Dr. Von Washington, Sr. Interview 1

Scott Brent: Well, hello, Dr. Von Washington. My name is Scott Brent. It's January 28th, 2015. The time of this interview is 4:05 p.m. and I just thought I'd talk to you a little bit about some of the history that you'd like to share with us for the Southwest Michigan Black Heritage Society and Engaging the Wisdom for our oral history project for Baldwin today.

Dr. Von Washington: Okay.

SB: Very good. And to start off, can you please tell me your address for the record?

VW: For the record, I live now at 1004 Cohasset Lane.

SB: How do you spell Cohasset?

VW: C-O-H-A-S-S-E-T Lane, spelled as it is. Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008.

SB: Very good. And then, the last preliminary question I have for you is, can you please tell me your birthdate and your place of birth?

VW: I was born on the 9th of March, 1943 in Albion, Michigan.

SB: Very good. Thank you so much.

VW: Mm-hm.

SB: We would like to start off with whatever early life you would like to talk about from your early childhood to your teen years. What part of that was most significant for you?

VW: Well I guess, like most people, you try to pick up, or I'll try to pick up when I began to have memory of that childhood. I, for some reason or another, I remember several years before I went to kindergarten. The importance of that is 00:02:00where I was living, in Albion, Michigan, and how we were missing our living. Because I am the second child in what would eventually become a 14-child family. So I'm the oldest boy, and we're living on Sugar Hill in Albion, Michigan. Now the significance of Sugar Hill is, like in many other cities in Michigan at that time, it would be a place where the majority of people who are living there are African Americans. And I'm, we are living at that particular time with my aunt, my Aunt Helen and Uncle Eddie, in a two-story home and we were living on the top 00:03:00floor. And I only remember my sister and my brother below me in this particular home. I, I think probably very soon after that -- there was maybe another child on the way -- we moved. And I remember three places, no, two places that we lived before my parents bought a home. And it was in that home that they bought that I believe I began kindergarten, so this moving was coming by the time I was 00:04:005 years old. And the thing that probably is most prevalent to me at that particular time is that I started school in an all-black school. It was called West Ward. Now I'm born in '43 and by the time I'm in the third grade, Brown vs. the Board of Education becomes a reality in the USA. Pictures have been sent to me lately over the Internet that let me know that I was out of West Ward one year before Brown actually became an official date, yeah right - and I'm just realizing that because I thought I left West Ward once Brown became official, but those records, that picture puts me there in the third grade in Dalrymple 00:05:00which was the first integrated school. Now for this particular project, the most significant thing to me about that is it was the last time I had black teachers. So by the time I got to Dalrymple, there was no one from the African American community who was teaching there that really knew anything about my existence, what was going on in the African American community, and to me that was relatively significant.

SB: And how did that impact your education, having school where there were no African American teachers?

VW: Nobody was telling me anything about what was going on in my family, in the 00:06:00background, what, if any, contributions African Americans were making to the society. It wouldn't be until I actually graduated from high school that I got to turn my attention to that subject. Because in Dalrymple, we were only being taught about what it meant to be white in America and no one was paying any attention to the reality of us growing up black in America. So that was very significant to me.

SB: I would also like to talk about the shaping of what it means to have a white education back then, versus a black education. How in your day was that sort of taught or formatted in that school?

VW: Well, you learned everything about the European experience and to a certain 00:07:00degree how it was impacting Americans, white Americans. We were being taught about what was going on in England, what was going on in France, what was going on in other countries, and I remember this, and who the white people were who made America what it was. There was no--nothing being taught about African or African American contributions to the society, America, or the world.

SB: When did you come to realize that this was impacting your education in a negative way? Did your parents instill these values in you early on, or did you just find this out on your own?

