Interviewer: You ready?
So this is the 22nd of June 2016,
and we're here with Elwyn Lee.
Dr. Elwyn, I'm sorry.
-: It's all right.
And this is Samantha Rodriguez
and Sandra Rodriguez
who are interviewing you
for the TCU Civil Rights
Black and Brown Oral History Project.
Do you agree for us to video record you
and later upload your interview
on a website
and also deposit it into an archive?
-: Yes.
Interviewer: Thank you.
First, we start out
with some personal questions
just to get to know you better.
When and where were you born?
-: I actually was born
in Portsmouth, Virginia.
March 4th, 1949.
Or so they told me.
I got to Houston
when I was very young,
so I know nothing of Portsmouth.
I think I was less than two years old.
So Houston is my home.
Interviewer: And who were your parents?
-: My parents are both deceased.
My mother just recently.
My father is Philip Ferguson Lee.
My mother, Ethiopia Hicks Lee.
And they grew up
in the Virginia, Maryland area.
They were graduates
of Hampton Institute,
now Hampton University.
My father was one
of the first 10 Tuskegee Airmen,
something I'm very proud of.
My mother and father got married actually
at Tuskegee Institute at the time.
I think it was 1943.
And...
Subsequently,
they migrated to Houston,
where I guess my life really began,
as far as I'm concerned.
In terms of civil rights.
I recall my father
when he left the Army Air Corps
as a Tuskegee Air flight instructor,
he couldn't get a position flying
with the major airlines.
If you ever see the movies
about Red Tails
and all that stuff,
all that acrobatic stuff,
my father taught those guys
how to do that.
He opened a flying school,
an acrobatic flying school,
of course.
But he was a Jack of all trades.
He could do anything.
When he came to Houston,
he got a position teaching
at Texas Southern University
in the industrial arts,
teaching how to make furniture
and painting and decorating,
and all that kind of stuff.
He could do that,
and he would do things on the side
because the pay was so low.
My mother,
who was valedictorian
of her high school class
and very smart,
was the secretary,
executive secretary.
Nobody wants to be
a secretary these days,
but I grew up feeling
very good about secretaries
because she was.
She was one of those secretaries
who had exquisite penmanship.
I used to keep copies
of just her writing anything.
It was so beautiful.
You know, when they dictated letters,
she would do it in shorthand.
She worked in HISD,
a secretary to a principal in Dodson.
Back in those days,
North side of 45 was basically
a black community,
part of Third Ward.
She...
Became the first black secretary
in the HISD administration building.
Her boss became one
of the superintendents
and she essentially integrated
the professional staff as it were.
When the administration building was
over on Richmond,
which was at,
seemed like a prairie
when we first went out there years ago.
So that's probably more than you asked,
but it kinds of gives you a...
In 1973, they went back
to Washington D.C.,
which is where they lived
until they passed.
Interviewer: What neighborhood did you grow up in,
in Houston?
And what was the climate like
at that time?
-: Well, I grew up in Third Ward,
which people today have problems understanding
where Third Ward is or was.
I give tours.
Interviewer: Can you tell us?
What were the parameters of Third Ward?
-: Yeah. I should show you a map
but basically, the wards,
they started downtown
and Third Ward started way down,
I think it was near Congress and Main,
and then it edged on southeast
coming down southeast
as far as the city went.
I said it didn't go,
but so far at the time,
as time grew on Third Ward,
the name attached to areas
that went further southeast.
In the original formulation,
the northern part,
that actually was Harrisburg.
And then it went down.
That's true.
And as time went on
it went further down.
Like I said,
I-45 was part of Third Ward.
A lot of what's now called
Museum Park,
and even the Museum District
was part of Third Ward too.
It still is in the minds of us
who grew up.
The powers that be did a lot of things
to kind of dismember
Third Ward or disrupt it.
I-45 at times felt like that.
But 288 certainly did.
It was very upsetting to people
when they did that
because it seemed wider
than it needed to be.
And there were beautiful
two-story brick homes
that were taken out,
and effectively it was wider
than it needed to be.
It felt like they were trying
to separate Third Ward.
And many of my friends
and I all thought that,
well, they're trying to take over
from Main down to 288.
Rename it, you know.
They wanted it wide
in case anybody tried to get over.
So that was the thought anyway.
Interviewer: When was 288 built?
-: I'm not sure what the year was.
You might have to look that up.
A lot of what I'm saying though
actually may have come true.
People who print the signs can,
you know they say,
if a lie is repeated enough
and loudly enough,
it will become somebody's truth.
