Oral History Program Sarah McClellan Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 19 June 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Sarah McClellan Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 19 June 2019 Copyright © 2022 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 Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ 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: McClellan, Sarah, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 19 June 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Sarah McClellan and Joe McQueen Circa 2019 Sarah McClellan Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Sarah McClellan, conducted on June 19, 2019 in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Sarah discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Alyssa Dove, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is June 19, 2019. We are at the Northern Utah Coalition in Ogden, Utah with Sarah McClellan, talking with her for the Women 2020 project at Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, and Alyssa Dove is with me. Sarah, thank you so much for your time and your willingness to share. SM: You’re welcome. LR: Let’s start with where and when you were born. SM: I was born on March 11, 1940 in Hartford, and it’s spelled just like Hartford, Connecticut, but it’s Alabama. LR: Alright, and did you grow up in Hartford? SM: I grew up there before I moved to Jacksonville, Florida. LR: Okay, and about how old were you when you moved? SM: Sixteen. LR: Okay, so what are some of your memories of growing up in Hartford, Alabama? 2 SM: A lot of folks might think that it would be bad but you can’t—we had nothing to compare it with so basically we had a happy childhood. LR: Okay. SM: My dad was a sharecropper and we worked in the fields, but everyone did. It didn’t make you feel different. LR: Right. SM: Because you had to do that, because that’s what everybody did. And we had lots of fun, played lots of sports and made up our own game. Because during that time, you got to remember when I was growing up was probably 1946 and 1948, and we didn’t have Xboxes or PlayStation. We didn’t have a telephone and we didn’t have television so you made up games, so we played a lot and we played outside a lot, not like the kids are today. I see them home on the couch doing the finger thing [texting] with their telephones and with the Xboxes and PlayStation, but we didn’t have that. LR: Right. SM: So growing up we did a lot of playing. We found the waterholes and we’d go fishing in the ponds and we would go swimming in the ponds. So that was basically what we did. It wasn’t bad growing up as you would think, because as I look back now I do know how bad it was, but as a kid you don’t realize how bad it was living in a segregated, very segregated community. A lot of Jim Crow going on during that time, but as a kid you didn’t know and I think parents shield you for what not to do growing up to stay safe. So you knew not to go to this place, you 3 know not to go to that place growing up. I couldn’t go in the front door, you know, in a place you knew you could not sit at the counters, and so they kind of told you that and I think they kind of buffered that because they knew the consequences, so you didn’t do those things. It was unwritten law. Okay? LR: Can you describe what a sharecropper is? SM: A sharecropper is a person that works the land for a landowner, and at the end when the crop is brought to harvest they’re supposed to share the crops. But it never worked like that because they didn’t tell you you had to pay for the seed, the fertilizer. And a lot of times they would have an account where folks could go and buy during the time until the crop came in, and when they went to the market, to the little store, they owed a big bill. So that shows that the sharecroppers really didn’t make any money, very little money the sharecroppers make because they had all these things to do. The owner made the money and the sharecroppers did the work. They even had to pay, for like the seed and fertilizer, all of that had to come out of their share. So that’s what a sharecropper did, and they never got out of debt, that was it ‘cause they always never cleared enough money to be out of debt with the owner of the land. So that’s what a sharecropper did, and that’s why it was so terrible, that’s why they never got ahead, because the way it was set up. LR: Right. You mentioned that when you were sixteen that you moved to Florida. Did your whole family move or just you? 4 SM: Just me and my sister moved there. I had an older sister that lived there, and so that’s why we moved there. And it was different. LR: How so? How was it different? SM: Large. Moving from a small farming community to a large city, very well populated. LR: Oh Jacksonville, yeah that is large. SM: That is where I moved from when I came here. LR: What was it like going to school in Alabama? I know you have nothing to compare it to, but for you what was that like? SM: Well, I understand it, but it was segregated so you knew everybody who went there was African American. But you did notice that we never got new books and we always got the old edition, because you know how kids mark up their textbooks. When new editions came out, the White kids got the new editions and we got their books. You would say, “Oh I have,” you knew the White kids so you know, “I got Joann Whatever’s book.” Usually when they got new furniture, a desk, we would get their desk and most the time there would be carved names on their desk. When I look back, I think they were kind of accepted growing up, but as you look back and you kind of wonder why you was behind in your education or you wasn’t up to date because you never got the updated information so how could you be up to date, up to part, with your counterpart the White kids? 5 LR: Right. SM: And we didn’t have a bus until a long time, and the kids had to walk to school, maybe five or six miles to school, if they lived in a rural area. Because the White kids had what we called a “Yellow Hound,” they had a school bus but they didn’t, for a long time the Black kids didn’t have a school bus. So when it was raining or whatever you had to walk to school and they expect for you to be on-time. I didn’t ever have to do that ‘cause we lived in a little town. But the kids that lived out in the rural areas, they had a long walk. When you have to walk to school in the rain, and sometimes it’d be cold, you know in the winter. LR: It gets cold in Alabama? SM: Yeah, you get cold. You get cold, because you’d get what they call the Great Northern Wind. The Great Northern Wind would come down and it might only get cold for two or three days, but it was cold. Then it’ll warm back up, but you’d get cold. Yeah, especially there because of the humidity. So what’s cold there wouldn’t be cold here, because of the humidity. It’s very dry and very arid here, but if you get thirty degrees there it’s cold. When I went to college and when I start to teach, they did an excellent job at teaching the kids. I learned a lot, and I didn’t realize how much I did learn ‘til I got competing with my counterparts. Even then when I went to all-black college at one of the Black historical colleges, even when I sent my transcript out here, it was up to par. I didn’t have to take no other classes like some folks had to do or they say, “You gonna have to take Utah history,” I didn’t have to take Utah history 6 when I sent my transcript to get my teaching certificate for Utah. So when I look back, I look back at that I came from all-black high school, all-black college, they did an excellent job in preparing me for the real world, because I was thinking I was gonna have to take some classes because I came from an all-black school. When I sent my transcript to the Department of Education there was no problem so they must have done an excellent job, and making sure I had all that I needed in order to compete. LR: That’s great. So kind of going back to when you were a young girl, what women did you look up to as you were growing up? SM: I really looked up to a lot of my teachers. One thing about going to all-black school we could always do as much, it wasn’t called Black History Day or something like that, we had Black History Month. When I came out here, the Black kids didn’t know nothing about the people that have made a difference, they just taught them about Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver, but what did you learn about? I don’t know what school you went to. LR: I went to a school down in Salt Lake. SM: I bet they talked to you about George Washington Carver, but they didn’t tell you about Madam Walker, the first Black woman millionaire, and who developed the traffic light and all that kind of stuff. They don’t know the rich history. But I learned that in school, so with that I looked up to ladies like Mary McLeod Bethune that started the Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach. She had fifty dollars and she started the college. She was one of my sheroes, because she did so 7 much with such small amount. Then there was Marian Anderson, who was the great singer, soprano, whatever