Jon Royal '70, Diane Alters '71, Mary Brooner '71 & Sheena Thomas '71
Primary tabs
- Jon RoyalJon: Do we each introduce ourselves?
- Diane Alters & Jon RoyalDiane: Yeah.Jon: My name is Jon Royal, I currently live in Des Moines, Iowa, and I was a member of the graduating class of 1970.
- Diane AltersDiane: I'm Diane Alters, I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and I'm a member of the class of '71.
- Mary BroonerMary: I'm Mary Brooner, I currently live in Eugene, Oregon, and I am a member of the class of 1971.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: I am Sheena Thomas, I currently live in Des Moines, Iowa, and I am a member of the class of 1971.
- Benyamin Elias & Jon RoyalBenyamin: Whenever you want to start.Jon: And we're here to talk about the memory we have, we were part- four of the six exchange students with a black college in Memphis, Tennessee in 1969.
- Jon RoyalJon: It was called Lemoyne-Owen and we kinda wanted to share some of our exploits and experiences and memories of that process. Gonna let Diane talk first. Diane Yeah.
- Diane AltersDiane: I'm going first not because my memories are clearest but because I have to leave. I- 1969 was the year after Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis.
- Diane AltersDiane: And not too far-- the Lorraine Motel was not all that far from the college in my memory, and I had gone in having read the autobiography of Malcolm X and being just ready to man the barricades, and... the reality was much different.
- Diane AltersDiane: You know, so my eyes were kind of opened to real poverty for the first time, and the real effects of segregation.
- Diane AltersDiane: I took a gym class and no one in the class could swim. The reason was that the swimming pools were segregated until very recently. So in the childhoods of my classmates, the pools were segregated and they could not-- They weren't even segregated; they weren't open to Blacks.
- Diane AltersDiane: So there was this really nice kid in one of my classes and we were talking about race, and he said, "You know, I- I wanna show you what-- Let's do something; let's pull this gag."
- Diane AltersDiane: So the two of us decided to walk down this main street in Memphis shopping district holding hands. He was Black, I was white. And we didn't make it all the way down the street. It was a horrible experience.
- Diane AltersDiane: We- I.. I got the hate stare for the first time in my life. And he hadn't experienced that either 'cause he was protected by his family in... in an all-Black situation.
- Diane AltersDiane: So it was... It brought home graphically to me what the world was really like in a lot of ways.
- Diane AltersDiane: It was a fantastic experience. I learned, I met some great people, I got to know some young women who took me in in their families and that was nice, but it was- it was.. yeah.
- Diane AltersDiane: That was the- kind of the highlight. That's what I remember as being a difficult but worth... pretty worthwhile experience.
- Mary BroonerMary: I'm Mary Brooner, and... we were four of six students that went. And I lived with a family that did not live close to campus, so I had a family car and I drove back and forth.
- Mary BroonerMary: And the family was four generations in a house, and the.. matriarch was a da-- She kept children in daycare, and... And then several of her children and grandchildren lived there. And I shared a room with her twelve-year-old daughter who was the youngest of her children.
- Mary BroonerMary: Living in... in Memphis in 1969, which was a very... It was a town that was raw, having gone through the Garbage Strike and then the assassination of Dr. King.
- Mary BroonerMary: It was... to be- You wondered why one was so accepted, but there were- we were... They were so welcoming and gracious, and... We- our- we would play cards 'til midnight every night. Cards were big in the community, and card games.
- Mary BroonerMary: And... academically, the program was not challenging because Lemoyne-Owen was a historically black college, and a commuter college. There were no dormitories on campus.
- Mary BroonerMary: So... and for most of the students it was their first generation experience academicallly. But there were so many bright people who we saw were- didn't- just didn't have our opportunities.
- Mary Brooner & Sheena ThomasMary: So for- the experience was much more cultural than academic.Sheena: Yeah.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: This is Sheena. I also lived with a family of seven kids and mother and grandmother.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: Two of the- two of the kids had already gone away from home, and had college educations.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: I had a sister Regina, who was a year older than me in the "family".
