Q: Why did you come to Salt Lake City?

Well, in August 1949, the doctor said that I was getting too rambunctious with all the peritonitis in my body. He wanted me to go to a quiet place and rest. There was no quieter place that I had been than Utah, so I came out to Utah to stay 90 days and rest.

Q: When you arrived in Salt Lake, what was your first impression?

Well, I had been here the year before, and my impression then was there was a lot of snow in winter. Dorothy and I had come out from California to visit her sister Noel. I said that it was the dullest place that I had ever been. I asked, "Where do you go, and what do you do for fun?" I don't think that we ever saw hardly any black people at all. We went downtown and stood on the corner there and looked like there was very few black people here. There were very few places that you could go. The only one that I remembered was the Porter's and Waiter's Club.

Q: Tell me about the Porter's and Waiter's Club. Where was it? What was it like? What did you do there?

Well, that was where the black people went. There was another little place that they had somewhere, but we didn't go to that one. It was right across from the Union Pacific Station down there. They had food, ribs, and the people played cards and stuff. And then they had music and you could dance. That was the only place that you had the chance to socialize. This was in 1949.

Q: You said when you went downtown there were no other black people. How did people look at you? Did they talk to you?

It was like you were invisible or something unless they had to go around you. And they made sure that they didn't touch you. They acted like the black was going rub off on them or something like that.

Q: Let's talk a little bit about your husband's job at the railroad. Tell me about the old railroad days.

Did you read his thing up at the university? He knew all about it. He was born in Denver. His mother came to Ogden. That was when he was 11 years old or younger. He went to school in Ogden and that is where I got all of my information. They weren't allowed to go in swimming pools, but they would go down to the river. His mother took in washing clothes for white folks. And he would go down on the railroad tracks and pick up coal and stuff so that they could have it. In the summertime they would follow behind an ice truck to pick up chips of ice and stuff to take home. So I learned a lot about Utah from my husband, because he was born here and then went to work for the railroad. He worked for them for 33 years. He was a waiter on the diner.

Q: Did you ever travel on the railroad with him?

Occasionally, when I would go back to Topeka to visit my mother, I would go back. And most of the time he wasn't there. But we were married after I had met him 18 months. We had to wait 3 years, and then we went on our honeymoon on the railroad. We had a bed in a car and the railroad boys would bring us coffee in the morning and orange juice. It was just like a fairy tale. So that was the only time that I got to ride with him is when we went back to Topeka. We had three weeks and we stayed 2 1/2 weeks and then I said I couldn't stand it anymore. "Let's go home; I gotta rest before I go back to work."

Q: Let's talk a little bit about the famous story in your oral history. You said that you got all dressed up and ready to go. Can you tell me from start to finish what that was like?

I came in August of 1949. When I decided that the Lord was not going to let me go back home to Topeka and that he had sent me here to do a work which I didn't know what it was, I looked in the paper. I looked at a lot of names and then went down to employment. They said that they didn't hire colored people.

I was a projectionist. I sold tickets and was licensed. In Topeka, I was accredited because I used to sell tickets at the dance and you used to have to be bonded. I thought that I could get a job like that. No, they said that they didn't hire colored folks. So, I found the one in there that had the most kids, because I just wanted to play with kids because I knew that I would never have kids myself. And I said I'm going to work because mother says any work that is honest is good.

I called Mrs. Sandak and we made an appointment. But, also we had been down to the Porter's and Waiter's and I had met Mr. Henry and he had said he would be in that day and would be having a party in Ogden. I had never been to Ogden. So, what I did was get dressed up so that I could go out and do my interview with the Sandaks and come back and be ready to go to Ogden with Harold.

