Oral History S-T-V-W-Y-Z

William “Bill” Saunders	interviewed 12/13/2008	William ‘Bill’ Saunders was a principal organizer for Local 1199 in the momentous 1969 Charleston Hospital strike. Brave black workers and their union changed labor history, forcing South Carolina’s legislature to raise pay scales for state employees, black and white. Bill was elected to the SC Public Service Commission, serving for 10 years. He founded and is Exec. Dir. of the Committee on Better Racial Assurance (COBRA) to address racism in the community and to assist people in need.
Roger Sawtelle	interviewed 09/25/2010	President, Merrimack Valley NAACP
James Scandrick	interviewed 07/31/2006	Sit-ins, music of the movement, demonstrations
Fred Scheiner	interviewed 10/29/11 Roslyn Heights NY	Fred Scheiner is a LI businessman who owned and piloted a small four-seater airplane. In 1968, while Dr. Martin Luther King was in New York City on a speaking tour, he was invited to address an important Rabbinical Assembly in the Catskills, to heal the growing breach between blacks and Jews. When Scheiner learned that Dr. King’s heavy schedule didn’t allow for a lengthy roundtrip car ride upstate, he offered to fly him to and from the Concord Hotel, knowing that his small plane was the only kind able to land at the airport near Lake Kiamesha. He safely piloted Dr. King to the conference where 700 rabbis sang, “We Shall Overcome” in Hebrew to greet them. “It was one of the great experiences in my life,” Sheiner said. The interview also covers Mr. Scheiner's anti-war activities and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Rabbi Hugo Schiff
Rev. John Scott	interviewed 10/09/2008	Rev. John Luster Scott was born in Halifax, NC. He worked with the SCLC in Operation Breadbasket (1970) and was a leader of the freedom movement. He knew Dr. King and liked to tell the dramatic story of Dr. King's safe arrival in a rural field in the dark of night in a single engine plane. Terrified for his safety, supporters had lined the runway with cars and turned on their headlights. Rev. Scott later became the pastor of St. John’s Baptist Church in Harlem, where he has been a fearless opponent of drugs and gangs. He is on the board of the National Action Network with the Rev. Al Sharpton. “The People of Clarendon County/Answer to Racism Event” was presented at Rev. Scott's church in memory of parishoner Julian Holliday (d. 2008). For a fuller account, go to the name link, left.
Dave Sear	interviewed 03/11/2011	Dave Sear, internationally known folksinger from New York, attended Black Mountain College in NC in 1950-1951 in order to study folk music and the social scene in the south. While there he formed an association with Lawrence Daugherty (1916-1980), an African American coordinator of music events around the state. Together they organized black and white members of the community and participated in voter registration drives. Dave Sear also helped establish a literacy course at Black Mountain College, and helped escort many of these new students to voting booths for the first time. To learn more about the historic friendship between David Sear and Lawrence Daugherty, go to the name link left.
Barbra Pace Sears	interviewed Arlington, TX	Barbra Pace Sears (1933-2005) was a civil rights activist in the 1950s and '60s who worked as a secretary to Dr. Martin Luther King; an educator; community advocate; and managing editor for many years at La Vida News/The Black Voice serving Tarrant County, Texas. With her encouragement, this Oral History project was born. Click the name link left to read her obituary in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Click here to read more about her in Alice Bernstein's article in remembrance of her life and work.
Donald Shaffer	interviewed 01/10/2011	Martin Luther King on Long Island, housing, voting, employment, ACLU Don Shaffer, Long Island civil rights activist, Working Families Party, NYCLU;
Harold Sharp	interviewed 01/02/2012	Harlem Health Festival, Victoria Theater