- Sheena ThomasSheena: It was a very loving family, a fun family.. We had- we had a great time together.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: They were very accepting of me; they had already hosted a Grinnell student the year before. They lived close to the campus so I could just walk.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: My... my reason for going was partly that I had- I had started an interracial relationship on the Grinnell campus, and it occurred to me that I should find out what it was like to be a minority in a black college as opposed to- to find out what that was like.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: Most of the classes I took were Sociology-related... And I learned a lot. There, one of the projects I did for one of the Sociology classes was to- to visit various churches and do a comparison study of... of churches and their... their methods, their... I don't know.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: Anyway, there were good gospel choirs in almost all of them. It was a great experience.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: To Diane's point about the swimming: I was one of the water safety instructors. That was something I brought from Grinnell, and... Yeah, we had an incident where I had to bring a student out of the water and... do some rescue... protocol with her.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: So, yeah, there were a lot of very scared students in the water safety class, swimming classes.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: My- I.... My social experiences were generally positive. I had- I had another relationship there that was... also very- a very good experience.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: And... I remember dancing and I remember card games and... and a pretty good social life, but we did do a march on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination.
- Sheena Thomas & Mary BroonerSheena: And that was a.... pretty tense experience.Mary: Yeah.Sheena: Very tense, not knowing what the reaction would be as we marched.
- Sheena Thomas & Mary BroonerSheena: I think I went there very naive...Mary: Mhm.Sheena: And... I came away with... quite a bit more understanding.Mary: Yeah.Sheena: So..
- Jon RoyalJon: I'm Jon Royal. Yeah, they- the way I ended up there was I was actually president of Young Republicans at the time on campus.
- Jon Royal & Mary BroonerJon: And that was like the largest organization on campus. I think a third of the students belonged to it.Mary: Last time it ever was..Jon: Hm?Mary: Last time it ever was.Jon: Yes. Yeah. Well, I left. [Laughter]
- Jon RoyalJon: Actually, it was partly I had gone to the convention in Miami in '68 and been disaviewed by the experience down there and decided I didn't wanna play politics anymore.
- Jon RoyalJon: But it was also that my girlfriend had started dating another guy on campus, and it was just too hard to see her everyday walking by on campus. And so this program came up and it was like, "Okay! I'm outta here."
- Jon RoyalJon: And.. so that was kind of the forethought I had in the process, obviously the Civil Right Movement and stuff like that, but it wasn't any great mental process of going, "Oh, this is where I need to be in the world to make a difference, " or something like that.
- Jon RoyalJon: And I had a different experience because... the only, as Mary mentioned earlier, the college was a commuter college, and so basically everybody came from home everyday, went back home, except that they had an old hospital which was the black hospital, and it was basically a three, four-story frame structure that was badly deteriorated. The doctor had died..
- Jon RoyalJon: The wife of the doctor still owned it and she was on the Board of Trustees, so she convinced them to rent out this wreck of a building to all of the basketball players, which were the big people that came in town. They recruited them from universities around the country to play basketball 'cause that was important.
- Jon Royal & Diane AltersJon: And they had the hospital rooms as singles, and there was one apartment, which was the operating suite. My bedroom had the old operating light over my bed. The surgery light.Diane: Oh my god.
- Jon Royal & Diane AltersJon: And Steve Barr and I shared the room, and there was a crack in the wall; you could see the sky outside. That was how good the place was.Diane: Whoa.
- Jon RoyalJon: And... but the.. the woman who owned it would come over and sit in the reception area and, because there were no girls allowed in the building... And- but Steve and I were paying our own rent, and so we went to her and said, "You have a choice. You can either change the rules or we'll just go rent somewhere else 'cause we're paying," had the money talk to her.
- Jon Royal & Sheena ThomasJon: And so she decided that since we had nice middle class backgrounds and values that we were different and we could have girls in our apartment.Sheena: Ooh.Jon: -whereas the guys couldn't. So we became party central.
- Jon RoyalJon: And... all of the basketball players, we would bring their girls up to our apartment, and so the parties were always in our apartment. And then the basketball players took care of us, 'cause they had all the contacts on campus and on the street, so anything we wanted, we were taken care of.
- Jon RoyalJon: So it was an interesting experience. It was like Mary said, mostly, again, and Sheena both, mostly a social experience.