I drove up in a taxicab and I had the man wait. I didn't know any better because I had money and went in and sat there and she asked, "Do you know how to cook?" "No." But, you know, I did because I had a café. I just don't like to cook. "Do you have any references?" "No," because I never done that kind of work. "Do you know anybody in town?" "Only the people that I stay with." No, really, you should have said goodbye and everything. I said, "But I do like a clean house and this one isn't clean, and I do love children." I picked the boy up and put him on my knee, and shaking him, and you could see this. "Just leave your number." But Mrs. Sandak can tell it so much better than I can.

I didn't even care, because I was waiting to go somewhere. So I wrote my number down and put it on the telephone stand and I left. And she said that she got to thinking about it and told Wally, "I want to hire her." And he said, "She could be one of them women from down on 200 South. You know with makeup and all that stuff." And she said that I want to hire them.

It was the best job out of all the jobs that you've heard me tell you was that one, because that is where I learned all the things that I knew and learned about people. She let me love the kids just as if they were mine. Beautiful job...and they still consider me like the family. And I consider them my family.

Q: How many years did you work there?

The whole time Mr. Henry and I got married in 1953, and then I had to have another operation. The first one I had to have because the adhesions from my appendix bursting was rolling up into my stomach and kept me down. They were tightening up, so the doctor had me have an operation. But Mrs. Sandak had gotten me with a Dr. Urshler who did diagnostic study, who was watching me, so he had me do that. Then he saw that I had tumors and said that if I keep working that I will never get well. The doctor said, "You needed to really rest."

So, he went walking to find where black people could buy homes. Did you know that we just couldn't buy homes anywhere? And if you got a real estate person, I guess they told you, they took you down to Central City to those dead-end streets and little shacks down there or in some other little place. He didn't want to get one of those. He said that we're going buy a home. And he went down on Post Street and Mrs. Lawrence, who you will be seeing pretty soon, had a house across the street that wasn't over a year old and it was up for sale. We bought it and he moved me in there.

But soon after the year was up after my operation, I was still went back and forth up to Sandaks, because they would go out of town. And even when I got my kids, I would take them up there and I would stay in the house and look after the kids in the house for them while they were gone, but that was for years. I would cater all of their parties because by trade I was a caterist.

Q: You were head of the NAACP. Let's talk about what years you were president of the NAACP?

I knew you were going to get technical on me. I think it was 1980. At the same time I had just brought in a 1976 OIC. I was the chairman. I had forty or so agencies that I was on boards with all at one time. Boards and committees and things. Tt wouldn't have been bad, but I was chairman of several of them. I was chairperson of the Utah and Idaho Baptist Association, and that is when I got started with that. Then I had the Alberta Henry Education Foundation that I was the chairman of. And then I was also the chairman of the Governor's Black Policy Council when Governor Rampton brought that in. And then that's where we heard of OIC and I thought it ought to go in Ogden because there were more black people in Ogden because of the railroad.

Well, they wouldn't take it so they came to my house while I was running for office. I decided that I should run for office so that I could teach people that you don't wait for the day of the election -- that you have to go to the mass meetings. So I would have mass meetings at my house and they still didn't come. So I said that I would run for office.

So in 1972 or 1974, I decided to run and after I got off of work from the Board of Education. I would go out and visit the houses and say that the mass meetings are important. Now, if I run and when it comes to your mass meeting, you run for delegate. Because if you can sixty percent of them, they can't bring the thing of race in.

I was running against another Jack who had been the legislative chairman for years -- an elderly lady. I knew that they were going to discriminate against me. When I put my material out in the stores, they would tear them and throw them away in the wastebasket. I am telling you this so that you know what it was like back there in Utah.

Still, I got one lady and she was going to be a delegate for me. She paid her tithes in the church and they called her in because she voted for me and was a delegate for me. I cried for days. I loved that lady. She just said that I would make the best candidate, and the church, they didn't. They didn't find anything wrong with Mrs. Henry. "She has done a lot of good things but she doesn't belong to the church." So that let me know where I was at and that I wasn't going to do it, so I almost 60 percented her. And I would have, but if one delegate didn't come, if they let her go in there while they were voting, change a vote, so I had all but one vote short of sixty percent, they could run a primary and then they could then get a task force out. But that didn't bother me any.

