Dorothy Gilliam: Interview #3

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some help from some quarters, and I don't recall that it was from the people at Ursuline or not. I would have expected that, since I was working at the Louisville Defender, that the editor there would have certainly known about Lincoln. The University of Missouri was well known as a school of journalism. There weren't any schools in the immediate area that offered journalism. But as to who made the suggestion of Lincoln, I just don't recall.

As I said, I took the train. I was trying to remember about the segregation at the train station, but I would assume that in 1955, when I was going, the train station in Louisville was probably still segregated. Louisville was a quite segregated city in many ways. There were, by the time I was away in the late fifties and early sixties, there were a number of demonstrations by blacks trying to open up facilities in Louisville. There was also quite a battle over integration of schools. This is something that is very easy to check, but I'm pretty certain that there were white and colored waiting rooms and all the paraphernalia that made it so difficult growing up in the South. The other thing I don't remember is whether or not the trains to go into Missouri were segregated. Somehow, I don't have memories of that, but those are things that are easily checked out, and I'd like to check them out, because I need to check them out for my own information as well.

I remember getting my trunk packed and my family getting my trunk on the train. My older sister [Evelyn] had gone away to a vocational school, but I was the first to go away to college, and so it was all very exciting. Lincoln is located in Jefferson City, Missouri, which is the capital of Missouri, so it's a capital city, and for that reason had a certain amount of sophistication. You know, people did come to it. Quite a medium-sized city. Once again, the campus was not a totally striking campus. I mean, you wouldn't call it a beautiful campus, but it looked quite beautiful to me, you know, a couple of boys' dormitories, girls' dormitories, administration buildings. The journalism school was at the bottom of the hill, so there were a lot of steps we had to climb back and forth to get to the School of Journalism. But it was really quite a fine school in many ways, quite full service in the sense of a large agriculture department, ROTC, music, science, arts. Quite a school, and I think it was very dear to me, because there were friendships that I made there that were long-lasting friendships. Even today, there are people that I—not that I necessarily talk to them regularly, but if I meet or see them, we can instantly go back and remember, and there are deep bonds between a lot of the people there.

The head of the School of Journalism was a man named Dr. Armistead S. Pride, and there were several other teachers who were well known, especially among black publishers. We published a newspaper there called the Clarion. Dr. Pride was something of a scholar—and I say "something" of a scholar. Probably I shouldn't qualify it in that way, but he was a scholar on the black press. There is a book, I believe, that will be coming out sometime within the next year or so, that's based on work that he did. Dr. Pride only died in the last three or four years at a quite advanced age, and the book that he did on the black press and some of the figures in the black press will be published sometime within the next year or so. It was completed by Dr. Clint Wilson, who is the head of the Department of Journalism at Howard University now, so the name Armistead S. Pride is a well-known one among scholars of the black press and certainly also some publishers.

Dr. Pride took a liking to me early on, and so he was always very encouraging. We all took turns being editor of the paper, so I was the editor after a while. I had a really good time in many ways at Lincoln. I had joined a sorority before I left Louisville; I had become a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, so I when I arrived on the campus as a junior, I had some immediate ways to maintain and establish social contact because of my sorority affiliation. So that was very, very good.

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something about advertising and something also about subscriptions, the business side, not a lot, but just enough so that you got a fuller picture of what the newspaper business was about.

Moorhus: Did it involve broadcast journalism, too?

Gilliam: You mean television and all that?

Moorhus: Radio, television.

Gilliam: Certainly not television, and I'm trying to remember if it involved radio. My memory is that it was primarily the business side of the newspaper and then the editorial side and the news side.

Moorhus: Did you live in a sorority house?

Gilliam: No, we didn't have separate sorority houses, so I lived in the women's dormitory, had a roommate both years. You would be of the age to understand and may have had the same kind of experience in school, but we had curfews.

Moorhus: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Gilliam: We had eleven o'clock curfews, and those people who had the audacity to stay out past curfews were just sort of pariahs. This was all really quite proper and correct. There were three or four women's sororities, three major ones, and we all had various kinds of events, social events, induction of other people, and there was rivalry between the sororities, but certainly of a pretty good, clean nature, comparatively speaking, and the same with the boys' fraternities. Then, of course, we had all the sports, and it was just a wonderful experience.

When I look back, I am very, very happy that I didn't go to the University of Missouri, that I was not accepted, because for my own development, for my own sense of self, given, I think, the insecurities I had with my father having died early, with having been a formerly fat girl who had been humiliated, and dealing with a lot of—not necessarily even dealing with these things. There were issues in my personality that I didn't necessarily recognize or wrestle with, but I think there were certain underlying tendencies there, and certainly one thing that was important for me was to be in a situation where I was nurtured, and where there weren't the kind of extra pressures of race that would have been the case at a place like the University of Missouri, where, in 1954, I can't believe there would have been more than two or three blacks. In retrospect, I'm happy that I was able to go to Lincoln. As I said, I did well academically. I was cum laude, and when I graduated—

Moorhus: Before you graduate, I want to ask a couple more questions. You said you were there on work study and a scholarship. What kind of work did you do while you were there?

