• Audio and Video files (requires Quicktime and Javascript)

The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections has made every effort to transcribe the oral interviews as recorded. It is standard in transcriptions of oral histories to retain dialect, grammatical idiosyncrasies, and the natural rhythm of the spoken word. The transcript is meant to reflect verbal conversation as recorded rather than a polished written document. Our transcription policy adheres to this protocol. While each interviewee was asked to read and edit his/her interview transcript to ensure the proper spelling of people and places, all transcriptions retain their original wording. Any post-interview content additions or corrections are placed in footnotes. Occasional interviewee requests to remove selected passages have been honored, and the point of such removal has been designated. We believe this policy preserves the integrity and spontaneity of the original interview.

This set of oral history interviews was conducted beginning in 2008 by historian Laura Warren Hill in conjunction with her research project, "'Strike the Hammer While the Iron Is Hot': The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, NY, 1945-1975." Statements in these interviews are those of the interviewees alone, and in no way speak for the University of Rochester as a whole, or for individual members of the University community. The University accepts no responsibility for the content of these interviews

Laura Hill: I'm Laura Hill, interviewing Dr. Walter Cooper. Today is May 21^st, 2008, and we are at the University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections.

We've had a very nice chat this morning, Dr. Cooper. Can you start by telling me a little bit about your earliest experiences with race?

Dr. Cooper:[1] Earliest experiences with race, of course. I was born in Clairton, Pennsylvania which is a community fourteen miles southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along the Monongahela River and, historically, during the evolution of basic manufacturing in that area. It became a steel mill town, surrounded by coal mines and a very large Coke and Byproducts  Works. My parents came from the South. I'm the grandson--great-grandson of a slave born in Florida. My parents came north in nineteen hundred and twenty-one. My father, who never went to school—not one day— worked in coal mines initially and then the steel mill for forty-four years before he retired. My mother had nine years of education in southwestern Georgia, and was the driving force, of course, for education, and actually the management of the apartment where we lived.

The first real problem with—in terms of racial encounters—took place when I was a sophomore in high school. The football squad was approximately thirty percent non-white and there were a—four or five young African American females who opted to be cheerleaders and, due to what I would consider probably an unwritten law within the Physical Ed Department of the school, they were not permitted to go through the ordinary channels to become cheerleaders. So we won four straight games and the week preceding the—our most, not hated rivals, but one of our rivalries in the area, McKeesport, Pennsylvania—I decided after our fourth victory, that instead of appearing for practice on Monday, all the black football players would show up at my parents' apartment and we would boycott the practice that day. That was the first real situation that I had run into and tried to handle with the encouragement of my mother, of course, and we broke essentially the basic back of the unwritten policy of black girls not being cheerleaders, or eligible and accepted as cheerleaders for Clairton High School.

Dr. Cooper: It was an interesting community, we—there was not a rigid pattern of housing discrimination. The non-white population was approximately ten to twelve percent. For example, as a youngster, our landlord lived adjacent to us, and he came from Italy; the baker across the street, came from Czechoslovakia, and other residents with names like Benich, from Czechoslovakia, Delinsky,  Cavalier, actually, Scarlatta and Rossi  and others—so it was a community which did not have a rigid pattern of housing segregation.  In nineteen hundred and forty-two, during the World War II, and the expansion of the steel mill operation brought in to the community an influx of new workers, many from the South, but other places in the country where housing had been rather fluid. The black minister, by the name of Reverend  Starks,  made the decision that the federal government had set aside moneys for two units in Clairton, Pennsylvania — Blair Heights and Woodland Terrace — to be open to all of the citizens. But this minister stated that he wanted Blair Heights solely for African Americans, so that crystallized housing segregation in the community, promoted by a black minister.

      The second—I would say—I was—you know,  I was an athlete, I was a—I graduated salutatorian of my class of three hundred and seventeen.  I was president of the National Honor Society, and I chaired the History Club. So, in the school itself, there was no pattern of discrimination and I think, by and large, the students got along very well with one another. It was a very interesting experience because, in high school, since Clairton had a steel mill and a small chemical plant, it had a tax base which was of a magnitude that could be supportive of a nice high school. And a high school – a new high school was built in 1927. So—but it—there were small, almost rural or semi-rural communities where you had a large white population, but no tax base to support a high school, so in general they bused in white students at the high school level to Clairton High School. So it was one of those situations, where we often think of busing, but from my experience, it was busing white students into a rather substantial high school which was attended by a fair number of African Americans.

Laura Hill: Interesting. Do you—I'm sorry to interrupt.

Dr. Cooper: Sure.

Laura Hill: Do you think the level of poverty then, in the outer regions,  contributed to the lack of racial tension within, amongst the students?

Dr. Cooper: Well I think—I think that may be a factor, and Clairton, in the eyes of those communities like Large and Pleasant Hills and Elrama, represented economic stability and I don't – there wasn't any rebellion against white students being bused in and there was not the economic viability to put them in private schools like Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh.

Laura Hills:   Right.

Dr. Cooper: So the other thing which I would like to point out and which has become prevalent today is that the rationale is often given for lack of achievement level of African American students because of poverty. But I was—I was born and reared during the Depression years, yet we had family. That's the differentiation. The black family had not been shattered to the extent that it is today. And so I think you could have a student coming from impoverished circumstances but it—but that student's opportunity to succeed is directly correlated to the stability of the family. And it's not poverty per se, because no one in my generation would have learned anything if affluency was necessary for academic achievement. I was in a class of 317, we have twenty-two blacks in the class, eleven in—and this is the class of 1946—eleven went on to post-secondary educational systems. Out of the eleven, three received doctorates degrees.

Laura Hill: That's impressive.

Dr. Cooper: We came from peasant folk. It wasn't like a second generation graduating from college. No. There was very little educational background in the parents of most of my classmates, who happened to be African American. The—. We had twenty-one honor students, three of whom were black, and out of my—as I have mentioned to you, three went on and received doctorates degrees. The two hundred and ninety-five white classmates—four went on and received doctorates.

Laura Hill: Wow. So, as we talk about the doctorate, you came to Rochester in 1952?

Dr. Cooper: Fifty-two.

Laura Hill: Fifty-two. And tell me a little bit about the circumstances surrounding that.

Dr. Cooper: Well, there's lots of circumstances, I can—. Well, when I graduated from high school, in Allegheny County at that time, with Pittsburgh in the seat of it—.

Laura Hill: Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Cooper: Yes. Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, with Pittsburgh in the seat of that county, in Western Pennsylvania. There was a program wherein they—the graduating seniors, particularly those who had taken the college prep course, had the opportunity to take a standardized examination, and those who were in the top half-percent or so received scholarships to Duquesne University, University of Pittsburgh, and at that time, Carnegie Tech, which later on morphed into Carnegie Mellon. I was in one of those top half-percent, and I had received a scholarship to Duquesne University. And I had interviewed in May nineteen hundred forty-six, so the—I met with the director of admissions, I remember his name, I won't call it now. He's since passed and I will not besmirch his name. But he went through the preliminaries, lauding my athletic ability, my academic ability, and certainly my participation in the school activities. And I then countered by saying "Well, Father, I come from a large family and I prefer to play football to eliminate the commute every day", of approximately fourteen to fifteen miles, which, you know in the winter would be rather precarious—.

Laura Hill: Sure

Dr. Cooper: So he kind of flushed, and he said "Well, the University has scheduled Wake Forest and North Carolina State, Clemson and other schools in the south, and if we have an athlete of color on our squad, they will cancel the game." So I said, well, I said "You mean to tell me that you would accept me full time as a student, but then deny me the opportunity to participate in all the extra-curricular activities which the institution offers." He said "Well I don't make the rules." And I said—here I am sixteen or seventeen years old—I said, "Well, I don't—",  I said "Well, I kinda understand that, but, under the circumstances, I cannot attend your institution." So I had a friend whom I had competed against, in the Monongahela Valley in athletics by the name of Daniel Towler  from Donora,  Pennsylvania, who already had committed himself to go to Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. So he contacted me and he said, "Coop, where're you goin'  to school?" And I said "Well at this point in time I haven't— I'm out of it, and I'm left with the unenviable option of going to the services, becoming an eighteen-month GI, and then going to college on a GI bill." And he said "Oh no, you oughta  consider Washington and Jefferson College. I have a good contact there." So I went to Washington and Jefferson College, under a—on an academic football scholarship. I had made All Monongahela Valley as a halfback at Clairton High School. So I went to my undergraduate—experience was—I went to Washington and Jefferson College, for four years. I majored in chemistry, minored in physics and math.

The reason I wanted to become a scientist because I didn't know any blacks who were scientists. I knew doctors, I knew pharmacists, I knew lawyers who were out of work, and I, and also knew dentists. But—so I took it as a challenge. And  I think the motivating factor in the household is that I read. We always had newspapers and books in the house, and in fact we had an unabridged dictionary in the house as early as nineteen hundred and thirty-nine, and had a mother who scrupulously went over your report card, and demanded a better performance out of you. But the other aspect of it was, I had a sister who was three years older than I and she—of course she started first grade before I did—but on returning home, everything she learned I had to learn. So she taught me how to read before I went to school—at that time, first grade, because kindergarten was not mandatory in Pennsylvania. So it was a situation where, within the household, it was a learning experience, and I would say with—it was an environment which dictated learning as an essential value. The—. It was—reflecting back on the experience—it was quite interesting. The church, where my parents were southern Baptists and we went to a church called Morningstar Baptist Church–. But, as a youngster, I remember very vividly the minister emphasized education, and in May or June of each year, high school graduates were highlighted and honored, and given a gift, and those who were going on to college were given a small stipend. A few years ago, reading some of the church history which had been written, I got a better appreciation for that minister because he had run for the board of education in Clairton, Pennsylvania in nineteen hundred and thirty. And so he left his imprimatur of educational interests on that church.

