude or like you're an antelope. I mean, my money's green. What's the problem? For my daddy, it was good and he had really talked about it so much, but I just could not take it. I wasn't going to take it and so I just went and sat in the car. My brother and I—This was again, sophomore year. See, that college experience, that civil rights experience for me was a mark in terms of what I was going to tolerate. | 12:15 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | My brother and I went to the eye doctor. Now this man is in practice. He's a doctor right here in New Orleans, Dr. Azar. We got there and the receptionist showed us to a separate waiting room and I refused to sit there. There were no magazines. It was the size of a closet. There was this other big waiting room. I went and sat in the White one. I went and sat and my brother came and sat by me, and the nurse was just appalled. "This is ridiculous." I mean, I was not going to tolerate it. I was not going to tolerate it. No matter what it meant, I was not going to tolerate it. | 12:49 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I guess you get to a point in your life where there's certain things you are not going to put up with. And so I think that either verbally or physically, I have always, as I have matured, made a case for requiring people to treat me in a certain way. I laugh when I go to McDonald's now because one of the places that we used to picket was McDonald's, and they used to have the sign up here. In those days, it was over 8 million sold and we said, "Never one to a Black person." All the years of sitting in the back of the bus and that stuff, because I had the deep community thing, the church thing, the family thing, it didn't affect who I was. It didn't. | 13:26 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I knew who I was and I was a person of value but then I felt it began to be our responsibility to let people know that there's certain things you're not going to put up with and I was not going to be treated in a certain way. That's been an important thing in my life in terms of being always respected in terms of a person, and I feel that way, that people should treat each other that way no matter what the ethnic background. | 14:19 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm interested in what happened when you were with your mother in the store. How would the saleswoman react when your mother would say that? | 14:54 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | She was miffed and she'd go, "The nerve of this person." She was miffed and then she would finally maybe wait on one more White person to let it be known that she was doing her thing, that you're not going to tell me what to do, but then she would wait on my mother. She would bristle, but it just was a characteristic of my mother that she wasn't going to take that treatment either and it was a good lesson for me. It was a good lesson for me. | 15:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Even at the time, it was sort of— | 15:37 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, I— | 15:38 |
| Kate Ellis | Because kids are always like— | 15:40 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, right. | 15:40 |
| Kate Ellis | —to their parents, "Don't make waves." | 15:40 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, don't make a fuss. Don't make confusion. Yeah, mama, don't say anything. Don't make confusion. But I assume I followed in her footsteps really with the business of people saying, "You can't try this on here. You can take it home." And even to the extent that my mother had to explain it, "Well, she's been out of town in school and that." | 15:43 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, would [indistinct 00:16:01]? | 16:00 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | She said I went away. Yeah, she said one time as someone—I'm not sure what I had done, if it was the time about not trying on a dress or a hat or something like that. You have to buy it first and you have to take it home and you can't try. And I said, "I don't want it," and my mother felt the need to explain that, "She's been away." She's from the moon, but— | 16:00 |
| Kate Ellis | She's not from around here. | 16:22 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, right, right. The shoe was on another foot. | 16:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah, I was just going to say, which is really interesting then you—I want to tell you something about that because it was interesting talking to your mother because the first thing she told me, I think, was, and I don't think I'm betraying her confidence in telling you this, that she said to me, "I want to tell you that I haven't been crowed. I didn't experience Jim Crow." I thought it was interesting because people have very—And some people will say that and for many people they may feel that way, but I'm interested in what you remember being with her and how again, when you were little, you were saying to her, "Mom, don't make [indistinct 00:17:07]. | 16:29 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. | 17:07 |
| Kate Ellis | And then later on she was saying to you, "Hey—" | 17:07 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, right, right. And that's interesting, her perception. Now, my mama, whenever I will say things to her about any general statements about European Americans, not individual people, but about the conquest of Native Americans, the whole thing around the world, my mama will go into this, "White people have been very good to me." She's hilarious. | 17:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, good. She didn't just tell it to me. | 17:37 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, no. No, she's hilarious. "I wouldn't have gotten a job at Tulane University, Beatrice. I was a professor there." She goes through this litany of her recent experience, and I'm saying, "Mom, I'm not talking about individual people." I said, "You get to know individual people." I said, "I'm talking about history," and she does not hear that. And she must remember the things in the store because they I remember them very well, about her standing up and saying, "My daughter and I were here first," and that took a lot of courage. | 17:38 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That took a lot of courage because everybody, not only the salesperson, but everybody looked around, "Well, who are these," and as I look back on it, it was wonderful. It was wonderful. She also took some flack because of her color. See, when she went to work—I mean, the color of her skin, not her race. She went to work as a teacher. She was 17, 18 years old and the first thing one of her students called her was a yellow banana. This was her first experience and so— | 18:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Will you remind me again of where she worked? | 18:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | She worked at a school called Lockett. Lockett, downtown, way down here. Yeah, she taught there 20 years. She has a very fine reputation as a teacher in this community. Oh yeah, she really does a lot. Wherever we go, somebody says, "Oh, Ms. Perry, you taught me." But that's interesting she doesn't think about that experience. | 18:38 |
| Kate Ellis | But that's interesting that people said essentially, "You're too light." I mean, that was— | 18:54 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Well, that was just a way of calling her a name, just referring to her complexion, calling her yellow because she was yellow, which there was nothing you could do about that. I think that if she were to delve into her past, she might find more experiences. I mean, my grandfather, her father, was a very conscientious, well, what they would call it time back, Race man. I mean, he was for the people. He was like Mary McLeod Bethune. He's out there. He started the first nursery school. He got the first nursery school started for, at that time, Colored children in New Orleans and he went down many times, hand in hand to the school board to beg for a job for a Black teacher or something. My grandfather was very much for his people and he's from the country. | 19:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Well, he got a good education. He wrote for the newspapers, as a matter of fact. The time speaking, she probably told you, but there's a history in our family of standing up for rights. I think that mama has some of that. And now, it might not be a Jim Crow situation, but if somebody's trying to take a parking space, she'll start getting out and get confusion and she's not the age where she needs to take on somebody like that. But I think that having a mission, being able to stand up and speak for yourself and for what you feel is right is something that's been a part of my history. It's been a part of my history. I'm not sure if I've told you. You may want to ask me something. | 20:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. Well, I mean, I would just like to hear more— | 20:46 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | What you want to know more about? | 20:48 |
| Kate Ellis | About you and just—Well, I say that, but if you have a train of thought, I mean, if there was something else you wanted to— | 20:50 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, okay. | 20:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Keep going. I mean, in other words, I don't want to interrupt you if there was something that you were just thinking. | 20:59 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Well, I'll tell you about an experience that I had. This must have been the summer of my sophomore year before I went to Willamette in Salem. That was the university I went to. I was a caravaner. At that time, my church took young people and trained them, my denomination, not my specific church, my denomination at a place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. And we were trained to go out in teams of four young people to various states, and work with their youth groups and so forth. We went to be trained. I was a leader, and I had never been on a caravan before in my life, but I led this caravan. There were four of us. The other three students were White. One guy was a sophomore at Yale, and the other was somewhere from Virginia, and another young woman was from Massachusetts. | 21:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And I did not really know a lot about doing this job, but I felt that I had to find it within me to do a good job, because these young people.—I didn't know how to do this but I was the leader of those people and then I was Black, and there were maybe only two or three other Black caravaners. One again, was from Massachusetts, a guy, and it was interesting that I didn't have—He was the first northern or African-American person that I had been around, kid, and I listened to him talking with this accent and I thought he was putting on. I said, "What is this boy? I said, "I don't know this. This is a different person." But it was good for me to see somebody other than somebody from my region, even though I'd been in college. | 21:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I don't know why that boy came across as being so—Well, that's neither here nor there but we went out to South Dakota and when we got to South Dakota, we stayed for one week in our team. We lived in the houses of the parishioners. We stayed for one week in each little town. We went to Sioux Falls and went to a little town called De Smet, and so a little town. Each place I went, for many of those people, they had never seen a Black person. Here I was, 17 years old, in a sense, representing the whole of the African-American or Negro or whatever, Negro, I guess, at that time, population in the country because these people didn't know anything about my people. | 22:50 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And one time the pastor, I guess it was in Sioux Falls, had me staying in this house with these people and I recognized that they were very cold but I didn't—They would eat their own breakfast and then they would tell me to come down and have cereal. They'd just leave the stuff on the table. And they had this yapping dog. I'll never forget this dog. I tried to come down the steps. This dog would be barking at the foot of the steps. It was horrible. It was horrible. And at that time, Andrew Young was in Birmingham, and he was on the cover of the United Church of Christ Magazine or something like that. And so, one of the members of the family tried to engage me in a conversation against Andrew. Well, I had grown up in the same church with Andrew, and it was my denomination and I just said, "He's doing God's work. Wherever he is, he's doing God's work." He's an ordained— | 23:28 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Finally, after the week is almost over and I've gotten this horrible treatment in this house, the pastor says, "Well, how was your week?" And I said, "It was awful, Reverend." I think his name was Addison. "It was awful, Reverend Addison." Well see, when I asked people who wanted to keep somebody, that family said, "We don't want no niggers," and I don't use the N-word. That's why I'm whispering. I don't use it. I don't let my students use it. And so, this man puts me in their house. He puts me as a test case right in their house and this is what they said. And he says that he told him, "Well, we going to let her stay with you." It was horrible and I said to myself, "He could at least have let me know and then I would've not been prepared for a family." | 24:17 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But the rest of the experience was very good. We stayed with families that were—I remember one lady whose name was Beatrice, like mine. She was 85, 89. Sweet, sweet woman. She would come and ring a little bell and wake me up. And she'd never in her life had a person in a home, a Black person. No, she didn't know any Black people. She never seen any Black. Sweet as toast, asked me how I wanted my eggs. She was a precious little lady. It was an experience but I began to feel the weight of the whole thing, see, because people were asking me all these questions about, "Well, why do you all want to come to our schools and why—" And I was explaining best of my understanding. I said, "In some schools, you got books 13 years old." I said, "When I was in the elementary school, the books we got were the old books from the White school, pages torn out, people's names written on them." | 25:01 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I said, "That isn't fair. You must understand that." It was a growing summer for me. I really grew a lot. It was a lonely summer. It was a lonely summer because I didn't see—I remember going outside looking at a black cat and saying, "Me and you, boo." I didn't see any other person of color. But now Native Americans, it was my first experience going to a reservation. Heartbreaking. It was devastating for me to see how those people were living how they were living. Well, the people would say to me, "We don't have a problem with Black people in our area," but they treated Native Americans with the same disrespect that we were treated in the South and they didn't see the parallel. They didn't see that. "No, we don't have a problem." | 25:49 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That was quite a summer and it was a good experience too, for those other three people on my team because this guy from Yale, see, here I was—He was a sophomore going into his junior year at Yale. I was going to my junior year at a college—Well, I was going to Willamette, but from a college that he'd never heard of and he thought he's a Yaley. Who are you? But they gained a lot of respect because the spiritual commitment was always there. See, everybody had to give a sermon and you had to be able to lead devotional groups and all this. You had to reach in and bring all that out so that was there. It was a good experience. | 26:44 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And then I went from there out to Willamette for that year and I remember walking across the campus and people would do that and I said, "Wow." I said, "Everybody up here must have sinus when they're past me," and then it dawned upon me somebody had told these people that Black people smell differently and they were checking it out. I finally put that together because there's no way in the world that everybody who passed suddenly had a sniffing problem. | 27:23 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I said, "Well—" But I learned a lot there. I think I taught a lot because as I said, I was an excellent student and I am not being immodest, but having thought that I was not going to do well, I was delighted that I did so well. And it wasn't easy coursework, but I knew how to study. I was serious about it and I think I was a model for—I felt that I was representing my college. I was representing my race. I had all of this on my shoulders, representing my family, and I was going to press on and I did. It was good. It was good. | 27:51 |
