The Great Depression; Interview with Arnold Forster. Part 3; Interview with Maya Angelou. Part 1

INTERVIEWER:

—sailed for Cuba, and it ended up off our coast, so—

ARNOLD FORSTER:

You want me to start at the top of the story, though?

INTERVIEWER:

Yeah.

ARNOLD FORSTER:

OK.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

OK, any time.

ARNOLD FORSTER:

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

ARNOLD FORSTER:

In the spring of 1939, the—out of Hamburg came a German ship, carrying approximately a thousand passengers, among which were two hundred and fifty children. They were destined for Cuba. I think the International Jewish Rescue Committee had financed the trip to that country. When they got there, after sailing along the American Atlantic Ocean coast, they found that Cuba was not ready to receive them, and after two weeks of dallying in that area, they started back up to find some other port of entry.

They never made it. They never made it, because

the attitude in the Congress was unhealthy,

they didn't want more Jews, though there were less than a thousand. The attitude in the White House was that they could do nothing about it in face of the existing high barriers in the immigration requirements. At the end of several weeks, that ship, with a thousand Jews,

and that many children,

was forced in desperation to return to Europe

, and to Germany. The evidence indicates that most of them went to the ovens, and the concentration camps of Hitler's Nazi community.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, thank you. I'm going to switch gears altogether, and ask if you remember the boxer Joe Louis, from the 30s.

ARNOLD FORSTER:

Sure.

INTERVIEWER:

What do you remember about him, what, why do you think he was such a significant character in those days?

ARNOLD FORSTER:

Joe Louis, in my view, in my memory, was a significant character because he was black, and had that kind of temperament and attitude, that was the exact opposite of the negative stereotype that most whites had about blacks. The decent people in the media were ready, eager, and willing to prove to the American people the stupidity of bigotry, and he responded with everything that he was, to the point where, and it was unique, he became a hero and a model in the United States. It was in a period when you could count on the fingers of one hand, among the five hundred professional ball players in both leagues, the number of blacks, and don't you forget that. It was the beginning of the destruction of the barrier against blacks in the United States in the sports field. And the Jews were kept out! Paul Gallico wrote a book, saying that the reason the Jews preponderated in basketball was that they were sneaky, and shifty, and clever, and manipulative. You would believe that a very well-known national sports columnist would write a book and say that, and continue until his retirement undisturbed. But he said it! Today I'm wondering, would a Paul Gallico say that blacks, who are overwhelmingly beautiful in basketball, and they've made it one of the great sports of our country, are sneaky, and manipulative? We've grown up, and Joe Louis helped open the door, and Jackie Robinson, who I was proud to call a dear and—

INTERVIEWER:

Hang on a second, that's, because we can't get into Jackie Robinson, because that's—

ARNOLD FORSTER:

I just wanted to give you one sentence, [laughs] 'cause I loved him and we were close friends, and we traveled together!

INTERVIEWER:

I know, but you'll never see it again. You got it in anyway. [laughs] Max Schmeling, do you remember the fights with Max Schmeling? Joe Louis against Max Schmeling?

ARNOLD FORSTER:

I remember, sure, I remember there was a German, by the name of Max Schmeling, who got crucified, if, that's the wrong word, by Joe Louis, I don't remember much more than that.

INTERVIEWER:

Your, so you don't remember what the Jewish community, if they came out against it, him—

ARNOLD FORSTER:

The Jewish community was not involved, that I knew. First of all, I never went to a football game in my life, I never went to a boxing match, I never read the sport pages, so, I'm in a different world.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, do you remember the incident with Marty Glickman in the '36 Olympics? Where the Jew-, two Jewish runners weren't allowed to—

ARNOLD FORSTER:

No.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, what do you know about Avery Brundage?

ARNOLD FORSTER:

I remember only that Avery Brundage, as head of the International Olympics, saw to it somehow, without taking the blame for it, that blacks and Jews were not very welcome, and had a very rough time making it to the Olympics.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, cut please.

ARNOLD FORSTER:

Oh, I didn't know you were on, I was on camera.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Take eight. [unintelligible] here, any time.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so tell us about the work of the ADL with regard to both blacks and Jews.

ARNOLD FORSTER:

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith, in which I spent most of my adult life, fifty years of it, was created just eighty years ago, in 1913. By charter it said, its purpose was to bring together, in greater understanding, the different groups of Americans that went to make up this great country of ours. We recognized at the very outset, that the weakest link in the chain of democracy, we all had to pay for. As a result of which, we were not concerned parochially with Jewish problems, but with all minority problems, with bigotry and prejudice and stereotyping against any victim group, to that kind of bigotry.

INTERVIEWER:

Great, thanks.

ARNOLD FORSTER:

Is that what you wanted?

INTERVIEWER #2:

Yeah.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

That's it.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, cut.

[End of Forster interview; beginning of Angelou interview]

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Maya Angelou take one. Camera roll seventy-three, sound roll thirty-eight.

INTERVIEWER:

In your book you describe segregation as—you know—as a young girl in Stamps, Arkansas you describe segregation being so complete that it's as if whites were aliens.

MAYA ANGELOU:

Yes.

INTERVIEWER:

Can you kind of explore that, describe that for our people?

MAYA ANGELOU:

Well, yes, when I was growing up, whites were called \"whitefolks\"—I mean it was one word—they were one people, whitefolks, and people who were not very cultured, who had no pretensions to, to the niceties of the world, called them \"poorwhitetrash.\" That was one word also [laughs]. And we, it seemed to me, and we—blacks, we Negroes, we colored folks—were humans, and whitefolks were those others, they were other than. And as a child I was certain that whitefolks didn't have innards. They were, what you saw was what you got. [laughs] I mean their, their bodies, their heads and their bodies, were empty. That you could put your hand on a whitefolks and your hand would go right through [laughs] them. That was my belief, they seemed so different. They walked differently.