So if you stick on a sign,
"Museum Park,"
which some developers want
to come up with that name,
and Museum District and areas,
which were just Third Ward.
Newcomers will just call it that.
When I give my tours, I go up there and I say,
"Right here was,
the one bar is a block
from the Asia house
in the Museum District.
And that's where black lawyers
used to come together
to drink after work,
and right across from that was
a black lawyer's office."
And then you go down a couple of blocks
I said,
"This is the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternities
and graduate house.
And when they built it,
it was in Third Ward.
It wasn't in Midtown." And then I go a block
from that and I said,
"This is the married women's clubhouse."
And there's a historic marker.
When they built that
and started a club,
it was not the Museum District.
It was Third Ward.
So how did it get renamed?
I said,
"Well, it's the same way
Christopher Columbus allegedly found America.
They said, 'Well we're going to call it another name.'"
I'm sure the people
that were here had a name for it.
They said,
"What the heck,
we'll call it another name."
But anyway, that's...
Interviewer: Can you describe to me
what group of people lived
in Third Ward,
what income brackets were
on Third Ward,
maybe some of the businesses?
-: Well, that's fairly easy.
Third Ward was basically black.
It was very interesting.
When I grew up,
there were two classifications of people.
There were black and white.
They were very few Hispanics.
And in my world,
there were none.
They did not exist.
I'm sure they existed,
but they weren't in that world
that we were in.
I think if you,
Kleinberg did a study,
I remember seeing it.
He said in 1975,
there was something like
six percent Hispanics.
But you know,
when I grew up,
they just were not a part of our
everyday experience.
There were white people,
there were black people.
And...
And a few Jews.
And the reason why
I say a few Jews is because...
The way Third Ward was,
the way the segregation was,
for me as a child,
you live within
those segregated boundaries,
and you rarely got outside of those.
When you went downtown,
that was rare.
And you had to be careful
where you're going with your parents.
You had to watch where you went,
how you behaved,
and that kind of thing.
And you couldn't go everywhere.
So you were living
in a segregated environment.
But as a child,
being in an environment
within those parameters
of Third Ward,
you felt safe and comfortable
because people look like you
and what have you.
Like, there were two movie theaters.
The main business district was along Donlan
which was the main commercial dealership.
At that time,
there have been studies done.
They had about
between 120, 150 businesses along Delano.
They had had savings and loans,
and lawyer's offices
and restaurants,
and you name it.
And when they had parades
for the local high school,
which was Jack Yates,
there's a big rivalry
between Yates and Wheatley,
Wheatley was in Fifth Ward.
So when they had their big game,
it was a big parade coming down Donlen,
and then it would turn down on Wheeler
and go down to Jack Yates.
And then in the Fifth Ward,
they would have another big parade.
That was clearly the main conditioner street.
Also at that time,
Wheeler went all the way through from,
it went all the way through to Scott.
It did not close at TSU.
It got closed sometime after 1967
There was something called,
they call it the TSU riot,
but really it was it was a police riot.
Interviewer: Can you talk
a little bit about that?
-: Yeah.
I forget what provoked the incident,
At the end of the day,
the police descended upon TSU,
and with overwhelming force,
and shot up two dorms.
And I think one or more cops died.
And they went in
and they destroyed televisions,
and furniture,
and all of this stuff.
Kids were down and ducking.
And when they finally did
all the investigation
that people who died
died from ricocheted bullets
from the police.
I don't know if they found
more than one or two if that.
Anybody in the dorms that had any guns
or what have you.
It was a...
A police riot in effect,
and they were shooting,
but hardly anybody was shooting back
and bullets were flying everywhere
and they ended up hitting
their own people.
Nonetheless, two or three people went
on trial for that.
I think at the end of the day
they did not get any sentences.
Because like I said,
it really was a police riot.
At the time,
it was a very big deal.
And sometime after that,
not too long,
I think they,
they closed Wheeler straight through,
which is kind of upsetting to me
because that's where
the parades would go.
I used to walk that way
going to high school,
and what have you.
Anyway, within these boundaries
of Third Ward,
it's the same way today
as it was then
in terms of economic standing there.
And even though you had a lot
of businesses going down Donlen,
you still had the poor sections
on the north.
And then as you come south,
it gets better and better
and better and better.
As a kid, I mean,
as just a kid in elementary school,
we had aspirations
of trying to go south.
If you could go south,
if your family could move south,
they would be in a better, better place.
And when you went to school
and because of all the segregation,
you had middle-class black kids
I guess, I'm not even sure
if the term upper middle-class applied.
It may have for me as a kid.
I don't know if it was accurate,
but you had kids and doctors
and lawyers and what have you.