I didn't think the Lord wanted me in politics because my grandfather always said as long as you live don't ever be a politician. I never knew the reason why. It always worried me why my grandfather didn't want me to be a politician. A missionary, go to Africa or somewhere, but a politician no. He said that a politician had to lie and no liars are going to get into heaven.

Q: You have so many accomplishments and opportunities and you have been right out there in the forefront of not only the African-American Community, but also the entire community. What do you attribute that to?

If I had all of the plaques, I think that it is about 50 of the awards they've given me. Every night, I said, "I don't want them. Why are they doing this? I don't actually ever do anything." Now you heard me say as of today right now there is peritonitis in my body. I was a hired teacher and I climbed on the tricky bars and hung upside down with the kids. Now how could anybody with the poison body do that? Nobody can. It has to be the Lord. The Lord sent me here and how would anybody hire me as a head teacher if I didn't have a university degree? I had never been in a university. It can't be me.

The Lord had a job for me to do. He sent me here and gave me a husband to do that. And then when he thought I was rested in 1967, I went to the daycare. I never went out and applied for a job. How do you account for me doing that if it wasn't for the Lord? The board hired me up there. How did I know all of those things? Because I love to read.

I have always read. I have a library over there full of books. I have read most of them because I think it is exciting and I try to tell people to read. If you read, you will have knowledge because it will get internalized in you. But anyway, they hired me as an administrator and the teachers hollered and they wanted to get out.

I was the first black in the Salt Lake School District. People wouldn't speak to me and they would walk way around me. I know they hired me to boot them down. By the time I left, they didn't want to let me go because I was fighting all of their battle for them. I had to devise an instrument, walk down the hall everyday and say, "Hello, how are you?" Then they would have to say, "How are you?" Right? I would say, "Wonderful. Oh, beautiful," and then keep walking. I did that every day and in every office I would stop and say, "It looks pretty" and would say, "How are you?" And so they got to wondering why is she wonderful all of the time? They were sick sometimes but I was never sick. Why was I not sick?

But then the teachers in the school didn't like it because I would tell them that they were prejudice and they had to teach all of the kids the same. I would look in their books and, of course, you know they have a degree so a letter was hanging up there. Dr. Thomas said, "Let's rectify that. You go and get the degree." I said that I really didn't need it because the Lord gives me what I need. He said, "I've proofed your record." I said, "I didn't think that nobody knew that I had already applied for the university to go and show my students, all of the students of the foundation: 'If I go and get an A or B, I expect you to get the same.'"

And we had forty and fifty and we were putting them in, because we didn't have students at the university until the Alberta Henry Foundation came along and started putting them in. As you heard me say, that Groverland said to me that we need to go and I said that I would plan and you all do the work. And then they kept coming until I couldn't do it. So Mr. Sandak and Virginia decided that we would go into a foundation.

Q: Tell us what the Alberta Henry Education Foundation is.

The Alberta Henry Education Foundation is the love of my life. I was with the Utah and Idaho association going up and down finding out this was how Utah was. They were really bright kids. Their parents did not hardly stay in Utah. The girls were bright, and they would get good grades. But none of the boys would because the teachers didn't understand the boys. They didn't need to educate them, because they couldn't receive the Priesthood. So therefore, why educate them? That worried me so, that is when I decided to put in for students in the school through the Association.

So, I went to Mr. and Mrs. Sandack, and four of their friends gave me money, so I could put them in while I was President of the Association. During that time, in six years, in 1966, I sent in my resignation to the Association because they didn't want me to do the things they way I wanted to do them -- to just pick any student, not the high grade student. But I picked the ones who really wanted it, but their grades were low, because they didn't go along with the idea that some teacher had in mind. Their grades might have been just 0.1, but they had something about them and they said, "No, we will do something else." So, I went home and the doctor put me in 21 pills-a-day because the peritonitis was acting up and kept me in for eight months.