| Kate Ellis | I mean, it sounds like it was good. It sounds like it must have been exhausting— | 28:32 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, it was. | 28:36 |
| Kate Ellis | —and isolating. I mean, how would you draw the strength sometimes? I mean, how would you draw the strength sometimes to— | 28:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, to press on. | 28:43 |
| Kate Ellis | —to carry that? | 28:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right. Well, because I had my family who loved me writing me letters. My father, I can see now. I think I turned 18 while I was out there, maybe 19. 19. I turned 19 and he sent me a cake and they sent me—I had my family and then I had two or three very good friends in that dormitory. They were young women who were like me. They were living in an independent dorm because they were not part of a sorority. I'm a part of a sorority. Now, I'm not downing sororities. I'm just saying that was, at that time, the independent dorm and they were also women who had come to school in their junior year like I so they were new like me and so we had something in common. | 28:49 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And I can remember one of them, Nancy Briggs, took me home for the week to Thanksgiving to her home. It was wonderful. I cannot remember where. Then I went to Yakima, Washington with another girl. That were good. But then there was the church. I found a congregational church to go to and I listened. And the one constant thing within my life that has been important through all the change in my life has been my relationship with God. I mean, that doesn't change. That's the real source. And your youth—See, I was 18, 19 old. It might sound exhausting, but I didn't keep it all in front of me. I'm a very focused person in terms of, "Okay, I'm here to go to school. I'm going to go to school. If the people like me, fine. If they don't, fine," and I really had said that. | 29:30 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I got the choir because I love to sing. That was a support group of fun. I mean, that was great. I loved the choir and then I enjoy studying and learning. I was a psychology major and I loved my reading, my work. Those were support things or my home thing. I was dating at that time. I was engaged to a man who was at Yale. Well, by then, he had graduated divinity school. He was a letter writer. Being a pastor, he likes words— | 30:17 |
| Kate Ellis | He had things to say. | 30:49 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, right. That was constant in support. It was good. | 30:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Did you end up marrying him or [indistinct 00:30:57] Stanley? | 30:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes, I did. Yes. Yes, that's right. Yeah, it was good. Those were very, very good experiences. I am grateful that my parents were willing to let me go through those things, because that was a big thing for me to go way out to the West Coast like that. I mean, Salem, Oregon, I never been there. I thought it was always under ice. I didn't know what it was like. Turns out, it rains all the time. But yeah, I had parents who were willing to let me grow and learn. That South Dakota thing, going there with the caravans. I'd never been on a plane at that time and they were willing to let that happen. | 30:56 |
| Kate Ellis | When you were on that caravan, did you ever encounter difficulties as far as trying to travel, as far as— | 31:34 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No. No. Uh-huh. No, I do not recall having any difficulty with that. Mm-mm. No, I really don't recall. Uh-huh. | 31:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, because I guess that—Well, that would've been early 60s. | 31:52 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. Yeah, that was—Right, it was '64. Yeah, maybe not quite. '62, '63, that summer. That summer, '63. Yes. | 31:58 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm just curious about what you mentioned about elementary school, certainly, about what you remember. The books. | 32:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay, yes. Yeah. | 32:13 |
| Kate Ellis | What else do you remember? I mean, if you want to say more about that and also other things that you—Where did you go to elementary school? | 32:14 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I went to McDonogh No. 6, and yeah, it's a school way up town on Camp. Interesting enough, to tell you how sturdy the building was, it's now a condominium. | 32:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh really? | 32:29 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes, it still exists. They didn't tear it down. | 32:29 |
| Kate Ellis | Where is is again? It's on Camp and— | 32:31 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It's Chestnut. It's way up above Prytania. I think it's 4849 Chestnut, something like that. It's up, way, way Uptown. Okay. | 32:32 |
| Kate Ellis | And while we're on the topic, just tell me, what street were you on when you grew up? What was your— | 32:41 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Upperline. | 32:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Upperline. | 32:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Upperline, 2722. Upperline Street. It's— | 32:47 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, you lived Uptown? | 32:48 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Uptown. I grew up Uptown. Uh-huh. Not far from Tulane. I mean, that'll give you a general idea. | 32:50 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah, I know that area. Yeah, just because that's where—I'm staying near Tulane [indistinct 00:32:59]. | 32:57 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. It's a neighborhood where we grew up. It's changed remarkably. My parents moved because after living 40 years in that house, it was an upstairs—Downstairs [indistinct 00:33:07] in my father's heart. The doctor said that it would be better for him if he were on one floor. They moved about, well, maybe seven years ago out here, and my daddy lived maybe two or three more years from out here. But yeah, we grew up Uptown. We walked, as I said, 17 blocks. We walked straight up upper line Street to McDonogh No. 6. Every day, walked there and back. And number six was a very good school. It was at a time when, although we didn't have the books—As I said, we had old stuff. It's hard for me even to remember that probably the paint was peeling. I mean, probably the physical structure was not that great. | 32:59 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It may or may not have been. Probably was not, but the teachers were outstanding. I mean, the fact that we didn't have the books that we were supposed to have didn't worry us because the teachers were right on it and we were students who—There were not students in the class who didn't seem to want to be involved. I mean, we wanted to be involved. We wanted to be there. We were motivated and we didn't have a whole lot of outside circumstances troubling us. See, I'm a teacher now, and I know sometimes the children bring such baggage. | 33:51 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It's just hard to even to start where you should. But the majority of the children in our class, and I'm not talking about that socioeconomic level because we went to school with all children. This was our school. You had children whose parents were teachers, children whose parents were not working at all, children's parents were longshoremen. I'll never forget that the children whose parents were longshoremen always seemed to have a lot of cash money. When it was time to go on trips, they'd come up with cash, see. | 34:20 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | My mom would give a check. I'd say, "Mom, I don't want a check." I didn't know if it was the same thing. I didn't understand the concept, but it was just that we were all in there together. But the teachers were so powerful and strong and so dedicated and focused. And the teacher's word was law in terms of discipline, behavior. And with me, the teachers knew my parents. They knew my grandparents. They said, "You Reverend Dunn's granddaughter. I know you're not going to do that." The environment was such that there was certain expectations and I followed them. | 34:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | We used to get free pencils and free paper and free blotters. I'll never forget it. Well, the blotters and the Coca-Cola pencils and all that came in a little packet. You don't even need blotters. Tell your blotter. What do you need blotter for? But all of that was free. Then we get Louisiana pencils and this loosely paper free and we used to always say that they'd give us that to keep us happy because we couldn't go to the other schools. But the books were outdated and the books were torn and they were written in but we got a good education. | 35:19 |
| Kate Ellis | What things would your teachers teach you? I mean, my understanding is that the textbooks at that time wouldn't even necessarily indicate that Black people lived in the United States. I mean, that there was this incredible absence. Would they fill in that? I mean, what things would they do that— | 35:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | All right, I understand your question. There was not a lot of teaching of African-American history. I mean, there was not a lot of filling in blanks. We grew up with the lack of information that those books perpetrated. They talked about Mary McLeod Bethune, maybe Booker T. Washington and who else? Oh, George Washington Carver. I mean, those were the only three people. Now, they weren't in the books, but our teachers would refer to them. If you look at old history books and how slavery was presented and compare with what we read now, our teachers did not make an attempt to change any of that information because I don't think they had it in their minds to change it either. See, we grew up with the same stereotypical misinformation. | 36:17 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Gradually, I guess, by high school maybe people were changing, maybe teachers were putting in more, or we were reading more and we were more aware. See, times were changing. But the concept of Africa, we didn't grow up with a sensible idea of what that civilization had meant and I guess Leakey and all those people hadn't done what they'd done then. And so, we didn't know about the discoveries because they hadn't been made but we grew up with the same negative ideas of what Africa was. I mean, the Charleston movies, the whole foolishness, and our teachers did not fix that for us because it wasn't fixed for them. | 37:15 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Same thing with Native Americans and even New Orleans now. I lived for a long time up in the Washington area and worked in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is very highly—But I used to [indistinct 00:38:14] in my classroom and it looked like United Nations. My experience with people is a lot broader than a lot of people in New Orleans in terms of, for example, the concept Indians. We don't say that anymore in Montgomery County. | 38:01 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But down here, people still do and some of those stereotypes are still there. I used to teach a class to teachers called the History of Ethnic Groups in the United States and it was called Human Relations 17 was the title, but that was the subtitle, because the purpose of it was to sensitize these teachers, most of whom were young European Americans, to the history of the various groups of people they're going to be working with and their need to open up and see there's value in all of this. | 38:33 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And I used to say to them that the term Native American, the idea of having people sit Indian-style down, all these little stereotypically—Don't say that. If you have the alphabet on your board, don't say I is for Indian. Do you want to have W is for White people? Just don't use that. Cut something out. I say that to say that there's still a lag between what, in this area, people's minds perceive or the feelings of differences. People down here, there's the difference between that and the acceptance of those and understanding then in places like Montgomery County, Maryland. Yeah, and I think it has to do with the experience. Were you hearing that long series, I guess you weren't, of articles race thing that was in the newspaper. | 39:04 |
| Kate Ellis | No, but somebody— | 39:51 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | You know what I'm talking about? | 39:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Yes, and I'm going to try to get a copy of that actually because it sounds like it was a good series. | 39:53 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It was. It was good. Yeah, to hear where people are. I called in a couple of times and they printed a couple of things that I said and I think one of them has to do with the issue of slavery, that we have never really come to terms in this country with that issue and people are either at one end of feeling that somebody's trying to make them feel guilty. Other people are saying, "It's your fault. It's this and this," but it is now a shame on the national conscience and we have not assuaged the conscience of that. And we got to figure out a way to do that. We've got to figure out a way to do that or we're going to be at odds with ourselves in this country. It's serious. | 39:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But the school, it was a good experience because we were taught that you had to be better than White students. You had to learn your lessons three times as well as when we went on trips, we were always much more polite and orderly and we would look—And our teacher would've told us, "Now we're going to the," whatever. We used to go to the symphony and we would sit in a little special place or whatever and we'd be sitting up with our little hands and they would've told us when to clap and when to— | 40:39 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And we see all the little White running around [indistinct 00:41:14] and we said, "What," but it was okay. I mean, we felt that we were told to do that and that was what was expected and we had to be better than. That was always the message that our teachers gave to us. And I think by and large, it was certainly true. It was certainly true. And so, I value the education that I got here in the elementary schools, in junior high and high schools. | 41:10 |