you call it, that would sing in the White House in Washington D.C. and all of that. But anyway, she was a trailblazer for a lot of the women entertainers, and black singers, that came along after her. The list just goes on and on. But we was able to know all about our culture, and a lot about people that they didn’t in Utah. I found it out when I started talking to folks, they thought Martin Luther King and they thought that was our history. When we sang the National Negro Anthem, they don’t know about it, James Weldon Johnson wrote the song. Even the little things, they don’t know about the inventions of the Blacks and hadn’t learn all of that. Your ice cream scoop, anything had to do with work the Black invented. The lawn mower, the push lawn mower, it was invented by a Black man. The ice cream scoop that you scoop up ice cream? Clothes pins, you know what clothes pins are? LR: Yeah. SM: They developed that. Anything that had to do with manual labor, you can just about believe that a Black person developed that because they were looking for a way to make their chores easier. LR: That makes sense to me. SM: So I think growing up I, I had a lot of folks I looked up to because they made such interesting things. I went to the Black History Museum in Macon, Georgia, and we were doing our family reunion there and we had a lot of young folks in the family went. The kids were just, “Wow!” They saw the scuba diving outfit was 8 developed by a Black man. The kids in the family went through and they were just in awe that, all the things that the blacks had invented, they don’t talk about it. It got lost in history somewhere along the way, somebody forgot to put it in the history book. I don’t know what happened, or they didn’t know no better or for whatever reason. So you know and I look up to all these folks that did so much, that were trailblazers, that made a way for me and a lot of people in my community. Even when I was in college, I had a lady named Gussie Fisher and she was so instrumental in giving me free rent, she even paid my telephone bill. We didn’t have telephones like they have now. But I was in school, I went to college in 1957. LR: Okay, so you were seventeen. You were a young freshman. SM: Yeah, well I finished high school at sixteen, because I guess I was one of the overachievers. Back in those times, I made four grades in two years. I almost got out of high school at fifteen. LR: Okay, wow. That’s impressive. SM: So I finished high school when I was sixteen years old, I worked a year before I went to college and I saved up some money. They didn’t have federal loans when I came along, that have kids in trouble with all this federal loan. We didn’t have no federal loan, you had to pay up. You had to pay your fees or get a scholarship. So you had to have your cash, you had to have some money. Now I 9 look at the kids now, oh twenty thousand, thirty thousand dollars. Oh my god! But we didn’t have it like that, you had to pay. AD: What did you do to earn money for college? SM: I worked in a restaurant. I was “salad-girl.” AD: “Salad-girl?” SM: Salad-girl, I did make salads. But when I was in college and then when I went there, believe it or not, I got a scholarship with the Presbyterian Church to go to school and they paid my tuition. I also got an on-campus job and I work in the kitchen, I like that ‘cause I was always hungry. When you’re seventeen, and you have no money, you hungry. I didn’t want one of them clerking jobs ‘cause they didn’t have no food, in the kitchen I could eat. But anyway, I worked in the kitchen in the dining hall. LR: Going back just a little bit, what was one of the reasons you moved from Hartford to Jacksonville? SM: Economical reason, because of economics and schooling. LR: Okay, was the schooling better in Jacksonville? SM: I don’t think so. LR: Okay, then you lived with your sister in Florida? SM: Yes, in fact, you’ve got to remember I’m the youngest of eleven. So when I say my sister, my sister was eighteen years older than I was, even my sister when I came out here [to Utah] was twenty years older. It’s not like living with a sister 10 who was eighteen years old, but twenty years older, because I happen to be the youngest of eleven. So my sister had a family well-established, who lived there for a while and so that’s the difference. I wouldn’t go live with a sister that was eighteen years old. LR: Right, makes a little more sense. I know you did go to college, but were you encouraged to pursue an education as you were growing up? SM: Well, it was expected of you to go to college. ‘Cause they said in order to get ahead you had to go to college, and so most of the folks in my area went to college and got degrees. They don’t do that anymore, a lot of kids here just don’t go but all the opportunities are here I mean we didn’t have student loans we had to work and you had to earn your money. In the summertime, I had to save up the money to make the difference, and back then I didn’t have a car before I finished college. You never thought about it, kids today now get a car when they are sixteen? My word. No, I didn’t get a car until I was able to buy my own car. When I worked in the summertime, it was to save your funds and monies for the school year coming up to make up for your scholarship and working on-campus. LR: What college did you go to? You said it was a historically Black college. SM: I went to Stillman. S-T-I-L-L-M-A-N, college in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. When I moved to the college in Jacksonville, that’s when I started at Edward, like the name, Edward Waters College. LR: Okay, and what did you major in? 11 SM: My major was Biology and my minor was Math. I taught Math and Biology at the school in Brigham City for seventeen years, but that’s another story. LR: We’ll get there. SM: The first time I really saw Ku Klux Klan was when I was at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. They would ride on the campus, and during that time we couldn’t keep the lights on in dormitories and in the hall because when would be riding. They were afraid that we might get shot or something. That was a real experience there, because they accused one of the Black guys of being a Peeping Tom, and so it was really scary to see folks riding the campus with sheets on. We couldn’t go downtown during that time because they were afraid for us. The Student Body President would take your order if you needed deodorant or toothpaste or something like that. You had to give him the money and write down what you wanted because they didn’t allow us to walk off-campus, ‘cause they were afraid of what might happen to us. LR: Right, so were you ever able to go into town? SM: Yes, eventually it kind of settled down. We didn’t have a lot of money to spend, but we used to go to the five and ten cent store, they used to call them, I think, Kress, and buy you a little toiletry or whatever. We didn’t have a lot, and then once in a while, you had enough to buy a hotdog or something like that. We didn’t have money like the kids have now, and we didn’t get no allowance from home, your parents didn’t have that kind of money. But anyway, that was a new experience for me. 12 LR: What year did you graduate from college? SM: 1963. I started in 1957, I think it took me five years to five and a half years to finish. LR: So did you come to Ogden after you graduated college? SM: No. When I first graduated from college, I got a job in a little town called Newberry FL, it was sixteen miles north, and I taught fourth grade because that was the only job I could get. So I taught there for one year and the second year I taught at Matthew W. Gilbert. It was two Black high schools, and you got to remember it was segregated, there was one on the north side and one on the east side. I taught at Matthew W. Gilbert High School on the east side in Jacksonville for two years. I taught Biology and Earth Science. I went up to the University of North Carolina, Raleigh, and got a scholarship. I got a National Science Foundation scholarship to study Geology for the summer of 1964 I think it was. I went there because I was teaching Geology at Matthew W. Gilbert and I was teaching Life Science, they call it Biology. LR: Okay, so did you get a degree from there? SM: No, they used to have grants called the National Science Foundation, but it probably was out by the time you came along. You could get grants to go to college to do special projects. Like I went up just to do Geology, and all we did we’d go to the rock and look at rocks and the different formation of earth formations, and then went to a lot of mines and caves. We went from Northern part of North Carolina all the way down to the southern part looking at the 13 different earth formations. So that’s what you did, it was like a project. When you got a National Science Foundation scholarship you’re work on that specific grant. LR: Okay, so you got more like a certificate instead of a degree? SM: Yeah, we didn’t get no degree. LR: Okay, when did you finally come to Ogden? SM: I came in 1966. I already told you about how I applied for my teaching certificate, but I got a job at the Intermountain Intertribal School in Brigham City, Utah. You familiar with that? The Intermountain Intertribal School in Brigham City, Utah. LR: I’ve only heard of it as the Intermountain Indian School. SM: We were really intertribal ‘cause we had ninety-nine different tribes at one time, that’s what intertribal comes from. It used to be just more or less Navajos, that’s why we were just ‘Indian school in the beginning.’ LR: So when you came here, you came here and lived with your sister. SM: Yeah, lived with my sister, ‘cause she encouraged me to come here. But when I came here, I kind of questioned, “What the hell am I doing in Utah?” Growing up in the South with so many Blacks and you got here you just see white people mostly, and then when I got that job in Brigham it was even worse. I would commute there backward and forth because I never move to Brigham, God forbid, but you never passed any Blacks on the highway going to Brigham. Nobody was going to Brigham but me, and that was almost a culture shock. I came from such a diverse population. We had a lot of Puerto Ricans, and of 14 Hispanics in Florida, I came out here and you rarely passed a Black person in a car. You got used to it, but it was kind of strange. Different, really different. LR: I can only imagine what that was like. I was curious when you first moved here, where did your sister live? Where were you living? SM: 2264 Lincoln Avenue. LR: I’ve heard and I’ve learned that there were only certain places where African Americans could live. SM: When my sister was looking for a house you couldn’t buy a house above Washington Boulevard. So most Blacks would be living in between the other side of Washington Boulevard, most of them would be on Grant and Lincoln all the way to West Ogden. The grid was pretty much for, most of the Black kids were from like 24th street, twenty-something street, about 29th or 30th street, 32nd street was the farthest because you didn’t have a lot of Blacks living down on 35th street on Lincoln when I first came here. There was a unwritten grid that they would show you homes. Even when I got married in 1972, we were looking for a house and they wouldn’t show us a house until we had to change realtors because he wouldn’t show us a house outside that grid. So we had to get rid of one of the realtors, the realtor’s name was Southwick, I’ll never forget his name. But anyway, we got some young Caucasian kid and he was trying to go to dental school and he was, “I don’t care where you buy, I just want to make the money.” The Southwick guy was like a middle-aged, older guy was sticking to the unwritten grid. This young kid’s, “I don’t care where you buy, you can look at any 15 houses, and if you can afford to buy it, you can buy it.” But we had a problem with the first Realtor ‘cause he kept wanting us to buy houses like on 27th Street or 28th Street, and he didn’t want to show us anything else. When you said, “Well what about this one?” He said, “Oh you can’t afford it.” I said, “How do you know what we can afford?” He would start to tell us what we could and could not afford. But anyway, that’s disturbing. Even in the 1980s, they wouldn’t rent to Blacks in certain places. They’re telling them it’s already been rented, then you send your White friend down there and they’re, “Oh yeah we have something.” And they said, “I thought you said it was already rented?” But anyway, people don’t understand that there’s always been segregation here in Ogden. When I first came here, at the Orpheum Theatre we had to sit up in the balcony, we couldn’t sit down on the floor. That was in 1966 and 1967, before they closed the Orpheum Theatre. LR: Okay. I’ve heard a story that you went, one of the first times you went and bought a ticket and sat down on the floor and they told you... SM: That was Hazel Jones, but they wouldn’t allow you to sit downstairs on the floor because you had to go up to, I called it the rooster’s nest up there, we had a name for it down South. They wouldn’t allow you to sit on the floor at the Orpheum Theatre. Or they had the skating rink at the Berthana. The Blacks couldn’t go when the Whites was there, they had a Black night and a White night at the Berthana Skating Rink. LR: Seems so weird to me. 16 SM: There was a whole lot of things that went on. I first thought it was just happening down in Mississippi, but it was happening here too. But there was so few Blacks here that they didn’t probably talk about it as much as the Blacks did in the south, but yeah at the Berthana. My sister was here, because my sister came here in 1946. Her husband came here and got a job with the Union Pacific Railroad right after he got out of World War II. LR: So when you came in 1966, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do? Did you know you were going to teach? SM: That’s what I was qualified to do. LR: Okay, and had you already applied for the job out there? SM: No [shakes head]. LR: Oh, so it was just one of those things, you got here and then you... SM: Then you just applied and I got hired as a teacher up there. AD: Did you enjoy teaching up there? SM: Loved it. I still get calls from some of my students now. I’ve got a student, that is a lawyer in SLC that was in my class in 1971, and she called me. I got a kid that has two Master’s degrees down in Arizona Steve, he’ll call, “How’re you doing?” So yeah, I really enjoyed it. I stayed there until they closed it, because I really enjoyed the kids. But in order to teach you’ve got to like kids, can’t teach if you don’t like kids. And I always taught 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. I never taught the little ones because I’m not that, you had to be like more nurturing when you 17 teach Kindergarten. They’re too much for me. First graders? No, I always taught 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. LR: Were those students, were they bussed into that school? SM: Yeah, they bussed in. They used to rent about thirty-six or forty greyhound busses. When they was just all Navajo, we would go down to either Gallup, New Mexico or to Shiprock, and we would fly there. They would rent a plane for us to fly there would be about sixty-five chaperones or something like that. They’d chaperone the busses back to Utah, and you had two chaperones on each bus. LR: So the students would actually move up here and live at the school? SM: Yes. That used to be Bushnell Hospital up there, I don’t know if you knew that. They converted that to a school, and they had dormitories. The girls had dormitories and the boys had dormitories, and they stayed here for the whole nine months ‘cause they didn’t go home for Christmas. They stayed at the school ‘cause it was too expensive to try to get that many kids back home. When I started, there was twenty-four hundred kids, so that’s why you need thirty-six or forty busses to bus them in. Then we started taking more and became intertribal; you had kids all the way from the Seminole Reservation in Florida, from Wisconsin, from Chicago, California, Nevada. We had kids from ninety-nine different tribes. LR: Wow, I realize I don’t know a whole lot about this school. SM: No, most folks don’t know that. 18 LR: Yeah, I had no idea. Would the same students come back every year? SM: Yeah, and they finished there. They would start up there in junior high in ninth grade. They had a school for the little ones, but the little ones on the reservations stayed from Sunday afternoon or Monday morning to Friday. If you’ve ever been to a reservation, they’re very sprawled out. You could never have a bus route to pick up kids. You see a hogan over there, you see a hogan over there and one over there. They didn’t like to live close together. It always baffled me why they didn’t make a neighborhood, but the ones that lived on the reservation, they didn’t live like that. So they would have to take their little ones into the school on Sunday afternoon and pick them up on Friday afternoon, even the first graders. AD: Do you have a favorite memory of teaching up there? SM: Most of my memories are my favorite, but I guess I can’t think of one favorite, ‘cause I pretty much enjoyed all of the times I had. But I guess one of the best ones, one of the things that I remember when I found out that a student in my class I was wondering why when at times I would write things on the board, now you’ve got to remember we had a blackboard we didn’t have all of this stuff, and she would always write backward I guess one day when I really realized that she was dyslexic, that was one of my, and I could help her. I would write it down for her because she would always had a problem copying from the board, “What! Where the hell did she get that from?” When I’m grading her paper you know, and I guess one of the greatest things was when the kids would come to you. I’ve had kids that come to me and told me how I made a difference in their life. One kid in particular that just could not speak English, because he grew up in a house 19 that only spoke Navajo, his name is Ernest Begay, and I’ll never forget he came and how he was so appreciative of what I had done to make sure he was successful. That’s why I get a call from him now and he has two degrees, Master’s degrees. When he came and told me that