Gilliam: I worked in the office. In fact, when I was at home at Christmas, I pulled out a picture from that time. This is a picture of me when I was working at the Louisville Defender. This is me at my desk. I would have been either a freshman or a sophomore at Ursuline, and these very handsome West Point cadets came to the paper, and, of course, I was in love immediately. [Laughter.] They came to the paper, and this picture was taken around my desk.

Moorhus: That's a great picture.

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Gilliam: Right. So that was that same community that I carried with me to Lincoln and that supported me in Lincoln, and it's the same community in many ways today when I go back to Louisville to that same church. Many of those people are still there and that sense of support and family, it's still there.

Moorhus: When you went back to Louisville from Jefferson City, vacations and over the summer, did you pick up with Sam Gilliam?

Gilliam: Yes, as a matter of fact. Let's see. [Pause.] Yes. I mean, yes and no. Let me think about this a little bit. Sam also went into the service. I believe it was in 1956 when he graduated from the University of Louisville, he was sent to Japan, and he was in Japan for two or three years. So we were kind of, as I said, on and off. But we continued our correspondence, and when he was in Louisville, we would see each other, and then part of the time he was away. In fact, I'm pretty sure when I went back in '57, after graduating from Lincoln, he was not there. I think he was away from '56 until '58, and by the time he returned in '58, I was somewhere else.

Moorhus: So you were ready to graduate from Lincoln in spring of—

Gilliam: In the summer. No, I'm sorry, it would have been June, late June, early summer, of '57.

Moorhus: And did you consider other things other than going back to Louisville?

Gilliam: I was looking for a job, and I sent letters to several places. My preference was, actually, to go directly to a job of some kind. I sent a letter to the editors of the Courier Journal and Louisville Times—they were the morning and evening papers owned by the Bingham family in Louisville—trying to see if I could get a job there. They wrote back a very cryptic note, that, in effect, said, "Don't bother us." There was absolutely no encouragement whatever. I was asking about summer intern positions, anything, and I was very summarily turned away, and I have no doubt about the fact that it was all based on race. There's no doubt about it. There was no serious consideration.

I also, I believe, sent letters to the papers in Indiana. I was trying to get jobs in the vicinity of Louisville, and, again, I remember one paper where I inquired about internships. I was told that they had two internship spaces which they had already given to a couple of students from the University of Indiana. In both these letters, it was the tone of, "Don't bother me. This is it," and we all know the difference between letters that are encouraging and those that, in effect, say, "I don't want you."

So with that kind of response from the white press, you know, most of these papers had no blacks at all on them. During this time, the daily press was just extraordinarily segregated. In fact, they had only begun to write about blacks in the mid-fifties, around the time of the school segregation and the school desegregation cases. I kind of got it in my head that that route was going to be pretty futile. So I decided to start looking for a job at a black newspaper, and since I had worked at the Louisville Defender for so long, I certainly wanted something different.

I wrote a letter to the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Tennessee, and in August, I was hired there as a reporter. I was at home looking for a job for a couple of months, and in August, I packed up my trunk again and went down to Memphis. Memphis, of course, had many, many connotations for me. One, I had uncles and aunts there, and although I left when I was a very tiny child, it still was my hometown, so I was curious about, and looking forward to, going to Memphis.

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twenty-year-old reporter working for Mr. Wilson. I had only been there a few weeks, and when Little Rock broke, Mr. Wilson, of course, was going to go to Little Rock, as well he should have. I wasn't prepared to do that story, probably, in the way that was needed, with depth and all that. But the thing about it was that he told me to stay home, stay at the office, and you know I couldn't do that. So he went to Little Rock, and as soon as I could, I went to Little Rock as well. I did all my work in Memphis, and I just had to go. It was like I was being drawn by a magnet.

So against his express orders, I went to Little Rock. I went over with a photographer, Ernest Withers, who knew everybody and knew how to do things, and knew where to go. We went to the home of Daisy Bates, who was the head of NAACP in Little Rock. Her home was the command center for the Little Rock Nine, and it was also the place where a lot of the black reporters came. Some of them actually stayed there. It was a place where they held the strategy sessions, and only certain reporters who were well known and who were really venerable were a part of this, and Alex Wilson was a part of it. I was not, of course, but when I decided I was going to slip over there, after I had done all the work he told me to do at the office, this photographer and I went there, and he was very angry that I had defied him, but he let me stay. He became a player, almost, in this. Actually, upstairs I have Daisy Bates' autobiography, and if you want at some point, I'll get that, because it'll have something. I haven't read it yet. I'm going to be emceeing a program on Wednesday in which Daisy Bates is going to be featured.

Moorhus: Where is that going to be?