| Kate Ellis | What junior high? | 41:41 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I went to Samuel J. Green Junior High, which is on Valence Street. It was seventh, eighth, and ninth grade then. I don't know what it is now but that was good. We had good teachers. Again, good, good teachers and high expectations, good parental support. Now my parents were very seldom able to come to events. I remember in elementary school, I know my grandmama used to come all the time though. We just wanted to have somebody there for you. But I always had a time when you did homework. It was never a question. | 41:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And if I needed to go to the library or whatever you need, parental support was there. There was an extension of that education into the home and my daddy had a lot of books in the library and he did a lot of reading. My father never went anywhere without a book because he felt you might have a time to wait. You might be in line. You might be whatever. He always had his book. And then of course, music has always been a good part of my life. That was good. | 42:12 |
| Kate Ellis | No, it just seems like music has been such a part of your whole family. | 42:40 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. Yes, it really has. Yeah, my mother's, and that piano is the piano that my grandmother played. It belonged to my Aunt Beatrice, but my grandma played on it and my aunt and we used to sing carols and hymns around it and all. It's a big part of our lives. Well, I had to restore it and the man said, "You ought to get new keys. I need to give your piano a new smile." I said, "No." I said, "My grandfather's finger touched those." I said, "No, I'm not going to get that." | 42:47 |
| Kate Ellis | It's a beautiful piano. | 43:19 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, music was real important. When I look back on the Jim Crow thing, because I know that's what you need to know, I guess what I've told you about the importance of what was in my home. The fact that we were segregated in terms of where we could and could not go did not appear to affect me. It really didn't. I mean, there were two restaurants that we could go out to eat in and we didn't go out to eat often, but we went to one of those too. Dooky Chase, which is still in existence, and another one whose name I cannot remember. My brother and I have tried to think of it. | 43:19 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I do remember traveling and my father never said anything about the Holiday Inn, but we used to have to travel from New Orleans to North Carolina before there was a place called the Ghana Inn where we could stay. And I could tell my father was tired and he'd been driving all this time and he was tired. And I do remember thinking to myself, "My father can do," and again, I don't know if this is my adult perception of it or if I did think this at that age, "My father can do everything, but he can't fix this." I mean, we cannot stay. They keep saying, "The nation's innkeeper." It was shining all around and we are driving up the road. "Come on in, the nation's innkeeper." But he couldn't fix that and I really believed when I was a girl, my daddy could do anything. I thought he was wonderful, but he couldn't fix that and I remember thinking, "Why don't we—" And I know I used to ask, but after time, you stop asking, "Why don't we stop there, Daddy? Why don't we stop there?" | 44:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | There was a little train up at Alderman Park that children could ride on. The Black children couldn't ride on it and my mom used to take us to the zoo and my brother would cry, now she has told me this, I don't remember it, would cry about this train so mama stopped taking it. She just stopped taking him because he didn't understand and it wasn't fair. I don't want to gloss over it as if to say, "Well, it was okay. You just had to sit in the back of the bus." The thing that keeps you able to deal with it is if you have something within yourself from your family that lets you know that you are valuable and the problem is these peoples. It's not your problem. These people who have created these stupid groups. It is their problem. | 45:02 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And it's unfortunate in the history of this country. See, if you look back at reconstruction, our people were doing well. If we had had two things, and people don't like to talk about reparations because it makes you uncomfortable. What you going to get? Who's going to do it? Who's fault? We've managed to do it for the Japanese. We managed to do it with the internment camps. They managed to do it with some of the people in terms of the Holocaust. They've managed to repay people. This country, America, would have men, I think, an idea in the mind of King George never would've survived had it not been for slave labor. Our people built this country. | 45:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Now we can say, "Well, maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't." Well, be that as it may, if we had gotten whatever was our due—Now they said 40 acres and a mule. If that was what it was, okay, fine. If we had gotten that, if there had not been enacted the laws that kept us from the forward move that many of us were making right after emancipation, things would at least been fairer and those are two things—There's a simplistic way of looking at it, but if you look at where the ownership— | 46:16 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, go ahead. | 0:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right at Reconstruction and— | 0:04 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:00:09] oh, I'm sorry. | 0:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | —newspapers and the ownership of property businesses, all of those things, we were going to survive. The fact that we survived slavery is a mammoth statement to the strength of the people. And I'm not saying that we would all today be wealthy. I mean, that's not the idea. But some of us, between sharecropping, have never gotten a foothold out of slavery. We really haven't. And then come our self-destructive choices. Now, sociologists will give you reasons for the pro and con, and if it's nihilism, if it's the hopelessness that Cornell West talks about, whatever, we—Now, I say Frederick Douglass and all of our people must be crying up in heaven to see how we destroy. We either are destroying ourselves. It must be harmful. It must be painful for them. | 0:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The point I'm making is that our progress as a people in this country has been severely affected by what has happened to us since we were brought to these shores. I wrote an essay about it in one of my books. And there was no plan. What you going to do with these people? And once you get this whole mass of people, you come over here, we'll keep breeding them. We'll keep buying them. We'll keep them working. But then there's emancipation. There's no plan? What's the plan? What was the plan for this whole mass of people? What's going to happen? And that these little ideas of sending some back here, like the Sierra Leone thing, and Liberia thing. Who was the main plan? Who was thinking? | 0:59 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Well, those few people, Charles Sumner and those few people had an idea that it's fair enough. "Give these people something. You've worked these people, generation after generation and have not paid? Have not even allowed people to work on Sundays—" Like some places in the West Indies, the slavery was such that, in some places in Latin America, slavery, that people could work on Sundays for themselves, or they could work on their birthday for themselves, save some money and get their manumission paid, whatever. This slavery was not like that. | 1:39 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And that is a legacy. And people don't want to talk about it, because it seems like we pointing blame. It's no pointing blame. It's, "Let's look at it. And see what do we now do?" How do we assuage the national conscience for the occurrence of this horrible blight on the—It is. What do you do? Who talks about it? How do we open it up? So I'm saying that I don't want to say lightly that segregation and Jim Crow and all of those things did not affect my life, because it does it. It's the history of it. It's who I am as a person. It makes me who I am. | 2:10 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | There was a man at the school at which I teach, and it's so funny. The European Americans in the Louisiana area are very dark. They don't realize how dark they are in terms of comparison to—They have a lot of African. They have a lot of other heritage. They really do. They don't realize that. | 2:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | So this guy came to school and his last name was Landry. Well, that's the Creole part of my family is Landry. My great-grandfather's name was Landry. His father was a Frenchman, and my great-grandfather's mother was obviously an African. And it was after their union that my great-grandfather came. Anyway, Landry, Donaldsonville. So this guy comes to my school to teach sixth grade. He's a Landry. He's from Donaldsonville. I thought he was Creole. I didn't know he felt he was White. I really did. And so we just got to kidding, and we called each other cousin, and we got the kidding back and forth. He called me "Couzan." We talked. | 3:00 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And so he made a comment. There was some students lined up in line. Most of the students at my school were African American students. There was really a lighter kid who was in the line, and he's from Honduras. And so one teacher remarked that all the girls in the class love him, and so he's the Casanova. So this guy, the Landry says, "Yeah, well, at least that would lighten up the gene pool." | 3:35 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | My ears kind of picked up, because I believe very firmly that we've got to try to fix the language in such a way that we don't use black, white as purity. You know what I'm saying? We got to fix that, because that's the beginning of getting that stuff in our head. So I just kind of said, "Wow, wonder what he said that for?" Then he made another kind of comment about color. | 4:02 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | So finally I said to him in private, because I wasn't trying to insult him—I said, "Ernie, you've made a couple of comments about color." I can't remember the other one. I said, "And I think it's important that we understand that you can't, to lighten up the gene pool like that's a positive." I said, "Black people already are laboring under that thing, that the lighter you are, the straighter your hair, the more you look like a European. If you look at the continuum, you see, the closer you are to looking like a European, this is what beauty is. This is what's acceptable." I said, "We got to stop that." | 4:21 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Well, by then I had found out that he was White, because people were saying, "Ms. Stanley, are you Mr. Landry's cousin?" I said, "Well, we could be." He said, "Are you White?" I said, "No, I'm not White." "Well, Mr. Landry is," I said, "Oh, okay." And then I realized then, because he has a right. He has a right then that's— | 5:00 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:05:17]. | 5:17 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Exactly. Whatever he is, he has that right. So at any rate, with this conversation, he said, "Well, I don't see color." He said, "When I look out at my students, I just see children. I don't see color." I said, "I'll tell you what." I said, "When you see me, you see an African American woman." I said, "The things that have shaped my history are the fact that I have African heritage." I said, "And I've got European heritage as we all do." I said, "I got French." I said, "The French people not running trying to claim me." I said, "And I need you to understand that if you do not see that I'm an African American, if you have to remove that in order to deal with me, you're having to remove an important part of who I am. And I want to ask you why." | 5:17 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I said, "Now tell me this. 40 years ago, where did you sit on the bus, darling?" I said, "You cannot tell me that the fact that you claim European heritage has not given you a leg up in many ways." I said, "Now you can choose to say you don't see color or color it's not important, and you're just a human being." I said, "That's fine. That's fine." I said, "But you must realize that, in this country your history has been shaped by the fact that you are basically European American. There have been benefits that have accrued to you." | 5:58 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I said, "You don't have to accept that." I said, "But just hear me." And I said, "When you deal with me—I said, "It's not a matter of prejudice." I said, "I have worked around, lived around people of all groups." I said, "And I accept and see people for who they are and what's inside of them." I said, "I even used to tell my students. "I don't like this person." I said, "Listen darling, when you go to the library, you choose a red book? You go to the library, 'I want a red book'?" I said, "Find out what's in the book. Find out who the person is. You can't go around choosing people on what they look like outside." I said, "But that doesn't mean you remove what's outside either, because that's who they are." | 6:29 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | He was stunned. And for a long time, he came nowhere near me. He said, "I wonder what's she's gonna pop out with next." But I hope he heard me, whether or not he agrees. But I just kind of hope that he heard. I know he never made any color comments around me again about the lightening up of the gene pool or—The other thing was real flagrant. No, it might not have been very flagrant. It might just have been comparing black and badness, something like that, and I made that comment. | 7:05 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I guess that's kind of where all of that is. It dawns upon me. I went to a convention. I remember the International Reading Association, so we had the Louisiana Reading Association Conference. And they were announcing—Again, they were maybe, I don't know, eight Black people there; I don't know. But they were announcing February as Literacy Month. The governor was going to proclaim it Literacy Month, and that in all the schools—Well, they've done it before. I guess it's for years. They're going to proclaim it Literacy Month. They went on with this kind of presentations. | 7:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I said, "I wonder if perhaps we could either look is there a reason that February has been chosen for literacy month?" I said, "Because in this age about concern with multiculturalism, our concern with blah-blah—" I said, "February has always been African American History Month." And what people understand is it's not us, everybody, we all need to know about each other's heritage, all of the groups. | 8:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And Carter G. Woodson felt a great need for people to be made aware of the contributions of our people. There's some people who only know either television or newspaper, African American people, criminals and stars. No, they don't. They really don't. They don't know anybody. And the same is true for Asian Americans. | 8:58 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | One of the things I did, when I was working in Maryland, I was an assistant principal for a couple of years, was to make sure that there was an intentional inclusion of the contributions of and the existence of people of all various groups. We celebrated Jewish American Heritage Month. I mean we celebrated Asian Pacific Heritage Month, Native American Heritage Month, Hispanic, Latin American, the whole thing. And there are many ways looking at that. Some people think it ought to be an inclusive thing, where you don't have a separate month. My point is do both of them. It doesn't have to be either-or, because if you don't single out, some people not going to do it at all. Even if you just have a sign in your room that says, "This is African American Heritage Month." You see? | 9:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 10:05 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | So I made this statement at the meeting, "Does it have to be February?" "Well, the National chooses February." I said, "Well, see, because African American History Month. And perhaps then we could say we could say—" I said, "The two things don't have to be mutually usually exclusive. We don't have to just celebrate literacy." I said, "One does not exclude the other or celebrate African American heritage. But could we at least say that they're both?" I said, "Because what's going to happen, if the governor says that it's Literacy Month, then it's certainly not African American Heritage Month. It doesn't have the same level." "Well, you should call National. You call. Here's the number. The National says that we celebrate in February. And so that's what it is." I said, "Okay, thanks for that information. I probably will." | 10:06 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But see, two things. One is that it shouldn't have to be an African American who makes that statement. Somebody else should be. And fortunately a lady did stand up from somewhere in Louisiana, White lady. And she said, "At our school, we combined them. And the community was very happy about it. And we did it. We made sure that we chose a lot of authors who were African American authors. And it made sense." I said, "Thanks so much for sharing that." So I didn't look like I was— | 10:49 |