that day, his senior year, what a difference I had made, I think that was because he was struggling. Kids kind of, you know how kids bully each other even though they’re the same thing—he was the kind of kid that always had a snotty nose and didn’t have very much or many clothes to wear, and I guess I kind of had a lot of compassion for him ‘cause the kids were kind of mean to him. They can be mean. Oh God, they’re mean. They don’t know, they just say what they want to say, “Why don’t you go get some clean clothes? Why don’t you clean your nose? You come in here looking so damned...” And I said, “No, don’t!” You know, I would feel so bad for him. But anyway, people don’t know, if you’ve never taught school, that kids are nasty. They really are. Some kids are nasty, and they don’t care what they say. So they look at me and say, “What you got on?” LR: You mentioned driving to Brigham City and there were no other African Americans on the road at that time, but there’s a story of you being pulled over by a truck driver. Will you share that story? SM: Well, I was coming from work one day and this man in this eighteen-wheeler tooting it frighten me and I was, “What did I do wrong?” You know, first thing you think you got over in the wrong lane. He blew and he told me to get over, you know how they point. I said, “Okay,” but you know this is the eighteen-wheeler, this not the cop. Why am I pulling over? Why is he pulling me over? I pulled over, 20 and he says, “I’ve been through some part in Washington, and Idaho, and Utah, and I want some soul food. I haven’t seen anybody who might tell me where to get soul food. Can you tell me where? Do you know anywhere around here I can get some soul food, ‘cause I’ve been on the road and I can’t find any food I want to eat.” You know, he’s looking for barbecue, catfish, you know that kind of, collard greens, potato salad. Wishful thinking in Northern Idaho. I guess it’s Northern Idaho, he came from the state of Washington down through Idaho. So I did tell him about the Plantation. During that time, they did have a place called the Plantation on 2nd South, and a lady called Mom ran it and she cooked all that kind of food, LR: There you go. SM: Because she took care of all the basketball and football players. On Sundays she would fix special meals for them, because they couldn’t get it at the University of Utah either. They came from different backgrounds, you talking back in the 1970s, so she would take care of the football players and basketball players up at the University. They all knew her because she would fix a special meal like black-eyed peas and the fried chicken. She would make sure that the kids would get something because they would be homesick anyway, and it’s a culture shock coming to Utah. It was really a culture shock, back in the 1970s, coming to Utah. They eat more diverse food now then they did back then, but you got to remember you wasn’t even in Salt Lake. Annabelle Weakley had a restaurant, it used to be the Porters’ and Waiters’ Club. They’ve got her picture about what it look like now. She had a cafe, but she closed in 1967. 21 LR: Oh, I didn’t know it closed that early, thought it was a little longer. SM: Yeah, but that’s my story with the truck driver. LR: You’ve kind of mentioned the struggle you had buying your first home here in Ogden. SM: It was in Riverdale. Same, different. LR: What was it like when you actually bought your home and moved in? Were you accepted in that neighborhood? SM: Well, yes. I had a bishop in my neighborhood, Bishop Hunsaker and all of them, but across the street was a couple, she’s Japanese and he was half Native American. LR: Okay. SM: They came across the street and met with me, and they said the others had a petition going around and they didn’t want us to buy the house. They didn’t want no Blacks to move into the neighborhood. He said they brought the petition over to them, and they said, “Hell, I don’t care who buy. If they can afford the house buy it.” This was the bishop and all of them that didn’t want us to move in. They didn’t know who I was, they didn’t know anything about us. They just assumed that if we were Black that we were going to depreciate their homes, their neighborhood. I don’t know, I guess that’s it. Or we were going to have wild parties? Or sell dope? I don’t know what the hell they thought, you know what I mean? Why would you go around and have a petition to try to get enough folks in 22 the neighborhood to tell them not to sell the house to us? That’s what I found out about my neighbors. After they found out that we did mow our lawn and that we did go to work had regular jobs, they found out that we kept the yard a lot better than some of the others, and I guess we finally made the ‘okay.’ I guess we got a check mark or something, I don’t know, but that’s what they acted like. They came over and told us that like the day after we’d moved in, and we were kind of disgusted to think that you move in and somebody trying to petition you. I know that guy probably said he wanted to make the money so he didn’t care who moved in. They cared about it ‘cause they didn’t have, and I still don’t have any Black neighbors in my neighborhood, but that’s another part. There’s a lot of neighbors who’s just not Black. It’s not because of those neighbors, ‘cause all them are dead. It’s me and Ms. Kayla Brown which aren’t dead, signing the petition in 1972, but that was my experience. Other than that, they never came over to confront us or anything, but to hear that was kind of disgusting. LR: I’ll bet. SM: To think that they would take the time to have a thing for folks to sign to have a petition to keep us from moving there, “Why? You don’t even know who I am. Why would you not like me? Why would you not want me to be your neighbors?” I don’t know. LR: That makes sense. AD: Do you know when the Intertribal School closed? 23 SM: May of 1984. AD: And where did you go to work after that? SM: They recruited me for the Internal Revenue Service to go in and be an Employee Development Specialist. I never touched a tax return in my life, but people think that if you work at IRS you do taxes. LR: They do assume that. SM: They assume that. They say, “Can’t you help me with my taxes?” “No, because I never worked with tax returns. I worked in HR.” They recruited me into HR, and I did that for about two years or three years, then I became the EEO director, EEO and Diversity Manager. During that time, we had about seven thousand employees during filing season. In my office I was over, I took care of all the complaints, and there were tons of them. LR: I bet. SM: It’s ‘cause they didn’t want to work, first thing, so that’s why I went from there. They closed the school in May, I went to work at Intermountain on Friday and that Monday was Memorial Day in May, and I went to work at the IRS that Tuesday. LR: Okay, wow. That’s a quick change. SM: So I really started May, or the day after Memorial Day. LR: Right, in 1984. How long were you at the IRS? 24 SM: Thirteen years, and I was at the school seventeen. I retired in 1995, and I had enough time to retire a year early because I never used any sick-leave. I never stayed off of work. I didn’t understand folks staying off from work. Why? I don’t understand. I still to this day, I don’t understand why folks who got a job won’t go to it. I go to work here every day. So I had seventeen-hundred hours of sick leave. LR: Wow, most places won’t allow you to keep that much sick leave anymore. SM: No, I couldn’t take that much annual leave, ‘cause they won’t pay you for sick leave. For annual leave, you could only carry two hundred forty. Six weeks, anything over that you’re just giving it to them. But if you come to work like that, they’ll let you convert that to when you get ready to retire, but you don’t get no money. I mean, I guess you get a year, but didn’t add much onto your retirement. I gave them five months because I didn’t need seventeen hours for twelve months, I had seventeen months of sick leave. LR: So let’s talk a little bit about the social organizations and the social clubs that were in Ogden, specifically just the African American clubs like the Anytimer’s Club. There’s not a lot of information about, I mean I’ve heard it from some that I interviewed earlier. SM: When I came here they had the Black Women, a Black woman club. I have to think, what are they called? Excuse me, it wasn’t Black Women, it was called Doves. D-O-V-E-S. I don’t know when they met and I don’t know what they did ‘cause I never did join. And they had a club when I came here called the 25 Invincible Club, I never did join. Invincible, I think that was the name of it. Then they had one they tried to get me to join, but it was a saving club. Do you remember? You too young. You save up your money for Christmas. I kind of forgot the name of it, I didn’t join it either. ‘Cause they tried to get me to join, I said, “I save my own money.” So they had that and the Doves were really big ‘cause they really helped, it was really mentoring young Black women. I’m trying to think if there are any of the Doves that are still living. If it would be a Dove left, it would probably be Hazel Jones. LR: Hazel Jones? Okay. She is on our list. SM: Or Mary Swain, I don’t know. I’d forgot who’s in the Doves because I never joined, because my sorority is Delta Sigma Theta sorority. LR: Was that in college? SM: No, I joined here. We started a chapter here. We were the first Black sorority in the state of Utah. LR: Oh really? What is the Delta Sigma Theta? SM: Delta Sigma Theta is a Black organization for Black college women. They have two hundred and fifty-four chapters, it’s about close to three hundred thousand of us, and we have chapters all over the United States, in Okinawa, Japan, in Hawaii, in Alaska—I know that’s part of the United States, but we do have chapters there. What we do is we give scholarships, and you do assessments, and we have fundraisers, and we give out scholarships for high school kids. We also do things with the elderly, because that’s what we’re supposed to do, you 26 know, go out and improve your neighborhood. But anyway, so I never did get into social clubs too much. LR: Okay, so did you help set up the sorority? SM: I was a founding member. LR: You were a founding member okay, and when did that happen? SM: April 1988 at the Ben Lomond Hotel. LR: Oh, that’s really cool. SM: But there was a lot, and you had a big issue starting. To join, that was easy. That was kind of a social, you know, like the Masonics and the Eastern Star would be. It’s a group, the Eastern Star and Masonics, they were big when I came here. They used to have events at Kiwanis Club, you know what the Kiwanis Club used to be? LR: Yes. SM: Every New Year’s Eve, they would always have a big dance over there, and we’d have breakfast, and they would charge, you’d have to buy a ticket. They did a lot with the young folks. It helped the kids, they used to call it Upward Bound? LR: Okay, I’ve heard of that. SM: Went to Weber State, they call it something else now. It’s part of that Gear Up program. You got a program at Weber State called Gear Up, you know Betty Sawyer? I think it’s part of that. They go out and work with the high school. They used to go up to Utah State for the summer, and it was called Upward Bound. 27 LR: Okay. I’ve heard of Betty Sawyer. SM: You don’t know Betty Sawyer? LR: I mean, I don’t know her, but I’ve heard of her. SM: Oh, okay. Anyway, I know she works in the Gear program. I know they go out and recruit from the high school, and, I don’t know, do high school stuff. I don’t know what they do, Dr. Romo is over that department, I know him well. I know a lot of folks at Weber State. LR: We’ve kind of hinted at your husband, but what was your husband’s name? SM: James Willie McClellan. James, and he hated it. James Willie. He said, “Who would name a kid James Willie?” I said, “Your mom.” [laughs] He died early with Cancer. But when he died, the folks would call me, and say, “This is embarrassing. What was Mack’s name?” Everybody called him Mack. All his friends who’d known him for years, and they wanted to send flowers and they didn’t know what his name was. [laughs] LR: He hated it that much that he didn’t go by it. SM: Nobody knew his name. All his friends would say, “Sarah, it’s embarrassing but what’s his name?” [laughs] I say, “You don’t know?” “No.” LR: That’s funny. SM: He worked for the railroad. LR: Okay. Where did you meet him? 28 SM: In Ogden. I wasn’t married when I came to Ogden. AD: How’d you meet him? SM: Through some friends at some gathering, it was always some gathering. Back then, we did a lot of socializing. We always had a lot of Christmas dances, or you had a New Year’s Eve dance, and folks would really dress up back then. You don’t remember, but you didn’t go out in blue jeans and stuff, back in the good ol’ days. “Good ol’ days.” You always had to have after-five clothes, we had the long gloves on. You were always having something. Folks would have things in their home, in their backyards, in the summertime, they’d invite you. But we lost all of that. The young folks don’t do that. You young folks ain’t got time for that. I mean, this young group, they don’t even have an Eastern Star really. I don’t know why they didn’t hold on. Somehow traditions like that didn’t get passed on, you know, that’s too sad. That’s kind of why I started this and some of this, so the folks would know who they are and know something about their history. Because the young folks don’t know a thing, they have kind of merged into the majority race here. ‘Cause they go to school—and my grandson, I have one daughter and one son. Like with my grandson, his classmates was always White or few Hispanics, he doesn’t know about. It’s why every year he have to go with me every two years to my family reunion, ‘cause we have a family reunion every two years, and my grandson been going since he was seven months old. He didn’t know he was going, but he went because I want him to see his family and to know about Black history, what other folks are doing, and they all not like the Blacks here in Utah. To see that we’ve got Black doctors, we’ve got Black lawyers in the family, and 29 everybody’s a social worker with a Master’s Degree. But I’m just saying I want him to know that. You know, because they don’t know their history. Most time when they go to the schools here, they don’t see nobody that look like them. They rarely get a Black teacher. [to Alyssa] Did you have a Black teacher? AD: I did have one, yeah. SM: One, alright. Who was that? AD: Ooh his name, Mr. Johnson. SM: Oh. LR: Not until I got to college. SM: I’m just saying most times they don’t, they don’t see nobody to mirror themselves after. They don’t see Black principals, or Black doctors, or Black lawyers too much. ‘Cause I had a sorority sister that came out here, and she was an Obstetrician, but she couldn’t get nobody to come. She was in the Women’s Center up at the McKay-Dee, but she couldn’t get any clients, so she left and went back to Pensacola, Florida. I don’t see, I guess, ‘cause it was strange to me because see I never went to a White doctor until I came to Utah. I’m trying to find me a Black one, my sister says, “A what?” I says, “I’m trying to find a Black doctor.” See I never went to a White dentist, I never went to a White doctor, until I came to Utah, ‘cause I never thought of going to a White man doctor to get my pap smear. I mean, that was strange to me to know that you don’t have no Black doctors here. What kind of place is this? ‘Cause I grew up, we always had Black doctors, we always had Black lawyers, we always had Black dentists, Black 30 principals out of necessity because White wouldn’t serve you. Because you couldn’t go to a White doctor, and people wondering why Blacks going, if you read the paper you look at where folks have their funerals and folks say, “Why do Blacks always go to Myers Mortuary?” You know, Myer’s probably get ninety-nine point nine percent of all Black bodies in Ogden, in case you didn’t know that. Because back when my sister came in 1946, Lindquist wouldn’t, didn’t take the Black body. So when she came in that was called Myers and Harding they were the one that would take Black bodies. That history had been passed down, you rarely see, and people get upset if a Black go to Lindquist. “What the hell wrong with them? We don’t go to Lindquist.” We don’t even know who Lindquist is, but we knew that all Black bodies go to Myers. You didn’t know that did you? LR: No, I had no idea. SM: Mine’s going to Myers, ‘cause I already got mine set up with Myers. I already got my vault and my casket and all of that, got it right there. Put it in, got it out there. Myers will have my body. But every family member, everybody I knew went to Myers. But I guess you folks don’t pick up, they have never picked up on that, you know, ‘cause you don’t probably have that many Black folks that you know that die and you go to the viewing. But that’s the way it is. I don’t know how we got on to the mortuary, but I’m just running. LR: It’s all good. I’m kind of stuck on these social organizations that were, that obviously are not anymore, but did you or your husband, were you involved, besides the one that you were a founding member of? Was your husband 31 involved in any of the social organizations? Like the Anytimer’s Club or the Eastern Star? SM: No, he was a golfer. They used to have a lot of Black I guess—do you remember bowling? You wouldn’t know bowling, back in the day bowling, you wouldn’t know. Bowling used to be big. I know that he was a part of a couple of bowling group, because I still got his bowling ball and also they had their shirts. His was gold, it wasn’t an ugly color gold. But anyway, he was a member, he used to do a lot of bowling. Bowling back in the day, back in the 1960s and the 1970s, were big. It kind of died out, even closed a big bowling alley up in South Ogden. But back in the day, you had a lot of bowling teams. I never learned to bowl. You’d think I’d learn to do a lot things, but bowling wasn’t one of them. I did a bowling fundraiser right, you know for here? But I don’t bowl, I just never thought to bowl. He was part of bowling and he on a lot of the teams they used to have Black golf clubs, groups. Between Salt Lake and Ogden, they had Black golfing, and he was a part of that. But yeah, he never was into social clubs that I know of. But I’d talk to Hazel, and she could probably give you more about the clubs ‘cause Hazel came here in 1940? When I came here in the 1960s, most of those clubs had dissolved. LR: Okay. I didn’t know that. SM: You know, there was a few, but they was petering out. Then they started the Doves and that lasted for a little while. 