Of course they were further south,
near MacGregor and what have you,
but we're all in the same school.
As you went south,
the homes get better
and they're still that way.
And I grew up on Isabella.
Isabella is clearly on the northern end.
And worse still,
I grew up right next
to the railroad track
and everything that connotes,
and I mean right next to it.
And on the other side was Cuney Homes,
which is still there.
Right now,
it's an 1,800 family public housing project.
It was a public housing project back then
in between as a railroad track,
the ditch,
and then my little wood frame duplex
and we were on the bottom.
And we had one restaurant
and two parents and three kids.
I found myself out in front
in the morning having to pee
on the bush because, you know.
I just couldn't hold it.
Couldn't get into the bathroom there.
But you know,
I could walk to school.
I get most people did
in their neighborhood school.
I walk over to Blackshear.
In terms of Third Ward,
two schools are synonymous
with Third Ward
more than any others.
One is Jack Yates Senior High School,
and the other is Blackshear Elementary.
And so I went to Blackshear Elementary.
Blackshear still exists,
fighting for its life,
thanks to the Texas education agency
that writes everything
and threatened schools
and that sort of thing.
Yates, too.
But it was like I said,
very comfortable in terms of
most of your day-to-day exhibits.
And most of the things
that I found risky had to do
with things like the Cuney Home Gang.
There was a thing called the Cuney Home Gang.
I lived too close to it,
and that was bad because
if you weren't in Cuney Homes,
then you were an enemy.
I'm living in the worst case scenario.
I'm adjacent to it,
but not part of it.
So part of my childhood was
living in kind of fear
of getting beat up,
worrying about the Cuney Home Gang.
Some of them went to school.
They would engage in fights
in the morning
and stuff like that,
you know.
That was a big memory of mine because
I often wondered why
people would be so violent.
Some nights though,
I found the answer
that you you'd hear parents,
or I guess they were parents,
beating people, their children
in terrible ways,
blood running down their back.
I remember my father was very courageous
and a very caring person
with more than one occasion would go
across the track to try to stop someone
from beating their kid.
So I imagine
if people were doing things like that,
you'd be pretty angry
and I guess just pass the violence along.
When I say violent,
let me give you some idea
of what I'm talking about.
One night I'm at home,
we're at home.
My parents had gone somewhere
and they literally circle my duplex,
like in the movies.
And they're going to break into the duplex
while me and my brothers are there.
We're just kids.
That's a frightening thing to see people
from high school to young adults outside
with God only knows what,
trying to break into your house,
knowing you're there
and your parents aren't there.
And it's terrifying, you know.
We managed to pretend to have guns.
And in fact,
we came up with this ruse where
one of us were trying to tell
the other one,
"Put that gun away."
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no."
"Put it away." We would say it very loud
to make them think we had a gun.
We didn't have a gun.
We didn't have anything.
And we were,
I don't know what would have happened
to us had we not come up with that.
As you go further south,
when you get to Wheeler,
starting on Cleburne
there was a Jewish synagogue there,
right at Cleburne and Ennis.
And you get to Wheeler,
there was a little Jewish shop
and there were lots of Jews going south,
and over at MacGregor,
you had some very wealthy Jews
that lived in that area.
The Weingartens,
there was a grocery store chain
much like HEB,
called Weingarten's at the time.
And Weingarten's had this estate,
and there was the Sakowitz estates.
Sakowitz was kind of like Macy's.
So we gathered many
of the Jews lived over
in that area
because at that time
there was some discrimination
against them in terms
of going other places.
And when the discrimination broke down,
and they could move out to Maryland,
and then they started leaving,
not all of them.
Many of them stayed
and are still over there.
But they many of them left
and went to Maryland
and places like that.
And then some
of the black professionals could move
into those houses,
but you still see some remnants
of their existence.
Like I said,
the building at Cleburne and Ennis,
it's still there.
And there used to be
old Lockhart Middle School.
It was an elementary school.
Recently, it was torn down,
but it was a Jewish school.
It had all the Jewish symbols
on the front of it as well.
In general, you saw very few white people.
There was...
One or two.
It's still kind of a food desert
in Third Ward
in terms of grocery stores.
We went to a little
family-run grocery store
at the corner of Alabama and Elena.
And it was Mr. Pelizona.
I think it was Italian.
He had very slick black hair,
but he was very nice,
he and his family.
We used to shop there
because he would give us credit.
So when we would shop there on credit.
I was just thinking
if I knew any white people
during those times,
that would be Mr. Pelizona
and that's about it.
There were no white people at my school,
no Hispanics,
and that was it.
