A Long Road: 50 Years of Experience from Five African American K-State Alumni Chapter 2

Charles Rankin: The community that I grew up in, I wouldn't say it was racist. I'd say it was more classic, you know, classism. As an example, the African American kids couldn't swim in a swimming pool but the white kids got to swim. If you went to the movie theater you had to sit in the section of the movie theater they called the crows nest. Even though you paid the same money, go into the theater, go upstairs to the balcony and sit in a cordoned off area in the back of the movie theater. If you went to a restaurant, you had to either take your food, buy it and leave in a sack or you sat in the back of the restaurant, not where the other folks sat but in the back. And the thing that if people would ask me what was the driving force that made me become a social activist, I would say San Francisco, California. Because my parents took their children out to San Francisco. All of my relatives lived in San Francisco, meaning my uncles and aunts. They all went out there in the 20s and so we went out there and daddy drove his little Chevrolet with his family in it to San Francisco. 

The innocent thing about the trip, and as we're talking about this I could see things that really impacted me. He couldn't rent a motel room, so he's driving from Winfield, Kansas to San Francisco and he drove as long as he could then we'd stop and we'd sleep on the ground and I remember that the ants bit me. So when people talk about camping I am not one of the supporters of camping because the red ants in New Mexico they bite you. But we finally got to San Francisco and my cousins were all about the same age was taking us out. There was a place called the Cliff House right on the edge of the west side of San Francisco and had five indoor pools, and so you could go swimming there. So my cousin Geraldine said, let's go swimming. Well I had to play like I could swam with white kids and black kids and brown kids before and I'd never had. So we going into the cliff house climb up a diving board, it was about 10 meters high, and I get up there and I did not know how tall 10 meters was until I got up there and I had to dive off because the little girl before me, dived off, you know, dived off the diving board, then my cousin was teasing me said was I going to let this little girl do something I was too scared to do so naturally I followed the lady and I parted my hair like Dagwood when I came out of the water, but then we go to a restaurant you could sit anywhere you wanted to, you go to a movie theater, you could sit anywhere you paid. 

I took those concepts back to my hometown and refused to participate in that discriminatory practice. We went to California all the time, and every time I learnt something, I'd bring it back to Kansas, but interesting enough, the swimming pool's incident, is this little girl I mentioned was working there, and she was maybe 14 years old, and she says, make sure you take a shower. And I took a shower, and the kids were on the side of the pool hanging on the fence, because they thought, surely they would hang me, or kill me in that white swimming pool, and I dove in one in the swimming pool, and came up underneath the diving board on the other end. And the kids got their quarters out, run around and paid their quarters we integrated that swimming pool. So I think it was more of a tradition than a reality. I thought that people had always done that and they figured you were supposed to do that, but there really wasn't rule that you had to do that. And I think a lot of discriminatory practices are really predicated on those types of experiences.

Upon the death of my mother, when I was in school I built her a cedar chest, and in that cedar chest we found documents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She was able to call to his attention the discriminatory practice that was taking place in the defense industry during World War II, and she said that the defense contractors and businesses and companies were not allowing African Americans or at that time Negros to work in the defense industry, and the government was being short sighted but not taking advantage of these people wanting to work. So he dispatched this the guy by the name of Robert Weaver, who was later on under Lyndon Baines Johnson's secretary of labor I believe and he came out to Kansas and my mother sat down and talked to him about what he needed to do to make the defense department hire Negroes at that time, so that they could work, and my mother did that. 

Kathy Greene: I was never one to demonstrate or picket, but we had a black student union that was developed and speaking about you know recruiting more students and making sure a fair treatment was given. When I first came on that campus in 1964, they had a shortage of housing but they had like one student, he was an older student who was getting an accounting degree and he was renting his house same as his wife across the street so a lot of us stayed over there, and it was integrated, there was only two blacks that stayed in the house and the rest were white. But I was originally assigned to a white roommate and all of a sudden she disappeared and I was like, what happened to so and so, and I found out later that she didn't want a room, her parents didn't want a room with me. I believe they were alumni and they were pretty big donors, and the Dean said, that's the assignment. We don't accept that she doesn't want a room with someone because of their race, and that's how it was put, and the dean was Dean Snodgrass, I will never forget her name. And she never told me that, but some other people knew about it and told me.

Veryl Switzer: Coaches treated us well because of Bill Meek. They brought him in my Freshman year, and freshmen weren't eligible to compete at that time, but he would try to make it understood that I was part of that family. He was from Alabama. He coached at Maryland and so he had never coached a black player until I came here. We had a good relation too, maybe now students to compete in the big schools in Alabama, Florida, so those were our experiences, and we experienced that with a coach who had no experience in working with black students, and I was his number one guy he made me feel at home and that was big help, because I could depend upon him, in fact had it not been for him, I wouldn't have played in the East West Shrine game, but they were not going to recruit blacks or allow them to play, he convinced them by telephone that I would be the best football player, that I had the skills and demeanor to work with anybody and everybody. I didn't know that this all happened, and I came back after the term, after the Shrine Bowl I didn't realize that it had they had words said to each other about whether I'm going to get invited or not, but he wouldn't tell me. Now I was drafted to the NFL, I went to Green Bay, they didn't believe in paying the price these youngsters are getting today, but at least they recognized me from a stand point of being a drafted number four and he had all but one quarterback and that experience gave me a really a thumbs up type of attitude, and I was the only black player in Green Bay, when they picked me up there. I didn't know whether I wanted to go up there or not, the weather was an issue.

Juanita McGowan: When I first arrived in the Manhattan community prior to working, well of course you're looking for a place to stay, and so I had looked in the paper, and had looked at what apartments were available in Manhattan, and so I called this one apartment community, and she said yes we have a two-bedroom apartment available, please come, and then my mother drove up with me, and so we checked into this apartment community and met with the manager, and she saw me and she said, oh! You know, I'm mistaken, I really don't have an apartment available and so my mom just kind of touched me on the side and she says my mom says oh that's so discouraging, she said my daughter's getting ready to move here I want to make sure she is in someplace that is safe, my mom says and we have the money to pay for the down payment and everything, and so she said I tell you what? Why don't you give me 30 minutes to kind of check our records again and then call me back and I'll let you know if apartment is available. And so when we walked what my mom said, don't worry you are going to get this apartment, so we came back in about an hour and she says, oh yeah I do have an apartment available for you. So I share that to say that when in the 1980s, the Manhattan community wasn't really ready for African American women, especially in this particular apartment community, I think I was the only African American who would be living in that apartment and so that was new, and so part of that pioneer experience is always being sometimes the first and sometimes when you're the first you can either be angry or frustrated or see it as an opportunity. And so when I moved to that apartment community and then stayed there, I was ending up helping her redesign the flower beds, how to improve the apartments and all that. 

I think one of my greatest support systems was Provost James Coffman, who was my mentor and who encouraged me to get with the Tilford Initiative, I remember Provost Coffman even looking at my salary at one point and saying your salary is not at the level of others in your position and therefore this is what your salary needs to be. Provost Coffman was probably one of my biggest advocates. I think he understood me, I understood him, we worked very, very well together. And I think people that knew me knew the quality of my work. But it's the challenges I experienced were students, very few though, students in the classroom were not used to an African-American instructor and then as you were promoted and you began to supervise people, really, every once in a while you had someone not comfortable with an African-American supervisor.