1 10 2 https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/39779/archive/files/d616489210b4e7c4e639185a9019e407.pdf?Expires=1779321600&Signature=c08AAdz-%7E6RKCZm3iEzEomXZJSotYuRdhFUoZB0mZVjU5BbrntBogbOZHdcQuxkRmpCKpdfEwX6nqdroVAnQaaTfbKz-fNHpfw3nEBTT8otcfjdPOCmR0gCR80XfD5N8FSY6CNZEWZON8SxIWzIqo8LIveCKPYerq4LniPRkZVrNjVFCPVmbyoCMaOeK1gZyBIceFixZ4zc8t30HS%7EbH3NhC7SqM%7EoviWaUF795L5OSzu8hwjNZ9KviwWbc8Zb41teWy-BPt6mwrlLdmeGZsSfOtIq1vOyflpY8r1TjcZobSA-DRofXtG1Ogd5AvGfLInRhoCPwRDojbe%7EQlvxyzdg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 1c5c616592fc08cdd2fc54b32f53ebe1 PDF Text Text TRANSCRIPT— WILIAM DUDLEY GREGORIE Interviewer: MORGAN WILLER Interviewee: WILLIAM DUDLEY GREGORIE Interview date: March 13, 2015 Location: Charleston, S.C. Length: 1 hour, 6 minutes MORGAN WILLER: This is Morgan Willer with the Citadel Oral History Project. Today is March 13th, 2015. I’m here with Councilman Dudley Gregorie talking about his experiences at Burke High School in Charleston, South Carolina. So, entering Burke High School as a freshman, what were your preconceived ideas about the school? DUDLEY GREGORIE: That it was probably the greatest school in the city, or the state, to attend. It was something that I was looking forward to most of my life; most of my family went to Burke. My mother graduated from Burke in 1939. So, it was a family tradition that we go to Burke High School, so I was expecting greatness. MW: Did you have siblings at Burke High School? DG: At the time, I had a brother and a sister at the school. They were a couple years ahead of me. So, I was a little brother at that time at Burke. But Burke was just a wonderful experience for me. I think that it prepared me for where I am today in terms of running for mayor a third time, I had my first elections at Burke High School when I ran in the eleventh grade for student body president. So, I kind of see all that as precursor for where I am today because it definitely let me know a little bit about what goes into an �election. It gave us an opportunity to develop our platforms and planks and go around to various classrooms and campaigns. And even more importantly that year was the time for Burke to have the State President Association and because I was elected that meant that I represented Burke as the President of the State Association of High School Presidents which gave me an opportunity to go to Colonial Williamsburg [Virginia] and attend the meeting of high school student body presidents from all over the world, and to discuss world issues. So again, it was just a precursor for me for where I am today. MW: Can you tell me what that election process was like at Burke? DG: A little different from running for mayor or running for council in that back in those days there was no social media, or anything like that, so we had to of course make all of our signs using stencil board and magic markers, and so we then had to place our signs all around the school. And then it gave us opportunities to give speeches before the entire student body, to have many debates on the issues, and my being in eleventh grade, and the other candidates being seniors, then I was sort off, a little behind at the time. But it was a great experience. One of the candidates was killed. So, it also placed me in a position to learn about death at a very early age. The candidate that was killed was a female, and her name was Sheela Wilkinson, I think it was, and she was really doing a great job as a campaigner, and for some reason I can remember very clearly when the news flashed that she had been shot, and shot in the back of her head in a car, so that kind of put a damper on the entire election process because we had funerals, and learning about death, and what happened to her and why. So, it was a very very telling experience for me. I can’t remember anyone else in the school at that time that had either died or �died so tragically. So all of that was an unbelievable learning experience for me, and not just for me but for everyone else in the school. MW: Would you be willing to tell me what happened and why? DG: We never really knew why. We just knew that she was in a car with some guys who were not necessarily the best people to be involved in. And somehow there were gunshots, and we’re talking about back in 1966, ’65, and she was killed. I cannot recall whether anyone was arrested or anything, all we remember is that she was dead. Being a very close-knit community she only lived a couple blocks from me, we played together, and she was a very very beautiful young lady. So it was very very tragic for her family and of course for her Burke High School family, that she’d been taken away so quickly at such a young age. MW: And how did the Burke community cope with that? DG: We had I would suspect counseling sessions through our guidance program with our guidance counselors to help us understand death, and of course our parents more so than anyone was there for us and helped us through the mourning period. MW: What were your responsibilities as president with that State Association that you were talking about? DG: The first I had to do was learn Robert’s Rules of Order (laughs) because I had to conduct all of the meetings of the student body. I had to deal with issues, school issues, might be lunchroom; you know high school kinds of things. But in addition to President of the Student Body, I was also co-editor of the school newspaper at that time which was called the Parvenue. So it also gave me an opportunity to help and learn how to do and put a newspaper together. That newspaper is no longer in existence, but it gave �us an opportunity to write, to express our views, whether popular or unpopular. It gave us opportunities to talk about teachers that we might have thought were unfair, which oftentimes made us unpopular, but our paper was pretty liberal and the teacher who was over the paper tended to allow us to be open and honest and write accordingly. So for me having that kind of dual responsibility, again I think prepared me for where I am today. MW: And do you have a favorite story you ever wrote? DG: Yes, and I think it was entitled “Where do we go from here?” And I coauthored that with one of my classmates and I think her name was Pamela Hunt and it was just an editorial about after high school what were our expectations, what kinds of things did we want to do and accomplish in life, and it was a pretty good first piece that I had written. And the subject matter was great because it left us a lot of room to sort off expand on our dreams and aspirations. MW: So you’ve already mentioned the Parvenue and student government, were you involved in any other organizations? DG: Burke had at the time an array of social clubs and school clubs, and I can remember being in Student Teachers of America, you name it, there was a club. Theron probably mentioned to you the Marcades, which again, was a group of young men who was all about trying to learn how to be gentlemen, learn how to be entrepreneurs, learn budgeting, learning how-to put-on events, selling tickets, and a lot of rivalry because there were a number of social clubs around. But at a very young age as I look back on it we did things that I thought were remarkable (laughs), like renting County Hall, organizing security, tickets, contracting with the entertainment industry; we were doing all this stuff at fifteen, sixteen years old. So it gave us a can-do spirit, that whatever you �want to do you can. I mean we were kind off ignorant, we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be doing that at fifteen, but fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, those are the kind of things that we were involved in at a very very early age, and those are some great memories. And those guys will always be my brothers, always my brothers. So, the Marcades was I think a great club, a great club. MW: What were some of those events that you put on? DG: Most of them were events to raise money. I can recall having, and I can’t remember who or what particular band, but we would literally hire a band and we’d put on a big dance party. And sometimes there were hundreds and hundreds of people that would attend, and mostly we broke even (laughs), at least we didn’t have any debts. But I thought that it was a good way for young men to really learn some life lessons, learn how to budget, learn how to leverage limited resources to create what we wanted to create. Not only did we do events like that, we had pep rallies before football games, we ate together, we were brothers forever, and those were happy days, very happy days. We were able to buy sweaters and get the sweaters with the monograms and our names, and all kinds of things to sort off separate us from the rest of the group. Very different than some of the things that are happening today. Gangs? I didn’t even know what that was (laughs). Burke really was a great protector and I think that sometimes to the point where we were a little ignorant about reality sometimes (laughs). But, you know, the basketball games and the football games, track meets, and homecoming parades, you name it. That was a good time, good time in life. MW: And Theron mentioned that you put on a Mardi Gras event, could you tell me more about that? �DG: That’s the Mardi Gras, that’s the event where we actually printed tickets, and hired bands, and all of that stuff. (Recording pause) MW: You’re very popular. (laughs) DG: Well running for mayor, very busy and trying to raise money. MW: It’s a full time job just doing the campaign. DG: And calling old friends who you haven’t spoken to in ten or fifteen years, and trying to ask them for money. Yeah, yeah it’s a full time job. Oh yeah, the Mardi Gras was the— I don’t know how to describe it —but, it was the culmination of everything that we had done in the year leading up to this grand big Mardi Gras party. Not just with our friends from Burke School but all the schools, ICS [Immaculate Conception School], C.A. Brown, all the high schools would come. And we would literally sell hundreds of tickets, hundreds of tickets. And it was always a very successful occasion. Sometimes some of us actually participated in some of the entertainment. We would go with the band on stage and sometimes we would sing some of the popular songs. We just had a great great time. I mean a liquor free, we didn’t know anything about that in those days, not like a lot of the kids today. So it was just a great occasion, a great occasion. MW: What were some of those popular songs that you were singing, do you remember? DG: I think “What Becomes of a Broken Heart” [What Becomes of the Broken Hearted, Jimmy Ruffin, 1967?] was one, James Brown, a number of James Brown songs we sung, some Stevie Wonder stuff, all the popular artists at the time. We would try to �sing them but most of the folks could sing better than me. I always wanted to try and be the lead but when I came down to it I was the back-up singer (laughs). MW: Why do you think this event was so popular among so many people? DG: Because it was a time for different schools, different classes, to actually come together socially. Yes, we had basketball games, and homecoming parties, but all those events were clearly associated with the school. This event was something totally independent from the school. The only association was that we were a club, but the school had no liability at all. Our club assumed all liability, and it was just popular and became an annual thing. We weren’t the first to do it, other clubs who did it graduated and went on, so we were just keeping up with the tradition. MW: So you used the phrase “great protector” earlier to describe Burke’s environment. Can you tell me what made that environment feel so safe, or who? DG: The teachers. The teachers were phenomenal people, phenomenal people. And you know, all of us were not rich kids, middle-income kids. And the teachers were more like our parents away from home. Whatever we would need to know to keep us safe, they would share that with us. And that’s all the way down to our relationships with girls, what you can, what you should do, they gave us life lessons, and we all listened to them. And protector because of the quality of the education they gave us, academically of course, but the life lessons they taught us. Academically our teachers had unbelievable expectations and I think we excelled accordingly. They would not take mediocrity at all, it was not tolerated. And the environment that they created for us, educationally, socially, I think is very rare today. And I think that’s part of the reason why so many of my �classmates are successful people. I think it had to do with what our teachers did to add on to the parenting that we had at home. MW: What were some of those life lessons that they shared with you? DG: (laughs) I can remember, and this is one, I can remember dating a young lady that was much much younger than me, much younger than me. And my teacher at the time was Ms. Mack Williams, and she sat me down and taught me a life lesson (laughs), that I remember to this day. And I think the lesson that she was trying to teach me was you are older than she is, she is only in the ninth grade, do you know if something happened there are certain liabilities? Well no one had ever explained any of that to me before, but here was a teacher who went beyond the academic part and taught me a life lesson, and without that lesson anything could’ve happened, because I adhered to what she said because it made plenty plenty sense. Another life lesson was that sometimes silence is the best wisdom to not go (half-cocked?), and sometimes if you say nothing no one can judge what you know or not know. That’s a great life lesson, a lesson I use today (laughs). And they taught us