After graduation from Washington and Jefferson College, and you know that was somewhat traumatic, because when recruiters came around, they—the process was to put together your resumé, and all of your credentials, place them in the recruitment office, and when recruiters came around they scanned and went through these many resumes and other addenda, and if they were interested in you they—you got a call to report to the recruiter's office. So I went over—this is like May of nineteen hundred and —oh my god— nineteen hundred and fifty, and the recruiter was from DuPont so, you know, you can read body language.

Laura Hill: Mmm- hmm. Wilmington.

Dr. Cooper: Yeah, you can read body language, that's one of the values of growing up, being of color. And you know, I sometimes say, "What are you doing here?" you know, "You don't belong" and so forth.

Well anyway, the recruiter went—you know, recovered himself, and he went through a litany of, "Well you have an excellent academic record, you were on the football squad, you were a star, you were an officer of your class, and —but, I would like for you to know that blacks—DuPont does not hire blacks at its research facilities in Wilmington, Delaware."  So I left there somewhat shattered because I firmly believed if you were prepared, that was the essential first step to becoming—being hired by some corporation,  but that was a lesson.

The school itself was very interesting;  it was all male, founded in 1781. It's the eleventh oldest college in the United States. It was all male from 1781 until nineteen hundred and seventy. It's coed now and probably has slightly more women attending, out of the, oh, fifteen hundred or fifteen hundred to sixteen hundred students.

Laura Hill: That's the trend in the university today.

Dr. Cooper: Well, but it has a downside also, because what is happening now—many colleges and universities, in terms of its admission policies, recognize that there's a—what they consider an unhealthy balance between the male and female students on their campus and so I think often—and this is what I surmise—that if a male and female have equivalent qualifications, they will take the male.

Laura Hill: Interesting.

Dr. Cooper: Yeah. I was told a couple years ago, at Howard University, they—seventy percent of the student body was female. So, so that's a—so it's a problem.

Laura Hill: Yeah. That is a problem.

Dr. Cooper: So, what was, you know, how about jobs? Well, for the summer I made the decision to go to graduate school because I had planned to work, to aid and assist the younger members of the family, and provide some financial support for my parents. I was late in applying for graduate studies, so I had a fellowship to Howard University, but that summer, nineteen hundred and fifty, I had two major events take place in my life—I'm giving you a—I'm giving you a biography—. [laughs]

Laura Hill: No this is great, it's fantastic.

Dr. Cooper: So I came home from college and a fifteen-year-old— I'll backtrack. During the summers preceding my graduation from college, the college males and high school graduates, we used to get together and we formed a club called  the Cosmos Club. Cosmos Club was—now this was in the '40s, the late '40s—was designed to aid and assist youth activities. So we would raise money during the summer through things like a Lil' Abner Hop, you know, and a little dance or something, raise enough money to support Little League baseball—that was the primary activity of the summer. And so we got to know lots of the youngsters, so this fifteen-year-old came up to me and said – uh, I asked him, I said "How're you doing?" He had been an honor student in junior high and he said "Not too well." and I said "What's wrong?" And he said "I'm on drugs". And I said "Oh, you smoke the weed now and then?" And he said "No, it's heroin." So I got another—I got together with another black college student and got on the docket of the city council. So I put together a statement of concern, went before city council, and actually exhorted the city council to practice more diligence in terms of getting rid of drugs and other acivil activities that were – that was taking place in the community because it was having a very negative impact on the children. Well the next day, in the—this is early June or late May of nineteen hundred and fifty—the McKeesport Daily News, which was close by, and two days later the Clairton Progress, a community newspaper, had—there were spokesmen for most of the institutions of the community, excoriating me in the press for besmirching or denigrating the good name of Clairton, Pennsylvania, and these young men—it was two of us—are in the community at best three months, they don't know what's going on, they're making these scurrilous statements out of ignorance. But a great tragedy was the fact that there was a black minister who had been in town only six months, he joined the chorus. He didn't even know us.

Laura Hill: Why the city council? Why was that your avenue for addressing the problem?

Dr. Cooper: Because they controlled the police department.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: The city council was responsible for the maintenance and the eventual policies of the police department.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Now—so then, what happens? The people who were, you know, handling drugs, or even using drugs, they became my antagonists. And I would walk the street and I would get things like: "What are you trying to do? Tell people how to live?" so I just ignored it. I got threatening letters and telephone calls and so I had a high school teacher who knew about the situation because I maintained a close contact with her, and she said well, you know, she could get the district attorney's office to provide protection for me, but I told her I didn't need any. What is sad is a few years ago I tried to go to the archives of theMcKeesport Daily News to recapture that information and they claimed they didn't have it in their archives. So I will eventually have to go to the congressional library and get that, yes.

Well anyway, one of the offshoots of that was in August, prior to my going to Howard University. The police chief, Peter Orsini  was at Blair Heights, in the parking lot, where my – it was the housing facility where my parents stayed and, his name was Peter Orsini,and he said "Walter, do you have a minute?" I said "Sure thing, Peter." He said "I just would like to inform you that the city has taken over the management of Blair Heights"—you know the federal government was getting out of the direct management process—"so I would like for you to know that your parents are staying at one of the apartments." I said "Yes." And he said "I would suggest to you pull back on your—on your criticism of the city." And I said—now I didn't even own a pen knife then—and I said "Well, Pete, nothing will happen to my parents and they will not be removed from their apartment." I said because "If they are, then there'll be hell to pay." And I walked away.

The other incident in 1950 was coming home and getting a job for the summer. Of course there was the steel mill, and in a town whose population now is around twenty-five thousand, there's summer hiring opportunities and so I was refused, and all the other black college students home for the summer and employment was supposed to be based on the tenure of your parents or relatives, uncles, in the steel industry, and at that time my father must've had about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years and other members—It was nine of us—and other members' parents or uncles had had maybe twenty-five to twenty-seven years. But they wouldn't hire any of us. So a friend of mine, a high school classmate, alerted me that the chairman of the board at U.S. Steel was going to visit the Clairton works, and would be touring and returning to the personnel office at 4:00pm. So I said well, we'll go to the personnel office and we will sit in.  And so nine of us sat in at the personnel office. Initially they said there were no jobs, so we just sat there quietly, you know, not bothering anybody. So around 3:30, you could see the personnel people fidgeting.  I had prepared a statement of concern, so the personnel men were fidgeting and so, at about, at 3:30 I told the group, I said, "Well, we are not going to accept one or two jobs, right? Correct."

At about 3:45, I got called in— since I led the group—I got called up  to the personnel office window and the person said, "We've been calling all over the plant, and we finally have found two jobs." I said "We aren't interested." Oh my God, at that time, two of my, the nine, came forth and accepted the jobs. So I said well we are not beat as yet. So that must have been like Thursday.  I said on Monday we'll go to the U.S. Steel main office on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. So I got a group and we went there on Monday and I went to the industrial relations office and I said "Look, I know that the chairman of the board of U.S. Steel is a very busy man, but we would like to have, as soon as possible, fifteen minutes of his time." And the industrial relations manager said "For what reason?" And I said "To inform him of the discriminatory policy in the hiring for summer help in the Clairton works of U.S. Steel. We only need fifteen minutes." "So you have a problem?" "Oh, I don't have a problem", I said,  "the corporation has a problem." And so we—he said "No—hold it." So he called the industrial relations in Clairton – fellow by the name of Johnson, I can't remember his first name — and so he set up a meeting  for like Wednesday and we met and everybody received jobs.

So that was 1950. Then I went to Washington D.C., Howard University, and then that's when the reality of the straight racial segregation in this country,  because Washington D.C. was one of the most segregated cities in the United States. How could this be the capital of the democracy, capital of the United States?

Laura Hill: I'm afraid it's still that way.

Dr. Cooper: There was only one town, downtown theatre that you could attend—that was the DuPont at DuPont Circle, and they had an amusement park at—was it Glen Echo or one of those places?

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: I know there was an "echo" in it—was it at Chevy Chase? Well, but blacks did not go there.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: So it was a very segregated town,  so then it really sunk in. But I had done lots of reading history and I knew experiences. In 1946, I wrote a term paper, in high school, on the Negro soldier's contribution to American history. To get any information I had to—on weekends I'd brown-bag, on Saturday particularly—go ride the bus to Pittsburgh, go to the Carnegie library, go through the stacks to see if I could find anything. What was very interesting in those days—most of the books, if you looked in the index, if you were seeking information on the Negro American or African Americans—it was Negro or Black Americans at that time—they did not have a separate title, in the indexing. You found them under "social problems".

Laura Hill: [Laughs] Right.

Dr. Cooper: So I was defined as a social problem in most of the literature of that time.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: So I went to Howard University and that's where I met my wife of many years. She was in chemistry and we married when I came here as a graduate student. We married in January of nineteen hundred and fifty-three, and well, being married, I then confronted the housing segregation in Rochester. In 1954, the wife and I answered ads for sixty-nine apartments and were refused at all of them.  But it was tough because I knew post-docs, one from Switzerland—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper:   —who answered an ad for an apartment,  and he was turned down because he had a foreign accent.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: So, ah, well that gives you—. So I arrived in Rochester.

Laura Hill: How did you come? To the University of Rochester?

Dr. Cooper: I had a fellowship.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: I had a – while at Howard University I took a special course under a Dr. Terrell Hill, who had been a professor here in—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —in theoretical chemistry at the University of Rochester. He had taught quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics.

Laura Hill:      Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Quite a prominent name in that field.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And so I had fellowship offers to Yale University, ah, I think maybe Penn State, and maybe another school, and he suggested that a better fit would be the University of Rochester—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —because of its smallness and so forth. So I applied and was granted a fellowship to the University of Rochester,  so I came here in August of nineteen hundred and fifty-two.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: I lived on—right off the women's campus, which was, you know, it was separate at that time and they did not combine campuses until nineteen hundred and fifty-four. And the first—on this campus, they built a dorm for women and they had a Dean of Women called Dean Haybein.  We used to call it the Haybein  Hilton.  

