Oral History Program Bettye B. Gillespie Interviewed By Rebecca Ory Hernandez 11 July 2012 i ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Bettye B. Gillespie Interviewed by Rebecca Ory Hernandez 11 July 2012 Copyright © 2013 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber and Davis County Communities Oral History Collection includes interviews of citizens from several different walks of life. These interviews were conducted by Stewart Library personnel, Weber State University faculty and students, and other members of the community. The histories cover various topics and chronicle the personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Gillespie, Bettye, an oral history by Rebecca Ory Hernandez, 11 July 2012, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Bettye B. Gillespie July 11, 2012 1 Abstract: Bettye Gillespie met with Rebecca Ory Hernandez from Weber State University’s development office to talk about her life and education, along with the life and activism within the NAACP of her husband, James Harding Gillespie. James Harding Gillespie was the chair of the Ogden, Utah NAACP chapter for over 30 years. Bettye joined “Jim” in his work as a civil rights leader. Bettye also speaks of attending Ogden High School, then continuing her education in politics and later at the University of Utah in the Human Resources Management master’s level program. Bettye served and retired as the first female Equal Opportunity Director at Hill Air Force Base. ROH: Today is Wednesday, July 11, 2012, and we are in the home of Ms. Bettye Gillespie. I am Rebecca Ory Hernandez, here to do an oral history with Bettye about her involvement with the NAACP Organization and the civil rights movement in Utah as well as nationally. Why don’t we just start with talking a little bit about your education and how you came to be involved in political science? BG: I have a degree in political science from the University of Utah. I also studied at Howard University in Washington D.C. and nearly completed a Master’s Degree with the exception of a written thesis. My aunt lived in Washington D.C. and that’s how I got there. I came home and got my Master’s Degree at the University of Utah in Human Resource Management after I started working. ROH: How did you become so interested in politics? BG: My husband was president of the NAACP for thirty-three years. Of course, that automatically involved me in politics. 2 ROH: Was he the president of the Ogden branch? BG: Marshall White was the president and my husband was the vice president. Marshall White was an Ogden policeman and was killed in the line of duty. My husband then became president. That would have been quite a number of years ago. My husband passed away three years ago. ROH: Do you remember the year when he became president? BG: I don’t remember, but they have a really nice portrait of Marshall White at the Center and they could tell you. ROH: What were some of the things that you did as a member of that group? BG: I was a Youth Director. We had quite an active group at that time. My kids were all involved and two of my daughters served on the National NAACP board. My oldest daughter, Shauna, and my middle girl, Deon, both served on the youth board and we were seriously into it. There were so many demonstrations and marches going on all over the country. We were equally involved. Just before we lost Marshall White, we moved to a house in Riverdale. It was up on the edge of Washington Terrace. We bought this house and some people threw tar through the window just before we moved in. It caused quite a stir. ROH: What year would that have been? Give me a time frame. BG: That would have been about thirty-five to forty years ago (early 1970’s). ROH: What were you able to do? Was there any kind of response? BG: It was all over the paper and in the news. There were neighbors around there who came with their scrub buckets and cleaned it all up. Of course, the FBI was involved and they don’t tell you a lot but they took care of it. There were some 3 kids in the neighborhood that my kids knew. We didn’t know they lived there at the time. I’ll never forget one lady who came with her grandson and he had his scrub bucket and they were really cleaning that tar. My kids were little and the Stake President on the side had two big strapping boys and he told them, “Go look after and make sure the Gillespie girls don’t have any problems.” As it turned out it, not everybody was nice. There was one man who said, “Well, our property values are going to go down.” Before it was over with, the Men’s Layman League from the Congregational Church came out and formed a circle around that block. They were going to protect us. There were other people we knew personally that came from the United Methodist and Episcopal Churches. There was one guy that came and sat on our front porch with a big rifle. ROH: How long did you live there? BG: We lived there for about eight years. ROH: Were there other incidents after that first incident? BG: Telephone. ROH: Crank calls? BG: Yes. My oldest girl loved to answer the phone and it got to the point where they had to go through a telephone operator in order to get to us. We got a lot of crank mail, so all of our mail went through the postmaster before it came to us. Those were interesting times. In the meantime, they were having riots in Los