Gilliam: Here in Washington at—I've forgotten the name, some hotel. But one of the reasons I'm doing it is because of this connection that goes back, and I don't think she will remember me at all, but she will definitely know and remember Alex Wilson. As I said, Alex Wilson became part of the story, because he was—you probably don't remember this, but there were several newsmen who were attacked by the mob as they were walking down the street, I believe behind the students, and one of those was Alex Wilson. If you look at almost any of the stories, and especially the stories in picture books from that time, they will have those pictures of Alex, of Mr. Wilson, who was attacked by the mob. One of the reasons he told me he didn't want me there, he said, "It's too dangerous over there for a girl. It's too dangerous." And I said, "Mr. Wilson, you can't—it's the biggest story of the year," and by then the troops were in the area. And he said, "No, you stay here." I don't know if he was just shocked to see me come or not, but he was very kind to let me stay.

I did some reporting and did some backup, met quite a few people, and, interestingly enough, as a result of having been in Little Rock, I met some of the editors from Jet magazine, and they offered me a job in Chicago. So after two months working for the Tri-State Defender, I left and became an associate editor at Jet magazine.

Moorhus: Wow.

Gilliam: I know! I know! It was just wonderful. If I had not disobeyed Mr. Wilson and gone to Little Rock, I would have never met the people who eventually saw me, and I don't know what they saw, because I certainly didn't feel that I was any great, outstanding reporter at that point.

Moorhus: You said that you were drawn to Little Rock as if by a magnet. Was that your sense of it being a great story? Were you drawn as a journalist or as a young, black female?

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But that was really quite an experience, I must say. First of all, just Chicago itself. When I first got there, my sister was staying in kind of a home for women, and it was not my idea of where I wanted to live. It was really all right, but it just wasn't—

Moorhus: What was she doing in Chicago?

Gilliam: She was working as a seamstress down in the loop. I don't know that this was necessarily the place she'd want to be forever, but she had made herself comfortable there, so when I came, I said, "Why don't we get us an apartment?" We looked around and found some horrendous places that they were trying to rent at horrendous prices, but then we ended up settling on a very nice place, which she and I both were very happy with, in a place called Lake Meadows, which was a nice highrise with a view of the lake [Lake Michigan].

Moorhus: North Side, South Side?

Gilliam: South Side, but really nice. Working at Johnson Publishing Company was another of those life-changing experiences. As I said, when I got there at twenty, I think I was probably the youngest associate editor they'd hired. The magazine was not very old at that point. I don't think the magazine was more than three or four years old. I don't remember exactly when it was started. It was still in its infancy, but still in the form that has endured to this day.

The editor was a man called Ed "Buck" Clayton, and he was really, again, one of these crusty guys who was very, very short-tempered when the copy wasn't like he wanted. I was doing all kind of things, writing these little short stories, little things that would finally drive me away from there. [Laughter.] The centerfold would be a girl in a bathing suit, and I'd write the copy for the girl in the bathing suit, and I'd rewrite articles from papers. A lot of it was rewrite, so you really were supposed to be quite smooth as a writer, and I was definitely learning as I was going. I remember Mr. Clayton once said to me, he said, "You write like you've got concrete in your fingers." I remember many a day I would go into the bathroom into the ladies' stall and just cry, "Oh, will I ever get this?" Because they were just rough. They were really hard on you. But I thank goodness I had someone who really looked out for me. He used to call me Rookie. He was the copy chief, and he really looked out for me. He kept the wolves away and just tried to help me, and would sort of comfort me when Mr. Clayton would go off and would be critical.

Moorhus: Were there other women on the staff?

Gilliam: I don't think there was another woman associate editor at that point. Maybe there was another woman. There were only about six of us who were associate editors.

Moorhus: So you were very young and the only woman.

Gilliam: Let me go back and check that. There were other women working in the building and doing other things—librarian—but in terms of there being another woman who was an editor, I don't believe so. I know there was a woman who came during the summer and did an internship there—Rae Pace Alexander. There were women who were working at Ebony. There was a woman who was the society writer. Somehow that—isn't that funny, little things like that—because it's not a little thing when you think about it.

Moorhus: Well, yes, it's kind of a big thing if you were the first woman that they had hired, for example.

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I dated, in a very conscious way, a man who was probably—a very nice man, but he was probably the equivalent of a truck driver. I just couldn't deal with all of that Jet magazine celebrity phoniness.

Moorhus: So you wanted somebody that was "real."

Gilliam: Real. And I don't even remember his last name, but I remember his name was Harry, and he was not very well educated, but he was real and he was very fond of me, said what he meant and he meant what he said, and it was like my way of fighting those kind of crazy tendencies to borrow other people's fur stoles and to show up down on Rush Street at the jazz clubs as the date of Lonnie Satin or somebody, you know. [Laughter.] I mean, I did those things, and I thought, "It's not me. It's not what I want."

I guess the love affair that I remember that started in Chicago was a man, an African leader named Tom Mboya, who was from Kenya.* He was coming to the U.S. on several occasions, courting government leaders. He was a part of his country's independence apparatus. He was a trade unionist. I met him when a mutual friend had a party when he came to town, and we just kind of hit it off. I must say, I had this naive attitude about men in a sense, because I probably thought it was more serious on his side than it was. But certainly there was the mutual attraction, and we saw each other in Chicago, and at one point, he invited me to Washington, and I came to Washington and saw him there. It finally kind of fizzled out, but several years later, I would actually go to Kenya, and that is—

Moorhus: A later chapter?