32 LR: Okay, so kind of going back just a little bit. How did you balance your home life with working? SM: The first thing, I only had one kid. I never wanted a bunch of kids, you know I only had one grandkid. So that helps, you know ‘cause my friend always had to babysit or something like that. But my husband, while I worked, my husband did a lot of the cooking. So when I came home from work, most of the time the meal was done. I cooked on the weekend, he cooked during the week. So that was the food part. I never paid any bills, my husband took care of all of the bills so I never did have to. Back in the days, you could pay most of your bills at ZCMI, you can pay your light bill, your gas bill. He liked to pay it like that. Folks did it a lot, you probably don’t know, you could pay your water bill, your gas bill, your light bill. You don’t remember that do you? Like at ZCMI? LR: Yeah, that was before my time. SM: But you could pay your light bill there or you could go to a credit union and pay that. If you had a bill to go out of town, at the credit union you could cash your check, and you can still do it, it free. For a long time I had a checking account and my husband didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, so I got rid of that because I never knew how much money we had. ‘Cause we’d write a check and, “I don’t know,” I don’t know how much it was and so we paid a lot. A lot of folks paid that, you could pay your bills at a lot of places you didn’t have to put it in the mail, you didn’t have to go, you just go to ZCMI, there was a ZCMI there. On 24th and Washington. You’d go upstairs and pay most of your bill, cash. 33 LR: What a novel idea. SM: So he paid all of the bills and on the weekend I would do the laundry. My husband didn’t like the way I did his shirts so he took his shirts to the laundry. Fine by me. He took his pants to the laundry, so I hardly ever had anything to do laundry for him ‘cause he wanted his shirts a certain way and I wouldn’t do no certain way. LR: I was the same way. SM: You know? I won’t starch no shirts and all that, mhm no. Uh-uh, you want to look like that? Take them to the dry cleaner. SM: So I had very little laundry to do and back in those days it was like I had a lot of dry cleaning clothes. SM: You know clothes was sent to dry cleaner more. SM: But now folks just put them in a dryer. It’s a different way of doing laundry. LR: Yes, it is. SM: I work for my work clothes I always kind of wore suits and heels and but back in the day, y’all don’t know that. I see them walking around with flip-flops and, “When did that happen?” Flat shoes on, well when I was an EEO director I wore heels and stockings everyday. The dress code has really gone. Even when I go to the hospitals, I don't know who's the doctor and who’s the patient. You know you don’t remember but doctors always wore the white coats and nurses always 34 wore white uniforms, white stockings, and white shoes and now they got on tennis shoes. I can’t believe it’s so... LR: Very different. SM: Yeah it’s a whole, but anyway so for my home life I didn’t have a lot to do. I mean you know ‘cause he did a lot of the cooking and I cooked on the weekend, if I cooked at all, but I cooked on the weekend. I didn’t have a lot of kids running around, you know you got one kid you can do that you know. AD: What role do you think education plays in empowering women? SM: I think it’s the key to success, is education. I was taught that always growing up and that’s why it was so important that I went to college. Because they said, especially the saying was, “You’ve got to be twice as smart as your counterpart the Whites, and in order to be able to compete.” So they always told me that in order to be successful I had to have an education. However you have to go to college, you have to have an education because without that you get lost, you can’t compete so to be competitive you have to have a good education and you have to have a college degree and possibly get something above your regular B.S. degree. So even when I was in junior high that’s what they was teaching you. When I was in college I used to say, “Why do I have to take all of these classes?” He said, “Because you have to be competitive so when you go out in the world, I don’t want them to come back and say that you need to take this class or that class.” I knew that was the road out from not having to live like my parents did as sharecroppers ‘cause they always make that example, you don’t 35 want to have to live, you want to live better than your parents and how you do that is to get an education. ‘Cause back in them days they wasn’t talking about trades, like the ATC and things like that, they always thought you had to go to college when I came along. They weren’t pushing a lot of the technical school like they do now. SM: Anyway so I tell all of the young ladies, and the folks that I mentor and talk with, that the key to success is getting a good foundation, a good education, so that you can be competitive. So that when a job come open they can’t tell you, “You don’t qualify,” because of this so make sure that you get what you need. So that’s the key to my success that has opened doors for me. ‘Cause I said when I transferred from the Intermountain Intertribal school and I went to the IRSthey wonder “How’d she came in here and get that kind of job?” For the first they were saying, “She just got it ‘cause she’s Black,” or something like that, that’s what they was saying because they didn’t realize that I had a college degree, I had taught for nineteen years at that time. When I walked in most of the folks in the IRS start out on the floor. You know what the floor, opener of the envelopes and, doing data conversion, and I walked in in human resource. They want to know, “how did she walk in like that and she hasn’t paid her dues?” Ladies used to say, “Sarah, you haven’t paid your dues ‘cause you haven’t never worked on the floor,” ‘cause most of them work their way up. I never had to do that because of my education and my background. “I’m sorry,” I got used to telling them, “I’m can’t be sorry ‘cause you crawl into the IRS,” no [laughing], “when you started working out there as a summer hire.” 36 SM: They used to get so angry ‘cause I never had to start on the floor, I just you know, they picked me up from another agency and I started in HR and she started out on the floor opening up envelopes out in the dungeon. She would say, “You haven’t paid your dues Sarah.” I’d say, “What dues? I paid my dues when I went to college and you didn’t, I’m sorry.” So we used to always have this battling between us ‘cause she always tell me, “you didn’t pay your dues! You don’t really know IRS ‘cause you ain’t never worked on the floor.” But that’s what my education did for me, it moved me up, it got me into doors that ordinary folks wouldn’t have been able to do in that time because of my education. LR: That’s awesome. Another question that is geared more towards the project is when you hear the term “women’s work” what does that make you think of? When you think about what is “women’s work?” SM: I don’t know. LR: I love it. SM: Because I never knew that. You got to remember I came up during the Civil Right Movement. I don’t know if you knew I was running from axe handlers from Kul Klux Klan. I was in college during that time, when they were in the city so I had a Kress Woolworth and you couldn’t sit at the counter but that happened in the days and so I heard folks, I know what you’re talking about but I never been, I ‘ve been working in Utah for fifty-three years and so I never stayed at home. I don’t do home, I don’t do “women’s work.” I don’t know what “women’s work” is, I don’t. Women’s work to me? I don’t really know, I never had the babies and all of the 37 babies. I don’t know. To me, all work is women’s work. I never saw the difference between, I never did myself and say, “I’m a woman so I can only so this,” I always thought I could do whatever I wanted and had the ability to do, not because it was woman work but if I wanted to do it I could do it if I was qualified. I hear this talk about “women’s work,” I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean I know what you’re talking about, but in my role in life all of my life. I used to see women like that and I’d wonder, “How can they do that?” When I came here [to Utah] I saw the women kind of submissive, back in the day when I first came here, “I got to pass that by my husband.” Why? Don’t you make a check? I mean I never did understand, I had to learn to calm myself because I, they just— they act like they didn’t have a brain in their head. “You a college graduate and you have to ask your husband can you do this? Why do you have to ask? You don’t ask, you tell.” They looked at me like, “What does she, what does this ruthless