Angeles and throughout the country. We survived and before it was over everybody was our friend and all of their kids were in our yard wanting to play in the kid’s pool and the swing set. 4 ROH: You mentioned some marches that went on here in Ogden. Can you tell me about a couple of those and what was surrounding the reason for the marches? BG: The one I can remember was when they completed the Marshall White Center. My husband had a lot to do with that center being built. The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was on the National Board of the NAACP. We talked back and forth to him and got it funded because there was no recreation at all in that area. ROH: There were no parks or recreation centers on that side of town? BG: No. ROH: At that time in history, were things pretty well integrated in Ogden? BG: Well, certainly some people were. We did have a problem with Lorin Farr Park. At that time, they didn’t want black people to swim in that pool there. I was still in the youth group when people told us that, so I threw my bathing suit over my back and with a couple of men went out there to see. Sure enough, it was true. We went to the city council and they talked about, “Why don’t we build a swimming pool in that area?” Now, we’re talking about one tenth of one percent black people at that time. They didn’t have any money to build a swimming pool for a handful of black folks. Weber State was on 25th Street and they had a pool. They said, “They can come up here and swim.” It really surprised everybody. It turned out that they were embarrassed. Of course, I was no great swimmer and when I was a child my mother would have never let me go into a public pool. We had our share of problems and there were restaurants that would not serve black people. ROH: Do you remember any of the names of those places? 5 BG: I’ll never remember the names of them. One of them was a Chinese restaurant. It’s long gone. There was another one where they were just as nice as could be. There was one that Jimmy and I would go to and one day we took another black couple and they wouldn’t serve us. ROH: Odd. BG: Really odd. That was that same Chinese restaurant. ROH: Was this early in your marriage or after you’d already had children? BG: I know that would have been in the sixties. I do remember that because after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, we went right back to that same restaurant with that other couple and they gave us such good service. They gave us so many shrimp we didn’t know what to do with them. We were in Washington, D.C. when the Civil Rights Bill passed. The NAACP lawyer came into the meeting and told us that the bill was passed. After we got home we went to the restaurant. The couple with us was also quite prominent. Much later, Margo was on the board of trustees of Weber State. They were just really lovely people. ROH: What were their last names? BG: Margo and Ira Horton. ROH: What was it like being in the meeting in Washington D.C. when that bill was passed? BG: There was a really big celebration. People were seriously into civil rights and there were a lot of people there. There were a lot of big branches in Washington D.C., from New York, Maryland and Virginia. There were really a lot of people there. They just really whooped it right up. 6 ROH: That must have been amazing. BG: It was. That was before we got to know Governor George Romney of Michigan. ROH: Tell me a little bit about that. BG: We always liked him. He was always here for something. There were meetings we were involved in all kinds of things. He was the one that came here a lot. The Detroit branch of NAACP was the largest branch. They just had loads of people. They were really active. The NAACP had a meeting in Mississippi—that’s where my husband’s family was from, Starkville, Mississippi. The meeting was in Jackson. My kids were really little and it was just really hot there. We’d never felt anything like that before. I almost got sick. Jimmy took me back to the hotel, but the people of the Detroit branch said, “As far as we know, the only Governor in the United States who is coming to this meeting is George Romney.” They asked, “You know the Romney’s don’t you?” I said, “Oh, yeah.” They asked, “Could you go meet them for us?” We said, “Yes, we can.” When the limo pulled up in front of the conference center and he got out he said, “There are my Utah folks.” He remembered that we were from Utah. He was so happy to see us because he didn’t know what kind of a reception he was going to get. He just hugged and kissed me. He only knew us from when he was coming back and forth home and since we got invited to everything we were always somewhere he was. ROH: Were both of your families’ friends or was the relationship primarily with George? BG: It was just with him. ROH: Was he active in helping with the NAACP at that time? 7 BG: I think he was in Michigan. He must have been because they liked him so much. ROH: Tell me about some of the other memorable times in the sixties and seventies with the NAACP. There were a lot of changes going on in the country in the late sixties as well. BG: After the Civil Rights bill passed in 1964, the voting rights act passed in 1965. We still had problems. A lot of people were killed on the court house steps trying to vote in the South. ROH: Was that also happening here? BG: No. As I