Gilliam: Yes, a later chapter.

Moorhus: Was he much older than you?

Gilliam: Not that much. He was no more than about thirty when he started coming over. Just a young, brilliant man. In fact, I've got a couple of books about him up on my shelf, books that were written later. He was finally assassinated in Kenya, so he was that kind of leader. It seems to me that in the sixties everybody was being assassinated.

Moorhus: Yes. You mentioned Sammy Davis, Jr. Are there other people that you remember—political figures, entertainers?

Gilliam: Who used to come to Jet? Oh, gosh, everybody came through here. Sports figures. Why can't I think of the names? Whoever was big.

Moorhus: Did you do interviews with people?

Gilliam: Yes, I did interviews. I did a few cover stories. The cover story I remember most was, I did a whole series about this man in jail, in prison, in federal prison in Indiana, and I went down to the prison and interviewed him. I think the main thing I remember there is that his contention was that he was being unfairly imprisoned, and I think I believed it. So I wrote several stories about him. I'm trying to remember if he was ever released, what was the resolution of that case. I left before any final resolution, and I can't say that I know what the final resolution was.

______________________ * Tom Mboya - spokesman for Luo tribe in Kenya; assassinated in July 1969.

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Then I had heard about the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and that interested me. I was interviewed by a person who lived in Chicago who was a Columbia graduate, and what interested me about Columbia over Northwestern was, one, that it was a one-year course, an intensive, one-year course. I was also interested and attracted by the very practical nature of it—the daily newspaper. We did not spend a lot of time in academic subjects that weren't going to prepare me to go out and get a job. So Columbia was my choice. I applied to Columbia, and I was told that I did not qualify, and I was told I didn't qualify on the basis that I did not have enough liberal arts hours from my time at Lincoln.

Moorhus: What year was that?

Gilliam: The first year I applied was '59, and I was told that I didn't have enough liberal arts hours.

Moorhus: You'd only been in Chicago for a year?

Gilliam: For about a year and a half when I started looking around to go back to school. It was to go in '59, because I know I was at Jet for a total of two years. I went through the interview, but I was told that, as I said, I didn't have the qualifications.

Meanwhile, another friend of mine at Ebony had decided to leave, and he was going down to Tuskegee Institute to head up a new bureau down there called the Information Bureau. It's kind of like a public relations office, but they called it the Information Bureau because it was going to be PR and then it was also going to be a publications center. So when I told him my situation, he said, "Why don't you come down and be my assistant. You can go to Tuskegee and get the liberal arts hours you need to apply to Columbia, so at the same time you'll be working, making money, and you'll be able to go to school and get these hours, because you could take two classes each semester." It was a perfect situation.

Moorhus: And what is his name?

Gilliam: His name is Samuel F. Yette. So that was a perfect solution, so in September of '59, almost two years to the day that I went to Jet, I left. It's funny, Mr. Johnson, when I meet him coming to Washington—he comes and meets the president and all these people—he'll laugh, and he said, "Yes, I remember when you left. You said that you wanted to get married, and all you met in Chicago were married men," and that's all he remembered, I'm sure, of my much more complex reason for leaving and reason for telling him. That's always a little amusing to me. But it had been a real interesting experience at Johnson. I'm just so thankful that I got it, and when I think back on the way it happened and the speed at which I was able go from Lincoln to Memphis to Chicago, I feel extraordinarily blessed, and I've never ever regretted it. I'm very, very thankful for that whole experience.

There were several things about Tuskegee that really fascinated me. The idea of Tuskegee really fascinated me. One was that Tuskegee was in the deep South, and, of course, here again, it was the heart of the civil rights movement, and there was so much activity. Tuskegee was—I'm not sure about this, but maybe forty miles from Montgomery, Alabama, so I knew that I was going to have a chance to go and sit in the congregation of Dr. Martin Luther King [Jr.]. I also felt that, as vicious as the segregation was, I would be somewhat protected, because Tuskegee was an all-black town, in a sense, and so I felt that I would be spared a lot of that daily kind of harshness, because not only was Tuskegee an all-black town, it was a college town. There was so much that was focused on the campus, it attracted people from all over the country and all over

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Gilliam: I don't think I would have been barred from Northwestern. I think part of my situation was those things that I told you, and Columbia was just my preference.

Moorhus: So you went to Tuskegee. Oh, before we get you to Tuskegee, did you experience problems of discrimination in Chicago, which is in the North and as far north as you had ever lived?

Gilliam: I'm not particularly aware of experiencing problems of discrimination in Chicago. Working for a black publication, living in Lake Meadows was at that time, and I think—I'm trying to remember if Lake Meadows was an all black, sort of a middle-class black establishment. They were pretty new, these lovely highrises, as I said, that still exist. I don't know if they were predominantly black or not, but I suspect they were, though. I suspect that they were, because at that point, there were very few blacks living on the North Side. I joined a church, and that was predominantly black. I don't think I had that much interaction with whites. I do remember spending a fair amount of time at some of the clubs, because there was wonderful jazz down there. I remember hearing Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole. I remember Sam coming into Chicago and taking me to some of the clubs, and hearing all these great people.

