Jon Royal '70, Diane Alters '71, Mary Brooner '71 & Sheena Thomas '71

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  • Jon Royal
    Jon: Do we each introduce ourselves?
  • Diane Alters & Jon Royal
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Diane: I'm Diane Alters, I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and I'm a member of the class of '71.
  • Mary Brooner
    Mary: I'm Mary Brooner, I currently live in Eugene, Oregon, and I am a member of the class of 1971.
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: I am Sheena Thomas, I currently live in Des Moines, Iowa, and I am a member of the class of 1971.
  • Benyamin Elias & Jon Royal
    Benyamin: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Alters
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Diane: You know, so my eyes were kind of opened to real poverty for the first time, and the real effects of segregation.
  • Diane Alters
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Diane: So it was... It brought home graphically to me what the world was really like in a lot of ways.
  • Diane Alters
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Diane: That was the- kind of the highlight. That's what I remember as being a difficult but worth... pretty worthwhile experience.
  • Mary Brooner
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Thomas
    Mary: So for- the experience was much more cultural than academic.Sheena: Yeah.
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: This is Sheena. I also lived with a family of seven kids and mother and grandmother.
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: Two of the- two of the kids had already gone away from home, and had college educations.
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: I had a sister Regina, who was a year older than me in the "family".
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: It was a very loving family, a fun family.. We had- we had a great time together.
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: 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 Thomas
    Sheena: 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 Thomas
    Sheena: 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 Thomas
    Sheena: Anyway, there were good gospel choirs in almost all of them. It was a great experience.
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: 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 Thomas
    Sheena: So, yeah, there were a lot of very scared students in the water safety class, swimming classes.
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: My- I.... My social experiences were generally positive. I had- I had another relationship there that was... also very- a very good experience.
  • Sheena Thomas
    Sheena: 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 Brooner
    Sheena: 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 Brooner
    Sheena: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Brooner
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Alters
    Jon: 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 Alters
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Thomas
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: So it was an interesting experience. It was like Mary said, mostly, again, and Sheena both, mostly a social experience.
  • Jon Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: So it was a- really, a learning process.
  • Jon Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Alters
    Jon: 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 Alters
    Diane: I'd better go. Thanks guys.
  • Sheena Thomas & Diane Alters & Jon Royal
    Sheena: 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 Alters
    Diane: 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 Thomas
    Diane: 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 Alters
    Jon: I remember- I remember New Orleans, the Mardi Gras. There's that part!Sheena: Wow.Diane: I remember that, yeah.
  • Diane Alters
    Diane: Anyway, thank you. Sorry, I'm so sorry I we-- Fill me in. I wanna hear.
  • Mary Brooner
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: Stacks Records was around the corner from Lemoyne-Owen College, and was still and active production studio at that time.
  • Mary Brooner
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Thomas
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: But I learned a huge amount, and it does change your views about poverty tremendously. Poverty and lack of education.
  • Jon Royal & Sheena Thomas
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Brooner
    Jon: 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 Thomas
    Sheena: 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 Thomas
    Sheena: 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 Thomas
    Sheena: And... his brand new radio was taken out of the car within ten minutes of arrival. City experience.
  • Jon Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Royal
    Jon: 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 Brooner
    Sheena: 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 Thomas
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Thomas
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Mary: 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 Thomas
    Mary: 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 Brooner
    Sheena: 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.