| Kate Ellis | That also hopefully would plant a seed in other people's head like, "Oh. Okay." | 11:15 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It can happen, right. And that this is not just this person of African American heritage. And what are we expect her to say anyway? Because sometimes that destroys the message in the sense that people, "Look, oh, what do you expect her to say?", kind of thing. But because this woman had the courage and the moral fiber to stand up and admit, "Yeah, we had done this," so this woman, in other words, she's not from out-stream. You see? Then that is the important thing too about people of good conscious, no matter what color you are. Your message has to be a morally correct one, even if it doesn't come from your personal history. | 11:20 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I used to tell people, when I taught those teachers the class, I say, "You be a committee of one, darling. If you're sitting in the lounge, and you hear people using racial slurs, whatever race, if they telling jokes, you'd be the one to say, 'Hey, don't talk like that.' Even if they don't like you, it doesn't matter. In 10 years, will it matter whether the people in your school like you? But if you can affect a different kind of conversation about these issues just by one word that you say, then it will matter in 10 years." But it takes courage. It takes courage. It's easy to sit there and people talking about the niggers this or—All of them like—No. And I do the same. When somebody starts talking about White people, people would say, "Well, how White people—" "All of them? Who are you talking about? Would you want people to say that about Black people?" | 11:55 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I had students this year, didn't want to go to French, "I don't like that White woman." I said, "Listen here. Has this French teacher ever done you anything? Is the fact that she's White, does that make a difference whether she can teach you French?" I said, "You'll be glad to learn a second language, child." "Well, Ms. Stanley, I just don't like her." I said, "Who told you? Who told you that? Why are you acting like that?" | 12:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | One little boy come, something about the White man, this White man. I said, "Darling, what White man kept you from bringing a pencil today to work in my classroom?" I said, "Get your enemy clear. Think." See, some of this is filth and foolishness that parents pump into children's heads, rather than teaching them to be positive and finding the good in all people somewhere, or some people almost every—You know what I'm saying? Trying to keep open, and then making the kid responsible for, "You take your pencil. This has nothing to do with segregation or prejudice or racism. This has to do with you and what your obligation is." | 13:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | So I say that to say that each of us, I think, bears a responsibility to be the moral voice and moral conscience for ourselves, for the country, for all of that. We can't just let it all fall by saying, "Well, you know how things are. You know how the system is." We are the system. So that's why I like the kind of stuff Cornell is doing. I really think that we've got to get a handle on the economic thing on in this country, because, see, that whole drug thing, it's a complicated thing. It's a complicated thing. It's a social thing. It's a moral thing. It's an economic thing. That whole drug, if you look at a pie—Now I always say, "Each of those pieces, then what change can I effect?" | 13:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But see, my daughter worked for the Children's Defense Fund one summer in Washington. And some of the statistics that come out of there about how we treat our children—See, this is the not just African American children, but America, we have a lot to do to turn some things around, the way the economic system affects children. | 14:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | See, children don't have advocates really. They don't vote. When we look at where we are, in terms of infant mortality, all those statistics, compared to other places in the world, we're not doing well in this country. This is a very young country when you think about it. It's a very young country, 200-some years old. But we've got to ask the right questions, and we've got to start moving in directions that are not profit-oriented. The whole cigarette thing, when you read that they're 14, 13 year old kids beginning to smoke, and the people in the industry say, "Oh, we are not trying to convince them to smoke. We just use this little cute camel. See?" Come on, it's profit. It is profit, and it doesn't matter. See, that's what's so painful. So African American people, who will not exercise power for whatever reasons, who are destroying themselves, they don't matter. | 15:08 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Ultimately, if we were to put all the people who are not productive, who are not helping to put money into the society, either old, the elderly, children, or whatever, put them on an ice floe and send them out to sea, that's what we're doing. We're not doing it, because that would be horrible. We'd have a headline, "Oh, look at America—" | 15:59 |
| Kate Ellis | How you could you send them out of there? | 16:25 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | "—got them on those ice floes out there going out and just let them die." But that's about what we're doing in terms of care, you see? And that is not a race thing. What are the guiding principles of this country? | 16:26 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The gun thing, I have looked at a couple of—And this has nothing to do with what you asked me to talk about. But I've looked at a couple of presentations and read some stuff about the difference in private gun ownership in other countries. Japan, nobody has a gun, but the police. And nobody expects to have a gun. But we have the National Rifle Association, who feel that they can speak for the country, when they don't. All the statistics show, if you ask people, they want something more done than what we are doing. And if 25, 30 years ago when John Kennedy was killed, and people started talking about gun control, if we'd done something then, we'd be much further along. But we had these interests that are not the interests of the people. | 16:48 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And so I think our people, when the system just continues to roll along, we get chewed up in it, because the profit is the motive that's driving the thing. And we get chewed up in it. I don't know. The welfare reform thing will directly affect our people, but how? Cutting people off, if there's no jobs, if there's no training—I worked as an employment counselor in Michigan. I had grown up, as I said, in a middle-class environment. Everybody I knew worked. Everybody had some kind of job. And it was usually either an education or people were ministers, that kind of thing. That was a circle I grew up in. And so working in the employment service, seeing these people who were, what they called then hardcore unemployed, who had never worked, was a new thing for me. | 17:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I was a compassionate listener. I was trained in what to do to help people in their search, and I would send them out. But it was just when you looked in the face of a young—Then, I'd see a young woman with children who wanted to work, but didn't have nowhere to leave her children. You start saying, "Okay, you're making some bad choices. You're making some bad choices here." And then I would ask, "Why then don't more systems have places where people to leave their children?" It makes sense that if you really want a woman to work, then you got to have somewhere for her to leave her children. That was an experience. | 18:38 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The other experience that I had that helped me see a different side of life with our people, I was a truant officer. And I had never been in homes where people had such a difficult time financially, where people had to make a choice between sending the child to school, sending this one—I worked with families where people had three coats, and they had five children. So then this one didn't come to school this day, because the others were wearing the coat. Or this one was staying home, because they were helping mama wash. And I said, "Wow, that's hard." | 19:18 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I went to visit one woman, and she said, "Ms. Stanley, I can't send him to school." She said, "I have been up all night." She said, "There are rats in here, and I've been holding my babies, because I don't want to hurt the rats." She said, "The rats to eat them." She said, "Could you please help me with the rats?" And I realized that that education wasn't even a priority. They're trying to survive. She's trying to survive. You know? | 19:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 20:14 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But I never grew up like that myself. We always had what we needed. But I don't know what there was. If these people who had come up to Washington and were in these economic straits, where the people with that migration, who left the South, whether it was the beginning of 1910 and all that stuff, if the—I just think that the economic piece is a real key piece. It's a real, real key piece. | 20:15 |
| Kate Ellis | Can I ask you something about that, to sort of bring it back to what we were talking about earlier? I mean, it sounds like your community, your church, your economic standing, your family, all of those, in a sense, served as a buffer to some of the harsher realities of Jim Crow. And again, I mean, you've said it very clearly. It's not like you're saying you weren't affected by it. It was okay, but it wasn't as bad. Did you see others around you, who you could see were suffering more? I mean, did you ever—You know what I mean? Did you— | 20:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | You like people begging? Or people who— | 21:20 |
| Kate Ellis | People who just didn't have the same kind of buffers against the racism typified in Jim Crow's segregation. I mean, you went to school, you said, with all sorts of kids. | 21:24 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, right. But the only place that I interacted with them was school. And they seemed to be doing fine. And the people that I interacted most directly with were people in my church. And they were also all right. | 21:40 |
| Kate Ellis | Middle class? | 21:53 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. Yes. The same socioeconomic level, and had that same buffer. | 21:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 21:59 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Community, neighborhood? No, I don't know if I've got blinders, or I'm not looking back well, but I don't. I don't recall personal experiences with people who were affected by that. Uh-uh, I really don't. I know my own children, my son and daughter, when they went to college, went down to Liberty County, Georgia, because they were in college in Atlanta. And they were involved in those marches. They got the cat calls and that kind of stuff. And I remember saying to them, "Does it ever end?" Like the Portuguese expression with Mozambique, "A lucha continua," the struggle continues. But personally, I really don't. I mean, you just went on and got in the bus in the back. The fact that there were certain places you didn't go in, or you went to the back door to be served, you just did. You just did. Or you didn't do it. You rode in your own car, [indistinct 00:23:23] on a bus. | 22:02 |
| Kate Ellis | I had another question about that actually. That's something that you said a while ago, which is that you'd ask your parents sometimes, and eventually you'd stop asking. | 23:24 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. | 23:31 |