- Jon RoyalJon: Academically I can remember going into a Social Pstchology class and the teacher's notes- the textbook I think was ten years old and it was a fairly new field, and the teacher's notes were yellowed 'cause she hadn't re-written them since she'd made the class up initially. So it wasn't an academic challenge compared to Grinnell.
- Jon RoyalJon: So it was a- really, a learning process.
- Jon RoyalJon: But, we also lived two blocks from the corner of Mississippi and Walker, which was where prostitution and drug trafficking occurred on a regular basis, and so, got to know the people walking by there. And it was... a strange experience being a young, white boy from middle-class America walking down that street, and in the early days of figuring out, until everybody got to know who I was and figured out I was okay...
- Jon RoyalJon: And actually, on the day of celebrating Martin Luther King's assassination, or the march of that, the.. the guys in the house said, "Don't go out today. We can't protect you today."
- Jon RoyalJon: So they told us to not go out in the neighborhood that day, 'cause they were afraid for us. And that was- it was very tense. A tense time.
- Jon RoyalJon: And I ended up- Since Sheena was a good friend, er, became a friend down there, hanging out a lot with her and became engaged to Regina who was her- her... host family. And that was a great experience.
- Jon RoyalJon: And we had many experiences like you talk about: we'd be driving down the street with her sitting next to me, and a cop car'd pull up and all of a sudden the heads would be like they were bobblheads, swiveling over at us and looking at us and everybody in- going down the street would look at us, and that sort of stuff's always an interesting social education.
- Jon Royal & Diane AltersJon: And it completely changed my views of, like Diane said, of what it was like to not have priviledge and not have.. resources and all those sort of things that we took for granted in the world and thought we understood how the world operated. It was- they didn't operate in a world like we operated from.Diane: Yeah. White priviledge.
- Diane AltersDiane: I'd better go. Thanks guys.
- Sheena Thomas & Diane Alters & Jon RoyalSheena: So--Diane: Remember the- wait- when-- Remember we drove down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.Jon: Mhm.Diane: And..Sheena: I didn't go.Diane: You didn't go. Well, the--
- Diane AltersDiane: A car was broken down, and it was like midnight or something, and there were three older Black men in the car, and they- we picked them up and they were shaking the whole time.
- Diane Alters & Jon Royal & Sheena ThomasDiane: They didn't know what kind of damage we were gonna do to them. Remember that?Jon: I don't remember that part.Sheena: Wow.
- Jon Royal & Sheena Thomas & Diane AltersJon: I remember- I remember New Orleans, the Mardi Gras. There's that part!Sheena: Wow.Diane: I remember that, yeah.
- Diane AltersDiane: Anyway, thank you. Sorry, I'm so sorry I we-- Fill me in. I wanna hear.
- Mary BroonerMary: So, Memphis was, and is the center of a lot of... Rhythm and Blues music, and Mississippi Delta singers would come up to Memphis and be on Memphis radio stations.
- Mary BroonerMary: Stacks Records was around the corner from Lemoyne-Owen College, and was still and active production studio at that time.
- Mary BroonerMary: And one of the songs that was like, at the top of the charts that year was Sliding Family Stone's song, 'Don't Call Me Nigger, Nigga'.
- Mary BroonerMary: And- and as we got to- which, I feel uncomfortable saying that word in 2015, but that was a pop song in 1971 in the African-American music scene.
- Mary BroonerMary: And... my family would play that-- We would play a game with that song. It was just like a joke between us, you know, back and forth as we got closer and closer to knowing each other.
- Mary Brooner & Jon Royal & Sheena ThomasMary: But it was also a great town for live music, and... it was a town where there- a lot of places couldn't serve alcohol but you could bring a brown bag and then order a chaser. So, that's how- how we did it.Jon: Yes.Sheena: No kidding.Mary: Yeah.
- Mary BroonerMary: But I learned a huge amount, and it does change your views about poverty tremendously. Poverty and lack of education.
- Jon Royal & Sheena ThomasJon: It was also the- the process, like Sheena talked about, of being the minority, and it was something you jsut can't imagine what that feels like, you know, to experience, to be the minority all of a sudden.Sheena: Until you do, until you do.Jon: Until you do it, yeah. It's not a- a thought process, it's an experiential process.