VW: I found this out really by accident that it meant something to me. Because 00:08:00my parents were going along with whatever education that was being given to us. My father's educational level, I discovered, was eighth grade. So my father's life was basically trying to get a job, so that he could earn enough money to feed a family. My mother was a very religious woman and she felt that her role in life and for her afterlife, because there was a lot of attention being paid to afterlife. As a matter of fact, there was more attention being paid to afterlife than while you were living in the African American community because of strong religious beliefs. Of course, when you're growing up, I was anyway, I wasn't very concerned about the after. I wanted to know what was going on now 00:09:00and how we got to do things. And I think it was only because I was an athlete in school that I got exposed to some of the things that white kids were exposed to. And even then we were constantly being warned, "Be careful." And one of the main reasons to be careful was: White people will kill you. If you get out of line, if you don't stay where you're supposed stay, and so forth.

SB: I have two questions for the [inaudible] thing that you just told me. One is, did people see the afterlife as a kind of escape from the harsh reality that they were facing? And, we can start with that.

VW: Yeah. Absolutely, because in the afterlife you were going to be given something. And I'll use the general term. God was going to make it something 00:10:00better for you. But we were never able find out how it was going to be different, or if it was going to be different. That was met with, "Don't be stupid. Don't ask stupid questions." You could not really find out if God was going to give everybody a house and you were going to have these streets of gold and honey and so forth. Where you would be, would you be living with white people then? Who was gonna be in charge? These were questions that you weren't supposed to ask. And you weren't seeing pictures of black people in heaven. You were only seeing pictures of white people. As a matter of fact, for me, I began to lament the picture of Jesus Christ in my home because as far as I could see, he was a white boy. And on many occasions I felt that my mother used him against 00:11:00my father. So some negativity was growing up early for me in this regard.

SB: Conservative attitudes toward religion created some of [inaudible] the divide.

VW: Oh, it was horrible. It really, really was horrible. I don't think a lot of people really understood that you were building this thing against yourself. And the stories that you're told, particularly the stories that had anything to do with being black within this society, were really negative. Anything, even coming out of the Bible that put you in the family of Ham, I think it's the Ham deal, made it negative for you. And, if you weren't careful, it was going to affect you and your children for the rest of your life, yeah.

SB: And you've mentioned that you were starting to lament the painting of Jesus Christ. Does that indicate that you were more in line with your mother's, your father's beliefs than your mother's beliefs?

VW: Well, it was only my mother's beliefs that we were dealing with. My father sort of dealt with life from his perspective. He was not going to church like my mother. He was not a religious person. My dad was more, he gave us the street view. He gave us the inner view of people who weren't exactly adhering to this way of life. He told us about the singers. He told us about the people in our family that could have been connected with the entertainers. He told us about the athletes. He told us about a totally different world. So, I think I was 00:13:00teaming with Dad all along, because I did not like the way we were being portrayed in the other sense, in the religious sense.

SB: Getting back to how your father was talking about the singers and the athletes of your time, did that have any impact on you to become an athlete?

VW: Oh, yeah. No doubt. An entertainer too, and, I mean, I ended up in both of them. So, yeah, my dad made me like them. He told me that, to a certain degree - my father was from Kentucky. Louisville, Kentucky - he told me, and we believed it - my father had a beautiful voice - that he was a singer. My father used to tell us, now I don't know if this was true because my daddy could tell a good lie, but he told us that we were related to John Bubbles, the dancer of that particular period in time. So when we would see him with Shirley Temple on 00:14:00television, man, we were all for that. Because it gave us a connection to ourselves and not others. But it also helped us not to hate white people. And that was a struggle on many occasions, because my daddy was also telling us you gotta be careful, because these people will kill you.

SB: Okay. And the reason why I ask that question is because one of the texts that we actually read for class, there was a principal in one of James Baldwin's essays whereby the principal would sort of be coercive and help black students integrate into the sports community.

VW: Right, right.

SB: And there was much trepidation on the part of many of the characters in that essay. But I would like to, yeah, also, it was just really interesting to know, and like you said, it was very, it was more than just a competitive, it was kill or be killed.

VW: Oh yeah, right.