The students came in and said the Association had no money and it was Grover Thompson and Tony Harp (and, by the way, Tony Nathaniel Harp was one of those students that came that I had put early). Do you no what she is doing today? She is a State Senator in Connecticut, is that not exciting to know that one of those students has gone all the way up?

They kept coming and I kept planning things for them -- like giving them little things, having a banquet, selling iron board covers, cupcakes -- and they still kept coming. It got up to be six and than eight students. Then Mr. Sandack and Mrs. Hyatt decided that it ought to go into the foundation. So, it went into the Foundation and the students named it the Alberta Henry Education Foundation. I told them they couldn't do that, I had ACC and all of that. "I'm not dead yet. You can't name it that." But they insisted and that's how it became, and now we got over 300 students that we are looking for, and I think we might have found maybe ninety some of them. They are of all race and all colors, yes every race, Native Americans, Asians.

Q: Now lets get into the NAACP

I brought OIC in which trained people, so I'm not going to say much about that. But at that time I was the youth advisor in the NAACP, and we had over 100 students and I would take them to Sillmar. See, the Black folks were somewhere else and everybody kept saying, "You ought to run for President." And I said, "I'm backing Jim Dooley." Finally, when Jim Dooley said he wasn't going to run again, than he said, "You should run." So I did run, and we won, and there were no people hardly there. I don't think over eight or nine people were still coming to the meetings. There was no money. So Mr. Lanorst Bush took the foundation, and we started building on the NAACP.

One of the things I wanted to build on was accountability and accessibility -- accountability mostly: that we were accountable to the people to see the things and help the people here in Utah. We were having a lot of problems. The places were not even. Even Hyrum would call them names and do things to them. There was nobody that was working with them. So, that was what mostly what my thing was. It wasn't national NAACP, because I didn't see what national was doing for us. They didn't come in here and fight our battles for us.

The only one we lost that hurt me real bad was William Andrews. I didn't like the lies that they told that said he had killed somebody, when he hadn't. Said he had raped somebody and totaled for sixteen or seventeen years, which was a lie. He hadn't done any of those things. So I thought he should, if anything, get life in prison, because the state has to live with that. It just doesn't go away. Just last week sometime it was back in the paper again.

Q: Let's talk about how were you raised as a child?

Well, mother says that 1920 October, four o'clock in the morning, she got on the floor on a share cropping farm down in Louisiana. We just had two rooms in it, and mom would say, "Jim, it's time." And my daddy would go across the cotton field and get the midwife, and they would come back, and at five o'clock I was born. She said, then, at seven months, I was up and walking and talking and haven't stopped since. I always knew everything. And they didn't know what to call me, because I have two other sisters. So they had a little scrawny peach tree in the yard, so they called me Alberta. Now, they didn't know that it was Elberta. So, it was Alberta and that was what I was named after peaches. So don't put peaches in front of me, because I'll eat them all up.

Anyway, I was always allowed to do what I wanted. I thought I knew everything, even though I didn't. So, when they decided maybe were going to lynch my mother, because mother had came out of Kansas City and she had went to the six grade and she could read and write. I got all my knowledge of learning doing those things from my mother. She could figure and add, and when they would go buy things at the store, the store that the man owned, she would put the prices and things down.

Then, when they would bring the cotton in, the share cropper band would say, "Well Jim, (they didn't talk to women) that's a pretty good crop you got there, but you still owe me." And mother said, "Oh no. The figures are, and they told Jim." And he said, "Boy, you better keep that gal quiet or we are going to lynch her." Mother said, "I will not be quiet." I get that from her. So she decided there was no point in staying there and she wanted her kids to have a education and no use to getting lynched down here, and she moved us back in 1923, when I was two-and-a-half years old, to Kansas, where my grandfather lived and my grandfather was a minister and had a church.