Laura Hill: [Laughs]

Dr. Cooper: [Chuckles] Well, you probably have a—I can go on and on but I won't.

So I ended up in Rochester and that's another story. But you may have some other questions you want to ask me.

Laura Hill: Tell me a little bit about your experiences at the University of Rochester.

Dr. Cooper: Oh I had a—within the University of Rochester I had—my thesis adviser was Winston D. Walters. He was a Ph.D. out of Johns Hopkins. He had done a post-doc in Tübingen in Germany.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, his adviser there was Karl Bonhoeffer.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, who later visited his lab. Karl Bonhoeffer was of the famous—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —was the brother of the famous theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And Karl had visited the laboratory so it was a—the chemistry and physics department was highly internationalized.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And of course the Cold War was going on then and there were many political discussions from, you know, colleagues, post-docs and so forth dealing with NATO, dealing with the Soviet Republics, and the campus was very interested in it because it—in '52, '53, '54—the world's most powerful cyclotron was located here at the University of Rochester.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: It was two hundred and fifty million electron volts so every two years or so, on campus, you would have the Enrico Fermis,  you know, all of the heralded physicists and mathematicians from World War II, Victor Weiskopf, Hans Bethe, just a plethora of famous men on this campus. And then you had a—you had a—you had a very vigorous program in international kind of activities. Ah, the—you had a—I'll never forget a conference here, it was toward the end or right after I got out of graduate school, of the impact of western cultures, societies on evolving, independent nations, particularly in Africa and Asia.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And so they have very interesting conferences on campus, and in 1959, while I was still in the community, of course, they had Robert Oppenheimer—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —the physicist who had been banned from atomic energy facilities. And he gave a talk at Strong Auditorium. It was overflow,  and they put speakers on the outside because people wanted to hear this famous physicist. The head of the chemistry department, while I was here, was Albert Noyes. He was—he served on a UNESCO[2] conference.[3]

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And then, head of the physics department, was Robert Marshak—

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: —who had received his doctorate under Hans Bethe at Cornell, and it was internationalized also. I'll never forget there was a post-doc in physics from Italy who was deeply involved in, you know, trying to understand America and he said, "I find it strange that in Italy, when I was taught American history,  the textbooks said that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were traitors. He said I don't understand, but your books don't call them traitors." And I started thinking and I said, "Well—

Laura Hill: Interesting.

Dr. Cooper: —that is true."

Laura Hill: It is true.

Dr. Cooper: And I said, "You know, he's the –Robert E. Lee—the soft-spoken—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —gentleman from Virginia."

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: But, you know, the—our hero at the battle of Lake Champlain, who got into trouble by divulging the defense of the Academy[4] to the British and we called him a traitor. But we—here were two men who were educated at West Point, they were on the federal payroll, and they decided to fight against their country but we don't call them—we don't call them traitors. Because I think, psychologically, after the Civil War—we're meandering a bit. But I think, psychologically, after the Civil War, due to the great slaughter of men—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and destruction of property, I think both whites, North and South, somehow regretted that they had slaughtered each other, for the ill-defined belief that it was— the war was fought to free the slave. The war, essentially, was fought to preserve—

Laura Hill: Preserve the nation.

Dr. Cooper: —the republic.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: Yeah.

Laura Hill: Sure. Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, so the university itself was a very exciting place. You had in the history department, people like Richard Wade, and you had—there were programs to bring prominent speakers to campus. But you also have to understand that there existed institutions in the community that tended to reinforce enlightened thought about issues, civil rights, peace in the world, and so forth. For example, you had the City Club, which brought prominent speakers to the community.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And I think we've lost much with the demise of the City Club. Controversial figures were brought here. And then you had a university that had a focus on national and international issues.

Laura Hill: Tell me a little bit more about the City Club.

Dr. Cooper: Well, from my understanding of it, it was—it had meetings at the Chamber of Commerce which was then situated on St. Paul.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And it would bring, bi-monthly or on a monthly basis, speakers like Senator Paul Douglas from Illinois, who was a liberal senator in the Congress.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, Robert Weaver, who was the first black to head a government agency, HUD.[5]

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And you had—I was told that in I believe the year 1924, they had brought W.E.B. Dubois here.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, and you just had a—you just had internationally-oriented people in the community like Saul Linowitz—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —who was associated with Xerox. And you had leadership. Whenever I mention to you the business of the—trying to counter the administrative decision to put nine hundred students on half-day session—.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: The president of the board of education at that time was a judge, ah, Judge Jacob[6]—what was his last name? Ah, I'll think of it in a minute. Ah, he had been a member of the Mensa Society[7],

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And I think what would be an interesting study would be to look at the devolution of leadership, say in one of your most important institutions, the educational institution, from the sixties up to the present time because I think you've seen a diminution—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —of the quality of leadership, not only in terms of education, but being also worldly aware, and aware certainly of some of the issues in education.

                                                                        Civil Rights Prior to 1964                                                 Index 43:35

Laura Hill: Let's actually move in that direction. Um, I know that you were very much involved in the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement prior to the uprising in 1964. Can you talk a little bit about that movement prior to the rebellion?

Dr. Cooper: Well  I think any—I think any individual who comes into a community and has been defined by the mores and unwritten rules of the community that you are a social problem, then I think you are morally compelled to fight those issues. Housing was a terrible problem. Police intimidation and harassment was a terrible problem.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, I would say my early involvement certainly began, in terms of a structure, was with the NAACP. When I came in the late fifties, the—after I got out of graduate school—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and was working at Eastman Kodak in the research laboratories, the president of the NAACP was Queenie Zuehlke.  Her husband was a administrator in the Kodak research laboratories, and he asked me to come out and talk to two youngsters at the church they attended in West Irondequoit. So I did that and his wife got interested in my being involved,  and so I became a member of the NAACP and chaired its education committee. But I think you have to have some background. For example, educated whites had been involved in NAACP—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper:  —as early as nineteen hundred and forty eight.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: The president of the NAACP was Professor John Slater—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —from the University of Rochester. I think he chaired the English Department. And he was the one who had suggested a scholarship committee under the aegis of the NAACP.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And a member of the NAACP at that time was Dr. William Jacob Knox—

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: —who was a Kodak scientist. He and another scientist[8], ah, then formulated the Ralph Bunche Scholarship Committee, which was under the aegis of the NAACP,  in 1948.  Dr. Knox had known Ralph Bunche when he was at Harvard and then when he taught at Howard University, and Ralph Bunche also taught there for a short period of time.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: So that was the beginning and then  I always had an interface with the younger community.  The NAACP had a—had a very vigorous youth council—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and it was headed by a schoolteacher, Laplois Ashford.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And Laplois Ashford had had a—more than a slight and a continuing relationship with Professor Richard Wade here at the University of Rochester, who was also interested in politics.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: So we worked with Richard Wade,  and I had become affiliated—well, not affiliated but aware of a social kind of organization called the Delta Ressics, which was a group of high school grads and some college grads, males and females, blacks who would meet and try to do things in the community. Many of them did things in the Seventh Ward—

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: —which—where you had the Hanover Houses.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Um. Richard Wade and I got together and he was interested in a candidate to oppose a —the Third Ward supervisor, who was a man by the name of Peck, ah, I want to say Lester Peck, I believe it was his name—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —who ran a pharmacy at the corner of South Plymouth and Adams. And we were looking for a candidate, and so I knew the Delta Ressics was, you know, comprised of the most forward looking and fundamentally better educated blacks in the community. Even though they were black professionals like Dr. Lunsford, Dr. – they had a dentist, and –

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —they had another physician, Dr. Jordan. Well, ah, the— I talked it over with the Delta Ressics, who would like to run for Third Ward supervisor and well, the men said "Well, you know, I'd face pressure from my employer." I said, "It would be logical if we chose a woman because she would not come under any economic pressures—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —she was not in the work force." So I suggested that Constance Mitchell run—

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: —for the Third Ward supervisor position and that was when I became affiliated with Constance Mitchell.  Dick Wade and I ran the first campaign, and what was very interesting, while on the University of Rochester's campus, there was a very dynamic NAACP campus chapter.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: And it was highly interracial, and it included even some of the post-docs from places like India.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And I'll never forget one meeting where we were talking about school segregation and segregation in the South, and this one post-doc from India—I think from the southern part of India— said, "Well, if it's a moral evil, why don't you just burn it down?" [Laughs]

Laura Hill: [Laughs]

Dr. Cooper: Well anyway, we embarked upon registering voters, and walking the streets of the third and the seventh and the fifth and eleventh wards—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —where you had a high percentage of the non-white population. So we registered voters, we were very optimistic that we were going to win in 1959, and we were—we lost.

Laura Hill: Mmm.

Dr. Cooper: But we came back in 1961;  I chaired the campaign, and we won. The— 1961 was the first time a minority had been—became a member of the governing entities here in Rochester, Monroe County.

Laura Hill: What changed from '59 to '61?

Dr. Cooper: Ah, from '59, I think you had a very active NAACP and there was a— I think the Civil Rights Movement in the South invigorated and stimulated greater activity on the part of blacks here in Rochester.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Having them take a closer scrutiny of their own position in the community. And it was not in isolation because you had stalwart religious figures at that time like Rabbi Bernstein from B'rith Kodesh, ah, you had Father Henry Atwell of the Catholic Courier Journal, ah, you had—you had, coming to the community, people like Martin Luther King Jr.—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —had come here around—must have been around January or February nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, and Central Presbyterian had Abernathy come—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and give a talk and—and so the Civil Rights Movement really energized and had blacks in northern communities re-evaluate their status. And so, I think there emerged a new energy and a new sense of identification within the African American community. It was not—it was not large in terms of a cadre of people really involving themselves in actions, but it was beginning to emerge.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Like the Delta Ressics were actively involved in political things. And I'll give you an idea of how the change that had taken place.  Nineteen fifty-nine, for the Delta Ressics, I interviewed— I gave them a talk on Paul Robeson.[9]

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: He had put out his autobiography, Here I Stand[10]. At the end of his—my presentation, a person who was a schoolteacher and later a principal, said well, was I a communist.