SB: And I just wanted to know, did the school system have anything to do, back in your day, with how people were sort of ascribed to their different roles?

VW: Well, yeah. I mean the school system supported it. My high school advisor, I won't give his name, but I have been on programs with some of his offsprings [sic] very close to him, and I had to tell them that the misguided information that he gave me, because he tried to make me believe that I did not have the intellect to go to college. So after I got my PhD and then met with some of them, I did let them know that I did not appreciate that. A lot of my other friends weren't exactly treated the way I was treated. I think it's because I 00:16:00was an athlete. But I belonged to a group. This group was called the Epics, when I was in high school. And it was all black males. And we were all honored and very successful athletes, but this was a group of only black men. So to a certain degree we began to pay back what was being done to us because we could not be in some of the clubs that the white kids had. But we began to be very successful in the athletic world and that success came to the school, so this improved the way we were held in the school, as long as you were a successful athlete. If you weren't a successful athlete, you had to go another way. Now a 00:17:00lot of my friends, even to today, were successful African American men and women, okay, who paid closer attention to academics. They did not mind our absence from the books and so forth that were being used at school. And so we kind of wrote them off too, but they still became friends of ours. The irony of it is that I met many of these people in my travels around the world. Incidentally, some of the kids that grew up down the street from me became Rhodes scholars. There was a magazine article, Parade Magazine, I think it was, for a long time did an article on the children of Albion and I happened to be mentioned, and I don't know, I think I had my PhD at that time, but I'd have to 00:18:00see that article again. I think I've got it in my papers, but very, very strange because one of the kids I went to school with, he played football and he ran track and eventually he bought Ben and Jerry's, the ice cream company, but I met him when I was stationed in Germany. We were, I was playing basketball and we went, ah boy, the city that we went to, I don't know, for some reason I think I went to Amsterdam because he was an economic consultant to the Dutch government. And all we did was sit down and play Bid Whist because that's what we did in our community. So I'm running into people who were living right across the street from me. And this was the center of these particular people in Albion, Michigan. 00:19:00One of the individuals is still consultant to the Los Angeles school system. And he had been involved with Ford Motor Company. He became a lawyer and he was involved with Ford Motor Company. His wife was involved with Prudential and then he became a legal consultant to the Los Angeles school system.

SB: Out of these people that you met throughout of your early childhood, meeting them later in life, who would you say was most impactful or inspirational to you?

VW: Well, I'd have to say two of my buddies, Jessie Walmack (Womack?)-- I'll use their names--and Billy Holland. But Sammy Cheek became an electrical engineer, I think, for, I forget which automobile company. Billy Tobert (Tolbert?) became a, 00:20:00Billy became a colonel in the United States Air Force, and I met him when I was in the Air Force. And both of these guys were in the Big Four [laughs] and these were my running partners. And George Burton, who still lives in Albion, Michigan, was an athlete but he did not go on to college, but the rest of them did.

SB: And in what way did they inspire you?

VW: Well, you know, in unspoken ways, they were aspiring to do good and in order to be within their company, you had to be aspiring in some way to do good. I did not, when I came out of high school, I wasn't quite ready to go into college. I went in the service. And it was in the service that I realized after certain 00:21:00missteps that I needed to get my college thing together, otherwise I was going to end up in a bad situation.

SB: And when you mentioned aspired to good, are you talking about the Civil Rights Movement or are you talking about the betterment of--

VW: Definitely, the Civil Rights Movement, definitely the Civil Rights Movement.

SB: Okay, I just wanted to clarify.

VW: Right, right. I graduated in '61. The 60s was considered the age of the decade of the Black Revolution and I was very, very much involved with it. As a matter of fact, I brought a copy of a magazine from 1973 that was the first publication of the Essence Magazine, which is basically a female magazine or a magazine for females. And I have an article in it in the Point of View. It was 00:22:00the first article that I had ever gotten published in the Point of View, and I kept that magazine, of course. And when I was in the service I met Arthur Ashe, and I brought a couple of my letters from Arthur Ashe, where he was trying to help me to get into college and so forth. And I met him and a number of other prominent African Americans coming to Europe for the United States government, and I was a race relations instructor at that time and they all were brought to my, one of the classes that I was teaching.