that early on. At first I got offended but as I thought about it and how important a lesson that was, even today I still use it. And so those are two that really stand out in my mind as great life lessons and lessons that I can use today. MW: Did you have favorite teachers? DG: All of my teachers were special. They had their own specialness, as for a favorite, not really, because they all had their own set of unique characteristics that made them stand out in their own way for me. One teacher, and that was Ms. Hazel, English teacher, she’s still alive today, and I can remember her giving us an assignment and that was to write a story or a play with characters. And we had to use cursive writing and we �had to use a fountain pen. That was a challenge. I can recall staying up all night, trying to create this story, and rewriting and ink spilling on the paper, and the whole shebang. And my mom saying “Dud, don’t you think it’s time for you to go to bed?” But it wasn’t because I needed to finish this. And once I completed it and I went to school the next day and passed my paper in, it was another life lesson. And that life lesson was, the more time you put in it, the better it will turn out. I got the highest score in the class. I had never ever, ever, ever in my English class gotten the highest score on an assignment. So that taught me, the more time you put in it, the better the results. And the fact that she was able as a teacher to recognize that it must have took a long time for this kid to do this (laughs), was extremely rewarding for me, extremely rewarding for me. And you know, I think of teachers as a blessing. Every time I speak correctly, every time I can read, or I can count, I celebrate them because it’s that basic foundation that they placed in all of us that helped us excel today. On tomorrow I’m speaking at a celebration of teachers. It’s called “The Legends,” and I’ve been just thinking about what I say to these teachers who are in their eighties and their nineties, who taught me. And I finally came up with a theme and that theme is “I celebrate you.” I celebrate you because of the foundation you gave me. I celebrate you every time I can read a book, I celebrate you. And that they will all live forever because what they’ve instilled in me, I take and I share with others. So their teachings will be here until the end of time, so I celebrate. And that’s going to be my theme in my speech tomorrow, “I celebrate you as a legend.” For instance, the picture on the wall, Septima Clark who was a teacher, a civil rights leader. One of the first things I did when I came on council was I found out that there was a road called the Crosstown, and that was not the right name. The name was supposed to be the Septima Clark �Parkway. Well the first thing I introduced when I came on council was to change the Crosstown to the Septima Clark Parkway. It took awhile, people still referred to it as the Crosstown, and anytime they do I correct them because hopefully with in the next five, ten years, no one will call it the Crosstown anymore. That it will a true salute to a legend, Septima Clark, who was an unbelievable woman, and unbelievable civil rights person. A teacher who fought for equal wages, and I can go on and on. And I use her as an example because those are the kinds of teachers that we had in those days. So, you know I continue to salute them and celebrate them every time I speak, or read, or add (laughs). MW: Why do you think the Crosstown wasn’t properly named? DG: I have no idea. There is a sort of memorial to her at the corner of President Street, and I guess that’s Spring [St.]. It looks like a gravestone, and when you read it, it says Septima Clark Parkway. And I’m just not sure but I was talking to Jim French, who is the owner of the Chronicle Paper, and we were just talking one day, and he says, “Dudley you know, there’s really no such place as the Crosstown,” and so I googled Crosstown and nothing came up, googled Clark. You got the Clark Expressway, the Mark Clark, and then I think Google showed me something like Clark Parkway. And that was enough for me to say, “hey apparently there’s been an oversight, we need to make this right, we need to take down every sign that says Crosstown and guys, you need to put up the Septima Clark Parkway.” They put up the Septima Clark Parkway signs, they kind off left a Crosstown sign sitting in the bushes, and I said “no, no, no, no, that one has to go too.” So anytime in council meetings, because we have a major drainage project going on now, and anytime it’s referred to the Crosstown, there’s no such place folks, it’s the Septima Clark Parkway. Even the mayor now acknowledges it, “Oh nope! It’s not the �Crosstown, it’s the Septima Clark Parkway.” And I think it’s very very important that these kinds of symbols in commemoration of someone that has contributed to our lives, it’s important to me that becomes a household name, so that instead of Crosstown they say Septima Clark, Septima Clark Parkway. That then gives our children the opportunity to understand what this great woman was about, what this great teacher was about. MW: Were you aware of her when you were in high school? DG: Yes, I’m sure in our studies we did have African American heroes and contributors, I don’t know whether or not she had gotten to a point where she was in those history books. But yes she was discussed. MW: So, what were your interactions like with other students at the school? DG: It was pretty good. I was I guess very talkative, extremely talkative, I think they even voted me most talkative or something like that. Very good rapport with all my classmates, we had a good time together. MW: Did you spend time together outside of school? DG: All the time outside of schools. Schools are so different today. In those days schools were community based, people were not bussed in. And all of our parents knew each other. I was in high school with people like Theron and others where we were cub scouts together, we were boy scouts together, and after school we played football together. We played basketball on the lots together, tennis together, yeah it was endless. We all knew each other, grew up in the same neighborhoods. Our parents knew each other, our parents grew up together. So I would say it was almost twenty-four seven. MW: What was the role of that community for Burke? �DG: I like to think of it as the other parent. I lived on a street called Court Street, it's been most recently changed to Maranda Holmes Street. And I like to think of our parents as porch mothers. As we played dodge ball in the streets, hopscotch, whatever, they were all on the porches watching, OK? Like any hen would protect the chick, but all the hens protected all the chicks whether or not they were their chicks. So it was that kind of synergy in our neighborhoods, at least the neighborhood that I grew up in. Porch mothers. Dad may be at work, but those porch mothers were out. We had strict rules. We had to be in before the nightlights came on. We would gather at the corner sometime, of Court [St.] and Race [St., and we’d sit where former council member Brenda Scott now lives, and all we would do is philosophize. Talk about things that most kids didn’t talk about. Most of the folks on our street, you know even though we were poor, most of the kids went off to college. Some of them have PhDs,’ some of them are lawyers. So I do think that it truly paid off and that it does take the whole community to raise a child. Because if we did anything wrong, by the time we got to the house our parents knew. And our parents knew that whatever parent called also took care of it before we got there. So we got a double whammy (laughs). Punishment, you can’t go out, you know the usual kinds of things. But I think our community was very close knit, a little different than communities are today. All neighbors knew everybody, and if something went wrong it was relayed back to the house (claps hands) pronto, in seconds. MW: Why do you think they were so strict? DG: Because they wanted us to be successful women and men. We would be, in some cases, first generation to go to college to get an education. Many of our parents did menial jobs, day workers, housekeepers, you name it. So they wanted to make sure that �as opportunities open, that when that door opened, we’d be prepared to go through. They didn’t have those opportunities. They had no choices but to do what many of them did to keep us going. And once those doors opened they were the ones who were cooking, and cleaning, and washing to pay our tuition so that we could go to college. So I think that they had the kind of vision for us that perhaps we didn’t realize as a child, but they wanted to make sure that when opportunities were there we were prepared to go through. MW: What did your parents do? DG: My father was a merchant seaman, a world traveler. He was Jewish, converted. As children we were taught Hebrew. We practiced two religions, mom being a Methodist, so we celebrated Jewish holidays plus the Christian holidays. Confusing yes. Confusing as hell (laughs). But because my father was a traveler and he all wanted us to convert to Judaism, my mother’s Methodism prevailed. My mother was a housekeeper. My mother raised many many many children other than her own. She cleaned houses on the Battery. She raised the children of the folks on the Battery. Many of them looked at her as mom. So my mother not only had to be responsible for rearing her own children, she had an unbelievable role in the rearing of many of the children other than her own for the people who employed her, cooking, cleaning, picking up kids from school, taking them out for walks, the whole shebang. So my mother was a pretty hard worker. She would actually sometimes just iron shirts just to help keep food on the table. My mother, well she still is, she’s ninety-four, she’s very strong willed, always wanted to be a doctor, but the opportunities never arose for her. So I think her mantra was always for us to go as high as we could go. And she always taught us that “once you hate, you lose.” And that was something that I thought was profound because as a child you didn’t think about it �that way. She said “No Dud, people will wrong you, but the minute you start to hate, they win, you lose.” And again that’s one of those lessons, life lessons, learned from my mom that has helped me through out my life. My father was not there most of the time because of his jobs, so that left it all on my mom to raise four children, two boys, two girls. MW: She sounds like an incredible woman to do that. DG: She is an unbelievable woman, still to this day. MW: So to reverse that original question, what was the role of Burke for the community? DG: Burke was like a community center, not just Burke, but even our elementary schools. They were the community centers of our neighborhood. I can remember teas and all the fine china and silverware, I mean just really done well. And as a child of course we would go and the PTA was very strong, but it was community centered. It was the place where events were held. The operetta, the plays, those schools always had something for us to do. We had no time to be bad kids because of all the extracurricular kinds of activities they afforded us to participate in. We were always busy; we always had something to do. There might have been a play; you had to study your part. There was always something to do and it was mostly associated with the school. MW: What were some of the most popular events? DG: Well homecoming of course. Debutante balls of course. But I remember more events growing up as a child going to Rhett, like things they don’t even do today, like May Day. And May Day was when there was this huge celebration, you crowned a king and a queen, and you wrapped a maypole. You’re probably not even familiar with this. �MW: Actually my high school had this. It was a tradition starting from the 1950s that we did (laughs). DG: You got it, okay okay. And it was just unbelievable, you know, plaiting the pole, unplaiting the pole. And all kinds of activities. The parks played an important role too. I can remember Ms. Maranda Holmes who was a neighbor who ran the park. There would always be events on the park. The circus at the time was held on Harmon Field. Most people don’t know that. That was an enclosed wall area. So you had the circus, you had the fair, it was very different than today. It was an exciting time, and maybe because we didn’t know any better. I’m glad we didn’t, maybe we wouldn’t have had as much fun. I had a remarkable childhood and growing up in Charleston, and being affiliated with Burke High School and Rhett and Simonton. Those teachers kept us busy, real busy. Yes we had a problem sometimes after school with folks wanting to take your money, and this, that, and the other. But we got through all of that, we got through all of that. MW: So what did homecoming look like, as far as events? DG: Homecoming was parades, floats, I don’t think we had a king at that time, crowing of the queen of the school and everything that led up to that. Because again all of that was done by students. Getting permits from the police department, organizing the parade, putting in all the participants and where you line up, and all that kind of stuff. Big event. And then the crowning of the queen, and then the football game. Just lots of stuff to do. We were busy children, okay? We were very busy (laughs). MW: And you mentioned debutante balls? DG: Yeah. The debutante ball was a ball where young ladies were selected by a committee to be a debutante. All young ladies weren’t selected. Supposedly the crème de �la crème. And a lot of times the debutantes, most of them were teacher’s daughters, professional people’s daughters, and