| Kate Ellis | Do you remember what they would say to you when you did ask? I mean, how would they talk to you about it? | 23:32 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | "We can't go there, sister. We can't go there. We'll go to Colored—We'll go to the Ghana Inn. That's a place we can go." | 23:42 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 23:51 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. | 23:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Uh-huh. When you're going past the brightly-lit hotels that said "Welcome." | 23:51 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, right, right, right. The Nation's Innkeeper. The Nation's Innkeeper, I'll never forget that, because Holiday Inn used to have this little light that was like a like you'd see at an inn. It was The Nation's Innkeeper. I think they didn't try to get into any deep thing, because eventually just kind of understood. But they would just say, "We can't go there, sister. We can't go there." And we would just be so glad to see this place, The Ghana Inn up there in North Carolina. We really were. Or we stated at friend's homes. | 23:55 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But it was insulting, that thing of the gas station. I can remember being insulted by the filth. I remember that, no matter how young I was, that the filth and just having White ladies and White gentleman and Colored. It was just so insulting. And it was filthy. It was filthy. It was just horrible. | 24:28 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But we knew that you couldn't stop to eat, so they prepared meals. They prepared little sandwich stuff. My dad would bring bread, I mean my mama. And we have a picture of us stopping at one of these roadside camps. And it was always a kind of a caution where you would stop, because we wanted to be sure which place we could stop, and nobody was going to bother us, that here's this man and his wife with this nice little children just stopping and trying to have a meal. But you just have to be—So I can remember feeling a little cautious, you see, about being out here in the open eating. But there wasn't a problem. | 24:46 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | One time my father was driving, and my grandmother was sitting in between us, and I was sitting over here. And we were coming from Mississippi. There was something wrong with the car. My father never borrowed a penny to send us to college. He kept the same car for year after year. So he had this old Plymouth. And it wouldn't go faster than 50, because something was wrong with it. And this Mississippi State patrolman stopped my father for speeding. And he was angry. My father had a temper. He was angry, because he was not speeding. He could not have been speeding, because if you put the car faster than 50, it made this big knocking sound. It sounded like a truck. It was horrible. He was not speeding. And he was getting ready to take that man to task, because my father didn't want to be called a liar. | 25:24 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And my grandmother, understanding what the situation was and knowing he better not disagree, this Black man disagreeing with no Mississippi patrolman, said, "Robert. Robert. That's all right, Robert." "Mrs. Dunn—I wasn't, officer," and he was going to go on. | 26:16 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And I began to be very afraid, because I had the feeling—I must have been, I don't know, 10, 11, maybe. '53? Maybe I was about 10, I don't know. Anyway, I was afraid that the man was going to do something to insult or hurt my father verbally, or that he was going to take him out that car and hurt him, because, by then you see, we had the Emmett Till. We had all of that stuff. So just going through Mississippi, which it was too bad Mississippi got their reputation, but just you were frightened. | 26:32 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And I just hated to see my father back down, when I knew he was right. I knew he was right. There's no way he could have been speeding. And he made his point. He said, "Officer," and he was very respectful, "I could not have been going faster than 50, because my car will not go faster without making a knocking sound. I could not." And in his Southern awful drawl, that just I had then associated with meanness, "You were speeding. You were speeding." And I could—And he tried. | 27:05 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And my grandmother said, "Robert, let it go. Don't say nothing," just very, very quietly. I think maybe I was in between, because she was, "Robert, just let it go. Just let it go." And he tried once more. And I just remember swallowing a tear that my father, that I knew that this man was right, but this system that this man represented was such that he'd better not try to press his point. And so we just drove on in silence. And I just felt so hurt for my father. I really felt so hurt, had to deal with that. | 27:34 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | My brother came home one day. My brother now, he has a doctorate in physics. The man is a very, very smart guy. And some of his buddies were going up on Fretet Street, which is not far—See, Fretet is parallel to South Claiborne. It's like eight blocks, not that far. But anyway, we lived on this street [indistinct 00:28:29]. And he was coming home from somewhere, and the police stopped him in frisked him, which was a regular custom for them to stop and frisk any groups of Black guys. And these were kids; they didn't look like they were going into any trouble. They were coming home. And I remember my brother coming home and telling about it. And I just felt so awful for my brother, that he should have to go through something like this. Why? He wasn't doing anything wrong. Those kinds of experiences where you see the unfair treatment of a loved one are very painful, and they affect you. They affect you. | 28:13 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I think it's true now too, that African American men are seen as a great threat, especially now that so much presentation is being made that they're all criminals, which is certainly not true, in terms of the total group of our men. But I think that at that time too, that's this great threat. And so my brother having gone through this, it was just something that happened to a lot of guys. But for it to happen to my brother really, really affected me. I thought about that. I didn't like that. I didn't like that. | 29:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Also, a couple of experiences I think related to race and society that I remember other kinds of things with other students. I remember another incident now. We went to a basketball game in high school. And we went to one of these Frostop things after—This was in '63. After the game, we were all excited. It was car full of us. And we were excited, because we had won. And we went in, and it was most of the kids that were from my high school. And many of them were—It was just about five or six of us, because we were in one car. Some of them were in my church. It was my brother and another guy, John Charles. We went in, and we ordered our little stuff, because everything was supposed to be all right. We were supposed to be able to go in here, I guess. I don't know. It was still high school, but there wasn't supposed to be a problem. | 29:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And one of our friends put money in the jukebox. And the record had started playing. And so the owner came out and yanked out the court. And so we kind of looked around and said, "What's going on with the music? What's going on?" "We try to serve you Negroes fast and get you out of here. And so you don't have time to hear the music," something he said. We just got up ourself and left. We got in that car, and we were all very quiet. It had spoiled our entire experience at the game. | 30:39 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And it was insulting. It was unnecessary. We were well-behaved. We were nice kids. We knew we were nice kids. And the thing that was always— We came from probably better, more-cultured families than this man, who was being so rude to us. You see? So it wasn't us as people, but it was us as Black kids, Negro people. "We try to serve y'all and get y'all out here fast as we can." And of course, all the other people looked around and said, "Hmm." So we got in car. I remember where the place was up on South Claiborne, that we got in that car. And we were just very hurt. And as I said, the mood completely changed. We were angry and bitter. | 31:12 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And I could probably multiply those. I'm sure that many people had those kinds of experiences. Many other people had those kinds of experiences. Now just recently, this is not me personally, this guy, Pratt, who's an African American classical pianist who has dreadlocks. He said he's stopped a lot by police, just because—He said he was running through New York. He's just running, because he was late for something, and they arrested him. They arrested him. So it doesn't end. It doesn't end. Appearances, yeah, I don't know. But those about, I guess, the only kinds of experiences. | 32:01 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I remember hearing my grandfather, my father's father, talk about the experiences that he had in his life. For example, he was an Episcopal priest. He started a school, because one of the Black teachers had been disrespected in the school in Townsville, Georgia. And he— | 32:48 |
| Kate Ellis | In a little White school? You mean a Black teacher in a White school? | 33:15 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, yeah. By either a White teacher or—I don't know the details, obviously. A superintendent or somebody had disrespected her. And he just was incensed by that, and he began a school at the church, an Episcopal school. And this woman taught there, and my grandmama taught there. My grandfather, I would like to have known him better, in terms of being able to talk about certain things, because he was very, very bitter about life. He's a very brilliant man. He could read Hebrew. He could do a lot, read, and he was very, very smart. | 33:18 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I asked my father one day, I said, "Daddy, why is grandpapa so bitter?" And he said, "Well, sister, he's so near White." I said, "But I don't understand. I don't see." And I don't remember if I said to my daddy, "But I don't understand," but he said that as if to say, "And that's why, and so you should understand." But I didn't. Because that at that time in Georgia, maybe he experienced a lot of prejudice, or he was mistreated. I don't know. But he carried a lot of bitterness. A real brilliant man, but it affected him. It affected him. It affected him. | 33:53 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I think we probably have lost a lot, in terms of what could have been, what people could have given, what positive contributions people could have made by being unfair, by trying to—And I say we, I don't think I, but this country. And I hope we're not going to go down and continue down this same road. I don't know. | 34:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Just curious about his response, "Because he's so near White." | 35:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Near White, yeah, yeah. That he's—I don't know. I don't know what his bitterness—I don't know. I really do not know what my daddy meant. But my grandfather was one who was very, very much, again this is my paternal grandfather, for his people. He was very, very much for uplifting the race, so the term goes. And he was anti-showiness. I mean, he used to talk about what he called society Negroes. And it was so funny. We went to visit, because New Orleans is heavy into stuff, going out to parties and stuff. And my mama loves it. I love it too. But when I was a little girl, we went to visit my grandpapa in Georgia. And he was talking about society Negroes dressing up, going out, doing this and this. And so real quietly I said to my mama, "Mama, you a society Negro." | 35:07 |
| Kate Ellis | What did she say? | 36:06 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I told her, right. She said, "Shh." But he was interested in people learning, getting an education and working. I mean, in his house, you couldn't iron on Sunday. This man was serious. You couldn't iron on Sunday. | 36:06 |
| Kate Ellis | You couldn't iron, yeah. | 36:25 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | You could not use an iron on Sunday. He was very serious about the Sabbath. Interesting man, he's an interesting, man. | 36:31 |
| Kate Ellis | Do you remember other things that he used to say? | 36:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, we talked about getting the hair straightened. He didn't think that Black women should have—He said, "Beautiful like you are." Said, "You're beautiful like you are. [indistinct 00:36:59] didn't do anything. Women trying to change themselves, trying to look White." Oh, he was into that. He was definitely into that. He didn't think you should do that. I guess that those are two things I remember about him, that he very much wanted people to be natural. He didn't want people to put on airs. | 36:48 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | But he felt he knew very much the value of education, very strong in his commitment as a priest, I mean Episcopal. He was very much into it. Even when his church, when there weren't a lot of people in attendance, he would have on all the regalia and all the garb. And he did the service as if there were a thousand people, which as I look back on it, was what he should have done. I mean, it's still a word of God it's three. He had to bring that message and do what he could. | 37:19 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I don't think I can remember anything else. I know that he imbued, I think, my father, who was his namesake with—My father's very serious about money, careful with his money, very, very good steward of his finances, and also very religious, in terms of his work in the church and his commitment to serve in the community. So I think those are some things that were passed on. He didn't seem to be a very warm and loving person. And I'm not sure if that was my perception of him as a grandchild, or if he was very—I don't know. I don't know. But I think that he probably would've been a different person in a different society. He would have had more positive use for his energies and his brilliance. Rabbis used to tutor people in Hebrew, but that's what happened, turned kind of inward. | 37:58 |
| Kate Ellis | It just makes me, I think that people with talents that are suppressed, because of that sort of oppression and denial, my guess is that that can be a form of torture. | 39:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, it's true. It is certainly true. It really is. | 39:19 |
| Kate Ellis | It can make you bitter or crazy or— | 39:22 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right, or both, all of them. | 39:24 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 39:27 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, yeah. We have a lot to work on today in this society. I try to help my students, because many of my students do not know any White people really, except The White Man or the person television or the image of the oppressor kind of thing. And so they don't have a clear perception. So I'm really glad when there are European American teachers in our school, so they can have—When a student starts something about, "I don't like White people," I say, "But what about Ms. Jones? She taught you. She worked with you. Didn't you like her? Didn't she do a good job? Isn't she a person? You want to dismiss a whole group of people?" "Well, that's different." I say, "No, that's not really different. So you really can't dismiss—" So I think that is good, that at least children have an opportunity. And I just wish that there were more groups of people for our children to interact with. I think that's an important part of their whole development. | 39:27 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The issue of Jim Crow segregation for these children is, when we talk about Dr. Martin Luther King, and I do a whole unit on the civil rights movement, for some of them, it's really removed. You can tell them about it, and they've heard about it. But just the thought that you couldn't go certain places, McDonald's, they find that difficult to believe. Or that you couldn't go to a certain college. My mama went to Columbia to get her master's. And you got Tulane. You got a lot of places down here. She went to New York. She went away for a whole year. And I stayed with my grandmother. My brother stayed with my daddy up at the house, but I lived with my grandmamma for that year, while my mama went away to get her master's. She shouldn't have had to do that, but that's how it was. That's what it was. | 40:29 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Anyway, when I talk to students, just to let them—Well, I always tell them about Frederick Douglass too, and how hard it was for him in learning to read, how difficult it was, and how valuable he saw education. I try to imbue these students with that same idea. So many of them live in such poverty. And I think that if you can relate the economic situation to race in this country, and I don't think they're separated, you can say that Jim Crow in another name continues to affect these children's lives. I mean, they can go to McDonald's. They can go wherever, but the vestiges are there. Even my son—My son is an honor graduate from college. He teaches now in elementary school, if he goes in a mall and goes in a store in Washington, DC, people follow him around. And Nathaniel would turn around and say, "Do not follow me." That should not be. | 41:34 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I worked in retail sales for a summer and in Washington in a store called Raleigh's. And the guard said—Two guys walked in, and she got all excited. And she was getting ready to go by them. And they said, "Hi, Ms. Stanley," and I said, "Hi." And these are two guys who are members of my church. But she was getting ready—I'm not saying that members of my church don't shoplift. But as soon as she saw these two Black guys walk in that store, she was all setting out to go and start following them around the store. And they said, "Hey, Ms. Stanley. I didn't know you worked here." I said, "Hey, darling." And we were hugging. And she was—All of that, those are vestiges of that whole Jim Crow thing. You can change the laws on the books, but people's perceptions of people many times do not change, if you haven't had experiences that change it. And the media, you got televisions that portrays certain images of people. You either are an entertainer, or you're a sports person. | 42:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The same thing about standards of beauty. You got children in my classroom who think that, because somebody is dark-skinned, whatever, or have this concept of good or bad hair. I said, "These are all ideas that have—You got to get them out of your mind. You got to get them out of your mind." But they're reinforced by what you see. They're reinforced. And I think too, that's a subtle kind of—There's a certain expectation of who is acceptable in this society, and the further you fall from that image, the less acceptable you are. By the way, society is why you have to build within your own self-esteem thing. | 43:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. Yeah. I'm just agreeing. | 44:30 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. | 44:33 |