SB: Can you talk a little bit about how a race relations class is conducted?

VW: Well, I guess seminar type. You sit around - the whole idea is to entertain the lives of everyone. A rank was not considered usable in these classes, so 00:23:00when you came to these classes, they would bring in folks of all rank but you leave it at the door. So it's a trip for a lot of the white officers because I'm a black instructor and now we're equals. And that was somewhat of the trick bag, what we were using in the seminars is that you, nobody has rank. And my job as a race relations instructor is to deal with everyone -males and females of different races and ranks - to get them to take a look at the world that we live in and how we treat each other. It was a very, very interesting concept because it was new for us and, of course, as an NCO, I didn't have to salute or give any 00:24:00kind of presence to the officers. As a matter of fact, I was not even allowed to wear my uniform. They did not know my rank; they just knew that I was the instructor.

SB: And this, 'cause you had mentioned just getting back to your childhood in connection with this story, you had mentioned that different clubs were open, depending on whether or not you were an athlete.

VW: Yes, right.

SB: Now, because you went into this race relations, we're going to call it a relationships community activism, is that the correct? Or it was more of an official vocation?

VW: Yeah, I mean I, you know, the government, in the service, if you got a job you got a MOS, Modus Operandi. And so I started as a clerk-typist and I think that's because that's the only class I did well in in high school [laughs] and 00:25:00so I could type. And once I began typing, you realize that you got to understand what you're typing, and it causes you, if you like your job, to figure out what words mean and how they're used. So I went back to high school and I took an English class twice, just so I could get better at it, and this really started me on a new career path, so to speak.

SB: Wouldn't that involve public speaking?

VW: Oh yeah, yeah. That, and that came later because, even though I knew I could talk, I did not at the time know that I could intellectually put things together to guide other people. That came as the years of college and the service came, and so forth. And I realized I had a propensity for doing that. And it became 00:26:00very, very useful to me, because in almost everything that I did, I was put in a leadership position, just because I could talk. And that was a revelation. That wasn't something that I knew I was going to be able to use. And so it's still a very, very big part of my life today.

SB: I'd imagine because you literally had more room to breathe coming back to those English classes, were you able to better explore your talents and in what way did that help?

VW: Well, what helped, helped me a lot, after the English classes, I was still in Montana at that time when I made the change and I made the change because I wanted to write for the sports in the newspaper that the government had. And so 00:27:00I took the classes, so I could do better at that and get rank. And then the Revolution caught up with me, what was going on, and I wanted to know more about the African American experience, my experience. James Baldwin was the first big influential writer for me, although it wasn't his book that prompted me. I read a book by Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land. That was the first one that ever dealt with anything from an African American perspective - an African American writer, a male writer, or black male writer writing about the black experience from a black perspective. And then I discovered James Baldwin's, 00:28:00Another Country. All of this was in the time that I left the United States and went to Vietnam. So there was very little to do in Vietnam other than work. I started reading these particular books and they were very, very interesting to me. And I just set out to read everything I could about the African American experience and that sort of was the prompting for me to get a better understanding of what was going on.

SB: And after you had read Another Country and other James Baldwin texts, my professor had mentioned that you had coordination with him while you were in the Air Force.

VW: Yeah, I did. Yeah.

SB: And what about his texts did you, you still have questions about and what was interesting about the way he wrote to you?