they would also have to select an escort. It was probably the first time we had on tails and tux, the women in long gowns, and waltzing, and all the kinds of things that go with that kind of event. So that was a biggie during junior and senior years, and I enjoyed it. And I was selected to escort a young lady, had a great time. Then there were the proms, that they still do today, and all the decorating associated with that. We were busy (laughs), we were busy. We didn’t have social media at all. We were just busy kids, busy. MW: How was learning to waltz for that ball? DG: Well, we did have dance as a part of the curriculum, and not only did we learn the waltz, we learned cha cha, we learned, what is the? MW: Salsa? DG: We learned a little salsa. But we also learned the, what’s the one that the cowboys do? [Makes arm movements as though doing the jig] You know what I’m talking about. MW: Line dancing? DG: No, we did a lot of line dancing, a lot of line dancing. Square dancing! We had lessons in all those things. We had drama classes, we had speech classes, Burke prepared us. I mean we had speech classes, and drama classes, and etiquette classes, you name it. When we got out of Burke, we were prepared to go into society and things weren’t foreign to us, because at least we were exposed. MW: You mentioned earlier in your interview that you were “ignorant of reality,” to what reality were you referring to there? �DG: There were things going on around us. There were gangs, East Side, West Side, the other side of the track. There were parts of the city we would not go in. We would not go in the East Side because we would be identified as West Side. And sometimes that would cause friction, fights sometimes. But again, when I say ignorant of reality I think we were so shielded from so much. And ignorance is bliss, we were quite blissful. Because we didn’t know about a lot of the negative things of the world. We didn’t know, I mean our parents protected us from “coloreds only,” the discrimination that was occurring in their lives, they shielded us from that and that’s what I meant by “ignorant of reality.” Because they didn’t want us to know about it, they didn’t want us to feel it. They taught us about it, but to actually experience it, they kept us from those places. That’s not to say that sometimes walking home in a group that the white guys would not take raw eggs and throw it at us. We got some of that; we got a lot of that. Or sometimes hazing and called out of your name. We felt that, but we never let any of that cut our stride. It’s not that we didn’t know that it existed, but at the magnitude it existed we didn’t know. I can remember getting on a city bus and we went to the back of the bus. Well one day, white man came and asked my mother to move out of the seat and to move to the back of the bus. And I said, “Mom, you taught us that a man gives a lady a seat, why are you giving this man your seat, mom? You told us that you should be chivalrous to women, he’s not.” And my mother said, “Son, don’t worry about it. Someday you’ll own the bus company and you’ll be able to do whatever you want to do.” That was shielding, okay, me from becoming belligerent, calling attention to us. So that was another life lesson, I mean the way she put it, “Don’t worry about it son, someday you’ll own this company.” And those are things that just stick out in your mind. But I’ll �be the first to say that racism didn’t exist [to me as a child], but racism was pretty rampant back then. But again, our parents shielded us from it all. One memorable occasion was I can remember my brother and I, with my father who was a world traveler, started talking to us about South Africa. And I thought “what are you talking about?” And he was telling us about how people are treated in South Africa, how it’s similar to what’s going on here, but just a bit worse, and how over time that he thinks that this country will change. So even in short pants, five, six, seven years old, I had a father who had been exposed worldly and could tell us about other parts of the world where that wasn’t even an issue, and eventually in our time, that we would see a totally different country. And he’s right, you know, I worked in civil rights for many many years, and I do know that discrimination still exists, it’s just done with a smile now. It’s very different. Discrimination against women, sexual orientation, color, you name it. It still exists in our world today. But again, those life lessons growing up taught me to be a bit tolerant, but it also taught me to work in civil rights and write civil rights policy, and I never would have thought that I would write civil rights policy on a national level that would just not affect me, but would affect the lives of many many people in this country. So those lessons lead me to working in civil rights, going to places like East Texas alone and trying to integrate public housing authorities, to integrate other housing projects or communities. And I mean, I did it. A lot of people don’t know that. I wrote a lot of civil rights policies, I was able to do investigations and find discrimination, and in the recent past when I was the director of HUD [Housing and Urban Development], and not only was I responsible for fair housing and civil rights, I was responsible for all of HUD’s programs. But because of my civil rights background, I was able to make history in terms of having the Secretary of �HUD, which is a cabinet level position, initiated a discriminatory complaint against a real estate company, who we literally was able to capture on camera discrimination occurring. And once that happened, it brought in an ex-governor, it brought in Congressman [Jim] Clyburn, it brought in Mayor [Bob] Coble. It escalated to a month long series of television interviews, and education people on fair housing and their rights. So again, I don’t think any of that would have ever happened to me without those life lessons I learned at Burke, through my community, and through my family. MW: Were you involved in activism of any kind while you were in high school? DG: What kid in the sixties didn’t? Are you kidding? (laughs) MW: I had to ask (laughs). DG: Well high school, you said high school. MW: Or college. DG: High school, no. I was a little young to participate in the sit-ins. My sister who was a couple years older, yes. But mom would not allow me to go to Washington, and be a part of the March on Washington, and hear the “I Have a Dream” speech—my sister did—or participate in any of the sit-ins, or even, be a person to help integrate the schools, just wouldn’t allow me to do that because of my age. College, yes. Washington D.C., yes. I would always march in the African Liberation Parade and that was a big parade to liberate, symbolically, the people of South Africa who were being discriminated against. I marched when people were killed at South Carolina State and we marched on the capital, which was probably one of the most scariest experiences of my life, because as we marched up the Capitol steps, they opened the doors of the Capitol steps, and literally there was an automatic machine gun in our faces. �MW: That’s horrifying. DG: Unbelievably. And we all ran and scattered. It might have been just to scare us, but they had just shot four students at South Carolina State, and we were just demonstrating against those state troopers who had killed family members, they were students. So yes, I was pretty active in undergrad and in grad school during those days, and when Malcolm X was killed, when Kennedy was killed, when Martin Luther King was killed, I was at college, Benedict College. And things go so bad until they literally had to close out school down and have our parents come and get us. Those were some scary times. The burning of cities. It was a tough time. MW: Did you sister tell you about her experiences? DG: Not really. My sister Ellen, she was excited when she came back from the march, and of course she told us about this great speech, and this man who gave the speech, and the multitude of people who were there, yes she did. She did. MW: And you said your mother would not allow you to help with integration. Was it just because of your age? DG: I think it was a part of it, but the folks who integrated the schools here, I think there were some prerequisites. And some of those prerequisites had to do with academic—so that they would not go there and—I was a good B+ student, didn’t test well at all, and I don’t know if that was my mother’s reason but it might have been the reason for the school not pushing me in that direction. But my life would’ve been so different if I had done that. I probably wouldn’t be sitting and talking to you today because I think we are what we are because of the consequences of our experiences, so I don’t think I would be here today, I’d be somewhere else today. �MW: And what were the attitudes of Burke students towards integration? DG: Frightened. We saw what happened in Little Rock, Arkansas. We had televisions and newspapers, and frightening, very frightening, frightening. And understanding that our fellow students like Millicent Brown, and others, they were the true pioneers because they bit the bullet, and made the sacrifice. So we were frightened for them, very frightened for them when they entered those schools, schools where we know were founded on the confederacy. I mean even now as I prepare myself to be, one day, mayor of this city, I am still frightened because I am a descendent of the slaves. We built this city. There’s no telling, what that could do, when it does happen. And I speak of it as happening, because I’m a true believer that when divine order and universal timing comes together, there’s nothing that can stop it. And that’s my feeling in regard to this mayoral race, it’s not about me, personally I’d like to be in the Caribbean somewhere, but if I’m the vessel, so be it. I just have to do all that I can to make it happen. Frightening, not really afraid, cautious, extremely cautious, because there’s just no telling what can happen because we still have zealots out there. But I just move forward. MW: And finally, if you could summarize the one or two most important things that your years at Burke taught you, what would they be? DG: To never take no for an answer, and to move forward until you get the yes, because somewhere there is a yes. To always be prepared, because with preparedness it will enhance your opportunity to achieve. MW: Well those are all the questions I have for you. So is there anything else you’d like to add? �DG: I’d like to say that this project, though oral, and I think oral is a good way to do it too, is going to be a great contribution to the archives of our school. And I am very appreciative of the opportunity. Appreciate. MW: Well I appreciate you talking to me. DG: (laughs) Thank you. End of Recording MLL 2/10/22 � https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/39779/archive/files/629662f36c51f90fb4049dc9ace7b4e4.mp3?Expires=1779321600&Signature=mgW3UaoiDXAjMY8DRg1nMOOZP97nhxk1goloa0oRF6Yd9UFuk-1%7ESU73Jz3tr8uSOBJP3otQRwczr5zLWj5EPMzpmvTWg8LFqBtdL4Lv9D%7E5PahYnk6sdTuPIpF-OrM5BR0zLKuPW0fpF9V8JlCOBGMvPuSMYAB23ZWJ7dPevVLigirhZEapF24JSHw9Auxkdog1y2H1qyiGHSxHnQ%7EN1H3oFg3uwyqqp8OE35PQ1ZNXm-6y0VT0b2Anyr5JPPhcGeO657IWpuYdaasbip8XSDVlJTx8odJFfedTHp4A1x-1hz0RjKw%7EQTB8g9wrXsizNdbF7VxK99qrNa6EmgPfyA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 8e13c045c8f8c9f23a86d62697027e5a https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/39779/archive/files/a06808b7bba4a3544d71fb8204660709.jpg?Expires=1779321600&Signature=h1H3QWMZOA8WhbaqDAHfNanayN7G0COwHFoj7yXuEawwhje%7EG%7E6VABsrkFo1vzz1AyYEbzkygXU1uHRzaLcCGyyAuC0KqinkXlFIxpFOu%7En8i%7E0-iNc0CHKvFhBvKHdU0GfaS6qAbcKM2EHdRpJV5coNUbt%7E1X6QQ9OKTuXAyoywskgmFtD3rzLTpS3uzqs1AGwMnzvbLGUgfKYgBlQy4Z6JKFzbG231BfhKYXwdv14gBNzxqNDGLt5u7-fqEGrkkhRUbHjwzs4SLiOEnviEOIzC0QVPpGIC98sSu5CY3GL8e3AwC8933i74YRJ4GLHEwD6qoio7pDwywwxXCbN8sw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 8e29f30a63e5d70dc900d8fb2ebe91f7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral Histories Description An account of the resource The oral histories in this collection were produced by The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel. Founded in 2008, The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel seeks to deepen understanding of the Lowcountry’s rich history and culture through the gathering and presentation of recorded memories from area residents.<br /><h3>Search Tips</h3> Interviews may be browsed by scrolling to the bottom of this page and selecting "View all items".<br /><br />When using the search bar, we recommend putting quotations around your search term, and selecting the Boolean search option, as illustrated here:<br /><p><img src="https://gdurl.com/aYPj" alt="aYPj" /><br /><br />To view interviews of a specific theme, please see the search tips in each series below.</p> <h3><strong>The Citadel in War and in Peace<br /></strong></h3> With generous support from the <a href="http://www.schumanities.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Humanities Council of South Carolina</a>, The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel collected thirty interviews with Citadel alumni regarding their experiences during WWII. Journalist and historian Jack Bass conducted the interviews during the Fall of 2008.They serve as a powerful testament to the veterans' experiences and their critical contributions to the war effort.