Laura Hill: [Laughs] Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And I had, as a graduate student, '54, '55, I had taught one day a week, high school students who happened to be black at St. Simon's, which was at that time at 6 ½ Oregon Street.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: I taught them  black history out of E. Franklin Frazier's A History of the Negro in the United States[11] which—

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: —he published in 1949. And I had gotten to know E. Franklin Frazier.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: In fact, he came here to one of the conferences, which I had mentioned. And I asked him—told him about the book and everything and he said it got him into trouble because The Daily Worker gave it a favorable review and he had to face a House or a Senate[12]—

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: —investigative committee.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Right.

Dr. Cooper: The mere fact of writing a book, which was a great book and it was one of the very few books on—that covered slavery, that had a demographic mapping of  where most of the slaves came from in Africa.

Laura Hill: I had to know that book for my oral exam just this past fall. I mean it's still an important text.

Dr. Cooper: And I think on page one hundred and sixty of that book is a—it talks about manumission, out of a hundred and twenty thousand skilled artisans in the South, over a hundred thousand of them were black.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: And that was in 1865. But you see these skilled men were not really integrated into the growing industrial revolution in this country so the most fundamental right in a democratic society, your economic rights, was denied a large segment of really well-trained artisans who happened to be black.

Well, what I was saying, that into the community were coming people like Abernathy, King came here.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Then later on, Thurgood Marshall.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, and you had A. Phil—well A. Phillip Randolph came later.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: But the community was no longer isolated in terms of an infusion of new ideas, new methods, new practices, for protest.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And you had the formation, in the early sixties, of a unit of the Congress of Racial Equality, ah, which was headed by Hannah Storrs, who was a school teacher at School 14 in the city. And Hannah Storrs had led a picketing of the Operation Engineers, you know that union that represents people with heavy—who use heavy equipment.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And the—So I think it was kind of a complex number of things which tended to energize the community, especially the young, the young educated ones.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Sure.

[Break]  

Young Turks  
Index 0:57:04

Dr. Cooper: No, I think the leadership thing is the thing that vexes me most.

Laura Hill: I'm sure.

Dr. Cooper: I think what I've seen is the disappearing – disappearance of the Young Turks.

Laura Hill: You know, I don't know a whole lot about the Young Turks. Gloria Joseph, who wrote a master's dissertation—her master's thesis at Cornell—mentioned them in her study, but I have seen almost nothing of them in the documents I've looked at.

Dr. Cooper: I'll tell you why.

[Interruption for tape change.]

Laura Hill: Please.

Dr. Cooper: The Young Turks. Obadiah Williamson came out of Florida, he was on a migrant camp in this area, and the churches—. See I think you'll find in my articles that the— particularly the reflections on the riot, the background information— the churches were involved, primarily the white churches.  Brick Presbyterian had a minister by the name of John Niceley  had a wife Dorothy Niceley.  They had a program to provide some services to migrants in Sodus, and I think the Sodoma Farm out in Brockport. Now, Mrs. Dorothy Niceley,  in one visit to one of these migrant labor camps, saw this young black child with such a beautiful smile, she adopted him. That was Obadiah Williamson. He was raised in the home of Reverend John Niceley,  and his wife, Dorothy Niceley. He was minister of Brick Presbyterian Church, on North Fitzhugh Street. Oh, but they educated—he went to Monroe High School, when it was a high achieving high school. They educated him at Oberlin College. And he came out and he went to Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

Laplois Ashford was born in McCool, Mississippi in nineteen hundred and thirty four. His family came north and resided here in Rochester, and he had some motivating high school teachers and he came to the University of Rochester. And he undoubtedly developed strong relationships with Professor Richard Wade, Professor Joe Frank, and some other people. So he graduated and he became interested in civil rights, you know there was kind of a back draft and an enhancement of some of the things the Delta Ressics was doing and people were beginning to group together. Ah, let's see, who else in that group is mentioned, there was – I don't know whether they mention Glenn Claytor in it or not, I'll have to go back. But Glenn Claytor was my brother-in-law.  He was young. He was educated in the Washington D.C. area. He came here, he had artistic ideas and worked for Edward's(??) for a while and then started going to school at night at the University of Rochester and went around giving talks. He was very articulate. Ah, let's see, who else might have been mentioned, ah, well we can get back to that; I want to look at the article. But I knew many of the young people like Maevonia Daniels. She might not have been mentioned. Her father was a minister, and they had a church over— a Baptist Church—over on North Street. Maevonia was also a graduate of the University of Rochester and a very good writer, she periodically would write articles, about discrimination and segregation, to the newspapers. Then there was Virginia Terrell, who was educated at Brockport. And she taught at School Number Fourteen along with Hannah Storrs, and some of the other young people. Later we picked up – joined us, was Eugene Newport, who was educated at Heidelberg, in Ohio. Okay, then later on in the community was Ernest Denny who was going to the Colgate Rochester Divinity School, but he had been educated at Oberlin.  Ah, who else? Then Beverly Davis came on later on.

Laura Hills:   Now these are all Young Turks as well?

Dr. Cooper: Well yes, they might not have been mentioned but they – I'm talking about that space between, I would say, sixty to sixty-two or sixty-three.

Laura Hill: Okay. So the Young Turks were described in this dissertation as comparable to a street gang.

Dr. Cooper: Oh, Jesus! What a big lie!

Laura Hill: Well what you're describing does not sound that way.

Dr. Cooper: That's a big lie!

Laura Hill: So tell me what the organization did.

Dr. Cooper: No they were actively involved in NAACP.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: They were very active in NAACP, particularly the youth council. What—who could write that kind of garbage?

Laura Hill: It was —it was a perception. It was a study—.

Dr. Cooper: These were college-trained, well educated people.

Laura Hill: Yes, this is very different from what my understanding was. So I'm very interested to hear.

Dr. Cooper: Who wrote that?

Laura Hill: It was a dissertation that came out of Cornell University —a master's thesis.

Dr. Cooper: You tell them  it's a big lie. And if they want corroboration for it,  they can see me.

Laura Hill: Absolutely. Absolutely. So tell me about the organization .

Dr. Cooper: See that's that business of idolizing street people, who have no skills. These people were well skilled people.

Laura Hill: Right. I mean what you're saying, what you're describing is very different than that description of them.

Dr. Cooper: Who wrote that description, do you remember?

Laura Hill: Umm, the woman's name was Gloria Joseph, and my understanding is she is a very—she was very active at Cornell, but I'll tell you, Dr. Cooper, she was writing at a moment where that movement in the streets was popular. I think sixty-seven  was the year—.

Dr. Cooper: Where's she now? I'll call her myself.

Laura Hill: I think she's in the Islands, actually. I think she's in the Islands now.

Dr. Cooper: See those are the big lies that are out. See there are lots of people who have tried to rewrite the history of Rochester.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And they've told lies. It's just like —it's just like the March on Washington. We had over two hundred people go on four buses;  we requested a fifth bus, and we were unable to get it. The FBI wanted the names and addresses of everyone who was going on that march, and we refused. There were only two black ministers who went on the buses to the March on Washington. It was the late Reverend Andrew Gibson and a Reverend Turner, who had a storefront church. Now all these people— everybody went on the March on Washington.

Laura Hill: Sure. So the Young Turks, then, were a highly educated, highly skilled group of people, and they worked underneath the auspices of the NAACP?

Dr. Cooper: Initially under the auspices of the NAACP. Okay. Now let me get to that, what evolved there. For example, Laplois, or "Lakie" Ashford, was a youth adviser, and during the summers, you know, he would get volunteers like myself to take youngsters to Letchworth—they had never seen – you know, remove the isolation from the youngsters. They also picketed the skating rink which was on, what, Chestnut Street? Because the police at that time had the practice of bringing K-9 dogs into the—.

Laura Hill: Yes.

Dr. Cooper: And it was led by Laplois Ashford and other educated blacks, young blacks. They also picketed Governor Rockefeller with the opening of Chatham Gardens, which was adjacent to Hanover Houses, which, Hanover Houses, was eventually torn down.

Laura Hill: Is Chatham sixty-three? Is it 1963 that Chatham Gardens opens?

Dr. Cooper: I think around that time, but it was the young people who were part of the Young Turks movement who picketed Chatham Gardens. In fact, Glenn Claytor was the spokesman for that group.

Laura Hill: Mmm-Hmm. And they're picketing Chatham because?

Dr. Cooper: Because it represented another form of segregated housing supported by the state.

Laura Hill: Sure. So back to the skating rink and the K-9s.

Dr. Cooper: —the K-9s and then they were able to get the police department to not—. They met with city council, and I sat in on thr meeting— and Laplois Ashford, Obadiah Williamson, myself, and maybe another person sat in on those meetings. And that time part of the city council was Frank Horton, who later became a congressman. And that, you know, kind of, cushioned that, or resolved that issue of K-9 dogs at the skating rink – at the rink which was frequented primarily by young African American males and females.

Now, lots of things were going on in the early '60s and it wasn't the guy in the street.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: I want to emphasize that. It was not the guy in the street who was part of that. Ah, in 1962, was the Rufus Fairwell case.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. You're aware of that?

Laura Hill: I'm aware of it. Could you discuss it a little bit?

Dr. Cooper: Well Rufus Fairwell was a hardworking person who had a job or second job at a gasoline station which was located on the corner of South Plymouth Avenue and Columbia Street. And he was closing up one night at about 8:00pm and a police car drives up and asked him what was he doing. He said "I work here, I'm closing up." And they  said "No, you're trying to rob it."