Interviewer: So you grew up
in a predominantly
African-American neighborhood.
-: Overwhelmingly.
Interviewer: Overwhelmingly?
(man laughs)
Interviewer: Yes sir, yes sir.
-: Okay.
Interviewer: And then,
what are your first experiences
with discrimination
growing up?
-: Well, you know,
you generally ran into discrimination...
Well, I don't know what
we would call it first.
Let me just say,
when you discover
you couldn't go downtown.
When you went downtown
and your parents had to tell you,
you can't go here,
and you can't go there,
and you can't drink out
of this fountain,
and that kind of thing.
You didn't go down that often,
but when you went,
you had to be given guidance
on what not to do,
And you had to stay close
to your parents so that
you would not run afoul
of these rules.
Interviewer: What years were these?
-: Oh, this would be the late fifties.
And then,
even as I moved into middle school,
I didn't have a sense
of being occupied in general
because I was on foot.
My family always only had one car.
I never had a car,
even through high school.
So my world was limited
to where I could walk
for the most part.
So I can only walk so far,
but you ran into discrimination
if you tried to get out
of the neighborhood.
Like I remember,
walking west,
and when I got close to Main,
policeman said,
"Where you going, boy?"
The way he said it,
he let me know
I shouldn't go that way.
I should just turn around and go back.
And same thing back in those days,
University of Houston was not
a very hospitable place either.
If you cross Scott
and went on the campus,
you might not get very far
because someone stopped you there too.
So, but you need to know,
the University of Houston didn't start
until Cullen,
because between Scott and Cullen
was HISD property.
Where TDC Stadium was
Joe Jefferson Stadium.
We played high school football there.
Junior high school football was played,
where Cougar places I think right now.
So that was public land.
And it basically didn't start
until Cullen,
but if you crossed over there,
you kind of got stopped.
I didn't know
until I was in college
that MacGregor Park,
which is right down the street
from U of H, down MLK,
that didn't become legally integrated
until 1967.
So most of the time
when I was in high school
and junior high school,
I had no idea that you couldn't go.
It was far enough away
that I couldn't get over there.
The park I could go to
and did go to was Emancipation Park.
But I naively thought as a child,
that if I could get over there,
that I could use it.
Little did I know
that I wouldn't have been allowed
to use it.
I have friends a little older
than I am telling me
about trying to use MacGregor Park
and being turned away.
Trying to sneak into the pool
and things like that.
I would have been very irritated,
but I never...
Recreational life in terms of parks
was Emancipation Park.
And then we spent a lot of time
at the YMCA,
which was in Wheeler, right?
Adjacent to TSU,
which is no longer there.
Emancipation Park is still there.
We played baseball there
and you could swim there.
But it was only 10 acres,
It's a little high,
it's funny getting mad about something
that has already changed,
but that's how insulated the world was
in many ways.
And so you don't know
what you don't know
as a child.
Interviewer: So eventually,
you would leave Houston.
-: Well, before I lived here,
so you need to know what's referred to
as the start
of the Houston Civil Rights Movement.
Started around '60 or '61.
I forget the exact year,
where students from TSU primarily
went and sat in at the counter.
I believe it was Weingarten's at the time.
Now, at that time,
I lived two blocks from that store.
That was the store where we shopped.
So that was,
there's a historic monument
out there right now
memorializing that spot.
So I was aware of that going on.
You know,
the older blacks in the leadership
as Reverend Lawson will tell
you and others,
you know how they try to talk the kids
out of going and what have you.
They went anyway.
And then the...
White political leaders
and business leaders got together
and went looking for black leaders
like Quentin Mease
and Reverend Lawson and others.
Tried to figure out what can we do,
and they came up with a strategy for
not turning Houston
into what was happening
in other parts of the South.
Fortunately that...
Fortunately that worked.
I remember people talking,
I didn't go,
but when Martin Luther King came,
many of the pastors were not
in favor of him coming.
And there were a few brave souls
who welcomed him.
And then when they went downtown
to what was the Coliseum,
some smoke bomb went off.
And I think they had to call it off
and all of that.
But there were
two or three pastors that welcomed him.
Reverend Lawson was one of those.
There's a wonderful picture
of Reverend Lawson
with Martin Luther King over
at Shape Community Center.
And of course it's in his house,
other people have seen it.
But it's interesting to note
for those who study history
that he was not always welcome
by local leadership.
Not everybody was as courageous
as he was.
And then I remember in the mid-sixties,
I forget the year,
I think it was '67,
when Muhammad Ali came to town.