Prof. Edward Sherman	interviewed 02/25/11 New Orleans, LA	In the interview, Prof. Sherman discusses the pioneering civil rights work of his father, Ray E. Sherman, mayor of El Paso in the 1930s, who brought the city its first public housing under the New Deal. He describes his early awareness of the need for civil rights activism and his activities as a young lawyer on behalf of desegregation in El Paso, then his work with his wife Alice in Georgia with the SLCC, helping black protestors who’d been jailed and teaching in a Freedom School. During the Vietnam war Edward Sherman used his military law background to work for the ACLU, representing black soldiers who had been court martialed for speaking out against the war. Prof. Sherman concludes by discussing the teaching of law for social purposes and the careers of some of his students. To find out more, click the name link, left.
Otha Sherrill	interviewed 08/15/11	Otha L. Sherrill, co-principal during riot at first integrated High School in Asheville, NC;
Beatrice Siegel	interviewed 07/09/06	Author of books on Civil Rights and African Americans for young readers
Dr. Samuel Siegel	interviewed 07/09/06	Dentist with MCHR, Freedom Summer, health care as a right
Rosie Simpson	interviewed 06/15/07	Rosie Simpson was an organizer with Chicago Packinghouse Workers Union Local 347 District 1 with Addie Wyatt and Charlie Hayes for 15 years. A mother of 6, she worked with the Urban League and was an organizer for The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), a coalition of neighborhood and religious groups working for racial reform in housing, economics, and the use of Willis Wagons—portable classrooms for black students, when empty seats were available in white schools. Topics: Chicago Packinghouse Workers Union organizer, school desegregation, Willis Wagons, community organizing
Rev. Susan Smith		Rev. Susan Smith is a courageous supporter of full and equal civil rights for ALL people. She is Associate Pastor of Exodus Missionary Outreach Church in Hickory, NC and Assistant Executive Director of the award-winning nonprofit Exodus Homes, which provides faith based supportive housing for people returning to the community from treatment centers and prison. Rev. Smith has worked diligently for 14 years with Exodus, advocating for justice and reform in the criminal justice system, as well as in workforce development for people recovering from addiction or incarceration. Rev. Smith serves in the Hickory Branch NAACP as chair of Press and Publicity. She is a Rotarian, and received the 2011 Spirit of King Award for the Hickory area.
Rev. Anthony T. Spearman		Rev. Dr. T. Anthony Spearman, president of the Hickory, NC Branch of the NAACP, holds two advanced degrees in theology and is proficient in Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish. As pastor of the Clinton Tabernacle AME Zion Church, he founded the nonprofit Clinton’s Corner of Catawba, Inc. He is also the Chair of Religious Affairs for the North Carolina NAACP. As he grew up in Rye, NY, he was the one black child in the fifth grade class of Robert Cullum, a white educator who became his ally. this is told of in the documentary A Touch of Greatness. Reverend Spearman received the 2008 Spirit of King award and the City of Hickory's 2009 Community Relations Award. To learn more about Dr. Spearman, including his research into his own family history, go to the name link, left.
Ozell Sutton	interviewed 11/15/05, Atlanta, GA	In this interview Mr. Sutton describes growing up as one of eight children in an Arkansas sharecropper's family (for a more detailed account click the name link, left) and tells what happened years later when he was Special Assistant to Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller (1967-71) and the family's former landlord, who had cheated his mother and threatened all their lives, came to the governor’s office seeking disaster relief after a tornado destroyed his town.