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: And they proceeded to beat him up, that put him in a wheelchair. Okay. And, it wasn't the man in the street who came forth to protect him and provide some legal counsel for him.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: So that was a big movement and a big issue. Then there were about thirteen other cases of police brutality including the Faison Case, and later in 1963 the A. C. White Case. Now, let me tell you what had also stimulated activities in the community. In November nineteen hundred and sixty-two—no, no let me back—yeah, '62. The—at  Attica there were thirteen, I think, thirteen hundred and thirty-one inmates, about seven hundred of them were blacks, and among the seven hundred blacks were seventeen Black Muslims. The Black Muslims asked for a request to have a Muslim minister come in once a week to provide them with services. The warden refused. So they went on a hunger strike. That brought Malcolm X into the community.

Laura Hill: And this is '62?

Dr. Cooper: Yeah, in the latter part of 1962[13]. Okay? Now, he then started recruiting blacks in the community to join the Black Muslims.

Laura Hill: Malcolm X did?

Dr. Cooper: Yeah. His recruiter whom he delegated that responsibility was a Muslim minister out of Buffalo, Henry X. Henry X became the local Muslim minister to recruit in the Rochester area. Now in January of 1963—

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: I believe.

Laura Hill: Yep, that's the right date.

Dr. Cooper: Yeah. The Muslims had a mosque on North Street, not too far from Sibley's Department Store. It was located upstairs of a business establishment.

Laura Hill: Do you remember the name of the business establishment? What kind of business it was?

Dr. Cooper: I've forgotten, I can go back in the files and talk to some of the people about it. But the—. In early January, the firemen show up one Sunday evening while they're having services—

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: —and told them that they had a report of fire being on the premise. No such fire. So the policemen left.   The following Sunday—I mean the firemen left. The following Sunday, the police show up and say,  "We have a report that there's a person on the premises with a gun." The Fruit of Islam— you know, the people who were essentially the sergeant at arms in the mosque— said "No, there's no such person on the premise with a gun. We do not allow it." So the police insisted and they wanted to go upstairs where services were being held, and a scuffle ensued;  the police department arrested I think around three to five of the Black Muslims, which are charges of resisting arrest, assaulting a policeman, and so forth. So they were given—they had some legal assistance, not only from a few black lawyers in town but also from Manny Goldman, who was a rather prominent attorney in the community. That quieted down for a while but I think in—sometime in early February, there was a sealed indictment from a grand jury deliberation which indicted around fifteen to twenty Black Muslims in the community. That represented, essentially, most of the Black Muslim—identifiable Black Muslims in the community.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: So then they had the Black Muslim trials of February, nineteen hundred and sixty-three. I knew one of the Black Muslims, Goldstein Small, and I served as a character witness for him.  But it wasn't the man in the street who was there to defend the Black Muslims.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: I want to get that across.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, Constance Mitchell, because she was an elected official, because she was centrally located at 36 Greig Street, right across from Immaculate Conception, not too far from that. And you had Father Kreckel, I believe, at Immaculate Conception, and then you had a minister by the name of Turnipseed at the Methodist Church, Cornhill Methodist. Okay. Now uh, her house became kind of the center for what we would call extra-legal meetings of people. When Malcolm X came to town, we would always meet him at Constance Mitchell—Constance and John Mitchell's place. Ah, people who had supported Connie Mitchell's campaign—Thelma Carroll, her brothers Mack, and Clifton, Effie Lancaster— these are educated people—Ernest Turner, ah, Mimi—what was Mimi's last name? [14]Well anyway, but these weren't street people, okay? So some of them, you know, persisted in these kind of extra-legal meetings. The Muslim trials, you know, they kinda disappeared but it kind of excited the community because they knew that other police brutalities and harassments were taking place.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. And it went beyond the social condition of the individual.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. The—let's see, there were other dynamics going on too. In nineteen hundred and sixty-two, the—for the first time in thirty-two years, a democrat had become mayor of Rochester, Henry Gillette.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, Henry Gillette had a much more of an open kind of ah, administration. And of course, he interacted with Constance Mitchell and others who were part of a growing black sophistication in terms of politics. Uh, the—Henry Gillette, for example, we had—it's so much to this story, it's very difficult to put in all the pieces. The president of Baden Street Settlement at that time was Dr. William Jacob Knox.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. Knox had been a Harvard graduate, a master's in chemical engineering from MIT, 1929;  a Ph.D. in 1935 from MIT; a member of the Manhattan Project, had worked for Willard F. Libby—his laboratory founded a way to isolate pure uranium from uranium hexafluoride, that's UF₆, the chemical structure. Knox was active. Another  black Ph.D. had joined the research laboratories at Eastman Kodak in March of 1959, Dr. William E. Lee. Lee had—was head of the very active community affairs committee of the NAACP. He was a Ph.D. out of Ohio State. The housing director—the housing chair of the NAACP— I'm talking 'bout when it was viable—was  Dr. Kenneth Woodward, a pediatrician. And so they had articulated, in terms of community meetings, discrimination in housing. Knox was out front on lots of issues dealing with housing because he was part of the Monroe County Housing Commission. He and Manny Goldman jointly resigned from it because they voted against scatteration of low income and moderate income housing. [15]

Laura Hills:   Right.

Dr. Cooper: Okay so, then—let's see who else. Laplois Ashford was head of the youth council, so these were all educated people.

Laura Hills:   Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Laplois had a master's in education and he taught at Franklin. What happened in nineteen hundred and sixty— there were so many dynamics going on then. In nineteen hundred and sixty, as I had mentioned to you, I started taking a look at the possibilities of de facto school segregation in the Rochester School District. And so my committee was very small: Hannah Storrs, John Steepee, a graduate of the University of Rochester and a Caucasian, uh, a school teacher and, let's see, the daughter of the commissioner of health for Monroe County at that time—I'll think of the name in a minute, but she was also a school teacher. Hannah Storrs, Virginia Terrell, Barbara Ames.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Barbara Ames. And so we started looking at, getting account, getting—looking at the trends in terms of funding of schools, when schools become—became essentially more minority, in terms of its population, a diminution in terms of income. Okay. Or incomes of finances, I should say, is a correction, to support the academic program.

Okay the—everything was going well until I—Paul Zuber came here. At that time he was chairman of the New York State's Housing Committee of—New York State NAACP's Housing Committee. After the meeting, I shared with Paul Zuber—he went over the study that I had put together—and he said "You have more on this district than I ever had on New Rochelle." Then I talked to the President of the NAACP, Quintin Primo, Father Primo, and I told him I'd like to report out these findings to the executive committee of the NAACP. His statement was that "I don't want to embarrass my friends downtown." So he put a block on that. And of course I told the other members—Woodward, Lee, Ashford, Knox—real key players. And I want to tell you, most of the speeches written, that were presented by Quintin E. Primo, was written by Dr. Knox and myself, Bill Lee—we wrote the speeches for the president of the NAACP. [1:22]

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. Now remember these weren't street people.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Woodward was a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan and the University of Rochester's Medical School. Bill Lee was a graduate of Hampton Institute, and a Ph D. out of Ohio State.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Okay? And of course Knox had an illustrious career. All right, now. Since the president of the NAACP had put a block on it, we went to the state NAACP to pursue it. John Sandifer, he was a legal adviser to the New York State NAACP, and another man by—his last name was Brooks. They —those were the two attorneys who put together a deposition, presented in the—in May of nineteen hundred and sixty two to the Third Federal District Court under Judge Burke.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Okay? B-U-R-K-E.

Judge Burke's court ruled that de facto school segregation was a reality. Okay. But now what happened to splinter the NAACP?

Laura Hill: In Rochester?

Dr. Cooper: In Rochester, yeah.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Dr. Lee retired as chair of the community affairs committee. Dr. Woodward retired— resigned as chair of the housing committee. Laplois Ashford had moved on anyway but I think he also resigned, yes. And so the heart of the— the activist heart of the NAACP was rendered null and void.

Okay. So we decided that—.  What do we replace the NAACP with? So we, the Young Turks, now including, at this time, Eugene Newport, who later became mayor of Berkeley, California. We decided that we would have— we would focus on the political institutions.

Laura Hill: Okay. Now NAACP continues to exist, but under Primo's—

Dr. Cooper: But limited activity.

Laura Hill: and under Primo's leadership.

Dr. Cooper: Under Primo's –yeah. But he eventually got outta town and went to Chicago.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Okay? Now, the organization kicked off was the Monroe County Non-Partisan Political League.

Laura Hill: Right, you mentioned that yesterday.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. The key players in it was Ashford, Newport, Williamson, and a newcomer to the town, Ernest Denny.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. I've seen the name.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. And — who else was there? Hannah Storrs—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Virginia Terrell, and a newcomer, Beverly Davis. So they had started holding meetings in _____ [16]and what they did—they would feature speakers like myself, Dr. Lee and others—Dr. Lee and I. And what was very interesting—there were probably three churches, established black churches that were very open to us.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Reverend Warfield  at Mount Vernon.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Reverend Greer at Aenon, and Reverend Andrew Gibson at Memorial A. M. E.  Zion. Those were the— those were the three churches that were really involved in the process.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. So we gave talks such as the voting potential of Negro Americans, the economic potential of Negro Americans.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And so it was tended to be an organization that had a forum for educational issues among the black population. Now we had many white allies, in fact, often when we would write a letter to the newspaper, we would get friends from suburban areas like Brighton and Pittsford to write supporting letters to convey the idea that there was widespread commitment to what we were espousing. Ah, for example, once the de facto school segregation issue came out, Jerry Balter, B-A-L-T-E-R, who was an engineer, had advocated the pie-shaped kind of a solution to de facto school segregation, where each suburban district would take a corner or a slice out of the Rochester Central School District.