So I was brought up in the church, because mother always made us go. We had to stay all day with grandpa, and grandpa would always tell us what he wanted us. We couldn't even look in a barber shop, because men were getting their haircut, we couldn't go to a ball game, and you couldn't go to a theater -- none of those things. But you had to walk in the way of the Lord. I had a ball, and didn't want to grow.

I wanted to always be young. Yet all the people would leave their kids with me. I was scrawny and they called me "half-pint," "little-bit," because I was straight up and down. I didn't come into womanhood until I was almost seventeen, because it was more fun to play basketball, football. Oh, I would tackle them just like a man. My mother worried: was I going turn up to be a women or a girl? If a boy tried to kiss me, I would beat him up. Then, I'd run and tell mother, "Now, mother, he tried that snoopy stuff..." (That's what I called it, snoopy stuff. "I ain't got time for that."

I won the tennis championship just before I came out here. They had it for the Black Community and they were all voting on that women that girl that came from the nicer part of town, and had the nicest racket and sort of things and knew she was going to win. I didn't know whether I was going to win or not. I hadn't been to bed all night. I had been playing this all night long and looked up and it was almost six, ran home and took a bath and put on my little short skirt and stuff and ran out there without any sleep, because everything has to be fun. I just played and said, "Bring me water." (That's one of the things you shouldn't do). I beat her and just laughed, because I thought it was fun. Everything is fun, and do I have to grow up now? I told my daughter that I'm trying hard to grow up and be dignified and like all these awards. That's not part of it. They're not me. They're awards to the Lord. And maybe I'll get something up in heaven.

Q: Paint for us a picture of the nightlife here in Salt Lake City. Tell us about some of the entertainment venues of the '40s and '50s.

I don't know them. All I ever did was go to meetings. All I ever did was go wherever I thought they had a board meeting, or anything that had money, or something that would be advantageous and good for the black community. You heard me say just in even one year, I would have maybe thirty or forty boards and agencies that I would go to, because I knew it would reckle them. Most of the time they'd never seen a black. Then, on top of that, Governor Rampton came in and appointed me to Brooklyn Institute. I would be up in Snowbird with the whole bunch, and I'd be the only black. I even got to go with the bid committee to select the Third Judge. That's when we got Judge Winda, and there I was the only Black. Than here come again an Energy Commission and Governor Rampton said, "Alberta will be on that."

So I was supposed to break the ice for all the places and for people. I would read all the stuff at home, and I would battle in it like I had been in it for years. I took a physics class and I took, you know, when you don't want credit, you don't degree, because I didn't know anything about physics. Did you know that the teacher read my paper for the whole class and there were almost a hundred of us? I was embarrassed because I wanted a silent storm. I love that about our water. That's why I don't drink water, because it was sheltered or something. He read and he said, "She's not getting a grade, but if I would give it a grade she would get an 'A.'" All because I got into it and I loved it. You know, if I hadn't been on the energy committee, I probably wouldn't been able to pass that class.

Q: So, you didn't have time for entertainment, although you went to the Porter's and Waiter's Club, the time when you met your husband. Did you go out to restaurants? Did you go to movies? Did you go to Lagoon or the Rainbow Rendezvu?

No, except when the NAACP had banquets, then I would go. But I never had knowledge of nightclubs and stuff. My husband didn't want to go anywhere because he had been over seas. He was working on the rail road, got his "Dear John" letter in 1944 and took him down South. He had never been South -- to an Oklahoma to a thing there, took him to New York, over to England, then over to France and saw all them dead bodies when they were going over there. So their group, they held them back, and didn't let them go. Had they been, they would have been some of them killed in France and Holland and then in Germany.

When he got home he went right back on the railroad for thirty-three years, and he didn't want to go anywhere. So, where was there for us to go? So, I don't know, and I'm sorry I can't tell you about this place or that one, because I never went. I was too busy meddling in other people's business. It's true. I'd rather do that. And even right now I don't go any place, unless if a person calls me to come out and speak and I go and I speak like I did last month. As long as I don't need to write nothing down, I can walk across the floor and speak for two hours. I did it for an hour and half.

