In the Summer of 1966 Sherril Adkins got a job as a waitress at Catfish King in Birmingham, Alabama. Having grown up on integrated military bases she had not yet experienced the racism of ordinary white folks of the South. When the restaurant would not serve an African American couple, Sherril took action.
In excerpts of her life story, Daisy Borel describes the sheltered self-suffiency of the African American community along Capital Avenue in down town Indianapolis of the 1930’s and 1940’s. When she returned to Indy from Tennessee with a BS in Nursing and a family she experienced the more subtle racial discrimination of the North.
89 year-old Mary Webster, recorded with her son Damon Richards, tells of her brief experiences with segregation during college and the importance of family.
In this excerpt of her life story we hear Olivia McGee-Lockhart tell about working at the Fall Creek Y during her college years in the early 1960’s. At meetings of The Intercollegiate Club she met different kinds of people, learned about the civil rights movement, the NAACP Youth Counsel, and the challenges facing African Americans in a changing world.
During a job interview in Indianapolis this native of Brooklyn, New York wondered why everyone in town seemed to be wearing black and white in May. Lorraine Ball tells about the impact of attending the world’s largest single-day sporting event!