Laura Hill: I see.

Dr. Cooper: Yeah, Jerry Balter. That's 1953. I mean nineteen—early 1963.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Now, there were lots of other dynamics going on, with the freedom of African nations, you know, kicked off by Ghana.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And coming into the community, visits and so forth, African students that also heighten kind of a consciousness among Africans and African Americans.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: So those were the dynamics. Now Minister Florence comes into the community.  Well, what happened, really is that Ashford— Ashford became the first black on the board of education, and he also became Deputy Commissioner for Public Safety, under Harper Sibley, who was part of the Democratic administration in the area.

Okay, now—so these are the events that led up to the riot. Primarily—the primary events was police intimidation, harassment, and cruelty, really. Okay. The other component—the other dimension of that was that Malcolm X was a frequent visitor to the community. And for example, in —I think it was February nineteen hundred and sixty three, at Baden Street, we had a meeting, which I chaired.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, and we had eight hundred at the gym at Baden Street, and Malcolm X talked.

Laura Hill: I think I have pictures from that.

Dr. Cooper: You do?

Laura Hill: From that event.

Dr. Cooper: Okay.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: All right, so then, you know—and I don't want to  go over what, you know, the riot itself. I think that's well documented in the article that I wrote.

Laura Hill: If I could ask you though, if we could go back to Malcolm's influence on the community. It sounds to me like what you're saying is there was widespread black support for Malcolm, even if there was not a large Black Nationalist community in Rochester.

Dr. Cooper: Oh, sure, because he was articulate, he was knowledgeable, and he—and he had a message which touched the reality of the black experience in the community.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Why couldn't he be popular? Ah, even, you know, the newspapers was antagonistic toward the Black Muslim, and I—somewhere in my files I have a letter I wrote to the newspaper saying that the NAACP—I was deeply involved in NAACP—we did not believe in their philosophy, but we certainly stood determined that they should have the right to express themselves under the freedom of speech here in the United States.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: So they had—even though the philosophies were diametrically opposed—the NAACP had taken the position that they should be heard and they have every right to the freedom of speech.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: So there was no, what I would call, organizational opposition—

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper  —to the Black Muslims in the community, even though the membership was not large, because as I kidded with Malcolm one time, I said "Look, Big Red" —which I called him — I said "Look, you—I know the Black Muslims have strict prohibition against alcohol and pork."

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: I said "It would appear to me that if you want to get more people involved with your organization, you would slowly—you wean 'em off alcohol, you know, that can be done, but, you know, you have 'em on probation until they get rid of the alcohol, and the toughest one would be, you know, asking the brothers to give up the ribs."

Laura Hill: [Laughs] The ribs. Sure.

Dr. Cooper: [Laughs] And he smiled and he said,  "It has to be all or nothing at all." So—

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: —so that—I think the police issue was the thing that fomented the riots and unfortunately I think the community was well aware of the fact that what had happened to the demise— in a sense of a very effective organization, the NAACP—

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: —they saw it as a sell out. Now, Franklin Florence comes on the scene kinda late in the game.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Dr. Knox used to write his speeches too.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Okay, an educated man, right?

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And unfortunately—now let me give you some background information. The chairman of the constitution and bylaws committee, for the formation of the FIGHT organization, was Dr. Kenneth Woodward.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: The chair of the first FIGHT convention, June of 1965, was Dr. William E. Lee.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Once the organization was formed—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: They said we don't need these Uncle Tom Ph D.s and so forth.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: And we were instrumental in—aiding and supporting. Then it became—he was—they became antagonistic to ABC, they became antagonistic[17] to the Urban League—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —which was founded in 1965.

Laura Hill: If we could just go back to—in the immediate aftermath of the riot. What was happening in the community prior to Alinsky, and—?

Dr. Cooper: The churches became involved. They saw that there was a real problem and they're out. Richard Hughes—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —from the presbytery, and some—Reverend Long, from Third Presbyterian Church—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and some support came from some members of the Catholic Diocese. They said we have to do something and they became sold on the Alinsky movement, which was operating in Chicago.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Were people—?

Dr. Cooper: Ed Long[18] was the organizer for Alinsky in this community.

Laura Hill: Right. Were people —I'm not sure how to phrase this question—were—I don't mean to ask were people in support of the riot, but was there—It's been very hard for me to tell from the documents how the larger black communities felt about the riots. I mean eight hundred people are arrested, they're obviously large—a large percentage of the population is participating, but outside of that, for the people that weren't participating, what's the reaction? [19]

Dr. Cooper: Well I think it was a natural reaction, that this was bound to happen.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Because of, essentially police brutality and you know, subsections of that, was the discrimination in housing and employment. [20]

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: So I don't—no one—you know, there were very few apologists for the riots.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: I mean you couldn't have, you couldn't apologize if you knew and experienced the conditions in the community.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: See,  but if you were an African—if you were a black  who accepted place, then there may be a tendency for you to apologize.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: See, psychologically, if you go into a situation and they say "Well, you're to live here and only here", and you accept that, to me, that's accepting kind of a second-class status.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And it's a diminution of your own humanity.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And so those—I think those who have accepted place, generally, might have not agreed with the riot and those who, in a small segment of a growing middle class, might've said "This'll make things worse for us."

Laura Hill: Well, I'll you tell you, I listened to three broadcasts that are here in the collection at the University of Rochester, one of them is Hannah Storrs, and another is Constance Mitchell. And it was so clear how they struggled to represent the black community, but to also—to also not apologize. I mean, there was clearly a tension that these two women felt in speaking to the riots. And they absolutely did not apologize, and they were firm in that.

Dr. Cooper: Well none of us apologized. I don't think you would see an apology—you know, there were probably some blacks who had white friendships might have apologized.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: I think it was—I think it was tragic that the business community that suffered the most was the Jewish community that had been more sympathetic to the rights of the blacks in the community. There was a heavy black —uh, Jewish involvement in the NAACP.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: You know, and they had essentially—Baden Street had started off as a community center to service Jews—

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: —around nineteen hundred and seven or so—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and, but it evolved into a situation where, particularly the Seventh Ward, you had high concentration of non-whites but the Jews stayed on the board and tried to administer a program.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Jane Goldman, Nancy Harris, Loma Allen wasn't Jewish but she was white and she's still a prominent person who tried to tell the community—the corporate community that things were awry in this community and they'd better do something.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: She's still alive.

Laura Hill: Sure. Sure. I um-- you've got me thinking about this now—I read an article, I wanna say in Newsweek, um, a contemporary article, where I believe you gave an interview, and one of the city hall officials, perhaps the mayor, perhaps it was um, Porter Homer, just absolutely denied that there was any indication at all that this was about to happen, that the potential for this was there. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Dr. Cooper: Oh they were warned.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: They were warned. But I think the—a large segment of the corporate community, maybe exclusive of Joe Wilson—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —took the position that this would have never occurred if it had not been for the agitation of people like Cooper, Knox, Lee, and others. And the Young Turks.

Laura Hill: So you were actually blamed.

Dr. Cooper: Oh, yeah, but you know, that's not publicized.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: But that's it – that our blacks were well satisfied and so forth.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: And they were being treated nicely, but the agitation of people like Cooper, Lee, Knox, Woodward—.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: —not the man in the street. The man in the street did not agitate.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: You see.

[Break]

Laura Hill: So I had asked you, before we, um,  took a break, how we get from this activist tradition with these particular people to, all of a sudden, they are Uncle Toms, they're working with Charlie. How does this come about?

Dr. Cooper: It—it's a dynamic that is psychologically, and also real. On the real front, at that time in the history, there's always a tendency for institutions to maintain a status quo. The corporate institutions and other institutions in this community recogn—were smart enough to recognize that if they dealt with educated blacks who had a track record of trying to meet the needs of a oppressed community, they knew what had to be done.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: It's the—what I tried to explain to you on telephone, on our telephone conversation, is that you have institutions that are constantly under perturbations for change.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: The institution will—will make adjustments and concessions to those perturbations that changes them the least.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: That's just a natural phenomenon.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And so I think in this community, they knew very well that, due to some of the inabilities of the leadership of the FIGHT organization to understand the total dimension and structure of the problem and what had to be done, and what possible steps had to be taken—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —it would have been easier to deal with them, than to deal with the people who have been part of the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement in Rochester, New York.

Laura Hill: Right. You mentioned this on the phone yesterday, um, who do you see as those key institutions in Rochester? Who are we talking about?

Dr. Cooper: We're talking about the corporate community.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: And you've been talking about United Way because when we formed the Urban League in 1965—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —they wanted to limit us to a small budget—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and didn't really want to give us any money. But Manny Goldman and Dr. Knox went to Dick Miller who was head of the Community Chest at that time—

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: —and said "Well, you know, if you don't want to give us the money, to structure this organization, and we will find it from some other place."

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: "Even if we have to get it out of our own pockets."

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: So the—the Community Chest came forth with forty-nine thousand dollars. The first administrator we hired came out of the National Urban League—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —a recommendation, Robert Gudger.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: We fired him within a week. [21]

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Within a month. Ah, no, it was within a year, I'm sorry.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Because all he wanted to do was sit in an office. And we were not looking for that type of person.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: So we were all business.

Laura Hill: Now, Franklin Florence was also a founding member of the Urban League.

Dr. Cooper: That was due to—yes, we tried to bring him in as a founding member—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and we were—we actually kinda promoted Franklin Florence—I told you Dr. Knox wrote his talks.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: And then he turned around and just said "I don't need you guys". But you know that's not atypical.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: When Kenneth Clark wrote up a master plan for the rehabilitation of Harlem—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —particularly to the youth, HARYOU-ACT, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited - Associated Community Teams, nineteen hundred and sixty- four—.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: As soon as it was structured—and I have a copy of it, it's about this thick—as soon as the money came in, then the quote "Hustlers"—and I can name names, but which I won't—said "Well, you know, if Clark is on the board, we can't spend this money the way we want to."