said, we just had a handful of black folks. Throughout the country there were all kinds of changes. It was just absolute turmoil all over the South and a lot of other places like California. They had fires, riots and all kinds of things. There were a lot of other groups other than NAACP. Urban League didn’t have a lot of turmoil with them but there were also the Black Panthers. ROH: I remember them. They used to scare me a little bit, but I was glad that they were out there. BG: I’m sure. We had an NAACP meeting in Los Angeles and I believe it was Hubert Humphrey that came. I can’t be sure, but I can remember this Jewish man who was on the board. They’re still giving awards in his honor. There was a group that actually broke into the convention hall before Jackie Robinson died and he was standing on the edge of the stage when these guys broke in. He was a big, strong man and stopped them. The Black Panthers came in and just took them right out of there. They had been marching around protecting us. That was some kind of time. 8 ROH: What is it like compared to now? What are your thoughts about the changes that have been made? BG: It’s just really, very different. I’ve served two terms on the board of trustees at the University of Utah. I was involved in a lot of things. I was on the Martin Luther King Commission and the Utah division of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. That was when Clarence Thomas was head of the Civil Rights Commission. ROH: What kind of projects did you work on in that role? BG: We worked on just about everything. People who worked with the city and the state could file a complaint to the Civil Rights Commission. We did some of those things. ROH: You handled those hearings? BG: Yes. Of course, the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission did everything. ROH: You’ve seen a lot, that’s for sure. BG: Yes. I remember when Coretta King came to Utah. I think that was after he (Martin Luther King Jr.) was assassinated, but I’m not sure. I believe she went to the Unitarian Church that was right on the corner from the University. That’s the only time I recall ever seeing her. I know that Martin Luther King Jr. came here once. I didn’t see him. I know they had put up a great big billboard that said he was a communist and all that kind of stuff. It seems to me that it was on what used to be Highway 91.We didn’t have Highway 89 then. Highway 91 is still there but it just goes through Kaysville and Farmington. They were not anywhere near as big as they are now. Anyway, there were a lot of people offended and I think 9 they might have made them take it down. As I recall, he must have been going to the University of Utah to speak. ROH: Did you get to visit with either of them when they came to Utah? BG: I don’t think I ever saw Dr. King, but when Coretta was here I did visit with her. ROH: What was that like? BG: There were a lot of people around but she was very gracious and very pretty. They had so many people, they were all outside. I can remember that. I remember being seated in the choir loft of the church, so I was really close to her. That was after he had died because I can remember giving a donation for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. I think that’s why she was here. I don’t ever remember seeing him. ROH: Are you still involved with the NAACP today? BG: I still belong, but I’m not as active as I once was. I try to go to a few things. I should be able to go to more. Before my husband died we went to banquets and activities. ROH: I know they do a lot on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Are you involved with that at all? BG: After my husband died I had a difficult time. So, I can’t say that in these past three years that I’ve done a lot, but I have been to things. I’ve been up to Weber to various things. Julian Bond is still President of the board. I got an award for Rosa Parks. ROH: You did? BG: That’s what that article was about in that book. 10 ROH: Did you ever have an opportunity to meet her? BG: No. ROH: What was your favorite part of living in Ogden and being a part of the Civil Rights movement here? BG: I never thought about any favorite part. We were just always going. We were always busy. Believe it or not, we got invited to everything. We got invited to the Governor’s Ball and we were always going somewhere. If you’re involved like we were with the University board, we went to everything they had. I said, “I’ll never eat another meatball in my life. I’ll never eat another olive.” We went to all of those things and all of their athletic games. We went to Weber’s games and we were always really busy. ROH: Active in the community too. Is there anything that I might have not touched on that you’d like to share? You’re being very modest, I know. BG: I can’t think of anything. ROH: Did you ever serve on the City Council in Ogden or any committees? BG: No. I got an YCC award. Actually, they were the YWCA and then they had some kind of a falling out. That’s when they became the YCC. I got their award early on when they were still YWCA. They were located near the Eccles Center. Then, they built this other facility and that has been there a really long time. I was a little bit active in that. I was always involved in something. I was pretty active in the League of Women voters. I always had the NAACP youth group. ROH: What did the youth group focus on? What was their purpose? 