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /><ul><li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- World War II"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- Korean War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- Vietnam War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- The Second Gulf War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- The War in Afghanistan"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Working Charleston</strong></h3> Working Charleston documents the on and off job experiences of the longshoremen and lawyers, the bartenders and carriage drivers, hospital aides and high tech workers who make Charleston among the nation's prime tourist destinations and vital centers of global trade.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /><ul><li>"Working Charleston"</li> <li>"Charleston City Workers"</li> <li>"Lowcountry Foodways"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Charleston and the Long Civil Rights Movement</strong></h3> <span><span>These interviews explore how community activism continues to shape modern life in the South.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /></span></span> <ul><li>"Charleston and the Long Civil Rights Movement</li> <li>"Civil rights movement--South Carolina"</li> <li>"African Americans--Civil Rights--South Carolina--Charleston"</li> </ul><a target="_blank" href="https://citadeldigitalarchives.omeka.net/items/show/193" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a> <h3><strong>Las Voces del Lowcountry</strong></h3> <span><span>This project is designed to raise the profile of the Hispanic/Latinos who call the Lowcountry home and to promote a rational and humane conversation regarding immigration, education, and employment policies.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:<br /></em></span></span> <ul><li>"Las Voces del Lowcountry"</li> <li>"Latin Americans--Southern States"</li> <li>"Hispanic Americans--Southern States"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Women in World War II</strong></h3> <em>*To search this series, type "Women in World War II" into the search bar, using the Boolean search option.<br /></em> <ul><li>"Women in World War II"</li> <li>"Women--Employment History"</li> <li>"World War, 1939-1945--Participation, female"</li> </ul> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Willer, Morgan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Gregorie, William Dudley Location The location of the interview Charleston, South Carolina Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1 hour, 6 minutes Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Mp3 derivative audio created with Audacity software. Archival masters are wav files. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William Dudley Gregorie, Interview by Morgan Willer, 13 March, 2015 Subject The topic of the resource African Americans--Education--South Carolina--Charleston--History African Americans--Civil rights--South Carolina--Charleston Burke High School, Charleston (S.C.) Description An account of the resource W. Dudley Gregorie was born and raised in Downtown Charleston, South Carolina. In 1967 he graduated from Burke High School. In the interview, Gregorie remembers his experiences at Burke and affirms they prepared him for the positions he held later in life, including running for   Mayor of Charleston. He discusses his efforts as a Charleston Councilman to honor Septima Clark’s legacy by naming a city artery after her.  Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Citadel Archives & Museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-03-13 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource The Citadel Archives & Museum Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Materials in The Citadel Archives & Museum Digital Collections are intended for educational and research use. The user assumes all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of copyright. For more information contact The Citadel Archives &amp; Museum, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, 29409. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mpeg Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Charleston (S.C.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context https://citadeldigitalarchives.omeka.net/items/show/1766 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Charleston and the Long Civil Rights Movement https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/39779/archive/files/7e0a902a3c22a91e9ab4464d07e2caa5.pdf?Expires=1779321600&Signature=kQwFXdjkx%7E4ZOzTLUvBsOpBRY-ND7DjxRO7Y260AHPth5l%7EI0aPYDLHbLRjcJh012UGIqo5LBC9v-9yzpKsgbc9wb303DHsYV1hOacfGinQapyua0Lr4euYA0Zabi-bYCv1AARzb-CwOvagn9YbGTPS9evpUXkV4%7E3m791NypiMZiZw9GnDlQ1h5Vqm4cMk3-k9rfcc4TXwjwj0b3UILewwyOKvAHvvrn4SxmL6yROf0R%7Exa-Vj0X%7EjAtgzw3fidqZvRtWHHgue0FXmxpXm0tkMs2fNwHHcHFK637w48DuRAHVkPl34Z5d1KXLyCkC0mufcbaU%7EEvJKv%7Emmc2i0w3w__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 902e6a1104cfc036f581dcd792f1dbb9 PDF Text Text TRANSCRIPT—THERON SNYPE Interviewer: MORGAN WILLER Interviewee: THERON SNYPE Interview Date: March 6, 2015 Location: Charleston, S.C. Length: 68 minutes MORGAN WILLER: This is Morgan Willer with the Citadel Oral History Project, today is March 6th 2015, and I’m here with Theron Snype talking about his experiences at Burke High School. So entering Burke High School as a freshman what were your preconceived ideas about the school? THERON SNYPE: Well honestly, I was kind of excited to get to Burke, I really looked forward to get the opportunity to get to Burke. Funny thing about it, at the time the junior high school that I went to, of course they call them middle schools now, but back then we called them junior high schools, and the junior high school I went to was called Simonton, which was on Morris Street by Jasper Street which is now condominiums, high-end condominiums. But Simonton was the middle school that I went to, and Simonton was kind of rough (laughs). There was a really impoverished neighborhood right across the street from the school called—it was an alley—and I remember the name of the alley until I was about to call it just now, but Pine Court, that’s what is was called, Pine Court. And Pine Court was where right now they call it Dereef Park—I think, over there across the street from the condominiums on Morris Street. But there were a group of rough characters who were not students that used to basically come �Theron Snype 2 and harass us younger kids (laughs) quite a bit during recess and the thing is Simonton, and honestly I was afraid of those guys. After my seventh grade year at Simonton they created eighth grade at Burke and the new high school C.A. Brown, which was built on the Eastside on Columbus, so I did not have to go back to Simonton for my eighth grade year, I actually went to Burke which was in the neighborhood where I lived. I grew up on Spring Street by right where the Crosstown is now, and the house I grew up in was the last house that was not torn down for the crosstown to be built, the Septima Clark [Parkway]. I was in Burke’s neighborhood. I went to school right at Rhett, which was an elementary school across the street from Burke, so I couldn’t wait to get to Burke School. (Both laugh) I was very happy about getting to go to Burke School, so as a freshman my preconceived ideas about the school was it was where I wanted to be. You know it gave me a sense of growing up and I was actually a couple of grades ahead of my age. I didn’t go to first grade. I spent about a day in first grade and my principal walked me down the hall to second grade (laughs), after somebody told him I could read well (laughs). I think a principal will lose his job if he does something like that today, but I was kind of young, you know, going into high school and my older sister, my two older sisters were already at Burke, and so I knew I’d have somebody to look out for me there. You know that kind of thing. So actually, I was very excited about getting to Burke School. MW: Do you remember what that first day was like? TS: The first day? Well understanding that many of the students that came to Burke at the same time I did, we were in class together from elementary school on all through, so there was a large group of people that I knew already going into Burke, so I wasn’t, say a student that transitioned from another city or another part of town, �Theron Snype 3 something like that, going to a school all of a sudden standing there by myself, looking lost, no that was not the case at all. As a matter of fact my older sister, for lack of a better way to put it, she was very outgoing and very dynamic (laughs); you know she was runner-up for Ms. Burke, she was the drum majorette for the band, so she like led the band when the band directed, that kind of thing. So, I had my older sister there, to kind of look out for me. So, the first day at Burke was not really challenging in that kind of respect. I wasn’t like the proverbial deer staring in the headlights (narrator laughs) my eyes staring all around. MW: Did you have any favorite teachers? TS: Oh yeah, of course I did. I remember one of my favorite teachers was Ms. Doris Hazel. Ms. Hazel was my English teacher from ninth grade through graduating. You know English was a required course, so you took it every year, and Ms. Altimeze McGriff was my English teacher, and Ms. Hazel was my English teacher the rest of the time. And I loved English, and I loved History, so it was Ms. Hazel’s class that I learned to write, you know, learned the basics of writing essays and that kind of thing. So, she was somebody that I’d have to say was a favorite teacher of mine. And also, a geometry teacher, even though I wasn’t that good at math (laughs) but my geometry teacher Hazel Stewart was another favorite of mine because she challenged you, you know? You had to get her work done or pay the price (laughs). MW: Did they have really high standards, for you need to get this done, do it now, turn it in? TS: Some of the teachers, yes. And then there were a couple of others that, you know I can remember, without calling names, a teacher that taught me physical science, �Theron Snype 4 and he had been teaching a long time, and most of the time we sat up and watched the Bunsen burner and condenser on his desk working (laughs) while we sat there with not a whole lot to do. As a matter of fact, my mother had to come to the school and raise Cain because it was a long time before we got our textbooks (laughs) for that particular class, but I would have to say that most of the teachers that I encountered at Burke challenged you to do well. And of course, when I started Burke Schools were segregated, and so we were always told that education was going to be the one thing to help us to get further along than our parents did, you know. So, education was pushed heavily in our community, not that everybody got the message, and just like today you have some cases where there’s really no parental involvement in what the students do, so they don’t get that push at home to do well at school. So, I don’t want to make it sound like Burke was a utopia for academic achievement (laughs), but there were a number of teachers that really motivated you and pushed you. MW: What were your interactions with other students like? TS: I’m a people person (laughs) so my interactions with other students I’d have to say, things went well. It’s a funny thing. I never got in a fight while I was at school, never really got bullied. And not to say that didn’t happen, because it did, but I was fortunate enough after I left Simonton (both laugh) to not be bullied. It was a different environment. You know at Simonton my lunch money was taken from me maybe once a week (laughs), because I wasn’t big, I was small and young, wasn’t a fighter. But at Burke I never had a problem, I was never afraid of being at school when I was at Burke. Never. MW: What was your group of friends like? �Theron Snype 5 TS: My friends (pause) I had friends in my homeroom class. Well, being a Charlestonian I knew people from church who went to school, I knew people who were in grades behind me or ahead of me, but I had a close-knit group of friends that I can say, pardon my slang—that I ran with—while I was in school. We had similar interests; we were in similar organizations such as the band. So, I didn’t have a problem with Burke, didn’t have a problem being bullied, or taken advantage of, so it was a good situation. MW: What did you and your friends do out of school? Did you guys hang out a lot? TS: Friends that I met in school? MW: Yes. TS: Well actually I’ve got just a couple that live in Charleston and as a matter of fact my friends from Burke, there are a couple of guys who moved back to Charleston after retiring or ending their career in other cities, and they’ve come back to Charleston in retirement and we’ve connected, and there are some other friends that I see when we have reunion meetings. So, I see them, but I don’t see them on a regular basis. One of them would be City Councilman [William] Dudley Gregorie, we were in the same social club in high school and everything, and knew each other since we were young kids, so I still socialize with him today, once he came back to South Carolina from Washington where he worked for HUD [Washington D.C., U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], once he moved back to town we reconnected and he’s somebody I see on a regular basis. Art Gilliard who has Art Forms and Theater Concepts locally, that’s a theatrical company. When he moved back to town, I moved into kind of the same neighborhood and we’re neighbors now, so I’ll see Art from time to time now. So those �Theron Snype 6 are the two classmates of mine who I see on a regular basis, others I seem them in passing, and we’re still friends, I still say “Hey how you doing, Jimmy,” or that kind of thing, but I don’t socialize with them on a regular basis, but we still greet each other fondly and socially. MW: So, you mentioned earlier