Most folks don't know,
they don't recall that a lot
of the legal battle about him going
to the military service took place
in Houston.
And my house was right between,
right behind,
what was then Miller Junior High School,
which is now
a women's college preparatory school.
And that used to be a white school.
Before they turned it
into a middle school for black kids,
junior high school.
I remember when we found the pool
in the basement
we didn't know
junior high schools had pools.
(man laughs)
But they left their used books
for us I recall.
But anyway,
right across the street I lived,
so to go to the junior high school,
I just had to walk across the street.
One day I look out there
and there's Muhammad Ali standing
in my front yard.
And I found out that
one of his attorneys,
he had a team of attorneys,
but one of his attorneys was
in the one-story building.
You know, it's just
a one-story converted house.
A law office was right next door
to the little,
small three bedroom,
two-story brick house
that my parents bought for $18,000,
about 1960.
It's still standing,
by the way.
Just barely.
(man laughs)
But anyway, he was there
and that was quite stirring.
He also...
I remember he visited
Jack Yates High School.
He went there in part
to support the crowning
of the homecoming queen,
and to talk about
how they should be proud
of having a dark homecoming queen.
Interviewer: And this was
when you were a senior?
-: No, it wasn't.
She was homecoming queen
at University of Houston in 1968.
This was before 1968.
This was...
Two or three years before that.
And of course that one is college.
This was high school.
But see, as I come to understand
as I got older,
the effort to brainwash
black people have been very effective.
It occurred in slavery and continued on.
And so when I was growing up a kid,
most of the kids had this belief
that if it was lighter,
it was prettier.
I mean, they really had that
thoroughly brainwashed,
and to be reverse educated
to actually gain an appreciation
of the beauty
of their own dark skin is really true.
Unfortunately, that took place
for a lot of us.
And we got kind of a more balanced view
of the world.
But I mean,
the brainwashing was very thorough.
So if you go in Jack Yates,
you know, black people
and all these different complexions,
typically if they were contestants
for homecoming queen,
It was always
the much lighter candidate.
And so when they selected
this dark-skinned girl,
and she wasn't all that dark, she was a little bit darker
than I am.
But you know,
it actually created a stir,
which was ironic.
But Muhammad Ali was a part
of the Nation of Islam.
Muhammad was very ethnocentric
and proud of his heritage
in being black.
So he actually came to the high school
and there's a picture
of him being at the high school in like,
in their yearbook,
which would have been my class in 1967.
I actually have the yearbook
in that bag over there.
I'll show it to you
if you want to see it.
But that was a pretty big deal.
James Brown had a lot to do
with people being proud.
He was saying,
"I am black and I'm proud of it."
People started to learn about their,
their history and all of that.
Kids took some pride
in being black
and that grew
and what have you.
I actually went to a prep school
after the 10th grade.
I went to Phillips Academy
in Andover, MA.
Which for two years,
Interviewer: Right before you go there,
so you're hearing a lot,
like James Brown and Muhammad Ali
and all this.
What does being proud
of your culture mean for you
at that time?
-: Well,
you know, as I...
Learn more about the history
of African Americans
and what people had done,
once you learn things,
you learn about the great
civilizations in Africa
that they had,
how all the things
that they were able to do
in these great historic African kingdoms
that got destroyed
through violence and all,
but the,
the civilizations that they had,
that's a past so many others,
you can't help
but be proud and realize that
what you've been fed is
a lot of distorted history.
So knowledge is power and agendas.
Pride is when you get accurate,
accurate information.
So I think,
people like James Brown
kind of encouraged people
to learn about their history.
And when you learn about your history
and actually see,
it's very easy to build pride,
and to...
not accept a second-class status
or people looking down on you.
Which could put you in conflict
with other people.
So when I went away,
I was...
Very proud.
Also I'd grown up
in an environment where,
you know, where we had...
We celebrated ourselves.
I mean, in this community
that we ran.
There were lots of public events
and things like that,
and we are a people
in all of that.
So when I went away to school,
went away to Andover,
that's the first time
for me to be around
a lot of white people.
I think I went to a church camp
before I left,
once.
And also I think I went to,
yeah I went to,
a national jamberry,
which is scouting.
I was a big time scout.
But here locally,
scouting was segregated.
We couldn't go,
the black troops had to go
to Camp Strake,
which was down I-45
or up I-45 toward Conroe.
We had to go on different weekends
than the white troops.
But when I went
to the national jamberry,
there were people of all colors there.
But it was interesting.
It was like foreign countries.
We used to decide who was going
to be brave enough to go over
to the Mississippi troop
and try to trade patches
and things like that.