11 BG: They were being brought up in the tradition. They had a national college chapter and they did all kinds of things. There were those who sat at lunch counters and they did all kinds of things. John Lewis, who is now a congressman, was beaten up over that Pettus Bridge. Some of these things I remember from television. I was the Equal Opportunity Officer at Hill Air Force Base for twenty years. I remember having to go what they call TDY, to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. This lady who was from here had been with the Clearfield Job Corps center and she heard that there were some people from Hill Air Force Base out there at Maxwell. I looked up and there she was to see me. I had to stay there three weeks. We had a whole bunch of training. She came over to see if there was anybody she knew. She just screamed when she saw me because she had taught at the Clearfield center. She said, “I’m going to take you to see this Pettus Bridge.” and all that. That was the highway that went from Montgomery to Selma one way. She took me to where Dr. King’s father’s church was. In fact, we went to one of the churches. I don’t remember whether it was Dr. King’s church. I think it was his father’s church that she took us to. We went to see that. I thought that was sure interesting. It was something else. There was a man who was in the Nixon administration who came down to speak. His name was Laurence Corb. He’s still active in some things. He did the Civil Rights work for Nixon when they were working on Affirmative Action. ROH: What are your thoughts on Affirmative Action? BG: I was definitely in favor of it because there had been so many incidents where people wanted to go to colleges and they couldn’t get in because there was just a 12 little bit of segregation and discrimination. That really helped some kids get a really good education. We knew one of the Little Rock Nine, Earnest Green. We were involved in that. I think he is still working for the government. Some of them have passed on, but I saw something in the paper about one of the women not too long ago. ROH: She still gives lectures. BG: Does she? ROH: She does. One of my friends lives in Little Rock and she’s part of a book club and they invited her to speak to their book club. It’s a pretty big group of ladies. It’s probably been about three or four years ago now. She had written a book, either a children’s book or a young person’s book about her experience. So, she was talking about her book. BG: Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine. I can remember it was in a magazine. It was these two military men with fixed bayonets taking this little girl to school. What was that magazine? ROH: I can’t remember. It wasn’t “Highlights,” was it? BG: It was a regular magazine that everybody took. If you saw any of his drawings on back of his magazine you would recognize it. ROH: Norman Rockwell? BG: Norman Rockwell. He had this little girl with the braids going up like that and there she was going to school having to have two military people escort her. ROH: Was it Ruby Bridges? 13 BG: It could have been. I remember that they just weren’t going to have it. Eisenhower was President and he had been a general and he didn’t take any nonsense. He just said, “Go down there and get those kids in school.” ROH: What was it like being in Utah while that was going on in the United States? BG: I can’t say it was all that bad because I have warm feelings about my teachers. Not all of them, but some. I remember when I was in high school there were only maybe eight black kids in there. ROH: How could you even imagine that was happening while you have access here in Utah and they did not have access in another part of the country? Did it ever occur to you? BG: No. We never had more than eight kids in the high school in one of Ogden High’s largest graduating classes. It might still be the largest. We had problems. There was a group there that all wore green shirts and they were kind of like a gang. They used to hang around in the hall and you had to pass them to get to the girls restroom. I was kind of afraid of them and I was really little. One of the guys that was in that group ended up as a law professor at BYU. He said, “Bettye, don’t you ever tell anybody how awfully we behaved.” They just meddled. They weren’t that much into racism or anything. They were awful but he didn’t want me to ever tell anyone and I said, “I’m going to tell everybody under the sun,” but I never did. He turned out to be the nicest fellow. We’d go to class reunions and he’d say to my husband, “Jim, when are you going to join the Mormon Church?” He said, “My wife can’t even get me to join the Episcopal Church.” There was one other on the university board from that group and he didn’t want me to say anything 14 about it because he had grown up to be quite a business man and had a lot of money. I never said anything about him to anybody. ROH: Why do you think you stayed so involved and served for all of those years? What kept you going? BG: I don’t know. It’s just something we got into. My husband was President of the NAACP and I wrote all of his speeches he gave and all those articles. ROH: You wrote a lot of his speeches? BG: All of them. ROH: All of them. Wow. That’s impressive. BG: Formal speeches and