crazy woman?” I would tell my husband, I wouldn’t ask my husband and they would be telling me, “I have to ask my husband if it’s okay.” Why? I mean you know so I guess I don’t know what “woman work” is. I know what they say “woman work” is to be a homemaker, you stay at home and raise your kids, and I know a lot of them wanted to stay home at least until their kids got to first grade before they would take a full-time job. It was important that they would be there to nurture their kids and to give them all what you give kids growing up. I never did worry about that, but that’s what they do you know. Also they have to be in the background to be very supportive of their husband, ‘cause they always thought their husband, they talk 38 like their husband was the breadwinner ‘cause they’d talk to me, I had to get on one—You don’t know me, I’ve got a sharp mouth—but I remember one wanted to know, “Sarah,” ‘cause I was the only woman in the Math and Science Department at one time at the Intermountain School this man had the audacity to ask me, “what do you do with all that money, you make the same money as I do.” M’kay? He wanted to know what I did with it, what is this Black woman doing making the same amount of money that I’m making? Then I flippedand I said, “Most the time I just take my check and flush it down the toilet.” Because I mean why would you ask me such a stupid question like I don’t have to eat and pay rent and buy groceries and buy gas.What am I supposed to do? Tell him, I mean what am I supposed to do say, “Okay Brother Brent, I buy my groceries, I buy my car. I mean he want to know what you do with that kind of money, and I guess he didn’t really know—I don’t know what he didn’t know. I don’t think he knew it was insulting to ask me that. It’s like, “All the men work in the department,” I don’t know what, “they got families, they got wives at home and I know what they do with their money but what do you do with your’s?” I wouldn’t even give him the dignity to answer that question. Because I thought it was the most stupid thing in the world, it was like I didn’t eat, or live, or pay light bill or gas bill. But anyway, I know what he was saying. The undertone that he meant was, “How can you be up to par with these men that are head of their household? You’re not the head of your household.” But anyway, that’s a side note. 39 LR: Yeah, that’s a good side note. You talked a little bit, just now, about the Civil Rights Movement, and I’m wondering when you moved here to Ogden was there a Civil Rights Movement here in Ogden? SM: They had a NAACP chapter. I joined the chapter and I still go, every second Monday I still go. ‘Cause I chaired the luncheon for the NAACP luncheon this year. We had it at the Eccles Center. I’ve been a member of the NAACP only at the college, ‘cause it was ten dollars a year and we used to have folks who used to pay our dues. To get us involved but yeah. But yeah we had the NAACP were the biggest civil right thing that was going on at the time. Jim Gillespie was the president for thirty-three years as you probably know. He was the president when I moved here. LR: How was it different, the Civil Rights Movement here in Utah? SM: They didn’t have one. The biggest thing that I remember is they got quite involved because there was a lot of kickback from the Hi-Fi Shop Killing, you probably too young to remember it. LR: I was a child when that happened but I heard about it, that was one thing that was talked about. That’s what kept us out of Ogden, “You can’t go to Ogden because of this.” SM: So what happened with that they got quite involved with that because I had a step-son at that time that was like sixteen years old or something. Every time he would come home through the Terrace he would get stopped ‘cause they were really stopping and harassing Blacks because they was very upset. What they 40 did was not right, Pierre and what was his name, but it wasn’t right but you don’t harass me because other Black folks did that. I had to get on the phone and talk really nasty to South Ogden and I threatened that if they stop him one more time I was going to sue them. I said, “The only reason you stop him again is if he’d have an infraction of some sort, other than that just don’t stop him for,” you could say, “riding Black. There’s no law for riding Black, driving Black.” So every time he would drive through they would stop him. If one [police] was out, they would stop him and pull him over. They never gave him a ticket just wanted to know, “Where you live, why you in this neighborhood, where you going,” and so it was a lot and so I remember that being a lot of tension and folks was getting a lot of flak from that because folks was angry. They should have been but they shouldn’t take it out on the whole race of people. LR: Right, right. They weren’t even part of it. SM: Because when I heard I was coming back, driving on my way to work. When I heard it, I was surprised an African American would do that. “What, they...!?” I was just, this is what happens when you stereotype, I just took for granted it’d be some White kids that did that, I never thought it’d be some airmen from Hill Air Force Base doing all of that. So you kind of [swatting hand] you heard it on the radio but you didn’t think eh you know, you weren’t real bothered, “That doesn’t affect me.” But I found out it really did and so NAACP were doing a lot during that period ‘cause there was a lot of pushback you know from that from the majority race here. 41 LR: So there was never really a Civil Rights Movement in Ogden, like what you saw nationally? SM: We did a lot of boycotting there, but in Ogden, they just didn’t do that. There just wasn’t a lot going on like we never did march or I can’t remember stories of there ever being boycotting, ‘cause that’s how we got to eat at the counters was by boycotting the stores. But I don’t remember that, I have to think, I can’t remember them having all-out marching down Washington Boulevard. It didn’t, I guess there wasn’t enough Blacks, for a long time we was 0.8%. I think now we’re 1%, maybe in some parts 2%. But for a long time we were 0.7 and 0.8%, we weren’t even 1%. So that’s not a lot of force to start. Like in Jacksonville, we had lots of Black folks you know what I mean. LR: Do you remember when it was, when there was no longer any segregation in Ogden? Do you remember when that happened? Was it a gradual thing? SM: It’s still segregated here. LR: Will you talk about that a little bit? SM: You know there’s just things that Blacks don’t, even with the I don’t know the—for a long time it was like, I think they joined a country club but that’s always been segregated and it has to do with money. You know I don’t know if any Black have ever been a member of that country club, that’s still very White. You know and it has to do with the probably the membership cost. It’s a money thing, that’s the way they do a lot of things too to keep you out. You just make sure they won’t be able to do that. 42 LR: To afford it, okay. SM: Yeah and I’m just thinking that, I don’t know what a membership is but I know I would never pay a membership to go over there to be with somebody who don’t want me there. I wouldn’t pay for that. I think that’s, there’s some segregation that’s going on you know with things like that. There are different events that take place that Blacks, probably not excluded not that they can’t be but they don’t. You don’t see a lot of, I’ve never seen too many, it’s something they’re trying to get I was talking to somebody saying we should, but even if you look at have you ever been to the parade? LR: Which one? SM: The [July] 24th street parade. Tell me how many Black folks you see. LR: I’ve been to the one in Salt Lake mostly, and not very many. SM: For a long time, and that’s coming in later years, you just don’t see folks nobody’s encouraged, they just don’t go. Have you ever seen Black people in it? AD: Now that I think about it, not really any. I’ve never even thought about it. SM: I mean Black floats and things you’ve seen. I’m saying so even today people don’t even think about it but we don’t participate in that because I guess, but we did come to the valley with Brigham Young. They’ve got the monument over there who drove them into, but we don’t, about the days of ’47? LR: Yeah. 43 SM: But we don’t, we’re not a part of that, and I don’t know if it’s because of us or that we weren’t invited or nobody want to be in it but we haven’t been...you know. There’s a lot of little things go on like that in Utah and you just, people don’t even think about it. You probably don’t even think about it, “Well, why don’t they include Blacks or how many...?” The Hispanic like the parades, they have parades. LR: Yeah, interesting. SM: You know how I’m thinking. We get, you know we not included, but I don’t know if we excluded. Because they probably would say okay, but they don’t come out trying to tell you to come on, “We want you to be part of the Days of ’47.” LR: That’s really interesting. SM: I mean, I’ve been around here for fifty-three years, I’ve never heard somebody turned around and offered...I mean I don’t know. I’m just saying those are the things that I, if