- Jon RoyalJon: I remember there was- before I was dating Regina there was another girl that I was attracted to, and we were talking and so I asked her if she wanted to go out and she said, "Yeah, that'd be cool." So I said, "I'll pick you up at such-and-such time."
- Jon Royal & Sheena Thomas & Mary BroonerJon: And I go over to her house and she was not there. And.. it was like, everybody at the door was kind of laughing to a certain extent that this white dude would think that she would actually be there for her to do that. So that was an interesting- a cultural experience for me.Sheena: Oh, wow. Yeah.Mary: Hm.Jon: Tryin' to say, "What do you think you're doing dude?" You know.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: Yeah, one of the things I was talking to Jon and Diane and Mary about was one of the first things that happened to us, was my dad the minister drove me down to- to Memphis to deliver me to this house. I'm sure he wanted to see where I'd be.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: And... he parked in the driveway and we forgot to lock the car before walking up into the- and they were- came out to welcome us and we went in, but he forgot to lock the car. We didn't think about locking the car because he never would have in Iowa.
- Sheena ThomasSheena: And... his brand new radio was taken out of the car within ten minutes of arrival. City experience.
- Jon RoyalJon: And I guess the other thing about it that it taught me was, when I came back to Grinnell, I suddenly had a whole different perspective of Grinnell, of the college.
- Jon RoyalJon: Because I pretty well didn't recognize that I was in the clique of the Young Republicans, I was in the clique of the Rawson students that I'd, you know, been in, and that sort of stuf. So I had a rairly small contingent of people that I actually socialized with and interacted- and the basketball players, but, you know, that was the- kind of who I socialized with.
- Jon RoyalJon: And then suddenly there was the people in the SDS and I suddenly had credibility with them, adn there was Concerned Black Students and I suddnely had conversations with them and there was this whole, much larger campus of people that I never allowed myself to get back into the rut of that- that I didn't even realize I was in that rut.
- Jon RoyalJon: So, I really became a strong advocate for, whether it's an exchange program or there's going overseas or whatever it is to get away and get a different perspective and come back from that.
- Sheena Thomas & Mary BroonerSheena: Well, I guess there was also their appreciation of- of the challenges of the- the challenging classes we have here at Grinnell, adn appreciation for them.Mary: Yeah.
- Mary Brooner & Sheena ThomasMary: And one of the reasons that the program started was Grinnell had a trustee at that time who... was also a trustee at Lemoyne-Owen, and he kind of devised the exchange program as an opportunity to bring bright, mostly science students at Lemoyne-Owen to Grinnell for a semester so that they could be exposed to more challenging and better facilites... laboratory facilities.Sheena: Mhm.
- Mary BroonerMary: And.. that actually was one of the reasons why I had become interested in the program, because I had been- I had lived next door to a woman who had come up on that program and she was a pre-med hopeful- and.. person. And... she had lived next door to me the sem- the spring semester of 1968. And we went spring semester of 1969.
- Mary Brooner & Sheena ThomasMary: And... I thought, "Well, this is- I should know about this. I should understand this." But it really was as powerful as going o- to another country.Sheena: Mhm.
- Mary BroonerMary: I never went into Mississippi the entire time I was there because... I- Well, I did-- I should correct that. I went in by myself as a white woman ina car by myself, but the man I was dating would not drive me into Mississippi.
- Mary Brooner & Sheena ThomasMary: Just wouldn't do it--Sheena: I was on a horse that stepped into Mississippi.Mary: Yeah.Sheena: Riding with a black guy, but.. that was it. I mean, it was just that small, like far.
- Sheena Thomas & Jon Royal & Mary BroonerSheena: But, yeah, I didn't want to go into Mississippi either. There seemed to be safety in- in Memphis versus the surrounds.Jon: Mhm.Mary: There was some safety in Tennessee compared to Mississippi.Sheena: Or just say that.
Alumni oral history interview with Jon Royal '70, Diane Alters '71, Mary Brooner '71 & Sheena Thomas '71. Recorded May 29, 2015.