VW: Well, for one thing he was writing from a perspective that I could stay with. My mother was very religious; I came from a religious household, so did 00:29:00he. His daddy was a minister and so he was talking about his life in his father's home and he made me think of my life in my father's home. Now, my father was not like his father. And it wasn't until actually later on in life that I realized that Giovanni's Room was about his homosexuality, which sort of helped me to understand that aspect of life, because not too much after that I would discover that one of my brothers was homosexual. And so, I had to begin to deal with how I felt about that, because my mother's religious inclination were not going on with that and so I had to deal with a lot of different things as I was developing at the same time. But my challenge was not that. My challenge was 00:30:00how they were treating - they being the white government, who eventually let some of us through the door - and more so as the revolution was going on as to how they were going to and how we were being treated. I wanted rank. I wanted to become an officer. I wanted the whole world to treat me the way they were going to treat everybody else. And so all this began to come to fruition at that time, particularly after Vietnam, because I read everything black in Vietnam that I could get my hands on.

SB: And during the Revolutionary War [ interviewer referring here to Black Power Revolution], whence these predicaments started to change, in what way do you see you comm-, in what way do you see yourself communicating Baldwin's message, that 00:31:00may be similar or different than the way he originally wrote it?

VW: I really don't, James was my guiding factor. I don't think I would have ever gone against, I would just take everything, you know, because he became a wonderful essayist about the nature of, of, of life from every perspective. So, you know, any time he was publishing anything, I wanted to get my hands on it as quick as I could because it led me into more thinking about every aspect that he was talking about. And, I mean, he was all over the place. One of the things that attracted me a lot was he was spending time in Europe and I was in Europe. Yeah, I'm wondering what's going on there too. And he's got fights with some of 00:32:00the others, that he was fighting with Richard Wright and Native Son and all of those guys, you know. And a lot of the black ex-patriots were coming to Europe. I mean, I was running around Amsterdam and Paris and London and all of those places because I had become a journalist. So, my life, really, I could have ran into him [Baldwin] in a club because I love jazz and everything and they were doing the same things. But I, but I was not at odds with any of the writers. I, I just wanted everyone to write their story, so that we could read it, so they were very, very influential to me at that particular time. And I had friends who were in the service who stayed in Paris and lived in Paris after they got out. I loved to go to Amsterdam, which was an international world. I was playing basketball at that, so I was traveling all over the place.

SB: Of course.

VW: And seeing London and, and Berlin and all of those particular places, and I had a sense to study the places that I was going to, and the people, and the problems that they were having with life because you learn quickly. "You got problems, buddy? Everybody's got them. Okay? So don't start thinking you the only one that's got them."

SB: True.

VW: Yeah, yeah.

SB: James Baldwin also mentions, in his works, that his identity always is, always taken with him, whether he goes abroad or stays in his own country.

VW: Right, right.

SB: And, as he is making those transitions, and I wanted to know when you were in Europe, actually, in what way did you see your identity either being transformed or being preserved through any significant experience you may have had?

VW: Well, Europe let me know that everybody that I walked, ran into, did not have a pre-conceived idea of who I was. They had not been taken through this horrific, psychological game from, from my perspective. They had not all been 00:34:00taught that you were damned from the beginning because of that, those religious stories, that family of Ham and so forth. And all of that stuff from the Bible that had been used to, to put, to put slams on you as a person. That was not there. They had their own problems. The Germans weren't thinking about me. The Germans were thinking about the Jews. And so they got that problem there that they've got to come out from under because they've been slammed with that, and this is dec-, a decade and so forth later and so they're worried about whether people are going to be thinking about them as hating Jewish people. So they're 00:35:00on a different kind of road. And I was in Germany when the Wall was still up, so the-, they aren't dealing with black people over there. As a matter of fact, as a black male, particularly playing basketball, we didn't really have many problems. As long as the government was paying your pay-, your paycheck and you, you had food and a way to go where you wanted to go.

SB: So, truthfully, the events of, leading up to the Holocaust sort of detracted from that issue.

VW: Yeah, right. [laughs] It did.

SB: That is surprising to know.