We did that.
I remember.
That was kind of a nice thing to do.
But I can remember going camping
and outside of Camp Strake
and being shot at by people in trucks
over near San Jacinto,
near Pasadena over there,
which was really frightening when nobody
in the camp has a gun.
You're just a kid
and people shooting at you for nothing,
for no reason.
Just because you're black I guess.
Most of the time,
I was just worried
about the Cuney Homes gang.
(people laughing)
That kind of thing.
So when I left,
it was a totally different world.
You went from all black
to all white.
Interviewer: What was that like for you?
-: I would say hell on earth,
in many ways.
It's...
You know, you...
You had no...
There wasn't one black professor.
There wasn't a black janitor.
There were four other black students,
but the school was as large
as Rice physically,
like 400 acres.
Rice is 450 acres.
And only a thousand students.
That means you could go all day
and not see anybody
that looked like you.
They had a different dress code
and different rules.
So you might as well have gone to Mars.
My first week there,
I went to a French class,
and this 40 year old man
with very dark hair,
with furry eyebrows,
started shouting at me
as I tried to enter the class.
I wasn't sure what he said
because he was speaking in French,
but I finally got the idea.
He wanted me to leave.
And I'm just a kid.
I'm like,
"This man is really angry."
"Why is he mad at me?"
So I come back the next day.
He's even angrier.
It's French One, now.
He's kicking me out, Every time he kicks me out
I get a demerit.
You get seven demerits, you get kicked out of the school.
And this is my first week there.
He's kicking me out
because he didn't like me.
Apparently.
So that's, that's rather
traumatizing.
And then when I try to go
to the dean of students,
he's not going to do anything about that.
He just,
"Maybe we can switch you
to another class" kind of thing,
Not a word about the inappropriateness
of what he did or any of that.
It was none of that.
Not at all.
And then I had another professor who,
I had a shadow mustache,
so much of a shadow that,
I forget how long it was,
14, 15.
I didn't shave.
Didn't have the money to shave,
and it was not a mustache.
And there was this professor
who would make fun
of my shadows.
Everyday.
40 something year old man.
I said,
"I can't believe this man feels the need
to make fun of my mustache."
We're talking about a class
with 15 people,
and everyday he's picking
on me like that.
I just...
Unbelievable.
So, you know,
you had another teacher
who threw a brick at me.
I don't think he threw a brick at me because I was black.
He threw a brick at me
because he's got issues.
And he thought I was talking
during the exam.
I wasn't.
I was a straight A student
before I left.
Perfect attendance,
model student,
and here's this guy throwing
a brick at me.
(man laughs)
You can't make this stuff up.
Then he gives me a zero for the quiz,
and I go to the dean to talk about it.
He says,
"Well,
I believe you."
I said, "Well, is there anything you can do
about that?"
"Yeah, but I'm not going to.
Because his family gave the school
a lot of money.
Just not going to.
Good luck,
on your final."
It was, you know.
That was very interesting.
So it was in many ways,
you ran into situations like that.
I remember it was an all-male school.
They would bus in young ladies
on the weekend sometimes.
I went to this dance.
First dance I went to.
I think it was the last,
maybe I went to one of them.
First of all, by now,
the whole idea
that the South was the only place
where there was,
(man laughs)
People don't like black folks,
well that was gone,
(man laughs)
by that point.
But I remember these young girls,
and I don't blame them.
They just acting the way
they were trained,
I suppose.
And I remember them looking down on me,
and I said,
"You know, I can't do this."
Because in my view,
I'm the proud son of my parents.
Someone who's accomplished all of that.
And the idea
that someone would look down on me,
I said,
"I can't do this."
I can't tell him what I'm thinking
because I'd probably get it a demerit.
So I left,
never to come back to any
of those dances.
Because I just couldn't do it.
I would not be treated like that.
And I remember,
I met a young lady that worked,
and she's from Boston,
act like that, real funny.
She worked in the kitchen.
She was an Anglo young lady. We became friends, you know,
we would talk.
And one day the guy
that was over in the kitchen
saw her talking to me.
All of a sudden,
she wasn't talking to me anymore.
I finally caught up
to her and to find out what's wrong.
And we were just friends, now.
And the guy told her that
if she's talked to me again,
he'd fire her.
So, you know,
that was one thing
after another like that.
Just on and on and on.
Plus, the fact that
I had to make up for...
The educational breakdown.
I was a straight A student,
but you're talking about
Andover Phillips Academy,
one of the premier prep schools
in the country.
So what they were doing,
at any grade level,
was much higher than what we were doing
down here in segregated Houston.
