The University of Illinois always accepted African-American students, from the very beginning,
in terms of matriculating at the school, but that could not live on campus.
There was a lot of tension, and so that's - that sort of is the backdrop for how students
in the 30s and 40s had to live on campus.
Back in the 30s and 40s, there were only a handful of black students.
They went to classes, they did what they had to do, and of course, they could not stay
on campus, so all of the people who ended up coming here at the University of Illinois
were actually living in what we call the North End, where most of the black population lived.
[music] Our family came here in the 1800s.
The main reason that people came to Champaign was the same reason that they were leaving
the south.
They were being driven out.
Racism was extremely bad at that time.
The Great Migration starts around World War I, as African Americans are moving up from
the South to the North, mainly because of opportunities and jobs.
Newspapers like the Chicago Defender and stuff began to put it in their papers about job
opportunities here in the North, and so African Americans began to move to major industrialized
areas.
Champaign, even though it wasn't a major industrialized area, being along the train corridor, African
Americans on their way to Chicago sometimes didn't have enough money, so they would stop.
African Americans pretty much lived all over in Champaign and Urbana.
Starting in the 1920s, you begin to see the restrictive covenants, and that's how we began
to get the North End.
That's because the only place they opened up land and allowed them to move into was
what was called Old Germantown.
The race relations in the 20s, 30s, and 40s: they were not considered to be um, what you
would call first class citizens, and it was just the assumption that that's how things
were, so even in Champaign, things were still very segregated; for instance, in the movie
theaters, if they wanted to go to the movies, they had to go up into the balcony, and certainly
they were not able to go into a lot of the restaurants, things of that nature.
So, even though there were a small group of people, they developed their own community.
In a lot of places you couldn't eat, you couldn't get a haircut, you just couldn't do nothing.
You could do janitor work.
That's what you found as far as the male population.
The classifications that they had at the University as far as working was concerned, uh, a lot
of them were not open to black workers.
You knew not to try some things because you didn't want to get your feelings hurt, so
you didn't try it.
The reason that my grandmother's family moved to Champaign, back in 1914 or -15, was because
when their son, William Frank Ernest graduated from Homer High School, he wanted to go to
the University of Illinois, and there was no place for him to live.
So they moved to East Park Street so he could live at home and walk to campus.
This was one of the best colleges in the country.
And uh, if you had the money and the effort and time to, you wanted your kids to come
to Illinois.
There were not a lot of blacks who were actually going to school on campus.
You could stay in the community, in homes that were large enough to accommodate black
students.
And initially that's the way it was.
It was quite a while before black students started living in the Halls.
In that era, education was the most important thing.
So anytime you had an ability to help a young person get educated, you were going to do
that.
So that's one thing.
The second thing had to do with - there was no other choice: there was our community,
and there was the campus, and if students couldn't live on campus, then they were a
part of the black community.
And of course the third thing was that you did get rent money, and that helped people
who, most of the people in Champaign were poor people.
My mother used to keep black students.
We only kept maybe a couple of girls at a time, or a couple of guys.
She would rent out one room to the students, and then we'd occupy the other two bedrooms,
and then we had a large basement, which we also used as a bedroom.
It was just like having another member of the family.
Elmer Brown, who also attended the U of I - he had a very long house, with brown siding
on it.
He also rented out to U of I students.
There were several apartments in there that he would rent out.
Then there was a lady named Mrs. Steele, who lived on 5th Street, and she rented to several
girls, and in fact, the Delta Sigma Theta, they kind of considered that their unofficial
house because all the girls that lived there were Delta Sigma Theta.
The sorority houses, both the Kappa Alpha Psi and the Alpha Kappa Alpha houses were
really places where students who came to the community could live on-campus.
And they were, to my knowledge, they were the only two back in those days, that had
full houses with house mothers and so forth.
The students preferred to be on campus, because that's a long walk, between where they had
to live and where they had to go to school, which is where houses like the Kappa house
became important, because they could rent these small places and be able to stay closer
to campus than say, where we used to live.
Before Epsilon Epsilon Omega came into being, my mother told me that there were women in
the community - African American women - who were kind of patronesses of Alpha Kappa Alpha,
and who make sure they had certain things that they needed at the house and so forth,
and supported them.
My grandmother - she was here in that first group of students, she was one of the founding
members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, uh, with several other young women.
Actually, her uncle, Albert Lee, worked in - eventually, he ended up working in the President's
office.
He started off as a quote-unquote messenger boy, and uh, did a lot with bringing local
students onto the campus, and so my grandmother was one of those people.