| Kate Ellis | I was thinking, recently when I was at the Baptist Seminary, I was trying to get somewhere, I passed somebody, which I guess you're not supposed to do. So these cops came up behind me. And they pulled up, and I had stepped in my car. I parked, and they said, "Are you from here?" I said, "No, I'm trying meet somebody." And they said, "Well, you're not supposed to pass anybody in the lane." And I said, "Oh, well, I just didn't even realize I'd done that. I was sort of in a hurry." But the thing that I noticed, I felt that within 30 seconds I had disarmed them. I felt that as soon I, as this sort of young White woman, stepped out of the car, that it was like, "Oh. Oh, Well, okay." You know? | 44:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, yeah, it didn't matter. Yeah. Uh-huh. | 45:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. And so I just think that you're right. I think in a sense, probably— | 45:30 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The opposite. | 45:35 |
| Kate Ellis | —Whites may be unaware, in a sense, of the kind of privilege. And I'm not at all saying it's better to be White. I'm not saying, "Oh." | 45:35 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I got you. No. | 45:44 |
| Kate Ellis | I think, especially having spent the past month hearing about, just being so seeped in this, sort of feel like, "Dag." By the time this guy finished with me, he was showing me where to go. And I think that if I had been Black, if I was a Black man— | 45:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, no question. | 46:02 |
| Kate Ellis | —they would've ticketed me. | 46:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Exactly. | 46:04 |
| Kate Ellis | They would've run me out of the Seminary. I mean, who knows? | 46:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. | 46:08 |
| Kate Ellis | So that's why I was sort of making a mental note of that, like, "Wow." | 46:08 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It's true. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're right. You're right, and especially Black males. I was telling my dentist, I still have Washington DC tags, because the process for getting my Louisiana tags has been so complicated. At first, I wasn't even going to inquire. But finally I've inquired, and I'm, I'm working on the process. But I said to my dentist, I said, "Oh, Willard." He was a childhood friend of mine. I said, "Willard, the police are going to cite me and put me under the jail." He said, "They're not going to bother, since you're a woman." He said, "Now my son—" He said they stopped his son. I don't know what his son had done, but he couldn't find his insurance. He got all nervous. He found the wrong insurance thing. And they didn't give him time to find the other one. And then they gave him a ticket. He called. He didn't know what else they were going to do. But he said, "It's as if the male is the great— | 46:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. That's some sort of strange form of paranoia— | 0:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. | 0:05 |
| Kate Ellis | —or some sort of holdover from days gone by. | 0:05 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Slavery. Right, right. Get over it. | 0:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Painfully, it's not. | 0:11 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No, it's not. | 0:12 |
| Kate Ellis | I mean— | 0:13 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. And the more who know it, maybe the better perception there is. I don't know. | 0:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah, no, I mean, I don't want to sound trite, but I definitely feel that I—I mean, you talked about moral responsibility. I feel like I almost have a moral responsibility to sort of, wherever I can, in some sense, among White people, set the record straight. | 0:17 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Just hear it from one person, it helps. | 0:35 |
| Kate Ellis | So— | 0:39 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | What you need to know about the family? | 0:40 |
| Kate Ellis | I want to talk about a few more questions. | 0:41 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I'm sorry. | 0:41 |
| Kate Ellis | No, you don't—Well, first of all, I think you were just finishing saying something, but— | 0:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Just about the police and having stopped this dentist's son. | 0:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 0:57 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. Right. I don't know if he was in a school zone. I don't know what the issue, why they stopped him, but when they asked him for his insurance, he got nervous and he had too many cards in there, like the one from last year. And he had the right thing there. | 0:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Like we all do. | 1:12 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right. Right. He had just hadn't thrown his stuff away. | 1:13 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. | 1:15 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | So he's going through this with a panic and pulls out the wrong one. And then they charged him with not having insurance. And then he got this ticket and it went far beyond. What if they had just said, "Calm down, son, just calm down. You have it. Just look back in there." You know what I'm saying? Just as a human being. But I think—He was a threat. It's really bad. It's really bad. | 1:15 |
| Kate Ellis | Hmm. All right. Let me just ask you a couple more questions and then we can sort of go— | 1:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. | 1:40 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, first of, what high school did you go to? | 1:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I went to Walter L. Cohen Senior High School. | 1:44 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. Where was that? | 1:46 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It was on Dryades Street. It still is up in that area. It's uptown, 3620 Dryades. My father was the counselor. He wasn't counselor when I was there. He was a counselor with my brother. And then he came back and he was the principal after we left. | 1:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 1:58 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | He was the principal at that school for 20 years. But yeah, that's where I went to high school. Walter L. Cohen. | 1:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Would you describe your community just a little bit more? It's uptown. | 2:05 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right. | 2:08 |
| Kate Ellis | Was it predominantly Black? | 2:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. Yeah, it was predominantly Black. And the socioeconomic level varied. I mean, there were people right across the street from us who lived in this housing that was maybe, I don't know if they were having public assistance, probably. Probably. They're usually single parent families. And it was like one door, there were like six apartments, and they were just maybe one or two rooms to the apartment. It's a very modest kind of dwelling. But they were clean and tidy and all of that. But the economic socioeconomic level was different. It varied in that area, but it was predominantly Black. I think it was probably all Black on our couple of blocks. | 2:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Did you have any parks nearby that you could go in? | 3:00 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Soniat Playground, sometimes we would go up. It wasn't too, too far, but basically we played in the yard. We played in the backyard. We did exciting things with lizards and stuff like that. | 3:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. | 3:14 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | We had fun. We had fun in the yard. My brother and I, we played with a guy in the back. So the question about parks, there was a park within bike-riding distance, but not right near us. Not right near us. You had to go across Freret Street, which was a big deal because they had buses on Freret. We used to go ride our bikes up at what's now Eleanor McMain. That was the name of it then. But it's a school that had really long sidewalks. And I remember we used to call it Long Banquette, because banquette is the word for sidewalk. So we go ride our bike at Long Banquette. It wasn't a lot of organized recreation in the close area, but we did stuff, walked to Freret and got snowballs. We did our own stuff, played games with each other. | 3:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Sounds like you had a busy—I mean, with the Jack and Jill Cultural— | 3:54 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. And as I said, we had neighbors. I had a girl, she's still my friend now, that lived next door to me, Vaughn. We did a lot of things together. We'd get on the bus and go downtown to Canal Street and get a sandwich, that kind of stuff. And we sat on the porch, we sat on the steps and just talked and just enjoyed who we were. Just that kind of stuff. Just fun. And then did stuff with our parents. | 3:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, it was good. We didn't miss—I don't know if my brother played with any teams or anything with New Orleans Recreational Department. I don't think so. Scouts, my daddy was a Scout Master, and so he did that. I was a Girl Scout and a Brownie. And those things were at school. The teachers at school were those leaders. So we did things with them. Everything. Took piano lessons, dance lessons at the Y, ballet, that kind of stuff. Everything that made our lives—that enriched our lives and didn't—you know, the segregation thing. | 4:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Everything was sort of— | 4:57 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It was within our society. | 4:59 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. | 5:00 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It certainly was. It certainly was. Yeah. Booker T. Washington was the place where all our concerts, where that was the high school. There was no other place. If we went to the movies, we went to the Orpheum. We very seldom went to the theater downtown, but we had to go way up. I mean, we counted the steps, like 90 stairs to get upstairs. So we just went to the neighborhood theaters, the Gallo, where it was just our theater, we went there. And the man knew my grandfather and we used to get in free. | 5:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? | 5:25 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, and my daddy would make us popcorn, so we'd come in free with this greasy bag. But we just stayed in our own stuff. I mean, if you don't knock heads with something, can't bother you. Can't hurt you. Didn't worry about it. We didn't worry about it. The big theaters on Canal Street, we weren't able to go to those. Or if we were able to go, as I said, you went in the back and you went way upstairs. So why bother? My uncle used to take us to the theater, to the circus, Shrine Circus, Shrines, whatever. And we had to buy—We sat way, way up. So finally my uncle said—We just didn't go anymore. Why go? Why pay the same money? We would sit up so high that we couldn't even tell what was going on way down there. Don't worry about it. | 5:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, I feel like in the back of my mind there all sorts of little questions, but I know that— | 6:24 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | You can call me. | 6:28 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. Well, and I think what we'll do, let's start the— | 6:29 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The survey? | 6:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 6:32 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. | 6:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Because this takes a little while. I'll keep this running, the tape running, and if then stuff comes up while we're talking— | 6:34 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | All right. | 6:41 |
| Kate Ellis | —I'll ask you. | 6:41 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. | 6:42 |
| Kate Ellis | Because it's funny to do—It's hard to even call it a life history because it's sort of so brief. I always know that there's so much left out. But anyway. Okay. Your last name is Stanley? | 6:44 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. | 7:00 |
| Kate Ellis | S-T-A-N-L— | 7:00 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | E-Y. | 7:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And it's Beatrice? | 7:02 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. | 7:04 |
| Kate Ellis | What's your middle name? | 7:05 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Alice. | 7:06 |
| Kate Ellis | And your maiden name is— | 7:10 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Perry. | 7:11 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. I got your address. It's 6427— | 7:16 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. Derbyshire Drive. | 7:20 |
| Kate Ellis | What's your zip code? | 7:26 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | 70126. | 7:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Tell me your date of birth. | 7:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | February 15th, 1944. 2/15/44. | 7:44 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. That was in New Orleans. And your principal occupation is? | 7:47 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Elementary school teacher. | 7:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. What grades do you teach? | 8:00 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I had seventh grade last year. I taught all grades, but seventh is my most recent. That's what I have this year, I believe. | 8:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Now you also lead musical choirs though, right? | 8:08 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, my mama showed you the tape? | 8:13 |