So I had to,
try to catch up,
because they weren't changing the standards.
I wouldn't want them to,
but it's a real challenge
when you're trying to make up,
kind of catch up to people
who've been in that kind of system
for years.
And so it would have been better,
had I gone in the 10th grade,
but I came in the 11th grade.
And in the 11th grade,
it's really your 11th grade grades
which get used for you
to get into college.
So, I mean,
you know, let me give you an example.
You go into English class
and they'll say,
"Write an essay."
Well,
we never had to write an essay
in class like that
at Yates.
When they say write an essay,
they want you to write an essay
from beginning to end
that is grammatically perfect spelling,
perfect.
And all of that.
And they could do that
because they've been doing that
for a whole year the year before.
And they said,
"We're going to write an essay
about this book that we're doing.
The first time the guy said that to me,
it was like,
"You got to be kidding."
So what I would have to do is,
I would stay up all night and write
and work on an essay,
and memorize the thing,
and then write it the next day.
And then after awhile,
I got to the point
I could write it
and do an outline
and do it from the outline.
And then finally,
I got to the point where
I could do it like everybody else,
but that meant I had to, you know,
spend a lot of sleepless nights
trying to catch up.
At the end of the two years,
I was one of the better writers
in my class.
I was winning writing contests
and stuff like that.
But what it took to get
to that level,
was, you know.
Very painful.
You know, that kind of thing.
And dealing with all these teachers,
always something coming up
that you had to deal with emotionally.
And the thing is,
you had no support.
You didn't have anybody
that you could really talk
to this about.
There was nobody there.
And you couldn't talk
to your parents about it
because you had no money.
And the phone booth was down the hill
and to use it,
you had to have money,
and I didn't really have any money.
That's a pretty daggone lonely situation,
and especially being so young.
So that's why when I left there,
I felt like I had gone
through hell and back and survived,
and college would be downhill.
I got into Harvard, Princeton,
and Yale and Westland.
Actually, I wanted to go to Westland
because I thought
it was the better undergraduate school.
But when I went to Westland,
it was smaller
than my prep school physically.
And it was an impressive place if you ever want to see
an impressive place.
Interviewer: So you graduated
at the prep school
and then went to Westland?
-: No, I didn't.
Because when I went to visit,
I said it's smaller physically.
I see this thing
as a great undergraduate school.
So in the end,
I went to Yale
because actually,
frankly because George H. W. Bush went
to Yale.
He was the alumnus
who had interviewed me
to get me into Andover.
Interviewer: How did you put up a connection with
senior Bush?
-: Well, that's an interesting story.
In the little black world
that we lived in,
nobody knew anything about prep school,
quite frankly.
The word didn't have no residence.
And one year,
there was this black male professor,
Mr. Roland,
who came into the junior high school
to teach.
He was the typical nerd.
He was tall with a bow tie.
Real nerdy guy.
And he had been other places
and he knew about prep schools.
So he tried to get some
of the black males to apply
and admitted into Strake Jesuit,
which was way the hell out there.
Good God, it was far out.
And he was talking,
we didn't pay much attention
but we did what he told us to do
and we got in.
Then he wanted us to go
and we looked at him like,
and that was like in another state,
it was Catholic,
and we weren't Catholic.
It was all male.
Nevermind there was a girl school next door.
We were typical kids
growing up in Third Ward,
where we'd always gone to school
with males and females.
Puberty setting in,
and he's saying,
"Go out into strangers."
We went,
"Are you kidding me?
With these white male students?"
You know, we had no sense of,
see that was a better education,
but most of us were making A's
and we couldn't get it.
We didn't have enough worldview to see
how that might be
an advantage to us.
If you were a kid in Third Ward,
you want to get to Jack Yates.
I was a basketball player as well as
a straight A student.
And you know, I said,
"Hey, I wanna go to Jack Yates
get on the basketball team,
make straight A's
and have a better girlfriend."
Okay.
That was my goal.
But anyway,
in the process of that,
my mother had heard this word,
prep school.
Got this book on prep schools
and she actually ran into
one lady at our church
who had been sophisticated
and been in other states
in different things
and knew about prep school.
And I remember,
she invited her to our house
and I'm listening through the door,
and turned out she had sent her two sons
to prep school.
One of them was
in Montgomery,
and one of them was another school.
I forget the name of it.
And the word,
Andover Phillips Academy,
came up in the conversation.
I'm just listening.
So to get into prep school,
you have to take something called
Secondary Schools Admissions Test.
And the test was being given
at Kent and Cate,
which might as well been
in another country too.