that Burke was “a different environment.” Can you tell me a little bit more what that environment was like? TS: Well, it was a different environment in that it was basically in my neighborhood where I grew up. There was more control I would have to say, before school and after school, you tend to have those situations after school where there might be some trouble, or they might want to get back at you for something you said during school. They don’t do it during school time because you get put out, they get dismissed (laughs), you know expelled. But that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, that I left Morris Street and Simonton that I didn’t experience at Burke, so the school itself was in the neighborhood that I grew up, there were a much larger number of students there than at my middle school. There were a number of students that I did not have to encounter, might be considered bad apples, you know something like that. I just did not have a problem with that, but the environment was good. It was our school, there was a lot of pride, there was a lot of pride at Burke School for the students there, and as I said repeating myself, we’re talking about times of segregation and so that was “our” school. We took a lot of pride in Burke, we always had good sport teams, we had a fabulous band. And I’m not saying that because I was in the band (both laugh), but we had good sports teams and a lot to do, you know what I mean? The extracurricular activities, social clubs, we had our own little world, you know? �Theron Snype 7 MW: Can you tell me more about your experience in the band since you mentioned it? TS: Oh okay, yeah. Even today the band is a pride of Burke School and that’s because of who the band director is, I think [Linard] McCloud, his name is Dr. McCloud. But back during that time Burke’s band had a reputation of being a good band that could perform well, and show out (both laugh), I guess that’s about the best way to put it. I can remember growing up Florida A&M was always recognized for their band, they had the greatest band, and as a matter of fact when I was growing up, Florida A&M’s band, Florida A&M in Tallahassee, Florida, their band traveled around the country performing, even when it wasn’t football season. And I can remember when Mr. Frank McKenzie who worked for West End Dairy, one of the milk companies locally, we had Coburg and West End Dairy, and Mr. McKenzie worked for West End. West End sponsored Florida A&M’s band here to perform at Johnson Hagood Stadium, you know when I was a kid, so Florida A&M’s band would come to town and we’d try to match what they were doing, you know the fast stepping. It was like 350 steps (laughs) a minute, you know that kind of thing, and the drum cadences. Burke’s band was kind of like a club or fraternity, well we had women or girls in the band too, so I can’t say a fraternity, but it was like a fraternal organization so to speak, it was a status thing too, you know—you were in the band. We enjoyed it. Melvin Hodges was the band director for most of the time, my senior year he left, moved to Atlanta and we got another band director, but for the most part Burke’s band was the pride and joy. The Christmas parade? We’d always be the hit of the Christmas parade. That’s when they had big Christmas parades down King Street. �Theron Snype 8 The parade has lost a little of its luster today, but it was a really big event back in the sixties when I was in school. MW: What instrument did you play? TS: Tenor saxophone, tenor saxophone. I played it when I was in college too. MW: How often did you all practice? TS: Monday through Friday, every day. MW: Wow. Did you ever go out and perform at special events other than the parade? TS: Our concert band did. The marching band, generally we performed at the games and parades. MW: So you also mentioned when you were talking about how it was a type of club, or fraternity, how there were social clubs. And you mentioned that you were in one with Gregorie, can you tell me more about that? TS: Social clubs were a big thing, especially for the male students at Burke. And the females had them too. My older sister Carol was in a social club called the Auroras. There were a couple of traditional social clubs that if you got to be invited to be in one of those clubs—the Athenians, the Jams—they were the hip guys. They were the guys that were cool, and you know everybody wanted to be in those clubs. But my friends and I started a social club, we were charter members, or the inaugural members of a social club called the Marcades. We were a close-knit group, very close-knit group, the Marcades, and I just enjoyed it. We used to sponsor dances. The Coming Street YWCA was the place where we used to hold dances to raise money on the weekends. Brooks Motel was on Morris Street, an African American owned motel. They had a small ballroom in there, �Theron Snype 9 and we would rent their ballroom and sponsor dances on Friday and Saturday nights— you could pay a quarter and get in the party. And when they built and opened the YWCA we transitioned from using Brooks Motel to the Y because the room was larger, so that we could rent. So that’s the way we raised money for our clubs, for our sweaters, we had pretty sweaters you know with our name on them, our insignias on them and that sort of thing. And we got to the point where my junior year in school the Marcades started to host a Mardi Gras annually at County Hall which was on King Street, 1000 King Street County Hall. County Hall was like the municipal auditorium at that time and that’s where our basketball games were held too. Where we played the big schools, all the basketball games were played at County Hall at that time because Burke’s gym was not in that good of shape. They built a gym right after I graduated in 1967, you know they built a gym that was representative of the school but otherwise when I was in high school, we played our games at County Hall, on King Street. But we would rent County Hall and throw a big Mardi Gras, it would be a thousand people there, we charged a dollar to get in. It was our big event, and we got a lot of status from that. We were the group who threw Mardi Gras. Now prior to the Marcades starting to do the Mardi Gras there it actually used to be sponsored by two of the other social clubs around, I’ve mentioned the Jams and the Athenians, they were the two hip clubs that I said everybody really wanted to get into. They used to sponsor that big event, and when most of the guys who were the bedrock of those two clubs graduated, and next thing we knew there wasn’t going to be it. We said “well, we’ll do it,” and we started to host the big Mardi Gras dance at County Hall every year. And that would be a really really big event for us. But we also did some community �Theron Snype 10 kinds of things, clean-up you know, and raise money to donate to charity and that kind of thing. We would do that with funds or proceeds from our events. MW: What kind of charities were you donating to? TS: Basically, there were clubs, like the dance clubs at the YMCA, or groups within a church, youth groups or something like that, that were doing activities. Or even around the school, we would find some group that would be worthwhile, and our advisor, because each club had an advisor—one of the teachers would be an advisor for your club—so our advisors would help us with that. MW: So this Mardi Gras event, can you tell me a little bit more about what it looked like? TS: Oh well, it gave everyone a chance to dress up, you know (laughs). And we would have a band rather than playing records. At our dances at the Y we had records, we called them Record Hops. But we had the event at County Hall, the big Mardi Gras, and we had a band, a live band to play. And it gave folks a chance to dress up and feel like you were going to a meaningful event. I guess it would be comparable to what’s a big event for young people now in high school to go to, do they still do things like that? MW: I guess maybe like a homecoming dance? TS: Yeah, yeah, but we had those too. We had homecoming but this was a little different and this—like I said was our thing that we were able to do. I’m trying to think what students do now that might be comparable and I can’t think of it. Maybe some of these cotillions or something. MW: Maybe. �Theron Snype 11 TS: But yeah, that’s a lost social event now (laughs). But like I said it was ours, and not to put too much emphasis on it, you can’t avoid it, we’re talking about days of segregation so we had our events, things that we did that helped us to compensate for things we couldn’t do in the larger community. One of the things before integration it was kind of like we always had a lot of stuff to do. Let’s just say our teachers that had gone off to college and gained some skills, say maybe in the arts like dance groups or whatever, and when they came back to town they would then be the instructor for these extracurricular activities like dancing and that kind of thing, or dramatic arts, things like that. That was our way to have a fulfilling experience as adolescents and teens growing up, rather than just sitting at home, or playing on the basketball court. MW: What were some of the other social activities that you all participated in? TS: Well one of the things that was big was one of the local sororities, AKA [Alpha Kappa Alpha], would have a debutante ball every year, and so it just so happened that a number of the young ladies in my class and a few others would be selected. They would ask a date or ask someone to escort them to that debutante’s ball. Of course, our prom. Our prom was always a big thing, it was a chance to fancy dress up and really act like you were grown (laughs). And I say act like you’re grown when actually my junior year to the prom my best friend’s mother drove my friend and I to the prom, and our dates (laughs). So, we didn’t even drive our own self to the prom back then. But we didn’t get teased about it or anything. At that time, my parents didn’t even have a car, so there was no car in my family for me to drive to the prom. Yeah, so my friend Gilbert, his mother drove him and I and our dates to the prom our junior year in school. My senior year at my senior prom one of my friends with a driver’s license—rode with him, my �Theron Snype 12 date and I rode with him. So let’s see, some other events—plays, like the Dramatic Guild in the school would have a couple of big performances each year. Other social events that our groups might have that might not be school wide, or community wide, there were always parties to go to, that kind of thing. MW: You mentioned homecoming, what was that like? TS: Homecoming was big, it was a funny thing, we had homecoming and it was kind of significant to us here, but I didn’t really understand, or experience homecoming as a big event. I left to go to college, and I went to an HBCU, a historically Black college, and homecoming football season is big at the HBCUs, you know. So, what we did for homecoming at Burke wasn’t near as extensive, the activities and that kind of thing. It was just a chance for former students to come to the game and encourage. It wasn’t as big as it is now. We didn’t have homecoming, if my memory serves me correctly, I can’t remember us marching in a homecoming parade when I was in high school, but they have one now from what I understand. But football season was just a fun time in its entirety. Not just homecoming, you know football season was just big for us, because being in the band was our chance to perform. Burke always had good teams. I remember being on Harmon Field with the band practicing and Mr. Walter Burke who was a member of my church, and his children still go to the same church as I do, Tony Burke and those, but I remember Mr. Burke who was the first African American motorcycle policeman in Charleston, he was one of the first Blacks to be hired on the police force too, but we were on Harmon Field having band practice before the championship game. We were going to play C.A. Johnson for the state championship in football, and that night he came on the park to tell us that President J.F. Kennedy had just been shot, and that was something that �Theron Snype 13 I’ll never forget. You have those instances in life where everybody say you’ll never forget where you were when you heard, and that’s true, I’ll never forget when I heard that President Kennedy had gotten shot. Then it was the big decision to whether or not they were still going to play the game, and the team C.A. Johnson had already come to town from Columbia, so they decided to play the game, to have the championship game. But the band just didn’t perform, so we didn’t have the half time performances in recognition of the president being assassinated. John F. Kennedy was well liked in our community, so we didn’t perform that day, and we lost the game six to nothing and I’m still convinced forty-eight years later that we had a better team (laughs); that we had the best team in 1963. You know, so that’s one of those memorable kinds of things. MW: What was the atmosphere like at those games? TS: We just had a good time. There were a couple of cheers that the band would lead, you know with songs that we’d play, like “I’m so glad I went to Burke High School” and the musical background for that was taken from an old spiritual kind of song, and we would just wail it (laughs), and have a good time with it. The football game was where you saw your friends, where you hung out, and there may have been a party after the game, and that kind of thing. Now there were a couple of instances where there would be some trouble after the game and it would not normally be students, but other outside forces or young people that didn’t necessarily