VW: And you also found out that the Europeans weren't rating you on your color. They were evaluating you on what you understood about the world around you. So I was in the right place at the right time, because I was studying the world from all perspectives, including the female perspective. I--[unintelligible noise]--I 00:36:00loved my sisters. I had five sisters; I had a mother; I had five aunts. And the way the world was treating women was also offensive to me. Yeah. So, all of this was sort of in my favor, but I had a conversation. If you, if you met me, I was not afraid of sexuality. I wasn't worried about whether we, if it was a girl that I was gonna be able to be friendly with them, okay? Because that wasn't the rate. The rate was--even with the guys--"Have a beer! Now, what do you think about this? What do you think about that?" And so, you know, it was, it was a conversation in the bars and so forth. It wasn't the same kind of thing.

SB: More ingratiating.

VW: Oh yeah. Gosh, yeah.

SB: And I want to go back to this sexuality, because this attitude that was held towards females back then, I wanted to ask, then, what was it like getting to 00:37:00know who would eventually be the love of your life?

VW: [laughs]

SB: To be young again.

VW: Well, let's see. When I was in Germany, I was married, first of all. And I had two children. So, I'm interacting as a basketball player and a coach. And because I was knowledgeable and I was also in the communications business, a lot of times, I was the voice for many of the players that I had. And, because we knew Europe as the land of free love, it was useful to be able to converse to even get it for your playmates, the guys that were on the team. So, the game 00:38:00that I found myself playing at times was the voice for 'em. A lot of these guys were coming out of the South and they had not really doffed this persecution complex that they had. They thought that the Germans were seeing them as black guys in the same way and I said, "Nah, nah, man, that's not what the chicks are after. Okay? All you gotta do is be cool. Have a little bit of money. Don't get too anxious, don't want to work, go too quick. Okay? Let them know that you got some conversation." And sometimes--the strangest kind of thing--you know, not that this is what the tape is about, okay--was you could get the girls to be with them, based on the girls wanting to be around you. You could, I could talk, and a lot them couldn't talk. So talk was a part of the game. It wasn't the 00:39:00whole game, but you're definitely gonna talk first. We're gonna drink some beer, have some wine, and we're gonna talk first. And then, we decide who goes home with who, so parties and everything were had and so forth and it was a, a whole different kind of world.

SB: This background in communications sort of transcending to flirting and yeah.

VW: Oh, yeah. You knew how to handle a situation, yeah. And so it was a very, very interesting to be in a world that's treating you totally different than the world you were coming from.

SB: I would imagine. I would like to just go back and, and talk about your ginormous family actually, with all of your sisters and brothers. Did you have much contact, contact with them, while you were abroad? And how were they experiencing relations of race, given that they were in America? And then, yeah, let's start with that.

VW: It was a totally different world. No, I didn't have much contact with them. 00:40:00Once I got out of the service and I reacquainted myself with my sisters and brothers, they told me of how I was in their life, because, they say, "We got a brother and he is overseas, and he is at war, and he is here and he is there." But they don't, they didn't know too much about me. But, but I, I know that they found it fascinating that I was this individual hooked to their family [laughs] and, to this day, one of my best friends is my youngest brother. And they always tell me how much they would tell people, "I got an older brother and he is in the service. And he is here and he is there and he's, he's a writer," and all of this, so, I became somewhat of a, a celebrity to them also. And but, once I got out and came back home and we reacquainted ourselves with each other. Now, my 00:41:00sisters, all of them were very religious in their own way. [laughs] I can't talk about their religion, but they were religious. So to a lot of them, I, being a man of the world, I was a sinner [laughs]. I didn't wanna be. I didn't think I was a bad guy, but I did not force my children to go to coll-, to Sunday school and church and things of this nature because I had a big beef about religion and what it had done, because, as far as I was concerned, religion was carrying for me the mark of, the stain of being black. And I have written about that and spoken about that on many occasions, is that I had to get rid of that. You had 00:42:00to get rid of that stain or would you would have a negative feeling about yourself. So it was only through education that I realized that, and a position on Christianity, you had to figure out what was going there, and how Christianity was used in its own way to destroy not only those African Americans but the Native Americans and anybody else that they came in contact with. So you had to learn, and then when you did meet somebody who was on the other side of the track, you had to let them know, "No I'm not going there. If you want me to be there, you got to deal with this. You got to deal with your own training, what your momma done told you, what your daddy done told you, what your priest done told you and so forth, okay, because this is not correct. And then you had to get into how they got this religious perspective, because it was the Africans 00:43:00that gave them the perspective of land and life and joy and family and so forth, and they wanted to close it off. And so, you have to reorient. You had to reorient yourself, which means that now you got to go home to your momma and daddy and tell them "Look, ya'll be telling us a whole bunch a jive." So even keeping friendships sometimes, you had to deal with that first. And if they liked you enough, they would get enough guts to deal with it.