I suspect that any racism was of the subtle variety, like where you would be seated in a club or a restaurant or that kind of thing. But I'd say much of my world was black, the black kind of upper crust, and so I didn't have that much direct connection. As I said, Mr. Johnson had his own dining room for employees, and his own cooks and all that, so we ate our lunch there in the building. There were a lot of quite well-known places on the South Side, quite well-known restaurants and things, although we did, of course, also go to the North Side for, as I said, primarily music and that kind of thing. I wasn't doing anything to particularly come into contact with whites. I didn't go and fall in love with an apartment on the North Side that I wasn't able to get, or I didn't try to get a job on any of the Chicago papers. I just really felt like I wanted to change from Chicago.

Moorhus: So you go down to Tuskegee. Did you take the train from Chicago to Tuskegee?

Gilliam: I don't remember. I don't remember. And I'm sure I had some trepidation about going south, because Alabama is deep South. The Alabama bus boycott had just ended and King was just beginning his ascendancy. There was still a tremendous amount of racial segregation tension. Mississippi was the heart of it all, but all those black belt states were fairly dangerous places to be. So I'm sure I had trepidation. And did I take the train? I probably did, but I just don't remember. I keep thinking about that trunk. The same trunk that I took to school was the trunk I took just about everywhere else. My sister [Evelyn] and I had gotten some furniture, which I didn't have, of course, until I got to Chicago, but then she got another roommate when I left, so I left pretty much everything that we had gotten together, and when I got to Tuskegee, I found a roommate there.

Moorhus: You had an apartment, then, in Tuskegee?

Gilliam: I shared an apartment with a woman who already lived there. She was a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine. Her name was Dr. Eleanor Isom, and I became her roommate.

Moorhus: And what courses did you take?

Gilliam: Well, I took some wonderful courses. I took primarily history courses. One of my professors was Dr. Charles B. Hamilton, who is now a professor at Columbia, and who has on

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Gilliam: That was one of the things that really excited me about going to Tuskegee, one of the many things, that I would be able to, not as a reporter or observer, but just as a congregant, be able to drive up there on some Sundays and hear Dr. King. It was just an absolutely stunning experience. The church was very full. I'm sure I went more than once, but I just happen to remember this—it must have been one of the early times. Once the pews were filled, they had folding chairs that they would put in the aisles, and somehow, though, it seemed to me that I started on a folding chair, but I ended up on a pew, and I don't quite know how that happened, and I cannot remember the title of the sermon. I just remembered, and Sam said that he can still remember my excitement and my overflowing emotions at being there. By that time, of course, they had won the Montgomery bus boycott, and so they had succeeded in integrating the buses. This little band of people who dared the system had started a revolution.

Certainly there were other things happening. There was the work of Thurgood Marshall* and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and there were other assaults on the legal system, but certainly the movement that launched Martin Luther King was a very key part of so much that was going on. So it was very exciting to be there and to hear him preach. I know there were other occasions, but that was part of the wonder.

Moorhus: Did you write about that? Did you write about the kinds of experiences you were having?

Gilliam: Not really, because we were sort of doing internal publications. I wasn't writing for another publication. It was more of a time when I was just experiencing things, and there would be those periods in my life, and I can remember being kind of happy to be out of the observer/writer role, and occasionally just experiencing a situation, and that's what that felt like. Those were the highlights of being in Tuskegee—my school work and working.

Moorhus: Did you have experiences of confronting segregation in a different way down there than you had previously?

Gilliam: Let me think about that a little bit. [Pause.]

Moorhus: I was wondering, since you were aware of some reservations about going to the deep South, whether there was anything that happened down there that was particularly distressing or confrontational.

Gilliam: I'm sure there were things that happened, even though we were, as I said, people who lived fairly circumscribed lives, because they knew how to avoid problems, and because the town proper, which sort of had everything—you had everything come in there—I would have more of my more overt brushes with segregation and police and all that once I was actually out covering things. But that was not my role there, and I think I was more concerned with playing it safe in the sense of following the rules. I think partly I was kind of concentrating on the next thing as well. I was concentrating on getting these hours, going to Columbia, getting a job. Tuskegee was kind of a means to an end, and so between working and then the school and then the classes and the studying, there wasn't a lot of time. I was trying to think—I was dating this man on the faculty down there, and I was trying to think—it seems to me that even the places we knew that

______________________ * Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), chief of legal staff of NAACP (1940-61); U.S. solicitor general (1965-67); appointed associate justice of U.S. Supreme Court, 1967.