INTERVIEWER:

Did you have no, so you had no, no real dealings and interactions with them—

MAYA ANGELOU:

No.

INTERVIEWER:

—that made them any more human—

MAYA ANGELOU:

At all.

INTERVIEWER:

—or—

MAYA ANGELOU:

At all.

INTERVIEWER:

—human as you were?

MAYA ANGELOU:

At all. [coughs] Every action from whitefolks was an action of disrespect, cruelty, scorn, so they couldn't be just. No, mind you I read about white people in other places and I believed them. I was a fond reader of Charles Dickens, and so I, I wept with, with the children and, and laughed with the Micawber, and Oliver. I mean I was, in fact I read Horatio Alger Jr., and I was that little, white boy. I understood him. I understood being lonely, and deprived, and almost forced upon one's own resources which were negligible, if at all. But I didn't connect those people with whitefolks, I just didn't.

INTERVIEWER:

What was, what were, so then what was your community like?

MAYA ANGELOU:

Ah.

INTERVIEWER:

Was it very insular, was it—?

MAYA ANGELOU:

Very insular. The, there were women who worked as maids for whitefolks and they would bring laundry over into the black area, and they would stop at my grandmother's store quite often and put the baskets down, and I wanted so to go through those baskets [laughs] and see what did whitefolks use, you know, what did they, what kind of things did they have? But the only, the only venturing into our area by whitefolks took place when people would come over to pick up cotton pickers—cotton pickers used to gather in the, in the clearing in front of our store—and the whitefolks would come over either in trucks or in wagons and pick up the cotton pickers. And one could see them then, I could see them, and they talked, they didn't, they didn't have what the West Africans in Senegal, the Serer and Tukuler, called La Lang Douce, \"the sweet language.\" I never heard whitefolks use sweet language, and I always heard black people use it. So, the sweet language was a language dependent entirely upon tone, and even the lengthening out of a word. So if you spoke, if I spoke the sweet language to you, in the South, instead of saying, \"Hi there, how are you?\" I'd say, \"Hey, how you doing?\" Well I never heard whitefolks use sweet language, and I heard black people use it all the time. Even though they didn't call it that, you simply did it. So [coughs]-

INTERVIEWER:

You talk, you talk about your store, the store is almost like an institution.

MAYA ANGELOU:

Mm-hmm.

INTERVIEWER:

What, what was the institution of the store?

MAYA ANGELOU:

Well, during, at the turn of the century my grandmother, with two sons, left and divorced my grandfather. In this little village in Arkansas white women didn't get divorced at the turn of the century, but my grandmother divorced my grandfather, and she had to raise the two boys. So she made meat pies from either canned sausage, which she canned, or chicken, or ham, smoked meats. She would make them up in the night and then at midday she would appear at the cotton gin, which was on one side of town, and the lumber mill was on the other side, five miles apart. My grandmother would fry the meat pies there in front of the cotton gin and as the dinner bell rang at twelve o'clock the men would come down and buy these hot meat pies for five cents. If she didn't sell them all she would wrap the rest of them, turn the brazier of hot coals out, dig a place in the sand and leave it there, and run five miles to the lumber mill where she'd sell them tepid for two cents. But the next day she would be at the lumber mill and she'd sell them hot, fresh, for five cents. After she built up a substantial clientele, she built herself a store between the two so the men could run to her, and there began her store. She, she in the end bought most of the land behind the town, much of the land in the town. She was really a West African market mama. I didn't know that until I lived in West Africa.

INTERVIEWER:

In the time when you were growing up, the store, was it a place, was it just a place where she sold goods, or was it more than that for you-?

MAYA ANGELOU:

It was, oh it was everything. It was the center of the black town that was not—

INTERVIEWER:

I'm sorry could you start by saying, \"the store,\" just \"the store\"—

MAYA ANGELOU:

I'm sorry, of course.

INTERVIEWER:

How we doing?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

MAYA ANGELOU:

The store was the center of the black town, the non-religious center, the lay center. There was Willy Williams Dewdrop Inn, there was a kind of roadhouse, but a place where all the people could come, that place was my grandmother's store. But she didn't name it her store, she named it for her son, my uncle who was crippled. My uncle was crippled, the whole right side of his body was paralyzed, and had been since he was three. Mama thought he was crippled because he had fallen off a porch, he was crippled because of some neurological malady. But Mama named the store the W.M. Johnson General Merchandise Store so that my uncle was never at the sufferance of a larger society as a black male, in the South, and crippled. So that was his store. [coughs] On Saturday women came there and had their hair curled. There was a big Chinaberry tree in the yard and so women sat there and they had crokinole curls put in. The barber would come and do haircuts around the Chinaberry tree. The Gandy dancers, who were the men who worked on the railroad, would come over to the store and buy their Coca-cola, and cheese, and sardines, and crackers. And the, and the blues singers would come through when they were walking through Arkansas, and their sound—I learned, I think, to speak in my mind because of the sounds of the South, the sounds around the store and in the church. From the time I was seven-and-a-half until I was almost thirteen I was a mute, but I listened, I just [sucking sound] took in sound, and the, the guys would sing from different places had different sounds, so that from the Brazos in Texas they would sing—

INTERVIEWER:

I'm sorry.

MAYA ANGELOU:

We have to change reels.

INTERVIEWER:

Yeah.