attend school, and I can remember Howard [High School] from Georgetown, the black high school in Georgetown, they came and beat Burke in the lower-state football championship football game and they had to have a police escort to the Cooper River Bridge, you know because kids were throwing things at the bus (laughs). And I’m laughing about it now, but it really was serious back �Theron Snype 14 in those days, but it was not the kind of thing that you wanted to be around and encourage. Basically, like I said, most of the time when something like that occurred it was not students from the school, but rather the outside bad influences that was doing something like that. But for the most part we had fun. I used to walk home after the games, living in that neighborhood and everything I never got bothered. So, I didn’t want to paint a picture without saying that from time to time there was that kind of problem. When we played Bonds-Wilson who was our rivals from the north area, if you lived in North Charleston, which there was no City of North Charleston at the time, it was just the county area, it was called Charleston County, and if you lived in that North area then you went to school at Bonds-Wilson. So the Burke game was a big rivalry, and from time to time there would be some trouble after those games but I never encountered a situation where I was threatened, or was involved in a fight or anything like that, but it did happen when we had those rivalry games like that, but for the most part it was a good fun experience, the football games, and the basketball games. MW: I was going to ask, was basketball just as popular as football? TS: Oh yeah. Basketball was very popular too, and as I said at that time when I was in school Burke’s gym—I got to Burke in ’61 for the eighth grade—so for the sixties while I was there our gym was not in that good of shape, so we played our basketball games at County Hall. So, it was always good walking home with your friends from the game at County Hall. Like I said, we didn’t have a car, so you know, we walked everywhere. And you’d be with your group of friends just walking home from the game and having a good time. You’d go to the basketball games and just sit up there and chant and cheer while we were at County Hall, so that was good. �Theron Snype 15 MW: You had mentioned earlier about a Dramatic Guild, and clubs. TS: Extracurricular activities? MW: What were you involved in? TS: Oh, we had a number of extracurricular activities at Burke, and boy I must’ve tried to get into all of them (both laugh). Let’s see I was in the, what they call the Hi-Y club, which was an after-school club sponsored by the YMCA. I was a member of the Future Teachers of America, even though I didn’t [become a teacher]. And you have to understand during that time the middle class in the Black community were mainly the teachers because there were not a lot of African American entrepreneurs or business owners, even though there were some, but not a whole lot. But for the most part during that time, during the time of segregation, if you were a schoolteacher, you were pretty much middle class in the African American community. So, I was in the Future Teachers of America, the Hi-Y club. I was a member of the Parvenue staff which was the school newspaper and my last year at Burke I was the sports for the Parvenue. So, I traveled with some of the athletic teams to the away games for baseball and basketball. I could get on the bus with the team and go to those games and enjoy that. I’m still a sports enthusiast. Now it’s all on TV, so I can sit down in front of the TV and be a couch potato (laughs). But back in those days I was Parvenue staff, Future Teachers of America, Hi-Y, and of course the band was an extracurricular activity at the time. And you know, this was not an extracurricular activity per-se, but something that just popped into my mind just now, was that there was a status thing for males, seniors in the class, to take what was a home economics course, and you would think at first that you’d get teased, they’d say “oh man you, you male student in a home-ec class,” but it was really kind of like a �Theron Snype 16 status thing simply because in the home-ec class the big thing was, and it was only one semester, in other words you didn’t take it the whole year, and the big event for that was you got to cook a big meal. And we would have the meal, and set the table, the guys would cook all the meals and everything. My homeroom class, my homeroom teacher Ms. Bonaparte, was a home economics teacher, so my homeroom class was a class that was outfitted with a cooking stove, and you know, other things that you’d use in home economics. And so home economics was pretty much thought of as a female course, a course for women to go into, but every year there would be one class of males, and it got to be like a kind of status thing, “oh we’re going to cook a meal, we’re going to have this to eat,” and that was the big thing, just the big day that we prepared the meal, and we all cooked, and we all ate. So that whole semester was just leading up to that one day, you know our day to eat (laughs). And we learned how to serve correctly, which helped me later on because when I was in college, I worked some summers waiting tables in Atlanta at the Marriott, so some of those things that I learned in that home-ec class actually served me well. MW: Do you remember what that big meal was that you cooked? TS: No but it probably was chicken! (Laughs) It probably was chicken. I can’t remember exactly what that meal was, it was a long time ago. It was forty-something years ago. And there was a book that I got for Christmas, last Christmas, matter of fact one of my co-workers bought the book across the street at the Preservation Society building there, and it was a book done by Sherman Pyatt who went to school with me, and he wrote a book about the history of Burke School, and as I looked in that book there was a picture of my junior year, but [with] the people who were seniors that year, and �Theron Snype 17 generally the home economics class would be made up of senior males, and I looked and there was actually a picture of the male home-ec class from 1966, which was the year before me. You know, and I recognized those guys in the picture and I said “Robert Robert, see I was telling you that the home-ec class was a big thing for males,” (laughs) and it even made Sherman’s book, there’s a picture of the class you know. I got off on a tangent and forgot your question (both laugh). I hope I responded enough. MW: Oh no, it was great. You mentioned a lot of clubs, was there a lot of encouragement to get involved in everything? TS: Yeah, mhmm. Like I said, we created our own opportunities back in the day. It wasn’t like the school district was really in our corner, you know, looking to provide us with activities and that kind of thing. So, within our close-knit community we created a lot of those things ourselves. And as I said, a big part of it was for myself and a lot of my friends that push from our parents “educations going to get you through,” “educations what is going to get you through.” You had to do well so you could go to college or get into the military and do something for yourself. And that was all a part of that, participating in the extracurricular activities. And I’ve got four children and of my four children I would say that only one of them really got involved in extracurricular activities in school. And I cannot understand why there wasn’t this great desire from all of my kids—“you mean you don’t want to be in this group, you know you don’t want to do something after school other than come home, you don’t want to socialize with your friends,” and but times change, but there was just not that emphasis during my kid’s generation that there was in my time. You couldn’t pay to get into some of these clubs, you wanted to be a part of these extracurricular activities because it was going to give �Theron Snype 18 you something else to do, more exposure to things that could benefit you in life, more than just going home or hanging out on the playground. I started to say go home and watch TV but there wasn’t a whole lot on TV (both laugh). We had three channels, you know, ABC, NBC, and CBS channels, which signed off at eleven o’clock every night (laughs). Yeah, I just couldn’t understand why the kids, especially my kids weren’t as interested in participating in extracurricular activities as I was, God knows I tried to push them to it because that was my experience. I felt the benefits, I saw the benefits of me expanding my horizons by being in these groups and I just really thought that they were very beneficial. But that was big around school the extracurricular activities. MW: You mentioned that you worked on the Parvenue, the school paper. Could you tell me more what that was like? TS: Oh yeah, here again it’s that sense of doing something over and above just the classes and learning and understanding how to write and how to tell good stories. And also reporting stuff that was going on around the school. For a child in the sixties like that to be exposed to writing for the newspaper was kind of a big thing, it was almost like say for instance kids today got to hang out around TV stations, and oh I know, a good comparison would be at a lot of schools now don’t they have a media course or something? MW: Mhmm TS: And you could have a student that could be on the intercom giving— MW: Social media or the TV TS: Social media and that kind of thing, so that was comparable to us to be able to be on the school newspaper staff and report on things that were happening, and to have a �Theron Snype 19 chance to write. And like I said I like writing, I like English, I like history. Science and math, hmm. I did what I had to do to pass, failing was not an option in my family (laughs). I couldn’t go home with failing grades. So, I did the math, and as a matter of fact I was in advanced math through school. Algebra seemed tough to me, but I waded through it and did it. But history and English, yeah, those were my things. So, I guess when cable TV came along with the History Channel (laughs) I still watch a bunch of stuff there, we have our individual likes and dislikes, so that was always big for me. MW: Working on your school paper, what was your favorite story that you ever wrote? TS: In terms of writing, being the sports reporter, one memory that sticks in my mind after all these years I’ve never forgotten. I remember one year we were travelling to Florence, South Carolina to play Wilson High School for the lower state championship in baseball, and we had a great baseball team. And I can remember Burke leading most of that game in Florence. And in the last inning Wilson came up and took a one run lead in the next to the last inning of the game. And I said, “well we don’t have to worry,” because in the last inning the three best players we had on our team were coming up to bat at the time. A guy named Chisolm—what was Bulldog’s first name, I can’t remember his first name—and he was the first person I knew that went to school with me that died in Vietnam, but Bulldog was the center fielder, Junebug who was Leroy Conners who worked for the city in the Recreation Department for years, he retired recently from that, he was also the quarterback of the team and he was the catcher on the baseball team, and another guy that we call Hoggy, Isaac Washington who played football too, very strong. So, we had the three of them coming up to bat in the last inning, so I just knew we were �Theron Snype 20 going to win the game (laughs). And all three of those guys came and struck out. And I remember coming back home the bus was quiet, almost the whole time. Marty Richard was the baseball coach. And I agonized over what I was going to write about that particular game, because we really played well, but it was just so heartbreaking to lose at the end the way we did, and I just wondered if I could capture that in the story I wrote for that game. So, I don’t remember the article as much as I remember the whole environment of that day travelling to Florence. I can remember on the way to the baseball pitch you used to have to wear a shirt and tie, you know, when we went out of town like that. And we were on Rivers Ave because this was before I-26 was built. So we were on Rivers Ave., which is Highway 52, and you took Highway 52 to get anywhere, Florence, Columbia, you took 52. And we were on Rivers Ave. headed toward 52 and Coach Richard came walking into the back of the bus and saw that one of the players didn’t have a tie on. “Stop the bus! Stop the bus!” (Laughs). He reached into his pocket and gave him a quarter to catch the SCEG bus home, because you weren’t going with us to Florence. You know, that’s how it started. And then when we got to Florence, we were just cocky because we just knew we had a good team, we knew we had the best team around, at least in the lower half of the state. And this was the lower state championship. But to lose that game in the way that we did, to lead the entire game, and they just lose it in the next to last inning like that, that was heartbreaking. I think that’s the first time I saw Coach Richard in an emotional state that he was in, you know, just quiet like that, because he didn’t think we’d lose either. So that’s the one thing I remember about my time at the Parvenue, that I’ll never forget. Of course, there were other stories that we wrote, but that one stands out in my mind. �Theron Snype 21 MW: He really made that kid go back home? TS: He didn’t have a tie, so he gave him a quarter to catch the bus home (laughs). Yeah, Coach Richard didn’t play. Yeah, he’s captain of a tight ship. MW: That question that slipped my mind