Rev. James Thomas	interviewed 04/14/2006	Demonstrations, Sit-ins, voter registration
Jose “Chegui” Torres	interviewed 11/04/2005	Boxing, Puerto Rico, Young Lords
Roberta Shade Tyson	interviewed 2/28/2011	Roberta Shade Tyson, civil rights leader in Baton Rouge and Plaquemine Parrish, LA;

Geronimo Valdez

Geronimo Valdez has been an Airfoil Cell Operator at Pratt & Whitney since 1988. In 2008 he was elected as a Shop Committee member of Int’l Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 1746. In 2005 he became VP and Exec. Board Member, AFL-CIO Greater Hartford Central Labor Council. He played a role in the successful 2010 lawsuit against P&W’s plan to move work overseas, saving 1,000 jobs. He is president of LCLAAA-Labor Council for Latin American Advancement.

Matthew Walker, Jr.	interviewed 04/15/2006	Sit-ins, jail, Freedom Rides, Martin Luther King
William “Sonny" Walker	interviewed 11/15/2005	School desegregation, black teachers, blacks in government
Lucius Ware	interviewed 08/23/2010	President, Eastern L.I. Branch, NAACP
Ludye Wallace	interviewed 04/13/2006	President Nashville Branch, NAACP Demonstrations, Sit-ins, black baseball, elections, City Council
Booker Washington	interviewed 12/ /2011	Booker Washington is VP of UAW Local 2110 in NYC, an amalgamated union with 30 contracts covering over 3,000 workers, including workers in universities, publishing, museums, and law firms. He was born in Clarendon County, SC during Jim Crow and attended segregated schools at the time of the Briggs v. Elliot lawsuit. He came to NY, became an employee of Columbia University, saw racial discrimination there, and learned about the union, encouraged by David Livingston, Julie Kushner, and Maida Rosenstein. In 1985, he became an organizer, and as a result of a strike, Local 2110 won recognition—and their first contract. “It was a grand experience and transforming for me,” he said. In January 2013 he received the UAW Region 9A Benny Thornton Labor—Civil Rights Award.
Onilaja Waters	interviewed 12/ /2011
Dr. Jefferson Wiggins	interviewed 10/17/2005	(February 22, 1925 - January 9, 2013) Lynchings, World War II, lynchings, sharecropping, segregation
Emmett Wigglesworth	interviewed 08/2007	Artist, SNCC
Cecil Williams	interviewed 05/15/2010	Civil rights in Couth Carolina, Clarendon County, etc.
Jefferson "Jeff" Williams	interviewed 03/20/14	Jefferson Williams (1918-2010) was born in St. Matthews, SC and broke new ground in the history of civil rights by becoming one of the first African Americans to own a pharmacy in Harlem. Also, he was likely the first African American to receive a reciprocal license as a pharmacist in the states of New York and South Carolina. His unpublished memoirs, “Oral History of a Black Man Who Succeeded in a White Man’s World,” is an important narrative addition to American history in the 20th century.
Isaac "Ike" Williams	interviewed 07/07/2005	Isaac "Ike" Williams Isaac (1945-2008), was honored as a life-long activist for civil rights on April 22, 2010. The tribute chronicled his life, from his student days at then - SC State College (SCSC) through his work as chief liaison for Congressman James E. Clyburn. To know more, click on the name link, left.
Clarence E. Willie		Clarence E. Willie, Ed.D. grew up on a US Air Force Base in Germany, where he was the only African American student in his high school graduation class. He went on to serve in the US Marine Corps, and underwent culture shock on re-entering the segregated south in the early 1960s. He became a teacher and then school district superintendent in Clarendon County, SC, and served as educational consultant at the State Department of Education. He has served as interviewer and chief consultant for PBS, and his book African American Voices from Iwo Jima earned him a 2010 Congressional Black Caucus Veterans’ Braintrust Award. For more of his story, go to the name link, left.
Kenneth Wingood	interviewed 09/26/2010	Merrimack Valley NAACP, MA founding
Margaret Wiseman	interviewed 03/26/2006	Sharecropping, CORE, demonstrations, Fannie Lou Hamer
Michele Woodard	interviewed 03/22/2012	Racism in Bayside, England, the court system first African American in Nassau County Supreme Court;
Rev. Dr. Addie Wyatt	interviewed 06/27/2005	Addie Wyatt discusses Civil Rights, racism in employment, her first job as a butcher, how she joined the union, her 42 years with labor unions, Women’s Rights, church work and desire to combine the meaning of the church and the meaning of justice, Poverty, United Packinghouse Workers, United Meat Packers, AFL-CIO, United Food & Commercial Workers, union contracts, butchers, pay inequality, discrimination, union organizing, strikes, Solidarity Forever, segregation, her work with Dr. Martin Luther King, Charles A. Hayes, PWI Local 1651, Rosa Parks, Montgomery Improvement Association, Selma, Alabama, Andrew Young, Morrison Hotel, Jesse Jackson, Barbara Pace Hunt, A. Phillip Randolph, Time Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, William "Bill" Lucy, Anita Patterson, Harold Washington, UMW, United Mine Workers, UAW, Eli Siegel's poem, "Something Else Should Die."

Rev. Lennox Yearwood	interviewed 12/14/2005	Hip Hop Caucus, Katrina victims, FEMA
Dr. Quentin Young	interviewed 09/22/2005	Dr. King, Civil Rights, Medical Committee for Human Rights

Zellner, Bob	interviewed 01/27/2008	KKK, chain gang, torture, SCNC
Zisholtz, Ellen	interviewed 11/21/2011	Swastika to Jim Crow; Executive Director of I.P. Stanback Museum, at SCSU, a historically black college, in Orangeburg, SC;