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Gilliam: Yes. Columbia was pretty overwhelming for me at first. It was a very different kind of situation. I had been at Ursuline in a white setting, but as I said, once again, I would go home every night, and it was all women, and it was taught by nuns, and it was not as high powered. This class attracted people from all over the country, so many different levels of experience and knowledge and background, and so much variety in their exposure. People had traveled to Europe, and had a much wider exposure than I had. Thank God I had had the work at Jet and had done some of the work when I was at the weekly Defender and some things, so that I wasn't totally green. But by comparison to a lot of these people who were just—a lot of them were very well connected. Not all, of course, but there were a lot of very wealthy people there. One of the people who, incidentally, became a friend of mine who was in my class was Jackie Kennedy's half sister [Nina Auchincloss Steers Straight]. There was a man there who, I believe, had been the editor of a paper in a small town for some time, and I could never quite figure out why he was there. A lot of them were people in my age range or older. I was twenty-four—no, I was twenty-three, rather, when I arrived. So there were people who were that age as well, but there were also people who were thirty and over.

So it was a wide mix, and I felt that I had a lot of catching up to do, because in many ways it was really making kind of a cultural leap, and I think I became aware of how much more exposure some of these young people had had. Blacks have always had to be bicultural in a sense, but it's never been two-way. We've had to know about the general culture, but I realized that as much as I thought I knew, they knew so much more about the general culture. Of course, they didn't know anything about my culture, but they didn't have to. So that was their advantage, but by comparison, I didn't look as well versed in their culture, which I was expected to be—not in their culture, the more shared culture, but certainly I didn't grow up with the kind of references and stuff that they did. So it was quite an adventure, and quite difficult at times. I remember one of the professors. John Hohenberg looked at me and he said, "You know, you've got so many handicaps, you'll probably make it."

Moorhus: What a strange thing to say.

Gilliam: I know, but he was right. It was that sense that you're not only black, but you're a woman, and he just saw them as handicaps. And he was right in the sense of where the journalism business was in 1960 and '61, and in many ways where Columbia was. [Tape interruption.]

Moorhus: Let's go back to your being in New York. What do you remember about the classes as well as the living and social situation?

Gilliam: Basically, the classes at Columbia were nine-to-five every day, so they were long, intense days. We put out a newspaper. We took turns as editors and picture editors. We learned to take pictures. We covered New York the way reporters covered New York. We covered some of the same stories that the New York Times, the Post, at that time the Herald, the New York Daily News—we were there, and I think that all the reporters just got accustomed to seeing the Columbia kids there. I doubt if they called us "kids" under those circumstances.

One of the stories I remember covering was Winston Churchill, from a distance. He came to New York, and I don't think he ever got off his yacht, but we covered that story. We covered the United Nations. The whole city was our beat, and it was a great way to learn the business, because, once again, we were writing on deadline. A lot of the professors were active journalists, a lot of New York Times reporters there.

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Gilliam: Right. Exactly. They all lived at International House, we all lived at International House together, and so we just had some incredible times. We did things together. I mean, I went to the beach for the first time. I was twenty-three before I ever saw the ocean. We all piled in somebody's car and went out to Jones Beach one night. I had never done things like ice skating, and groups of us would go, and because I couldn't ice skate, they'd put me in the middle, and about eight would get on each side of me, and we would manage to ice skate in the park. There were just all kind of things that didn't cost very much, but I realized how limited my fun had been when I saw the kind of things that people did and enjoyed. The guys were at different schools. My girlfriend was at Fordham [University], I was at Columbia. The guys were studying advanced business, and they were at various schools around there. I don't even remember what schools they were at now. It was a time of getting introduced to a lot of different things, and just a very good and exciting time in many ways.

Moorhus: Did you go back to Louisville at all during that year?

Gilliam: I went back for Christmas, I think. I know I didn't go back for Thanksgiving, because I spent Thanksgiving with a family in New York, but I believe I went back for Christmas, if I'm not mistaken. Money, of course, was always a factor. It's one of the things I had been doing when I was working at Tuskegee, saving money for school. I also got a couple of scholarships, but still it was very expensive.

Moorhus: Did you have to work while you were in New York?

Gilliam: That I just couldn't do. You just couldn't go to Columbia and work, or at least I couldn't, so I didn't. But luckily, I had been able to save. Columbia was hard. It was a real challenging situation. It was hard being a minority. Being a black and a woman, having that double burden, was hard. I had some friends at International House who helped to give me the kind of cultural nurturing that I needed. I made some very good friends at Columbia. One friend is still one of my best friends right now, a Jewish woman from New York who lives here now—Merle Goldberg. I met her at Columbia. She was real close then, and we got to know each other because everything was alphabetical, and so Gilliam and Goldberg.

Moorhus: Were you married? You said Gilliam.

Gilliam: You're right. No, I wasn't married. So it wasn't that. Why did we think that? That's right, I wasn't. And she said that, and I didn't even know. So maybe that weren't many Ds, Es, Fs, because I was Dorothy Butler.

Moorhus: Yes.

Gilliam: But I remember she said, "Remember, we used to always sit together because of our names?" And I would say, "Yeah," and I was thinking Gilliam and Goldberg. That's funny. That is funny. But at any rate, that seemed to have thrown us together.

Moorhus: Something threw you together.