earlier popped back into my head. You were talking about the gym and how it wasn’t that great of quality of a building. What was the rest of the school like as far as classroom quality? TS: Well, the rest of the school was good. As a matter of fact, I had a good time saying I went to Burke University simply because we had individual buildings. There was the administrative building on President Street, then there was the science building, maybe the home-ec building, you know where my class was. And then in the back they had a big, gigantic, not gigantic, I’m sorry, a large building which was the original school that was called the annex. So, you had the annex and then you had the four other buildings. So, we had a campus with more than one building. You know most schools was just one building, well we had a group of buildings on our campus, so we used to always call it Burke University (laughs). So, the physical condition of those four buildings, because they were newer, was pretty good. Even the annex, which was the older school, the oldest building, which was the original high school, was kept up pretty good. We just didn’t have a gym, didn’t get invested in a gym. And it’s ironic right now because Burke High School is the only high school around that doesn’t have its own football stadium. Burke plays at Stoney Field, but the city owns Stoney Field. And the city owns Stoney Field with the school district having oversight over it, okay, but that’s not Burke’s stadium, that’s not Burke’s football field, per-se, you know to say Burke has its own football stadium. So, it’s kind of ironic that back in the sixties when I went to �Theron Snype 22 Burke, we had a gym that was just unsightly, run-down, and dirty, now even today we got a good gym, but we still don’t have a football stadium. And check out all the other high schools, Wando, West Ashley, James Island, everybody has their own football stadium, except Burke (laughs). MW: What do you think it would take for Burke to get that football stadium? TS: Just more consideration from the school district. As far as they’re concerned it’s ok for Burke to have Stoney Field, not a whole lot otherwise goes on at Stoney Field, so they think that Burke is all right. But it is not Burke School’s football stadium, you know? MW: There is a sense of pride that comes from (crossed talking) having it. TS: There’s a sense of pride that comes from having that. I wonder if there’s a Bulldog even printed, I mean painted, on the scoreboard. You know like the school mascot would be prominent at most school’s facility or stadium. I know they got some blue seats there because Burke’s colors are blue and white, but yeah that’s something that came to mind. But it always disgusting to us that we didn’t have a gym, worth a quality gymnasium. We had to play our basketball games at County Hall and walk all the way to King Street from my house to go to the game, instead of walking around the corner where I went to school. MW: You mentioned earlier when you were talking about your sister, and her being outgoing, you said she ran for something called Ms. Burke. TS: Ms. Burke? MW: Can you tell me more about that? �Theron Snype 23 TS: Yeah, the school queen. Carol was very popular. She still holds some resentment about coming in second (laughs). Don’t tell her I said that. But she was the first runner-up for Ms. Burke, and a lot of folks thought that she would won. So, there were a considerable number of us that were surprised she didn’t win. Like I said, she was very outgoing at the time. We had a drum major for the band, but she was the head majorette, and Carol actually used to direct the band on the field when the band director didn’t some games. She was well known around the school. So, I guess in a sense that kind of helped me when I first got there as a baby faced looking eighth grader (laughs). When is started my eighth-grade year at Burke I was actually eleven years old, because my birthday was in November. So, in November I turned twelve and I could say I was one year ahead of my age, but at the start of the school year I’d be two years ahead of my age. So, I was young, immature, and baby looking (laughs). I probably looked like somebody's little brother. Folks used to ask me “Do your mama know where you are?” (Laughs), “wipe that milk from around your mouth,” (both laughing). MW: What would you say was the role of Burke in the community? TS: Burke was the school that turned out the African Americans, the Charlestonians from the African community who went on to make a mark in life, to be successful in life, they went to Burke. And they would come back, and we’d have a sense of pride about what those students were able to achieve. It gave many of us the sense that we wanted to achieve too and do the same thing. The Burke choir and the Burke band were significant parts of the community. You know our concert band would play concerts around the community. Every year the Dramatic Guild would have a big play that the community would turn out for, so yeah, Burke was a hub in the African American �Theron Snype 24 community during those years. There was just a lot of pride associated with it because that was our school. That was the only school around to go to, well in the city; you know you had schools around the outlying areas. Yeah, but that was our school if you lived in the City of Charleston. So, I would have to say that Burke was considered a hub. MW: Vice versa, what was the role of the community for Burke? TS: It goes back again to the sense of it being our school. So, most of the folks in the African American community in Charleston at that time, if you graduated from school, you graduated from Burke. My mother did, my father actually started out at Avery, but he went to the apprentice school at the navy yard, instead of his senior year. So, he didn’t graduate from high school, he actually finished the apprenticeship at the navy yard and worked on the navy base until he retired. But my mother, my aunts, most of the people older people you looked up to, everybody went to Burke. And there was that sense of pride about Burke, so that was one thing in the community. If you lived in downtown Charleston on the peninsula there were no other schools to talk about that you went to, you went to Burke. There was just that sense of pride, you know, “that was my school.” And a lot of the good things that happened to many of us growing up happened at Burke, as a result of being at Burke. A sense of achievement, you know when you achieved in a science project, or you did well on a performance of some choir or the band or the dramatic guild. You just had that sense of achievement because that opportunity came to you as a result of being at Burke School. Maybe that’s a good way to talk about what Burke meant to the community also, so I’m glad you asked that question, because it started to help me frame that whole idea about what did Burke mean to the community, what did the community mean to Burke. Well with everybody being there and having that �Theron Snype 25 sense of pride, and when you were able to achieve and do things that made you stand out in the community, it usually happened at our age of a result of being at Burke. And church comes into play, but ordinarily under most circumstances it was a result of being at Burke that you were able to stand out, and achieve, and accomplish things. MW: What were the attitudes of Burke students when integration started in 1963? TS: You know, it’s funny because I can remember those persons in my class that transferred to Rivers to go to high school, and there were about two or three of them. And they came back and participated with us as if they were still students at Burke, and in all of our things, and it was because they didn’t have the opportunity to participate in these things at Rivers [High] or Charleston High. So, there was no problem with them coming to Burke and participating in our extracurricular activities or being a part of what we did. And even today Herman Whitney who left us in the tenth grade to go to Rivers, and still lives in Charleston today, well when my graduating class from high school has our reunions and things, he participates with us. So, they had the courage to step out there and do what their parents wanted them to do, because it wasn’t their decision to go to those schools, it was their parents who said, “we’re going to integrate these schools,” and “you’re going to be a part of that,” so they did. So, we admired most of them for having the courage to do that. I would venture to say that there were probably a large number of students who felt like me, who didn’t want to go, wanted to stay at Burke. So, I wasn’t being pushed by my parents or anybody to try and integrate the schools. But those students whose parents pushed them in that direction to do that were for the most part admired. MW: Was activism encouraged at Burke? �Theron Snype 26 TS: No. But not just at Burke, but I don’t think activism was really encouraged in Charleston as it was in some other places. Just to go into some detail to clarify the statement that I’m making. We had demonstrations here in Charleston when I was growing up. We boycotted the Grants and the Edwards store which is at Morris and King, and Woolworth at the lunch counter and that kind of thing. But it never got like it was where we would see on the news in the evening, the kind of animosity and that kind of thing. We would demonstrate and march, and I’m saying we, I was kind of young, so I’d be lying to say I was out there marching on King Street and marching on the Post & Courier when they had that big event before I left to go to college. But those who were marching and that kind of thing, we would march and then maybe the store might hire one person or something, and the demonstration would stop. I went to college in Alabama, I went to college at Tuskegee, okay, Alabama. When I got there, there was a difference in the movement in Alabama (laughs) than there was in Charleston, South Carolina. I don’t know about the rest of South Carolina because I didn’t do a lot of travelling when I was young. I didn’t know what was going on in Columbia that much, I don’t know about Greenville that much. My world was just around Charleston. That’s just the way it was back in those days, we didn’t have TV like now and everything. Media, we didn’t have the kind of media we have now that could expose you to what was going on around the state. But speaking for Charleston, when I got down to Alabama, there was a difference in the movement in Alabama. And the kind of brothers and sisters that were in the fight down there were different than what I encountered here in Charleston. There was no real push for me to get involved in voter registration drives. When I got to Alabama everybody was campaigning, “man let’s go down to Lowndes �Theron Snype 27 County and see if we can register some people to vote,” so that’s what I mean the activism wasn’t exactly the same. Yeah, we had segregation here in Charleston, we had heroes, and we had those who had the courage to get out there and challenge the system and demonstrate and march, but it just didn’t seem to be with the intensity that I would see on the news in the evening when I saw what was happening at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, or what’s going on now, or you see what was going on in Birmingham, or in Georgia in some places, Lester Maddox with the ax handle and all that. You know for instance the difference when Harvey Gantt integrated Clemson, Ernest Hollings was the governor. Ernest Hollings made sure that what happened in Alabama with George Wallace standing at the door of the school did not happen here. So, we had people like Ernest Hollings, who even though it may not have been that easy for Harvey Gantt at Clemson his first year we didn’t have that negative reaction of him getting into the school that you might have seen, for James Meredith being shot to go to the University of Mississippi or George Wallace standing in the door of the University of Alabama, that kind of thing. We didn’t have that here. So, activism, I’m pretty sure, no I’m not pretty sure I’m very sure that there were some here that marched and demonstrated, but it wasn’t pushed like it was when I went to college. Yeah, Charleston is not that tough. I don’t want to give the impression that there were none, there weren’t people here with the courage to get out there and demonstrate and march and try to change things that was, but with the question being was activism encouraged and promoted at Burke, my response would have to be no. MW: Why do you think Charleston was so different than other places, like Alabama? �Theron Snype 28 TS: Yeah, that’s a good question. Because in a sense my naivety at my young age I might just not have known what was going on. I do know that we had some civil rights leaders here, like Essau Jenkins. Example of what I’m talking about I had heard of Septima Clark, but I didn’t know how great her contribution was to the Civil Rights Movement until later on in life. I was in Memphis for a conference as a young adult and they’re building the Civil Rights Museum that is now this big, gigantic thing, but this was like the first phase of it being built at the old Lorraine Motel in Memphis. And part of the group that I was with attending the training conference in Memphis got a chance to go and visit the site, and I walk in the building and there’s only probably a fifth of what’s there now, very early in the construction of the Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, and I walk in the building and they got plaques on the wall of the Civil Rights leaders around, and I walk in the building and I’m in Memphis, Tennessee and the third plaque I look at