| Kate Ellis | Yes, she did. | 8:15 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I know she did. Mama shows somebody the tape when they come in. I had the choir this year at my school, because the school did not have a music teacher, so the principal asked me would I do it, and I did. But it's not a skill of mine. I mean, that was not my major. I just did it. And I can play the piano and I can sing, and I had the children singing, but that was it. That's not a real skill of mine. | 8:15 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Was that because of budget cuts? | 8:38 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. Yeah, we lost our music teacher. | 8:39 |
| Kate Ellis | That's so— | 8:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Isn't that silly? It is. It really is. It's foolish. It's foolish. | 8:42 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. How would you like your name to appear in written documents? | 8:48 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Beatrice Perry Stanley. | 9:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And you are divorced? | 9:21 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. | 9:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Is that right? | 9:27 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Mm-hmm. | 9:27 |
| Kate Ellis | What's your former husband's name? | 9:27 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | He uses the initial A, and then his middle name is Knighton, K-N-I-G-H-T-O-N. Stanley. | 9:29 |
| Kate Ellis | When was he born? | 9:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | July 15th, 1937. 7/15/37. | 9:45 |
| Kate Ellis | In New Orleans? | 9:55 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No, he was born in North Carolina. Dudley a little town. D-U-D-L-E-Y. Dudley, North Carolina. | 9:56 |
| Kate Ellis | And he's a minister? | 10:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. | 10:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Then your mother's name is— | 10:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Lillian. | 10:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Her maiden name is Dunn. | 10:14 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. | 10:15 |
| Kate Ellis | What's her middle name? | 10:16 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Velma. V-E-L-M-A. | 10:18 |
| Kate Ellis | She was so nice when I went over there. | 10:23 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | She was happy to have you. | 10:27 |
| Kate Ellis | And her date of birth? | 10:31 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | October 24th. That'd be 10/24/14. 1914. | 10:33 |
| Kate Ellis | And she was born in New Orleans? | 10:38 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes, she was born in New Orleans. | 10:44 |
| Kate Ellis | And occupation? Teacher? | 10:48 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. | 10:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Then your father's name was Robert? | 10:57 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. | 10:57 |
| Kate Ellis | Robert. | 10:57 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Uh-huh. | 10:59 |
| Kate Ellis | What was his middle name? | 10:59 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Nathaniel. So I named my son Nathaniel after him. N-A-T-H-A-N-I-E-L. | 11:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Perry. | 11:06 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Perry. | 11:07 |
| Kate Ellis | And his date of birth? | 11:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | April 13. What's April? Five? 5/13/11. | 11:11 |
| Kate Ellis | And when did he pass? | 11:20 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | 1989. October 3rd, 1989. | 11:21 |
| Kate Ellis | And he was born in—? | 11:23 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | He was born in Wilson, North Carolina. | 11:31 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Should I put school principal? | 11:37 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's fine. That's fine. That's what he did longer. He was a principal. | 11:40 |
| Kate Ellis | A lot of paperwork in this. I mean, it's sort of all part of the—I'm going to interview Mrs. Ward on Saturday. | 11:55 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, [indistinct 00:12:16] | 12:15 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. I just thought it'd be, again, really interesting to get a sort of generational perspective. | 12:16 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. | 12:19 |
| Kate Ellis | Especially since she and your mother are 14 years apart. | 12:20 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. | 12:23 |
| Kate Ellis | I thought that they might— | 12:23 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Have different perceptions. | 12:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 12:26 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. | 12:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Again, even the way that people talk about it sometimes. | 12:29 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I think you're wise to do that. | 12:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And you just have one brother, is that right? | 12:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. Yeah. | 12:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Was he Robert Nathaniel? | 12:40 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right. The third. | 12:42 |
| Kate Ellis | When was he born? | 12:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | August 17th, 1942. | 12:58 |
| Kate Ellis | In New Orleans? | 13:02 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. | 13:05 |
| Kate Ellis | He's your older brother? | 13:08 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. | 13:09 |
| Kate Ellis | And you have how many children? | 13:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Two Son and daughter. | 13:14 |
| Kate Ellis | What are their names? | 13:17 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Nathaniel is my son, Nathaniel Taylor Stanley. | 13:18 |
| Kate Ellis | And he was born? | 13:20 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | In, or what time, date? You want date? | 13:28 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 13:30 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, date. June 22nd, 1965. | 13:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, we're pretty close in age. | 13:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, okay. | 13:38 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm June 10, '64. | 13:40 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, all right. That is very close. | 13:41 |
| Kate Ellis | So he's heading for his 30th. | 13:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. | 13:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Was he born in New Orleans? | 13:47 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No, he was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. | 13:49 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 13:54 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | His daddy was a professor at Bennett when we got married in my junior year. We got married my junior year. We moved there. And he was born, my son was born two weeks after I graduated from college in Greensboro. | 13:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, your former husband was a professor? | 14:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | At Bennett College? Yes. | 14:09 |
| Kate Ellis | While you were a student there? | 14:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. Yeah, my junior year, he was not mine. My senior year. He was not my professor, but yeah, he was working there. He was there, yeah. June 22nd, '64. And that was in Greensboro. | 14:12 |
| Kate Ellis | '65. | 14:20 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | '65. '65. | 14:21 |
| Kate Ellis | I was checking. And then what about your daughter? | 14:24 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | What's her name? Kathryn. K-A-T-H-R-Y-N. Kathryn. And her middle name is Velma, like my mama's. Velma Stanley. She was born February 9th, 1967. | 14:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Where was she born? | 14:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | She was born in Detroit, Michigan. | 14:43 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. I always forget Michigan's—how you— | 14:49 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Abbreviate it? | 14:55 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 14:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I don't know these new abbreviations. Must be MI, but I don't know. Because isn't it— | 14:56 |
| Kate Ellis | I always forget. It's so embarrassing. | 15:02 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I know. I just write them all out, honey. I never learned the new ones. It may be M-N. I don't know. That's Minnesota. I think it's MI. | 15:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Do you have any grandchildren? | 15:12 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No. | 15:13 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. I need to list the cities where you have lived. | 15:19 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. | 15:23 |
| Kate Ellis | And when you lived there. | 15:23 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. | 15:23 |
| Kate Ellis | So you started with New Orleans. | 15:25 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | New Orleans, that's right. And then— | 15:27 |
| Kate Ellis | From 1944— | 15:31 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | To really 1961 when I went away to college. But I came back and forth, but then the next place of residence would've been Greensboro. | 15:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 15:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | So we got married in '64. I was in school there, but we lived there. | 15:42 |
| Kate Ellis | So Greensboro from 1961 to— | 15:48 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | 1966. In Detroit, Michigan, '66 through '68. And then Washington DC from '68 to—Actually, although I lived in Silver Spring, I lived in Maryland, which is suburban Washington. I really lived in the Washington area from '68 to '92 when I moved down here. I lived in about three years in suburban Maryland. But I mean, just make confusion to put that in there. | 15:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then the schools you've attended, starting with elementary. | 16:32 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. Elementary is McDonogh Number Six. And then— | 16:36 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:16:47]. | 16:46 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, let's see. Elementary, probably kindergarten. I probably went when I was five. 1949 to 1951 maybe or '52. I mean, longer than that. Oh heavens. Let's see, '49, first grade, second grade, one, two, three, four, five. About six years. '55, about '55, '54. That seems too long. | 16:47 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, so kindergarten. | 17:17 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Kindergarten in '49. | 17:18 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. So like '55? | 17:19 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, probably about '55. That would make sense. Then Samuel J. Green Junior High. That's probably about right, from '55 to '58. | 17:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Oops. | 17:33 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Then from '58 to '61, Walter L. Cohen Senior High. Oh, God bless you. | 17:43 |
| Kate Ellis | Walter— | 17:52 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Are you chilly? | 17:53 |
| Kate Ellis | No, I'm fine. | 17:54 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | You sure? | 17:55 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. It's C-O-H-E-N? | 17:55 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | C-O-H-E-N. Walter L. Cohen. | 17:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Senior High? | 17:59 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Senior High. | 18:00 |
| Kate Ellis | And then Bennett. | 18:10 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. Bennett College. B-E-N-N-E-T-T. In Greensboro, North Carolina. That was '61 through '65 with that interim year, ''63 to 64 at Willamette University. You don't have to put that. That's an important part of my life experience. | 18:11 |
| Kate Ellis | And then? | 18:30 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Graduate school. | 18:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. But you got a BA in—? | 18:33 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, psychology. | 18:36 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:18:38] | 18:36 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, yeah? Okay. | 18:40 |
| Kate Ellis | And then? | 18:41 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Graduate school was George Washington University. And that's in Washington, DC. And that must have been '70 through '71. | 18:42 |
| Kate Ellis | So is was a Master's? | 18:57 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | [indistinct 00:19:00] Yeah. It's a Master of Arts and Teaching, which is called an MAT. | 19:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 19:01 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Then that's on the last degree. I have other graduate work, but that's the last degree. I'm going to Howard University. | 19:08 |
| Kate Ellis | So I'm going to say Howard. | 19:14 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, Howard University. I was in a doctoral program before I moved down here. | 19:16 |
| Kate Ellis | When was— | 19:22 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Let me count back, probably from '89 through '92 when I moved. | 19:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 19:31 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Working on a PhD in educational psychology, but I haven't completed the program. | 19:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. You're not ABD, are you? All but dissertation? | 19:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No. | 19:44 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 19:44 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No, uh-huh. No, no, no. More coursework. | 19:44 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Worked on doctorate in education. | 19:46 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Educational psychology. | 19:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Now I need to list your current and most important previous jobs. | 20:08 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. My current job is an elementary school teacher. | 20:12 |
| Kate Ellis | At? | 20:20 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Danneel, D-A-N-N-E-E-L, Elementary Middle School. And that's here in New Orleans. | 20:20 |
| Kate Ellis | On Danneel Street? | 20:38 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No, no, no. It's on Broadway Street. Name of it's Danneel, but it's here in New Orleans. Name of the school is Danneel. You got that? | 20:38 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. D-A-N-N-E— | 20:44 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | E-E-L. And it's on Broadway Street. | 20:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. How long have you been there? | 20:47 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | This will be my second year. See, I've just moved—I've taught there one year. I'm going to my second year. | 20:50 |