Gilliam: Yes, but we'd apparently sat relatively close together. But she was just a marvel to me. There was another Jewish woman there who I got to be friendly with—Marian Elias. The cultural thing was just amazing to me, because I had never heard anybody show such disrespect for their parents. These girls talked about their mothers like they were dogs, and I had just never—it was just amazing to me. My mother was something. We just venerated our mother, and you just

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some of the people at my church sent me some money, still these little folded dollars that just represented so much love and caring. My mother did what she could, and it's just always been that sense of support. I think about it now, that it must have been something for my mother to have this daughter who was getting ready to go off to Africa. My mother at that point had never probably been much further than New York, but she was always supportive of anything I wanted to do. That was another typical thing, where she said she just prayed for me, and all she wanted was to make sure that I wrote on a regular basis so that she'd know that things were going well.

Moorhus: But you got your degree before you left?

Gilliam: I got my degree before I left, and my mother and my sister came up for graduation, so that was very exciting.

Moorhus: Juanita or Evelyn?

Gilliam: Evelyn. They were very, very thrilled at my graduating and getting my master's. I'm not sure whether I went home or not. I may not have gone to Louisville between graduation and leaving for Africa. I don't quite remember.

One of the things that happened before I graduated was that I was interviewed by the Washington Post. One of the positives about Columbia is that it's a good employment agency. Many, many people come in and interviewed the students, so I had interviewed with the Post. My whole reason for going to Columbia was to get on a daily newspaper. I had interviewed with several places, and the guy at the Post was the city editor, Ben Gilbert, and after he'd interviewed me, he wrote me a letter that was very, very different from the letter that I had received a few years earlier from the Louisville Times and from the paper in Indiana. He said they really were interested, he thought I needed more experience, I should try to get a job in the boondocks for a couple of years, and then be back in touch. He said, "But if you ever happen to be in Washington, come by and meet our managing editor, Al Friendly."

It just happened that for Operation Crossroads, the orientation was going to be in Washington, before we went to our destination and I was bound for Kenya. So I decided to take him up on his interest. I got to town and I called him and told him I was in town, and he said, "Why don't you come by and meet the managing editor?" So I did. I got a foretaste of Washington, because we were meeting right over here at the Washington Cathedral. In our group there were eighteen of us, and there were three blacks. I was trying to get a cab on Wisconsin Avenue to go to the Post, since I didn't know anything about the city, and I must have gotten passed by by a hundred cabs before I finally got one. I mean, Washington in the early sixties was a real segregated city.

At any rate, I went down to the Post, and I met Al Friendly, and then I met Russ Wiggins. Wiggins was the editor, and Al Friendly was the managing editor. Ben Gilbert was the city editor. Al Friendly said, "Well, what brings you to Washington?" And I said, "I'm on my way to Africa." And he said, "Oh, that's very interesting. Why are going?" and all that, and I explained to him why I was going. He said, "Why don't you write something for us?" And I said, "Sure." We talked about the kind of pieces he would want.

I just remembered, I did go home before going to Africa, because I had also gone to the Louisville Courier Journal and told them about going to Africa, and they also said, "Why don't you write us a story." You know, first person, "Louisville girl goes to Africa" kind of thing. So I was pretty busy once I got to Kenya, writing, doing all this freelance work. I wrote stuff for

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where she talked about when she—I mean, this is a Mississippi woman who didn't vote until she was in her forties—but she talked about how her first trip to Africa was just so incredible to her, because she was able to see black people, that she knew that black people could do anything and everything, and she'd always been told that that was not the case. And mine, on a different scale, was that same way. I was a lot younger, and I hadn't been beaten down as much as she was. But that was very, very exciting to me. In a sense, I guess, I had the somewhat romantic idea that I was going back to my roots. It was the early sixties, so the whole black consciousness movement hadn't happened, but it was still very, very exciting for me.

Interestingly enough, there were several hundred of us going to Africa all together, and what happened was that we flew here, came for orientation in Washington—

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Moorhus: You were saying that seeing blacks in positions of authority upset some of the whites?

Gilliam: Some of the white people in the group had to be sent back home, because they couldn't take the culture shock of an all-black country. It's very interesting how the reverse psychology worked for some people. They thought they wanted to do it, but the reality was too much.

Moorhus: It was just overwhelming.

Gilliam: It was overwhelming. We were in Nigeria a couple of weeks, and then went on to Kenya. Our group was about eighteen or twenty. There's a book somewhere on my shelf about Operation Crossroads, and one chapter talks about our group in Kenya. Kenya in the early sixties was a quite extraordinary place. It was still, at that point, the favorite colony of white English people. Kenya is incredibly beautiful. It has an altitude of about six thousand feet. The weather is the most temperate in Africa. The whites lived in something they called the White Highlands, which were the most beautiful parts of Kenya, primarily on estates. The blacks still lived in tribal situations, in many cases.

What had happened in the late fifties, the leader of the independence movement in Kenya was Jomo Kenyatta,* and Kenyatta had led something called the Mau Mau, in which they had perpetrated a lot of acts of violence on whites. Kenyatta had been, for some years—first of all, he was banned, then he was jailed, and the summer we were there, the summer of 1961, Kenyatta was to be released from jail after many years, and Kenya was on the verge of independence. The actual formal independence would not come for two years, but these were the first steps toward independence, and the actual date had been set. So we were really there as we saw the end of the Brits' reign and the beginning of independence.