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: We won't be able to—literally, steal money.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And so Clark has to go. So they pushed him off the board of HARYOU-ACT.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Was that happening in Rochester as well?

Dr. Cooper: Well, I think a similar situation. You don't want competent people—If you have the nebulous idea of how to run a corporation organization.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And if you're unaccustomed to the fiduciary responsibilities of a corporation, you don't want people on your board—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and, you know, assuming that you have some malicious intent, in terms of handling money, you don't want people on the board who're going to put your feet to the fire.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: It's the same kind of principle.

Laura Hill: Right. There are, um--.

Dr. Cooper: The—pardon me—the other aspect of it is what I tried to convey to you during the telephone conversation. That among oppressed people, you know, you look at the evolution of their oppression from one of harsh to maybe just slight oppression, but the conditional response is—but the response is developed under conditions of hardness—are often conditionally transmitted, a conditional response that's transmitted from generation to generation, and it ends up, even when the conditions are less harsh.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And, that's what I was telling you about Kwame Anthony Appiah's  assessment of the Ashanti in Ghana.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: But you look, and you see in African Americans, you see the same thing.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm

Dr. Cooper: If you take a close look at the plantation, under slavery of even post-slavery plantation, as Blackmon, or Blackson, has just written in a book, you know, Slavery by No Other Name.?[22]

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: He claims that a quasi slave system existed in this country until 1951.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And so what you see in that—what were the—what was the black psyche, what was the socio-psychology of blacks during slavery? And of course, you know, the average plantation in the United States had fifteen to twenty slaves on it.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Okay? Now, ah, a slave owner's not going to have fifteen Mende,  because they can communicate with each other and run rebellions.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: So, you know, you take two Mende,  three Fulani, two Sara,   ah, maybe ah,  three Mandinke.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: You know, two Wolof, three Fulani, you mix 'em up.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: They all know how to work, but they can't communicate with each other so they can't—they can't cause slave revolts. Even under those conditions—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —during slavery you had over two hundred revolts by slaves.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: So—and what that leads to, you have this, you have these groupings—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —of people of the same color, but not of the same culture, in terms of language—

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: —and the plantation owner plays a nice game. He takes maybe one Wolof, or one Mandinke, , you know, and give them special treatments. They're designed to keep him informed about what's going on in the slave quarters.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: So suspicion arouses, you see, and even after manumission, you have built into almost the habits and the culture of these people, an element of suspicion of one another.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And so it becomes a conditional response that's transmitted from generation to generation, until you'll end up with an African American community today which, you know, is broadly diverse.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: It's not unified.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: As I mentioned to you before, even during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the NAACP had only—had a membership of about 569,000.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: And the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious denomination among blacks, its leader did not support Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And you saw the—the nascent position of Condi — Condoleezza Rice's family in Birmingham.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: You know, in a sea of segregation, you know, taking a docile, non-intervention process.

Laura Hill: Right. So how does that translate back to Rochester?

Dr. Cooper: Same thing.

Laura Hill: Tell me how it translates between FIGHT, between the NAACP, between the Monroe County Non-Partisan League, tell me how all that is working.

Dr. Cooper: Well, the NAACP—I told you, the president said he's not going to embarrass his people downtown.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. And he maintains that after the riot? I mean there's--.

Dr. Cooper: Ah no, he was gone. He went to Chicago.[23]

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: But of interest to me, he was supposed to head up a committee in the Diocese of Chicago to promote integration.

Laura Hill: Mmm. Hmm.

Dr. Cooper: That's the way the system works.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And so, you know, even though the leadership elements out of the NAACP, the old NAACP, the Monroe County Non-Partisan—there was no—there was no barrier to communications with Franklin Florence initially.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Yeah, but he gets in this setting where Ed Long[24] and Alinsky and others influence him and he says "My future's with these folk." And then he has a corporate community and even a religious community— it is more sympathetic to him than it was ever to the leadership in the NAACP and the Non-Partisan Political League.

Laura Hill: Why are they more sympathetic?

Dr. Cooper: Because they stand for the status quo! It's as simple as that. People don't—are resistant to change. You aren't going to get a sea change with the FIGHT organization! There's a possibility of a sea change with the Dr. Knoxs, the Dr. Lees, the Dr. Woodwards, and others.

Laura Hill: So it sounds like your position is, the work that you all would have done in Rochester would have been far more radical than the work that FIGHT did.

Dr. Cooper: Not necessarily radical but it would have been, what I would say, more conducive to—to a better integration of the non-white community in all of the institutional activities of this—of this city.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And community.

Laura Hill: And that would have then improved the condition—.

Dr. Cooper: Because we—you know, housing—. Was the FIGHT organization for scatteration of housing? No, it built housing right in the black community. It was interested in this fallacious belief that concentration of blacks represents our power.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And there's no economic power in those situations. And in the final analysis in the United States, all power is economic power.

Laura Hill: Right. Right. So, I—.

Dr. Cooper: Now let me give you another aspect of that—.

Laura Hill: Please—.

Dr. Cooper: At the time, when they were riding high, as I mentioned to you there was no—there was no emphasis on education, it was not a priority.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Okay? Now, Kodak initiates a laboratory assistants program. What was that program? That program was designed to take graduates, minority graduates, primarily Hispanic and African American at that time, hire 'em as laboratory assistants, give 'em a mentor, and then expect them to go to college, you know, for free. Three hundred were involved in that program, according to one of the primary participants, and at the end of the program, out of the three hundred only two received a college degree.

Laura Hill: Why is that?

Dr. Cooper: Because education—they were the people who came out of that attitude in this community in the late sixties, early seventies, that only housing—jobs and housing were important. Education was not in the—education was not in the—a priority item.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Do you—do you think, Dr. Cooper, that that preceded FIGHT, or that that was a result of FIGHT? That that attitude towards education.

Dr. Cooper: I would have to get the data on that.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: But I know that the educational thrust, through the Ralph Bunche Scholarship Committee and so forth, tended to die down then, after that.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: But you can look at it in these terms. If you look at the older children, and the grandchildren of that cohort of the late sixties, early seventies, who were involved in those programs—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —I'd be willing to wager that very few of those children went to college.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And are part of the drop-out situation in the Rochester School District.

Laura Hill: Right, sure.

Dr. Cooper: No I—. See I look at it in—in terms of systems. Ah, the most dominant institution in the United States is the economic institution and as I told you before, blacks, in general, do not have a comprehension of the American economic system. Or they would not be such an ultimate consumer—they're ultimate consumers because of the psychological need to project themselves as being—having a positive image of self. What I wear and what I drive.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: And that's why I said, often middle income and upper income blacks are not good role models for low income blacks. Why? Because their lifestyles are the same.

Laura Hill: Hmm. Hmm.

Dr. Cooper: You know and—. You know athletes are no role models.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Most of 'em. Look at Mike Tyson. He blows four hundred million dollars in twenty years.

Laura Hill: Sure. Sure.

[Break]

Index 1:54:57

Laura Hill: You know, we've had you here for two hours now—I would love to go on talking more, but it might be, it might be better to schedule another time.

Dr. Cooper: You know I can talk for days on this, because I've lived it.

Laura Hill: Yeah I would love to listen to you for days.

Dr. Cooper: See, you see the problem, I never—I've never rejected a challenge.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: See, I was taught by my mother, if there's an issue that challenges you, don't turn your back on it because you do it first time and it's easier the second time,  third time and fourth time.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: And she was a tough woman.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: But she understood this society. And she came out of Georgia.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. There are a number of—there are a number of topics I would like to take up with you, the next time we talk if you, of course, are willing to do that. Um, one of them that we didn't cover today is the migration into Rochester.

Dr. Cooper: I'll give you that very simply.

Laura Hill: Yeah, okay.

Dr. Cooper: It's very simple.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: In 1945, at the end of World War II, there were approximately five thousand blacks in this community.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. Right.

Dr. Cooper: You know, they were not truly integrated into—

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: —into the industries of this community.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And truck farming became prominent in this area. And by nineteen hundred and—by nineteen hundred and fifty, ah, there were still only six thousand or seven thousand blacks in the community. Special census of nineteen hundred and fifty-seven showed the population had gone to seventeen thousand. By nineteen hundred and sixty, it was twenty-four thousand. Special census of nineteen hundred and sixty-four: thirty-four and a half thousand.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Census of nineteen hund—of two thousand, eighty-four and a half thousand.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Now, people who were coming to this community in the fifties, and up into the sixties, were primarily people who were stay-ons from the migrant labor experience.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Okay. And so in—. Beginning in the sixties, you had a slow but steady increase in professionally trained blacks. But many of them—

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: —but many of them were not involved with our organization, and I'll give you an example. During black history month, I used to give talks—Africans and African Americans, the commonality of the colonial[25] experience.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And many of these middle class blacks would tell their friends "They oughta put Cooper in a box and ship him back to Africa."

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: Because, most likely I was a pan-Africanist in those days.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: And I understood it.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: Ah,

Laura Hill: And that wasn't popular in those days.

Dr. Cooper: No, it's still not popular.

Laura Hill: [Laughs]

Dr. Cooper: Nobody has it any longer, since 1973, and that's why you've had a diminishing of leadership in Africa.

Laura Hill: Mmm.

Dr. Cooper: There's no—there's no process to create more of Eric Williams—

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: —in the Caribbean, or the Kwame Nkrumah—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —in Ghana, or Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria.  Azikiwe should have been the first president but, because of population domination by the rather conservative and backward North, the Hausa Fulani,   Sir Amadu Tafawa Balawa became the president.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And he just didn't know how to govern. See that's—to me, those are perfect examples of how you can take quote "people who are maybe, the most populous in a population, and not the best educated."