says Septima Clark, Charleston, South Carolina. And it said what she did about being fired because she was—from being a teacher—a member of the NAACP. That she went over to the Barrier Islands, Johns Island to educate kids out there who basically were being totally forgotten, because some of those students never came off Johns Island growing up. But here was Septima Clark, lifted with all the biggest civil rights icons that I’d heard about growing up and everything. And I’m saying to myself that I was so young and uninformed about everything growing up that I didn’t even recognize what was happening around me, that I didn’t recognize Septima Clark’s contribution to the Civil Rights Movement until later on as an adult. What I’m saying is for the sake of this conversation my naivety and the young age that I was I probably ignored some of the activism that was going on locally, so I have to qualify my statement �Theron Snype 29 to say that Charleston was a little different than Alabama, maybe I just didn’t notice it, I didn’t notice or recognize the intensity of what was happening in Charleston until I had something to compare it with later on as to what was going on in Alabama and Mississippi while I was down there. So, it is how I can put it. MW: Do you have any favorite or significant memories that you’d like to share, that are good or bad? TS: I thought about that prior to the conversation, I looked at the question and would say “well what were my significant memories,” you know, because I had a lot of them. I was able to do okay in school, I was not one of the honor students at graduation and everything, but I was in the top fifteen percent of my class in school. I won a local essay contest, well actually I came in second, in a local essay contest my senior year in school that I was very proud of. My senior year in school I actually worked in the office. I had two blocks of time during my senior year in school where I didn’t have a class, and so the principal allowed me to come in the office and work in the office there, and that experience helped me later on in terms of understanding professionalism and dealing with people. The chance I had to travel around the state while I was at Burke School in the band, every year we had the All-State Band Festival at South Carolina State in Orangeburg. I would always go there every year and just have a great time with that. But just the sense of achievement of when I did well in school and was recognized for doing something such as that essay contest. It was just a good feeling; it was a good feeling. I don’t have any real bad memories of the time I was at Burke, like I said I didn’t get into any fights. I wasn’t a fighter, I was very small (laughs) so I didn’t want to fight anybody, I couldn’t beat anybody (laughs). So I didn’t have that kind of bad memory saying I got �Theron Snype 30 beat up one time, or I never had a situation where I was put out of class for acting up or anything, but my memories or my best memories are of the teachers that were so interested in helping those that wanted to do well, or to achieve, the help that they gave us in doing that. You know if you wanted to do well in school, and you wanted to make Burke School, my time there a good experience, you had teachers there that would be in your corner to help you achieve that. You know they didn’t just come to work and go home and just forget about their students and that kind of thing. So, I have some very fond memories of wonderful teachers and administrators at Burke that pushed me to help me to achieve my dreams and try to be what I wanted to be. MW: So finally, if you could summarize the one or two most important things that your years at Burke taught you, what would they be? TS: I’d think I’d have to relate back to the statements I just made prior to you asking me this question. I think that the important thing that my years at Burke gave me was that I could escape the boundaries that I lived in, locally, in this segregated society, that I could escape that, that I could have a better life, that I grew up in. And don’t get me wrong, my life wasn’t that bad but that I could achieve, and I could be what I wanted to be. And if you came to school with a desire to achieve and to do well, you could do that at Burke. So it was that sense of pride and that sense of family that was real important for my years at Burke. I still have some fond memories of being at Burke School. MW: So those are all the questions I have for you. Do you have anything else you’d like to add? TS: No, other than I like that I’m having the chance to do this, because it actually forced me to think, well what did happen at Burke, you know, what did be at Burke mean �Theron Snype 31 to me? And you asking me these questions caused me to start to think in that perspective, because a lot of things about my high school years, or it may just not be me but I’m just saying, a lot of things you could take for granted during those years. But now that I’m being asked, was there anything significant about being at Burke School, being a student at Burke, so it’s forcing me to think about it as an adult, and say yeah Burke School was good for me, there were some good things. And I had good times at Burke, and I’m just glad that I was able to be there, just met some great people who are still friends today, and it’s so funny because I see people who went to school with me at Burke that I knew and I pass them in the street now and I can’t even remember their names, some of them, and then I have to say you know Charleston is not the little sleepy community it was back then, anymore, we’re a larger city, we’re spread out now. So, a lot of those folks that used to live in my neighborhood that I’d see all the time they may live in North Charleston, Summerville, Ladson or someplace now and I never see them except once every five years in passing at some event, and I can’t remember them. But otherwise, there were some relationships and some friends that I had at Burke that carry forward even to today. And there are some persons who went to school with me who had done really well in life and I’m so proud, you know, I’m so proud of them because I know where we all came from. And so that sense of pride among those that have achieved and while I was there that’s kind of fulfilling also, mhmm. End of Recording MLL 2/9/2022 � https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/39779/archive/files/c3a3e3809196ceac8776cc06b96d6781.mp3?Expires=1779321600&Signature=hzHSGks-ykcbiS-29xq6mHsg%7E0eSIjQlokGr%7ELbQJyWQ7TE00mJ9yi9QCTbMizG0DaYE1gQ%7EG57164kZvM0wNRXOWCEKNIsdX7CmKjSTNMgVBWuwH6IXxls2yMs-xkMdO8pLDCeqX6icwA0Udw0qWP7eGb5pXZ3wrDvjA9u0-VDSin%7EaT-wNbC1kheH7wbDJYOE2CD8FDkXT%7EYcBAYc10JjpJBitAnfoECCsUqmz66rFCBBjSkBMBZjUQ0bFEZfENcUU0X%7ETqvoF0rI69NlIE-RhoDj7w6G4aS3lQJilBrWJp3n44pb4mmOQu91Lm39pf4oEV-vTygHwWPhhRqjupw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM af8e63219313ffccb2abf85d761bd696 https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/39779/archive/files/9d55ec84828c3eb4da3d77a78900de76.png?Expires=1779321600&Signature=elHK22E10fAB31SFSMM00MK-tOKy8WUYLXLFR2Rdr706drPsXVCr%7EyjkI5p6DyA1mB9aHDZZktNyYSgvzlT161WNDXA9zBU9elBoNiLoFNdP2xuPb1kFsuq6svUumBSTVjzLra%7EkiIqfk7J7wD37wAbaFlhKP0Nmw3HLEzNQensOZLdbCoRHnihxjmUtbITET4mlPAMTA%7EqHi6FiE0Rum-dPQZEhpmlhRHNMJ6AzegJieAbxvlEh0MGtYghY6GzJaz0jVy3FsGSWwk08tZGmp8hA75I3fuyDcPZCZwcxsB7HMYbNSp9KaFRadmeXpBKmqAqB-PVzNeh7ISxC0E7ZJg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM a285c0bd5169e18f0747dbadc8135de9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oral Histories Description An account of the resource The oral histories in this collection were produced by The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel. Founded in 2008, The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel seeks to deepen understanding of the Lowcountry’s rich history and culture through the gathering and presentation of recorded memories from area residents.<br /><h3>Search Tips</h3> Interviews may be browsed by scrolling to the bottom of this page and selecting "View all items".<br /><br />When using the search bar, we recommend putting quotations around your search term, and selecting the Boolean search option, as illustrated here:<br /><p><img src="https://gdurl.com/aYPj" alt="aYPj" /><br /><br />To view interviews of a specific theme, please see the search tips in each series below.</p> <h3><strong>The Citadel in War and in Peace<br /></strong></h3> With generous support from the <a href="http://www.schumanities.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Humanities Council of South Carolina</a>, The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel collected thirty interviews with Citadel alumni regarding their experiences during WWII. Journalist and historian Jack Bass conducted the interviews during the Fall of 2008.They serve as a powerful testament to the veterans' experiences and their critical contributions to the war effort.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /><ul><li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- World War II"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- Korean War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- Vietnam War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- The Second Gulf War"</li> <li>"The Citadel in War and in Peace -- The War in Afghanistan"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Working Charleston</strong></h3> Working Charleston documents the on and off job experiences of the longshoremen and lawyers, the bartenders and carriage drivers, hospital aides and high tech workers who make Charleston among the nation's prime tourist destinations and vital centers of global trade.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /><ul><li>"Working Charleston"</li> <li>"Charleston City Workers"</li> <li>"Lowcountry Foodways"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Charleston and the Long Civil Rights Movement</strong></h3> <span><span>These interviews explore how community activism continues to shape modern life in the South.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:</em><br /></span></span> <ul><li>"Charleston and the Long Civil Rights Movement</li> <li>"Civil rights movement--South Carolina"</li> <li>"African Americans--Civil Rights--South Carolina--Charleston"</li> </ul><a target="_blank" href="https://citadeldigitalarchives.omeka.net/items/show/193" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a> <h3><strong>Las Voces del Lowcountry</strong></h3> <span><span>This project is designed to raise the profile of the Hispanic/Latinos who call the Lowcountry home and to promote a rational and humane conversation regarding immigration, education, and employment policies.<br /><br /><em>*To search interviews in this series, use the following terms utilizing the Boolean search option:<br /></em></span></span> <ul><li>"Las Voces del Lowcountry"</li> <li>"Latin Americans--Southern States"</li> <li>"Hispanic Americans--Southern States"</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Women in World War II</strong></h3> <em>*To search this series, type "Women in World War II" into the search bar, using the Boolean search option.<br /></em> <ul><li>"Women in World War II"</li> <li>"Women--Employment History"</li> <li>"World War, 1939-1945--Participation, female"</li> </ul> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Willer, Morgan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Snype, Theron Location The location of the interview Charleston, South Carolina Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1 hour, 8 minutes Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Mp3 derivative audio created with Audacity software. Archival masters are wav files. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Theron Snype, Interview by Morgan Willer, 6 March, 2015 Subject The topic of the resource African Americans--Education--South Carolina--Charleston--History African Americans--Civil rights--South Carolina--Charleston Burke High School, Charleston (S.C.) Description An account of the resource Theron Snype was born and raised in Downtown Charleston. In 1967, he graduated from Burke High School. In the interview, Snype remembers his experiences at Burke. He talks about his favorite English teachers, Ms. Doris Hazel and Ms. Altimeze McGriff, and his geometry teacher, Hazel Stewart. He describes Burke's positive environment and the abundance of activities for the students. Finally, he remembers the students that integrated Charleston Schools and states that activism was not promoted at Burke. He reflects on the limited understanding he and his friends had back then about the magnitude of the civil rights movement in Charleston. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource The Charleston Oral History Program at the Citadel Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Citadel Archives & Museum Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-03-06 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource The Charleston Archive at CCPL Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Materials in The Citadel Archives & Museum Digital Collections are intended for educational and research use. The user assumes all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of copyright. For more information contact The Citadel Archives & Museum, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, 29409. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mpeg Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Charleston (S.C.) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context https://citadeldigitalarchives.omeka.net/items/show/1763 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Charleston and the Long Civil Rights Movement