SB: And that was sort of like, so meeting friends they had to know your religious background first?

VW: Yeah, absolutely.

SB: Do you, so going off of that, can I ask a more general question?

VW: Mm-hm.

SB: How do you see dialogues about religion today, versus back then? Do you think they've improved or do you think people have still had the same mindset about coming from difference?

VW: You know, if I had told you the truth from my perspective, it's is easy to 00:44:00get around it, because a lot of people talk about it, but they don't follow it. So, you begin to know that I got to have it there, because I got to make people believe that I believe it, but I really do know that there is a little bit of crap that we got to deal with here. So you don't have it as anything that's stopping anything nowadays, because my opinion is we're accepting it, but we know it's got holes. Well, let's not go there.

SB: Do you see an inherent need to convince people that you had a background?

VW: Mm-hm.

SB: Where did you think that was coming from - a family point of view? Or, was that self-developed?

VW: Here is where it came from for me. I was a Boy Scout in the latter years of my elementary education. Probably 9th, maybe 8th because I was a Cub Scout, too. And the guys who were teaching me in the Cub Scouts and in the Boy Scouts were worldly guys, and they took us places and we did different things. And they took me away from that church group and they are the ones who sort of started guiding my life. I still see them today, one of them anyway, that's very, very 00:46:00influential to me. And one of them lives in Paris of which I wish I could make contact with him again. I know his sisters and so forth and I'm trying to make contact with them, because I'm doing some genealogy studies now. And I want to know if they are the Sanders of the Sanders who came here from Virginia on a flotilla as free blacks into Decatur, not Decatur, Vandalia, Michigan, cause I've done a lot of work in Vandalia about the Underground Railroad. So I'm trying to do history on that. If I'm on the same track for what I think you're asking me, no, because I can get off track.

SB: Then I'll follow up, then, just in case. So, what, to you, was comforting to know that conducting these genealogies helped reaffirm the person who they are today?

VW: Because, God, it's such an interesting story! I've found out through study that in 1849 - I had already done two stories about the Underground Railroad, I'm doing a new genealogy study on the Erie Canal--because I found out there was an Underground Railroad line on the Erie Canal that we don't learn about, which is what they should have been teaching us about when we were in school. So, finding out about this flotilla. This Quaker named Sanders inherited slaves in Virginia, but he wanted to set them free. But Virginia didn't allow it. So, he kept them, letting them know that at his death, they would be set free. That was 00:48:00a principle for it. But, he also set up a way to get them out of Virginia, down the Ohio River, up to Michigan, into a free setting in Vandalia, okay? And that's when they were set free. They were given land, they were given money, to start a new life.

SB: He kept his promise.