| Kate Ellis | So— | 20:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I started in— | 20:57 |
| Kate Ellis | 1993. | 20:58 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | 1993. Right. To present. | 20:59 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And before that? | 21:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Before that, you want the name of the school? That was this other school here, Wilson. That's the same job, teaching. | 21:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Sure. | 21:09 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. That is from 1992 to '93. | 21:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Wilson—? | 21:18 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Elementary. And I was an assistant principal for two years. This was in Montgomery County, Maryland. That was 1990 to '92? | 21:19 |
| Kate Ellis | What was the name of the school? | 21:42 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The name of school was Kemp Mill. K-E-M-P, Kemp Mill Elementary. | 21:43 |
| Kate Ellis | And that's Montgomery County? | 21:53 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Montgomery County, Maryland. That's right. And before that, I was an assistant principal at—This, was still at Montgomery County. Okay. | 21:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Give me one second. | 22:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | All right. | 22:04 |
| Kate Ellis | You know what I'm tempted to do? | 22:06 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | What are you tempted to do? | 22:07 |
| Kate Ellis | That's okay, actually. | 22:10 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | You sure? | 22:11 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. What was the years at Kemp Mill? | 22:12 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | At Kemp Mill? Kent Mill was right before I moved here, which would've been '91 to '92. | 22:16 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then you were assistant principal— | 22:22 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | At another school called Belmont, B-E-L-M-O-N-T, also in Montgomery County, Maryland. And that was from '91 to '92. | 22:25 |
| Kate Ellis | You mean— | 22:38 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | The year before that, 1991. 1991. | 22:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 22:41 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Before that, I was a social studies teacher specialist. It's kind of a supervising teacher, teacher specialist. Also in Montgomery County. That must have been '89 to '90 | 22:46 |
| Kate Ellis | At? | 23:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Montgomery County Public Schools. It was just general Area Two, but it doesn't matter what area. | 23:04 |
| Kate Ellis | And that was from? | 23:16 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | '89 to '90, that would've preceded that? | 23:18 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 23:21 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. Two years before that, I worked in personnel. I was a staffing assistant, helping to hire people, and this was also public school, personnel, Montgomery County. Staffing assistant in personnel. And that must have been from, what? '87 to '89, does that look right? | 23:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 23:51 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And all the rest, and then for the years before that, I was a classroom teacher in a lot of different schools. | 23:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And were they all— | 24:01 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | In Montgomery County? | 24:03 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. So I'm just going to say teacher, Montgomery County Public Schools. | 24:04 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. But that would've been for two years. But before then, I was a teacher in Washington, DC for 12 years. | 24:08 |
| Kate Ellis | So I'm going to say teacher and I can just say Montgomery County Schools and Washington— | 24:14 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And Washington DC. Right, right. And other stuff before that. I mean, I've just had so many jobs. I was an employment counselor. I was a truant officer, all of that. | 24:18 |
| Kate Ellis | From [indistinct 00:24:41] | 24:39 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | From '72 through '80-whatever. | 24:41 |
| Kate Ellis | '87? | 24:49 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right. I was teaching. Yeah, there was a year off where I went full-time in school, but that's all right. That's just confusing. | 24:49 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. That sounds good. | 24:55 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Is that okay? | 24:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 24:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | All right. | 24:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Great. All right. Have you ever received any awards or honors or held any offices? | 25:02 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I graduated first from my class from college. I was initiated into Mortar Board Honor Society. Going too fast. | 25:07 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:25:20] from Bennett College. | 25:16 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I graduated second in my class from high school. I graduated first from college. I was initiated into Mortar Board, which is an honors society when I was out at Willamette University. Mortar Board. | 25:22 |
| Kate Ellis | M-O-R-T-A-R? Board. | 25:34 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Mm-hmm. | 25:37 |
| Kate Ellis | At? | 25:39 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Willamette University. | 25:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Will you spell that? | 25:40 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. W-I-L-L-A-M-M-E-T-T-E. I think it's one M. It's one M, two L's and two T's. I'm sorry. | 25:41 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 25:51 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Willamette University. It's named after the valley, Willamette River or something. I was initiated into Psi Chi, which is the Psychology Honor Society there at Willamette. I received a national literary award for my poetry. Okay, going too fast. | 25:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, go ahead. | 26:21 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. Oh, I got a Woodrow Wilson. When I graduated from college, I was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow alternate. I come in second for that and I had a scholarship to work on a PhD in psychology. | 26:29 |
| Kate Ellis | After— | 26:45 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | After graduation from college. So I was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow alternate. | 26:46 |
| Kate Ellis | After graduation from college. Okay. | 26:56 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Then I got a national literary award from my national sorority, actually. Yeah, for my poetry. This was in 1989, I guess. That's probably about all. | 26:56 |
| Kate Ellis | From? | 27:18 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | From Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated. My sorority, they had a Black Renaissance Gala. And everybody, you competed for literary awards. And I received a literary award, and that's about all I can think of. | 27:18 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. I would love to see some of your poetry. | 27:37 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I'll give you a couple of books before you go. | 27:42 |
| Kate Ellis | Congregational is your denomination? | 27:44 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Right. Right. | 27:46 |
| Kate Ellis | Are you still with United— | 27:51 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Central United Church of Christ, Central United Church of Christ. Same church that I was christened in and married. | 27:54 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:28:00] last— | 28:00 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Last Sunday, couple of Sundays ago. | 28:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Let's see, it was the Sunday before this one. | 28:03 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | I think my Auntie Elise told me. | 28:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Yes, yes. | 28:08 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. Yeah. | 28:09 |
| Kate Ellis | I've been trying to hook up with her. And that's the only church you've ever been—Well, actually, no, no— | 28:11 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | No, in Washington— | 28:20 |
| Kate Ellis | What was your membership there? | 28:21 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. In Washington, I was at People's United Church of Christ. That was the church at which my children's dad was the pastor, People's United Church of Christ. And for a little bit, I was a member of Plymouth United Church of Christ. But it's all the same denomination. | 28:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Was People's in Washington? | 28:35 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. People's in Washington. | 28:37 |
| Kate Ellis | Should I put the Plymouth? | 28:41 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah, you can. That's fine. Plymouth United Church of Christ, that's in Washington also. And that's all. Those are my Washington churches. | 28:42 |
| Kate Ellis | I interviewed an interesting man the other day from your church, Dr. George Thomas. | 28:54 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, yes. Yeah. It was his son, John Thomas, when we went in the Frostop place where the man pulled it out. | 29:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 29:05 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | It was his son that had put the money in there. | 29:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Is that right? | 29:07 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's right. That's right. John Charles Thomas. | 29:07 |
| Kate Ellis | Wow. | 29:11 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. Yeah. I bet that was interesting in interviewing Dr. Thomas. He's had a lot of experiences. | 29:11 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah, he has. | 29:16 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yeah. Yeah. That was his son. | 29:16 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? Eloquent. | 29:18 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. | 29:20 |
| Kate Ellis | He showed me a letter he'd written to the mayor in 1963, right after, I think, Reverend Alexander had been pulled up the steps. | 29:22 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. Yes, yes. I saw that picture. | 29:29 |
| Kate Ellis | I was like, "How did they respond to this?" I mean, it was such an [indistinct 00:29:36]. | 29:34 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | [indistinct 00:29:36] they ignored it. But he wrote it. That's good. | 29:36 |
| Kate Ellis | But evidently, I think the Louisiana Weekly printed it. Times-Picayune didn't. So it's interesting. Okay. I need to list any organizations that you have previously or currently belonged to. | 29:41 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. | 29:58 |
| Kate Ellis | And that means civic, community, educational, political, whatever. | 29:58 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. The National Council of Negro Women. | 30:04 |
| Kate Ellis | And if you have general years that you were— | 30:10 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Of membership? | 30:15 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 30:16 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. | 30:16 |
| Kate Ellis | If you don't, don't rack your brain. But if it's sort of like, "Oh, this was when I was in—" National Council of— | 30:17 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Negro Women. Right. That was the organization started by Mary McLeod Bethune, National Council Negro Women. That's, I don't know, I think maybe '89, I became a member of something like that. Very recently. | 30:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 30:38 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | National Association—NAACP. NAACP. | 30:40 |
| Kate Ellis | For how— | 30:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | For a long— | 30:49 |
| Kate Ellis | Let's say, starting when? | 30:49 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Okay. Probably starting, I say a long time. Probably starting '80, '85. That's not long. Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, that's my sorority. That was 1973. And I have been a member of the National Education Association, NEA. That membership was when I was in—That was in the '80s, the early '80s. But I'm no longer. The International Reading Association. That's '94. | 30:49 |
| Kate Ellis | Is it 1994? | 31:32 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | 1994. Right. Recent. And the African American Writers Guild. That was a group I was in, in Washington, and that was '89, began probably. My alumni club, Bennett College Alumni Club is a group that I was very active with in Washington from the late '70s through my leaving. Bennett College alumni. And I kind of believe that that might be it. | 31:41 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. What about, you were a member of CORE? | 32:23 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, that's right. Oh, that's right. Yeah. In the '60s. Sure. Congress of Racial Equality. Sure was. I'm glad I told you that. | 32:25 |
| Kate Ellis | What about B Sharp? | 32:33 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Okay. B Sharp Music Club. I'm an active in singing the choir, in the choir with that group. And I have been a member of that group. Yeah. | 32:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Now the next is to list activities or affiliations. Any other activities or affiliations. So that's where I would—And hobbies, organizing, interest, publications. So I would put piano and singing? | 32:47 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | Yes. Right. Piano and singing and writing. I have self-published four volumes of poetry. And those are basic hobbies. Music is really basically the hobby and interest. And I do work with my church, all that kind of stuff. Helping with the choir, helping ride the children to rehearsal. And that kind of encouraging, kind of a booster. Tutoring children at church. I think that might about say it. | 33:01 |
| Kate Ellis | And finally, if you have any comment that you'd like to make? Like a favorite saying or phrase or a quote? | 33:43 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | That's interesting. A very interesting question. Well, I'll tell you my philosophy, my life philosophy. It's kind of a quote. It's just that I want to be kind and be helpful. And if I have done those two things, and each day if I can look back and have been kind to someone and helpful to someone, then it has been a successful day for me. | 33:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. That's it. I need to just ask you to read this form and sign it. And I can turn— | 34:14 |
| Beatrice Perry Stanley | And the form says, "Everything you have said can be used against you"? | 34:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Can and will be used against you. | 34:34 |
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