I have a couple of pictures in here that I'll show you at some point, of me and another woman in our group as we arrived in Kenya. Frankly, as I said, one of the reasons I was interested in Africa and in Kenya was this leader, Tom Mboya. [Referring to photograph.] Here I am, and this woman was the wife of one of the African leaders, and this young lady was a member of our Operations Crossroads. She was a student at Harvard.

______________________ * Jomo Kenyatta (1897-1978) - imprisoned and sentenced on 8 April 1953 to seven years hard labor; after completing sentence, he was still confined until freed 22 August 1961. Became prime minister of self-governing Kenya on 1 June 1963, and President of Republic of Kenya on 12 December 1964.

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And that's one of the instances that this woman writes about in this book, when I recounted my frustration at being passed by on the roads.

Moorhus: Sort of like being passed by the cabs on Wisconsin Avenue.

Gilliam: Yes, but this time, after having been so thrilled with blacks in Nigeria, where you had a predominantly black country, and blacks running it, you come to Kenya, and it was like a little England. Yet it was in Africa.

Moorhus: Did you get into the homes of any of the local people?

Gilliam: Yes, I got into the homes of some. I said we built a road leading to a children's hospital. The person who was the doctor there, a Dr. Mungai Njorge, he was quite well off. I think he had been educated either in the U.S. or in England and was a medical doctor and quite well regarded. He had quite a nice home. Also I was in Tom's home. It was not particularly palatial at all. He at this time was still basically a trade unionist, balancing all these really difficult politics. I got in the home of one of the white people, which was quite palatial. They lived very, very well, and I'm trying to remember who that was and why I was there, but it was with some of the other young people from Operation Crossroads.

Moorhus: An official function or something?

Gilliam: Right. Exactly. One of the nice things about the summer was the excitement of the people about the approaching independence. Every time you'd be riding along or whatever, people would always raise up their hands, and they'd say, "Uhuru, uhuru," and that was for independence—freedom. "Uhuru" is "Freedom now." So there was this enormous sense of excitement that freedom was coming, and that there was going to be change, and of course, there's so many things that have happened with that change. And, of course, I always think that in this country, when we look at what's happening in the African countries, we don't remember how long it took this country to get to some point before it settled down into a workable situation, the turmoil that many of these countries have gone through, and it is sad, there's no doubt about it. But I think we have to realize that all new countries go through certain periods, and given colonialism and the poverty-stricken way in which many of these countries were left, they had been stripped of a lot of their natural resources.

At any rate, the big thing that summer, in addition to the excitement of the people about approaching independence, was that Jomo Kenyatta was going to be released from detention. There had been a build-up all summer about that. There also was a build-up of—there was a constant hint of danger around politicians and around politics. I remember a couple of us went out with Dr. Njorge once, and he took us to some of the outlying areas and outlying territories, and there would be roadblocks, police roadblocks, at certain places, just a constant feeling of danger and potential problems, fear.

But in August of 1961, finally the word came down that Kenyatta was going to be freed. He had a home in a place called Gatundu, so he was going to be released to his place, and a couple of us—in fact, the young lady whose picture I showed you and me—we were somehow able to wrangle our way to be inside the compound, because we were going to try to help. We said we wanted to help do things like unpack the dishes for the house, because the house hadn't been occupied. I don't know where Kenyatta's wife had been, but at any rate, finally he was going to be able to come home.

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under control. The rich people pretty much had to guard themselves—their compounds, their lives, their children—all the time, but they had plenty of money to hire plenty of guards.

We, in our eager American ways, got to the palace to see the emperor early, and the guns that were used to guard the palace at night had not been put away, and we got there, and we just saw all these guns. It was very clear that that country couldn't have survived in that kind of armed, unequal state forever. Certainly, as Haile Selassie started, and I mean after his death, it was clear that something had to happen, and, of course, you eventually had the Marxist takeover. But like most problems, they often are brewing for many years before there is an explosion or a resolution of some kind. But, of course, Ethiopia just ended particularly tragically—victim of the Cold War, victim of its own internal follies and problems. But it was kind of an exciting climax to that trip to Africa. We left Ethiopia and came back through Nigeria, and then finally came back to the U.S.

Moorhus: Did you bring things back with you?

Gilliam: Some things, yes. One thing I brought back was that fly whisk over there, which I got from Kenyatta, from inside the compound. He always carried a fly whisk, which was a symbol of authority. It also had a very practical use, brushing away the flies. I brought back some things, but I didn't have the money to really bring back a lot. Much of the African pieces I've gotten, and, of course, my interest in Africa and collecting African art with small pieces I have, goes back to those early times. But I was a very poor student, and really just had almost nothing. I wasn't able to buy very much. But I did bring back some things, some fabrics and things for my mother, and I'm sure I brought some things back for Sam, who had loaned me the great $200. [Laughter.]

Moorhus: Okay, we will quit for tonight and start at the Post next time.