stuff like that. If he had to just talk to the press, he’d talk to the press. He was cute and had a cute personality so the people liked to interview him. ROH: Are there any words of wisdom or advice that you have to give to young people today? If students at Weber State who are doing research on civil rights and just about the future, is there any kind of message that you would like to leave to the future? BG: They have this group up there, Black Scholars United. This past year and they gave me an award. I don’t know how deeply involved they are in that but most of them knew about it because it’s a part of the history, the books. I’ve spoken at Weber a couple of times. I did one on Rosa Parks for one of Adrienne’s classes. They were interested and they wanted to know about this back of the bus thing. I had to tell them about the military people that went off to a segregated armed services and how President Truman desegregated it. I had a colonel out at Hill 15 Air Force Base that said he went over in a segregated Air Force and came back in a desegregated one. He was white. He knew a lot about it. I had to tell them about that and how those men came back home and had to sit at the back of the bus. ROH: Were they shocked? BG: I don’t know whether they were shocked, but they were sure interested. ROH: Can you imagine putting your life on the line and coming home and being told no you can’t sit where you want to? BG: Prisoners of war had more privileges than black veterans. Through the years various presidents have gotten rid of it. I remember this colonel at the base said he remembered that. ROH: Do you have any recollection of segregation as a child? You didn’t mention anything as a young girl when you first got to Utah, do you remember there being separate places for blacks and whites? BG: No, just that restaurant thing. I remember we had a junior high school called Central Junior High School at either 24th or 25th and Monroe. There were not a lot of black kids in school but there were a couple of black boys. There was a little mom and pop drug store that sold candy and they got into it with this man about something. Of course, I didn’t know anything about it. I went over to get my candy and he wouldn’t serve it to me. He said because these two black kids had been over and raised a fuss and I said, “Well, what does that have to do with me?” “Well, I’m just not going to serve any black people anymore.” I went right back across the street and told Mr. Junk, the principal, “I don’t know why he 16 blamed me because of something that somebody else did.” Mr. Junk took me over there and he told him, “You’ll serve her or none of the kids will ever come over here again.” That’s where he got most of his money from. I tell you, he was surprised and so was I because there weren’t many people who were willing to do that. I’ll never forget him. He was a big fella too. There I was only five feet tall. ROH: Well, you have seen a lot of changes over time. BG: I have. There are other stores. For example, Walgreens got into it for a while. People didn’t know what to do here. You could go in there and buy anything you wanted but they didn’t want you to sit at the counter and have a soda or a malt. I was old enough to remember that we boycotted that place. They didn’t have that many people going in there. They had to shut down. It was a long time before they ever opened up in Ogden again. There are fifty-two units in this condominium complex and I’m the only Black. When we lived in Washington Terrace we bought a really pretty home. My husband just loved it. He had three vegetable gardens, twenty rose bushes, fruit trees and this, that, and the other. It was just really nice and that’s where we lived all the time. It was right near the schools and the kids could walk to each one of them. We lived there for a long time. He became ill and was ill for a long time before it dawned on me that he was seriously ill. He was not doing well. My kids, by that time, had graduated from college and had moved away. My youngest daughter Kendall went to Weber. The other two went to the University of Utah. My youngest was daddy’s baby and he said, “If you go to Weber instead of the University of Utah, I’ll buy you a car,” and he did. He bought 17 a car because the Gillespie’s have been in the Ford Lincoln Mercury business for years. So, she stayed home and they went away. Pretty soon, Jimmy and I were there all by ourselves. Here I was trying to do all this yard and for a while we had some little deer babies passing through. There were some twin deer we had occasionally. We don’t know where they came from or how they got there but it was not far from here. They came running through our backyard and I was trying to get the neighbor boy to come over so he could see them. I kept saying, “T.J., come see the baby deer.” He never got over there in time. He was only about three. I look in the paper and there is T.J., he’s the quarter back at Fremont High School. I couldn’t believe it. When he was three years old, he said, “Mr. Glesky.” He couldn’t say Gillespie. “Would you come play with me? My sisters won’t play with me.” ROH: That’s so sweet. BG: I thought that was something else. Now, there’s a big picture of him on the sports page. ROH: Well, thank you so much for sharing your stories with me. Thank you for being such a great humanitarian too.