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: You can't run a country, and you can't even run a city, with people who are not well educated.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: You can't run a good community organization unless you have well educated, committed people of integrity running that organization.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: And as I talked to you the other day, ah—was that yesterday?

Laura Hill: Yesterday.

Dr. Cooper: Oh my God—no it wasn't.

Laura Hill: [Laughs]

Dr. Cooper: As I was saying to you yesterday, if we look at modern—if we look at revolutions, you know, bloody or peaceful—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —you don't find the man in the street or the farmer running the revolution. But you know, the corporate entities knew better. Incidentally, it's kind of ironic and sad that even though Franklin Florence, you know, demonized educated blacks who had been involved—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —he didn't demonize those who had not been involved, you see.

Laura Hill: That's right.

Dr. Cooper: So you get the point?

Laura Hill: That's right.

Dr. Cooper: You see, there was—hell, I didn't want to be any kind of leader. But it was, you know, it was imposed upon me because of the society which classified me as a social problem.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Denied me the rights of housing—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —and often in my life, denied me the rights of my economic opportunities.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: I would've just preferred—I look in my basement and all of the scientific material I've gathered and patents and everything and, you know, I wanted to be just a scientist. That was the wish of Dr. Knox, Dr. Lee, Woodward just wanted to be a practicing pediatrician.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: But we—imposed upon us, was this burden of trying to not only solve problems for ourselves, but solving problems for others.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: Of the same color. And see Florence and them did not understand. I didn't want to be a leader.

Laura Hill: Right. There are a couple of things I have questions about from—from conflicting documents.

Dr. Cooper: Mmm-hmm.

Laura Hill: Um, the police department was adamant, in their internal correspondence, that it was the Black Muslims that started the riot.

Dr. Cooper: No, no, no, no. The Black Muslims did not start the riot. The riot was started from a street dance—

Laura Hill: Sure, they had—

Dr. Cooper: —over at Baden Street. They—the Black Muslims did not start the riot.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: See, that's to reinforce the justification for the sealed indictments against the Black Muslims in 1963. The Black Muslims did not start the riots.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: You can check with Goldstein Small, he's still alive.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, um—

Laura Hill: I will take his contact information from you.

Dr. Cooper: —yeah, and—Johnson was one of 'em, he just died maybe three or four months ago.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: But they did not start the riot. That's the big lie. See that's—

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: —that's a institutional justification for its own cruelty and its own, ah, involvement in setting the stage for the riot. It was—.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: See—.

Laura Hill: It doesn't go anywhere. I mean, that story doesn't go anywhere.

Dr. Cooper: Well, well—

Laura Hill: It's not picked up in any of the other documents; it's just in these internal memos.

Dr. Cooper: Yeah, well.

Laura Hill: It's just in these—.

Dr. Cooper: They lied about it.

Laura Hill: Yeah, sure.

Dr. Cooper: Ah, you know, the thing about it—why?—you know, I don't understand—tell me like this woman, Joseph—.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Why—? How—? Why— why did she think that the guy in the street—?

Laura Hill: Well listen, this is why. She— her project— came out of, I believe, a sociology department, a public policy department kind of a thing, and she was working with questionnaires, she had assembled a group of people and they went door-to-door, um, in the Seventh Ward, to do this. So I— I suspect that her knowledge of the situation was coming from a skewed source.

Dr. Cooper: People in the Seventh Ward weren't involved.

Laura Hill: So they wouldn't have the—

Dr. Cooper: They wouldn't have the—no.

Laura Hill: —the knowledge—

Dr. Cooper: —no, no, no, no—

Laura Hill: —of this organization. So I suspect that this – and again, it's – she just mentions it briefly—and again, I suspect, she heard it, she had an idea, you know, and then went from there. Um— really I've not seen that term in any of the other documents or literature so I was interested to hear you refer to it.

Dr. Cooper: See, ah, let me tell you—

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: —if we didn't have the myth of the man in the street liberating people, we would have never had and, to a great degree, Jesse Jackson.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: You see what Barak Obama will do, whether he wins or loses, he will remove from the political scene the Jesse Jacksons, the Sharptons, and those other type of folk.

Laura Hill: Is that good or bad?

Dr. Cooper: I think that's good.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: I think it's good because we've moved into a new, new situation where you have to have knowledgeable people—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —to get us out of this, ah, quandary. Ah, you know, the rhetorician, as I call 'em—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: --much like the theoretician—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —but of different ilk.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: The rhetorician will not—has never freed people. It may—you see the difference between a Martin Luther King and these other people. King used the homiletics of the black church to initiate a process of change. Now, you listen to Sharpton; the rhetoric is there, and not even the homiletics, but what kind of change does it have in mind?

Laura Hill: It's interesting that um, we haven't talked a whole lot about the black church. One of the things that's happening in Rochester, of course as you knew, in this moment is that ah, black theologians, like James Cone is here and writing, um, Gayraud Wilmore comes shortly thereafter—.

Dr. Cooper: I knew Gayraud.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm. What's—?

Dr. Cooper: I read James Cone.

Laura Hill: What's their relationship to the community? Is there a relationship to the community?

Dr. Cooper: Not a very good rel—not a direct relationship.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: Because the traditional black minister in this community—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —not well trained—

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: —protects his congregation from any infusion of new information.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Or new ideas.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: The black church is isolated. I'm—I'm in exile when it comes to the black church. I'm even in exile when it comes to the Urban League.

Laura Hill: Okay.

Dr. Cooper: And which I was a founding member of.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: Because it's—it's inept, it's—and it certainly is not fulfilling a mission that was started and, for a short period of time, implemented in Rochester.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: You know, I tell the mayor—you know I'm on his commission on literacy—I said, "You know when the black preachers"—and they're always running to city hall with some idea to get a small grant or something—

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: —you know, discretionary funds that a city council person may have, or the mayor out of his own budget.

Laura Hill: Sure.

Dr. Cooper: I just said, "You tell 'em, it's very simple mayor. You tell 'em two things. If you wanna help literacy or education, have a library in your church, with a competent person to run it, and then you tell them periodically, as their sermon, use the text of the Book of Hosea, the fourth chapter, the sixth verse, which states 'My people perish for lack of knowledge. If ye reject knowledge, therefore ye reject Me.'"[26]

Laura Hill: And that's why you're not popular with the black churches.

Dr. Cooper: I don't wanna be popular.

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: I—the most fundamental aspect about myself is a deep and abiding faith in my own humanity and the creative talents that can emanate from that humanity as seen through my own eyes. Not defined by someone external to me.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And I have wonderful relationships with people from all over the world. I spent eighteen days in Venezuela last year, hosted by a Venezuelan. But the only thing I ask of people is to be of—is to have integrity.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And that's all. I'm asking nothing else. If I question your integrity, then I don't deal with you.

Laura Hill: Yeah.

Dr. Cooper: And I know myself, from an early age.

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: And—and I had a mother who knew America. And when I was about eight or nine she said, "Here's money, you need a haircut. Go—go to school. Go get—go to a barber shop." She said, at that time the black kids were wearing pompadours. She said "If you come home with a pompadour I'm gonna cut off all your hair."

Laura Hill: [Laughs]

Dr. Cooper: I said "Well, why would you wanna do that?" She said, "You're a young black boy in the United States. Your color will always announce your presence. You do not have to have a crazy haircut, you don't have to be loud, you don't have to wear"---she didn't say ostentatious, but that's what she meant, "ostentatious clothing".

Laura Hill: Mmm-hmm.

Dr. Cooper: "You're identified by the pigmentation of your skin."

Laura Hill: Right.

Dr. Cooper: "And don't forget it." But she also told me, "See, you may be a young black boy, but you're as good as the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt." And I never forgot it.

Laura Hill: Okay. I think that's probably a good place to stop. Thank you so much for this Dr. Cooper.

Dr. Cooper: Well, you're more than welcome.

Laura Hill: I really appreciate it.

—End of Interview—

[1] Dr. Cooper made additions/corrections to his transcript in February 2009.  Spelling corrections are reflected in the transcript text. Content additions and corrections that change the transcript text have been included in footnotes.

[2] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

[3] A UNESCO committee — Dr. Cooper later stated.

[4] West Point — Dr. Cooper later stated.

[5] Department of Housing and Urban Development

[6] Dr. Cooper later supplied the name: Judge Jacob Gitelman.

[7]Mensa International Society www.mensa.org

[8] Dr. Samuel Dent — Dr. Cooper later added.

[9] Dr. Cooper later added that his talk had been a review of Robeson's Here I Stand.

[10] Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (New York: Othello Associates, 1958).

[11]  Edward Franklin Frazier,  The Negro in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1940). Many subsequent editions.

[12] The Internal Securities Committee, Dr. Cooper later added.

[13] November, 1962 — Dr. Cooper later added.

[14] Dr. William Lee, Dr. William Knox, Dr. Kenneth Woodward — names later added by Dr. Cooper.

[15] Dr. Cooper later stated: "He and Manny Goldman jointly resigned from it because they voted for scatteration of low income and moderate income housing, and it was turned down by the Housing Committee.

[16] In churches — primarily A.M.E. Zion, Mt. Vernon Baptist, and Aenon Baptist.  (This clarification later added by Dr. Cooper.)

[17] Dr. Cooper later added: "This was ironic because we had involved Florence in being a founding member of the Urban League in 1965."

[18] Edward T. Chambers from the IAF staff was appointed by Saul Alinsky as chief organizer in Rochester.

[19]  Dr. Cooper later added that the non-white population at that time was 34,500.

[20] Dr. Cooper later added that the universal experience of limitation by the police covered the broad distribution of the black community.

[21] Within six months, Dr. Cooper later stated.

[22] Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

[23] In Chicago, he was given an important position in the Episcopal Diocese — Dr. Cooper later added.

[24] Edward T. Chambers

[25] Slave and colonial experiences — Dr. Cooper later stated.

[26] King James Bible; Hosea 4:6 "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children"