I probably sit here long enough I could think of other things that you, that they’re going that you know you’re not a part of, you’re not going to go to. I guess I could go to it if I wanted to but anyway. LR: Yeah, that’s interesting. How did you become a part of the Northern Utah Coalition? SM: I retired in 1995 from the Internal Revenue Service and a lady named Reverend Shirley Jones, if you had been here you would know who she was. She was a Black Religious Science minister. There’s a church over there by Macy’s on Grant. Let’s see, Grant go behind Macy’s over that way. You know what I’m 44 talking about? It’s a church over there. They brought her here to be the pastor from Los Angeles. Reverend Shirley Jones was a member and a lot of folks didn’t quite understand, especially the Blacks, “What is a religious science church?” ‘Cause they come as a cult. During that time I was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and she became a member because I was the only Black that was a Black and a member of the Chamber of Commerce. You got to remember this was back in the 1980’s I was trying to remember the Chamber of Commerce. Commerce to Internal Revenue Service. They bought my membership, ‘cause I was the EEO Director. LR: Okay, you said you were the only African American on the Chamber of Commerce at the time? SM: I was attending at that time. At first they didn’t want to pay this, I mean, you didn’t have that many Black business people ‘cause the Chamber’s more or less about businesses. So you gonna pay all of this money to be a part of something you’re not a member of, I mean you don’t have a business. I don’t know how many go down now. I haven’t been in quite a while. But anyway so we became fast friends ‘cause we were the only two Blacks at that time I was going to the Chamber. She said, “Sarah does, there’s this grant from the Utah Department of Health and I need an African American board, advisory board, then they would come for you, but they don’t know me, they kind of suspicious. Would come work with me setting up an HIV advisory board? That was December ‘cause we got our first grant in 1996. I retired in September of ‘95 so I could go home and do anything she got on top of me. So I said, “Okay,” and I did, I set up an advisory board and 45 got the advisory board going, ‘cause I didn’t think anything about HIV, that was the last thing from my mind because I was doing EEO cases not HIV. We did and we got the first grant. Just as we got started, she got a call from her church she had to go to Manhattan in New York to start a church in Manhattan, so that left me. That wasn’t what I wanted to do, that wasn’t my call. I was happy wherever with Shirley, you know? and the Health Department said, “Well you know how to do that,” “I do?” So when the grant came again, I wrote the grant the next time, and that’s how it got started. LR: Okay, by happy accident? SM: Yeah, by happy accident because I didn’t know Shirley was going to leave. She left and went to Manhattan and started a church, a Religious Science Church, and left me. And I was working with her and she told me, “I just want you to go out and do presentations,” ‘cause being an old teacher I could go out and do the presentation. So we got the grant and I went to the jail for like fifteen years doing HIV presentations, I went to a lot of places doing HIV presentations but anyway used to go to public schools until, what that group of folks, what those ladies said? “We have to video her,” I forgot the name, it was a group of ladies. I don’t know. It wasn’t important but they said, “And she cannot talk about condoms and she cannot do this.” I said, “To hell with it, I don’t even have to. Y’all can teach your own kids ‘cause I’m not going to have you.” “You have to be videoed every time in class, just in case you won’t make the mistake and say ‘condom.’” The only way I know how to prevent HIV is to use a latex condom the right way every 46 time, but you can’t use the ‘C’ word in public school. Did you have any public school? Did they talk about condoms? LR: No, they still don’t. SM: That’s when I learned when I was going there that the kids here do a lot anal sex, and the reason why they do anal sex is because they still a virgin. Okay, they taught me that. LR: I can see the mentality that they’re thinking of, and it’s still not safe. SM: I tried to tell them that’s a higher, that’s one of the higher risks because the capillary thing that, ‘cause I keep telling them that their anus was made for stuff to come out not to go in. So when you force something in there you break a lot of capillaries ‘cause it’s not, the body wasn’t made for that function, you can use it like that but there’s a high risk. If you’re gonna use it, fine, but make sure you have on a latex condom. But you can’t tell them that, the kids you know. I think even today they don’t talk about prevention of HIV or STDs but anyway that’s Utah mentality. So I refused to go, I stopped going because I didn’t want to get into what these mothers, ‘cause they said their supposed to teach them in the home and their right, and I guess the parents will sit down and talking to them about condoms. I don’t know. The kids had some stupid questions to ask and so somebody was missing the boat but maybe the parents didn’t have all of the class for teaching it because they would ask me some [questions] if they were doing it all and teaching at home they should know. But anyway, I stopped doing presentations. 47 LR: So you’ve been with the Northern Utah Coalition from its beginning, and you just stayed on the board? You’ve never stopped? SM: No. LR: Good for you. SM: No, I didn’t get any rest for my retirement. I was retired for like a month and a half and Shirley called me and I’m still doing it. I just got the grant for Opioid, I’m working on that because I just got twenty-thousand dollars to do that. I don’t know when I’m going, this supposed to be my last year. But I guess it won’t be. We have clients that really need us and they come in. I get thirty-five hundred dollars, three thousand five hundred a year from the, for vouchers, from the LDS Church. I can give those out. I get a contract with UTA, I can get bus passes and bus tokens for half-price ‘cause they need to get to the doctor in Salt Lake. They don’t have money and so I can give them bus tokens for, even when they’re trying to get to McKay from down here if you don’t have a car you’ve got to catch the bus. It’s two fifty or something like that to ride the bus, I think the bus tokens cost about that, and so I keep bus tokens for that. LR: Okay, good. So before I ask my final question, is there any other story that you can think of that you’d like to share that I haven’t asked a question about or anything else you’d like to share about your life that I’ve missed? SM: I don’t think so, we’ve talked so much I’ve forgotten what I’ve said. LR: I haven’t so we’re good. I’m going to go ahead and ask the final question and it’s a question that I’ve asked everyone that I’ve interviewed for this project and it’s a 48 three-parter so here we go. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history? SM: Yeah, I think it really has. As you probably know in given time if you look at the population there’s always more women then there is men, so that right away would give you the idea that if all of the women vote they’re going to make a difference over the men. Also women are citizens too so why wouldn’t they have voting? So at that time they were treating women like a second-class citizen because to me they’ve always been first-class citizen and I don’t know who came up with the idea that women couldn’t vote and why they couldn’t vote, I think it’s ‘cause they were stay-at-home moms or they didn’t contribute. So yes, they really have made a difference. I think they made a difference with the education, especially why women, and kids look at that ‘cause I can’t imagine a young woman having a mom back in them days that wouldn’t be able to vote. Like I grew up and my mom couldn’t ever vote but it didn’t have to do with the suffrage, it was because she was Black. She couldn’t vote, my mom couldn’t ever vote. My dad could never vote because, oh dear Lord that’s a different story, but so yeah I do know that voting had really made a difference. I even think voting is the reason why I am who I am today, because women had the right to vote and women made a difference in the politics, in the decision-making politics that helped me along the way. Without the women I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today. I would’ve been in what women roles would’ve been, not running an organization, but probably been home doing what, probably had me knitting or crocheting somewhere at my age. So yeah, I really 49 think that women have paved the way for women like me and I know they have, that’s why I’ve always been involved with Planned Parenthood and YCC and different organizations like that because I know that there was some other organization that laid the groundwork for me. LR: Well, thank you Sarah for your willingness to just sit and to just share and talk and I’m so grateful that you did. SM: Well, thank you for considering me.