VOICES OF HISTORY
There's still a long way to go

YVONNE WALKER- TAYLOR: After my last divorce in the 1950s, I tried to adopt but they wouldn't let a single woman adopt in those days.

And then I just gave up the idea and took on different students to mentor. I have pictures of them all over the house. There were twins who were the most like children. One of them lives in Atlanta. "Mama" - soon as I hear that, I know who it is.

NED WOOD: My second son decided he wanted to be a doctor. So he went to Indiana Tech for four years, and then Tennessee four years, and Detroit four years. When he finished, he was a surgeon doctor. He's a top surgeon now.

I have a daughter who retired from the Post Office. My oldest son worked at General Motors, and he'll have his 30 years in this year. He's done janitorial work. But he gets almost as much as someone on the assembly line - $20 an hour. When I retired in 1973 I was getting $5.

GEORGE COOPER: My daughter Peggy went to Roosevelt High School in Dayton. Her life has been much, much different than ours. When I went to college, I had to work to earn money. Peggy worked while she was in college because we were trying to help her develop a work ethic, if you will. She didn't have to work, thank God.

When she graduated, she said she wanted to go to New York and think for a year. We said, `Peggy, we've seen you through college. If you want to go to grad school, we'll help you do that. If you want to think, you'll have to do that on your own.' She decided to go and think.

She got herself a little three-story walk-up in New York and started working for the Northern Student Movement, $50 a week.

Ned Wood poses in front of his home on Dearborn Avenue in 1980.

ELLEN LEE JACKSON: Harriman, Tenn., only had maybe 5,000 or 6,000 population, I think. It wasn't very large. The people didn't treat you mean as far as I could see, but they didn't have too many blacks right away to work in the different businesses.

WALKER- TAYLOR: I climbed the ladder at Wilberforce University the hard way. I started out being just an instructor. Then I ran the reading lab. Then I finally became an assistant professor and then an assistant to the president.

I went in little pigeon steps, all the way up, and finally I was provost. I was running the school when the president was out raising money

Then in 1984, I became president.

WOOD: I retired May 25, 1973, and left for California June 1. My wife got a job, so I figured with her income and my retirement, we could make it.

She worked for a home for girls. It was a huge building. It housed 59 girls. They were wayward girls, wards of the state. They called it Penny Lane. My wife worked there while my son was in college, trying to be a doctor. She and I both helped our son through school.

COOPER: Once, we didn't hear from Peggy for three weeks. We couldn't find her. You can imagine how we felt. She finally called us and said she had been in the South, registering black people to vote. She didn't want to let us know because she didn't want us to worry. Toward the end of that year, she decided that she would like to be a lawyer

She went to Harvard, and that's where she met her husband. He was in law school a year ahead of her. They got married, went to New York to live. She was working in the legal defense fund for the NAACP.

Then Mayor Ed Koch appointed Peggy a family court judge, and she worked at that for a goodly number of years. She finally came and said she was going to quit, because she had gotten the chance to teach at one of the law schools.

She said, `I have accepted a job at the NYU law school. The basic reason I'm going to take it is that I'm so dissatisfied with the quality of law that's being practiced in this country that I want to train some good lawyers.'

A few weeks ago, Janet Reno asked her staff to look across the country and find eight lawyers who were interested in trying to put more humanity into the training of lawyers. Peggy was one of them.

JACKSON: In Tennessee, as far as myself, I mixed very well with the whites. In the block where I lived, well, we were the only blacks. Around the corner from us there was maybe two blacks, I think. Now, farther down there were a lot of blacks.

There wasn't any kind of white flight in our neighborhood. I believe it was because the man that I married was well-known. He was a very likable person and I think that helped keep them from thinking any differently about it.

He passed in 1989. I came back five years later to stay with my brother and his wife in Jefferson Twp.

WALKER- TAYLOR: My third husband had had three children of his own. Never a one came to see him till he died in 1983 and then they just thought they were going to get this house. So weren't they fooled when I had a prenuptial agreement?

Ah, those kids would have taken my house away from me. I'd have been out in the street somewhere.

WOOD: I came back to Dayton from California in 1976. My wife came down with chronic arthritis and couldn't no longer work. I came out of retirement and went into gardening.

My garden was almost as long as this building. It was half an acre. It was on Hoover. We had the biggest and best garden in the city and all the surroundings. I started that up in 1977. My brother shared it with me. We raised a whole lot of vegetables there. We had sweet potatoes. I raised one that was a fraction under three pounds. It was huge. We sold a lot of them, and some of them we used for our own food.

I worked in the gardens for 17 years.