VW: Yes, absolutely. And so the thing that has been missing in our history that I like to do is because a lot of the history sometime that happened to African Americans is written by white Americans, and the African Americans never get a chance to talk. So, my job as a writer is to give them voice. And that is what I do in many of my storytelling is I figure out what it would have been like to be in that situation, knowing what these people would talk about, the same as what 00:49:00everybody else talks about: "What are we going to eat today? Who you seeing? Where you going? Why you going there?" Okay, and so forth, and the results of it. Well, in the Sanders plantation. Let's call it a plantation. It was a farming situation. He educated all of his blacks, so that they would be ready. They took care of his mill. They took care of his farm. They took care of his, going to get groceries. They took care of everything, and so they were really ready when they got on that flotilla, went down the Ohio River and into Cincinnati, went to Cincinnati, caught the train in Cincinnati, went up to Michigan, took the last twenty miles and went into Michigan and found their freedom. Well, I'm studying their families now. All of the genealogical evidence is there from this one woman who wrote this book. It's called something 00:50:00Manumissions. I forget it right now. So, I've been on a trail of learning to do genealogical studies, so I can trace these particular people. Well, what interests me is, are these the relatives of the people who lived across the street from me? And that's the Saunder's family, so, I'm on their trail right now.

SB: [laughs]

VW: As a matter of fact, I meet with my cousin tomorrow, no, next, next Wednesday to talk about our family that came out of Florida. And I have genealogical connections and papers on all of them. So, that's a part of what I'm doing.

SB: And can we talk a little bit about the writing process and how doing this genealogy, genealogical research sort of helps with that?

VW: Oh, yeah. Right.

SB: I guess I'd just like to talk about, a little bit about the writing process that you do. Do, do you conduct like, I don't know to say surveys, but like formalistic interviews we are doing right now?

VW: Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

SB: Okay.

VW: In fact, with the show that I produce, Kentucky at Sunrise, I had to go talk to the Eastern families--the Eastern Quakers from the East area, down in, near Vandalia.

SB: Okay.

VW: So I had to go through genealogical studies with them. The thing is that they have no records other than who owned these people when they were slaves. But when they got to Michigan, because it was a free state, they would have to document who they were when they were given land and so-so. They bought land, and when they bought land, that's when the records started. And with that, the 00:52:00family records started. Anybody that's born, anybody that buys crops, anybody that sells crops, and so forth. This is the records that you find and that you can, can make a point of knowing who did what at what time. I'm telling some interesting stories there when you find them. Matter of fact, my genealogical studies at the game (? is this the word he used?)-the Gates people did included my gre-great grandfather in the Civil War, and instead of finding out he was a hero, I found out that he was kicked out because he was a drinker. So, that [laughs] sort of ended that up for a little bit. But I'm still doing a study in Louisville to, to find out more about my family.

SB: Very good. And as you're writing these pieces, does it show that race 00:53:00relations or race attitudes have improved throughout time?

VW: Well, it doesn't take a genius to figure that out. Yeah, they have improved, okay? There's still work to be done on both sides, because attitude doesn't bring money and you're living in a money world. So no matter how you look at the world, if you don't have money and the opportunity to get the things that you need, you can find yourself trapped in other places. You can find yourself trapped in, not a world where it's a white racist attitude, you can find yourself in the middle of a black racist attitude. So improvements are there.

SB: So, we're talking about accessibility to -

VW: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

SB: - they directly correlate with how you're perceived.

VW: I'm from Albion. Poor folk. I'm from Albion. This was poor folk. In my lifetime, I taught in these very realms. I taught for Kalamazoo College. I taught for Western. I taught at Michigan. I taught at U of D. I taught at Wayne State. I taught at Michigan State. You know, this isn't a common place, but at the time when I was coming out of school, this was inconceivable. How I learned to get and move through these things is the subject of the piece that I'm working on as a writer, because things had to happen in order to make that possible. And those men that I was, that I was talking about, when we came out 00:55:00of school in Albion, they wrote that article because this was unusual for African Americans to make these accomplishments in these steps. So, yeah, things are much better. Not for everybody, but for those who know how to make it work, yeah, you can come out pretty good.

SB: Thank you for clarifying that distinction for me.

VW: Yeah.

SB: Unfortunately, that was the last question I had for this first interview. And I want to thank you so much for meeting me, here, today. And I really appreciate your time.

VW: Yeah, cool. Right.

SB: Thank you very much.

VW: You're welcome. All right. You too.

SB: I really have a lot to go on.

VW: Very good. Very good.