Albert Lee was instrumental, I'm told, in placing a lot of the black students in homes
in the black community when they came here.
He used to look out after us.
Make sure we were going to school, and going - check up, you know.
He helped so many kids to go to college.
He helped the Nesbitt boys, he helped my sister get a scholarship.
He was just an all-around good person, and if you needed to know something, you went
to Mr. Lee.
He was a force of energy within hisself.
He cared about his people.
That's all I can say, he really cared about his people and he cared about those students
on campus.
If you were to ask the students that were here in the 30s and 40s, they would say that
he was their primary support system.
During that time, again, students were not able to do a lot of the things that they did
on campus.
So one of the things that Albert Lee did was to organize community households, and it was
those community households that ended up being the places that students would stay while
they were matriculating at the University.
In essence what he did was took care of the needs of the students when they were outside
of the classroom.
And there were many, so he was really considered to be a very strong mentor, and an advocate
for those students.
That's why euphemistically he's called the first black dean of students at the University
of Illinois.
He was also very involved in getting those students connected to the religious communities.
Mr. Lee was in charge of our church.
And we had to learn.
We learned how to read and write and everything, before we ever started school.
Bethel AME Church was the first minority church in the city of Champaign as well as the city
of Urbana.
Therefore, it has been the bedrock of this community.
I'm so proud of the history of the church that I grew up in, in that they've provided
a lot of leadership in this community.
The first African American on the city council was Kenneth Stratton, out of that church.
First black teacher hired in Urbana Public Schools, Taylor Thomas, came out of the church.
First African American on the Board of Education of Unit 4 was Mr. Edwards, came out of that
church.
They were the intellectual leaders of the community.
It was people like my grandfather, the Banks family, the Pope family- when I call these
names, these are all people that you see streets named after, I believe the county building
is named after one of the Popes, because these were people who were leaders in the African
American community.
A lot of what students need is just interaction with other students.
So the church buildings were always open - for instance at Bethel Church, they had a orchestra,
um, and that orchestra was made up primarily of University of Illinois students.
The churches really were the social hub of the communities.
College students came to the - they ran out of money, they went looking for a minister
or church or someplace.
We encouraged them.
The kids would come to church on Sundays, and after 12:00 they couldn't have nowhere
to go to eat, and so we'd feed the kids who came to church, and take them to our houses,
our homes, and feed them, but they had nowhere to go.
They didn't know the town, they didn't know the people.
It really was the war that caused things to change in Champaign-Urbana.
Or, people coming back from the war.
And so what they came back to was a hyper-segregated society, and so when you combine that with
soldiers who have been used to a disciplined life, who have been used to success, and then
you're telling them, "No you can't be successful because that's not your place," um, there
was a lot of tension.
When you can't get a haircut, when you can't get a hamburger, on the very campus that you're
matriculating, there's a problem here, not with us, but with this, how this society is
functioning.
And so that sort of is the backdrop for how students in the 30s and 40s had to live on
campus.
I think what's changed between the 40s and today are those very specific areas, such
as housing, public accommodations, those things that people fought and died for, have changed.
Um, there's always the undercurrent of white supremacy that has not changed.
It's very resilient, it's very pernicious, so I think, um, you know, if you were to talk
to students today, some of their conversation would be almost exactly the kind of conversations
that we had when I was a student.
It basically boils down to:"Why don't you treat us like human beings?"
I mean, so, across the board, that's what all of those things were about.
Each generation is just going to have to do it all over again, because it's not going
anywhere.
And so, places like the University of Illinois really become extremely important because
this is one of the few access points to the quote-unquote middle class.
And it is through the educational system.
I see some changes in the positive direction, but I also see a lot of uhh unrest.
And you would think that as we are growing together as a society, what we're looking
for is equality and justice.
I think it was um, a lot closer back then, because um, so many of the students had to
live off-campus and in the community.
Whereas nowadays, they don't.
You know, they don't have to live in the community, and they don't have to associate with the
community.
One of the things that the campus can do is try to connect with the community that you're
living in.
Um, it can even get down to things as specific as - since you're going to be here four years,
register to vote in Champaign, for instance.
Things like that, where the people actually feel a kinship to the community that they're
living in.
So the more you can engender positive environment for relationship building, that's how these
problems get addressed, and that's how they get solved.
So the thing that the community can do is realize that the University is not a cash
cow.
But what they do best is the intellectual resources that they have.
And so if you want to find out how best to meet the needs, say, for instance, of school
children who are not doing well in school, there are people on campus who know that answer.
I think what young people should know is that you're not doing this by yourself.