JACKSON: After I got back from Tennessee, when I'd go out I didn't know where I was half the time. There was such a big difference in the town from what it was. All of the things boarded up now.

Everything is dead as a doornail on Fifth Street now. Most of the things are gone - a lot of them are gone - and those that are there are boarded up. Quite a change!

I think that is sad because at the time when I was here, we couldn't go out anywhere unless we stopped at some of these places on Fifth Street. If we had a club meeting, we had to stop at some of these clubs before we came home. It was always a joy. But now, there isn't any kind of entertainment out there.

COOPER: I retired in 1981. Since then, there have been a number of instances one can talk about where institutions and even groups of people have made contributions very quietly. But no question about it, there's a leadership vacuum today. I don't really know why it is so, because we have, as a people, progressed so positively in the past two decades. The sheer brainpower for that kind of leadership is here. It's available.

While I grant you this is a different day than King's day, there is still a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done in the area of human and race relations. The brainpower is there. But I'm afraid -and this may be following the white pattern - that money has become the prevalent factor.

WALKER- TAYLOR: Name one. Name one black leader. Now, Colin Powell would be a good one, but Colin is going to keep himself up here and he's not going to come down and get dirty.

Jesse Jackson is an opportunist to me. He goes which way is popular to go. That's what I feel about him, my personal feelings. I don't feel any loyalty to Jesse Jackson. I don't feel the same kind of love and respect for him that I did Martin Luther or for my man, Malcolm X.

There's nobody out there that you can say, "Look! Here he's coming up; he's going to be one of the leaders." And a leaderless people is a confused lot.

WOOD: After I retired, I was living at 625 Dearborn. The crime and the drugs didn't start until the mid-1980s. And it advanced. They started selling heroin at first. That was too expensive. They couldn't afford it. It was $25 a pop. Then they came up with the crack. They mixed up cocaine with other ingredients.

The neighborhood really went down. That's why my sons and daughter wanted me to move out. It was dangerous for me. I could either get killed or get hooked on it. Them old addicts say, `Hey, take a hit.' I'd say, `You want me to be a damn fool like you? No way.'

JACKSON: I would say life is better for blacks today. Myself, I have always been around white people so it's not any problem to me. It's like where we were born. Right across the alley behind our house was a white family that lived there and they were always friendly toward us.

They would come over and play in the yard with the boys every day in the summer and that was every day in the summer. When I was young they called me sis.

COOPER: It's better today for a black person than at any other time in my life. No question about it. In the past two decades, doors have opened for black participation which were never dreamed of four decades ago.

Thirty years ago, if you wanted or needed a black nuclear engineer, I doubt that you could have found one. Today I know six. And I don't know a hell of a lot of people. That's progress.

WALKER- TAYLOR: It hasn't changed much. I feel that it's retrogressing. I feel that we're picking up and I feel that people who have prejudices against blacks are resurrecting them now because I think the lid is off. I predict some very stormy time ahead for the next millennium.

I don't know if we respect each other or not. I see black on black crime. Back in the 1940s and the 1950s you used to reach down and bring somebody with you. Now you just get up there by yourself and say, "Look at me. I'm up here."

Then, well, look at Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. There he is up there with his white wife. He thinks the world is his oyster. He came up, but how did he get there? And he's so black that he bleeds black, so he can't deny being black. We are known by the color of our skin.

JACKSON: I think it works out OK now. I think in days to come you won't know who is white and who is black. That's what it's leading up to.

There shouldn't be any difference anyway. We were all born to the same things and there really shouldn't be any differences in the blacks and whites.

WOOD: One thing my great-grandchildren can take from me would be become a born-again Christian. There's a passage in the Bible that says, `Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all of its righteousness, and all of these things will be added unto you.'

I came back from World War II and repented and rededicated my life to God, and I was baptized over again and lived a clean life. I think that was part of the longevity of my life, living a clean life most of the time.

COOPER: Whatever I am today, or whatever I was, goes back to home in Washington, N.C. It also goes back to a woman named Margaret Gillespie Cooper, my wife. She is not only a supporting influence but a guiding influence, if you will.

But life's been interesting. It's been good to us.

WALKER- TAYLOR: When I die, sing no sad song for me, 'cause I've lived a good life. A good life. I've had ups and I've had my downs and my sadnesses and my joys. The only thing that I regret is that I was never able to have my own children.

I despair sometimes when I look, when I see what's coming up and what's probably waiting for an unsuspecting group of youngsters who want to demand their rights but don't quite know what those rights ought to be.

There's going to be a whole lot of changes, a whole lot of heartaches. Man, there's going to be so many things. I'm going to float around and look. I hope I'll be able to look down and see what's going on down here.