So I remember going out there,
and for some reason,
I'm going out there by myself.
I mean, it's not like anybody went with me.
I don't know.
Somebody dropped me off,
and I'll never forget it
as long as I live,
because remember now,
I'm in this little insulated world.
I get out there
and this very tall white woman
looks at me like,
"Who the hell are you?"
"Why are you here?"
And I looked behind me like,
(man coughs)
"Who is she looking at?"
Because whoever it is,
must have done something really bad.
I was me.
And she clearly didn't want me
to be there.
And I said,
"My goodness."
And so she's,
I'm trembling practically.
The lady is being very angry with me.
And she says,
"You got to put down
three schools that you,
and I had been sent to put down
these two names that I had gotten
from my mother and this lady.
And she says,
actually, one of them,
I think it was,
and she says,
"You're going to have to put three."
She's just, you know.
So, I remember hearing Phillips Academy.
So I put it down,
and there were two:
Phillips Academy Andover,
and Phillips Academy Exeter.
Those in the prep school world
know those schools,
but I just remember the names,
and I put them down.
So when they sent off the scores,
those two schools wrote me back
and I started looking at the catalog
and the pictures.
And I got fascinated,
because you know,
Jack Yates is one square block.
We had about 25,
2,700 students.
And you see this picture book
and it got,
I don't know how many tennis courts,
several baseball fields,
an ice hockey rink,
all of this stuff, 400 acres.
You're saying this is a high school?
What world is this?
You know, you get fascinated by it.
So anyway, the next step in the process,
they said,
"We want to encourage you
to continue to apply."
And you had to meet
with an alumni representative,
and the alumni representative
for Phillips Academy
in Houston was George H. W. Bush.
He was a state rep.
He was an official with something,
(indistinct)
And I went down there
and talked to him.
We had a really nice conversation
and he apparently wrote
a very nice letter saying,
"Yeah you know, this kid's legit.
We ought to let him in."
And so that's how I got
to Phillips Academy
on a full scholarship.
And he took a great deal
of interest in me.
He's a wonderful man.
Always has been.
I mean, when he would come up,
he would always invite me to dinner,
along with some of the other Texas kids,
and he would keep track
of my progress and what have you.
So when Westland didn't pan out,
I said, "Well, I want to go to the school
he went to."
Because I thought a lot of him.
A little known story,
but actually true.
And later on years later,
he invited me to come work
with him in in the White House
when he was vice-president.
And that was a really tough decision because...
You know, I had to struggle with that
because at that time,
my wife was making, you know,
taking some steps,
being a Democratic politician,
and you know,
he's a Republican,
and I didn't see how that was gonna work
with me working for him
and her being that.
And you would think
that could work there. There've been a couple of people
that have done that,
but in general,
the way these parties are
at each other's throats,
even back then was,
I couldn't figure out
how it was going to work.
I thought I should, you know,
defer to what she was doing
and keep doing
what I was doing teaching.
Who knows,
I might've been in the,
let's put it this way.
I know George H. W. Bush
before Clarence Thomas did.
(man laughs)
And my classmates used to say,
"Hey, you could have been
on the Supreme Court.
Well, maybe so.
Maybe that would have been a possibility,
but he's a wonderful man,
his wife is a wonderful lady,
and that's just how that went.
I remember when my wife
was first getting into politics,
and this is it what encouraged me not
to take the job,
Jimmy Carter was coming
in the town,
and she put my name
on the list to be with her
while he was just going
to come off the plane.
He was shaking hands
with Democratic folk,
and I was just going to be there standing behind her.
And she sent me there,
and they told them I couldn't come.
And you know what the reason was given?
The reason was that they found my name
on invitation lists to events
from George H. W. Bush.
And of course,
given the relationship,
I had been invited to things,
you know?
But I didn't know it was a crime.
(man laughs)
And it just showed me how,
you know, parties,
Democratic and Republican politics.
So I said,
"Wow, really?"
"I get invited to an event,
and I can't go stand in the line?"
"Really?"
I mean, I wasn't like an issue
or anything like that.
And I said,
"Wow."
So I figured that, you know,
if I was doing that
and she was doing the other thing
it was to drag her down
and everything.
So I declined that invitation
but I appreciate it though,
the offer.
I'm sorry I had to talk about that too much,
but anyway.
A little bit of history.
When I graduated from prep school,
George H. W. Bush paid for my parents
to come,
which at the time was huge.
Yeah.
Because,
had he not,
they wouldn't have been able to come.
Interviewer: I can understand why
you speak so highly of him.
-: Yeah.
Interviewer: Do you need a minute?
-: Yeah.