Q: What is your opinion on the importance of education for children?

No, you don't want me to talk about that, because that is the thing -- without education, you are not really going anywhere. Nobody. You've got to have an education. Now, I don't mean you got to get a Ph.D. I am not talking about that. I've seen some people, Lord forgive me if I say this, but they have Ph.D.'s and they're fools. That's all they've got. You got to have a whole lot of other things to go along with. But to be able to stay in and get whatever you want, and do whatever you want to do, you've got to get an education and it's got to be well rounded. That's what I always told students. If I can and go and I don't know too much and I can go and I can learn about it and can do anything, I can go anywhere.

So, education, to me, means more, and I really think in Utah they ought to rethink their priorities. I think they ought to pay the teachers more, but I think they ought to bring back the money that they took away from the students and put it back in there. You know, these teachers have all this meeting time. I'm sorry I don't think this is necessary.

My granddaughter is going to school. She never brought her book in; she used a book with somebody else. The kids don't have all their materials. Did you know that? In our schools in Utah they don't have books. They have to use them over and over again, and they don't have enough because they have so many kids. So, I think they need to take that money and put it into supplies and things. I feel sorry for some of the teachers, because they use their own money to buy supplies. So, I say pay the teachers enough and go back to the basics for that the kids can write.

I go to the stores and I would be appalled. They're working, but they can't do anything unless they got running things. And I'd already figured it out in my head. One day, I gave the lady, I said, "This is too much money." "Oh, no it's not." She got on her little calculator. I said, "I'm just being honest. I really shouldn't argue with you. Take a paper a pencil and figure it out. You've given me too much money and you're going to come up short." If it was anyone else I'd just say, "Heck to it, it's mine. But I can't take your money." I said, "Call somebody else over." So they called this other man. "Are you having a problem Ms. Henry?" "I'm just trying to give her money back. She gave me too much money." (Because they all know me). And he said, "That's right, she did. A dollar and something too much." They can't figure unless they got a computer. They don't ask them to use their heads.

In characterizing the African-American community over the years, can you tell us about some of the changes?

What community?

Q: Well, is there an African-American community? I know it's not as diverse as everything else, but talk to me about some of the changes.

Every place I've been they've had a community. The people who lived north of the peak, and all were black and when some of us got sick. We would go to a neighbor's house and stay if we had the chicken pox. We don't have that kind of community here. It's not that closeness thing that everybody knew everybody and if I got in trouble a neighbor could whip me.

You could look around where I'm living at. Do you see any blacks? Do you see anywhere around here? When I lived on Post Street there were about five or six families -- that was about as much of a community as you were going to get. Our community for us blacks was in the churches that we go to, and we all don't go to the same church. My daughter belongs to the Faith Temple, and her kids they go to the Faith Temple. But I'm a Baptist, a fighting one. And there's where we were born, and the children are blessed. When you die, you know my husband died, and they had his funeral right there at the church. To me, that's where a community is in Utah.

If I don't agree with something that someone else says out in the community, it really doesn't matter, because we're not going to come together. You know when Rodney King got beat, and I was President of NAACP, I said, "They're going to have a community thing out at Neddy Gregory." And we'd call the community, and that's the only time the community gets to come in on the decision is if the leaders would ask them to come together. We've had the school district, when I was President at Neddy Gregory, about some of the principals that did things in the schools, you know. We don't have that, but we do have organizations that are doing a great job now.

Now, this is my perspective, we've got sororities. To me, they are doing great things. They are taking the place of a community, if you haven't had one, but otherwise, as far as us getting together, I haven't had the mass meeting. I've been here twenty-one years, and I have the mass meeting right here in my house every year. This year, I said, "This is my last time." Because I had it all the time, I was on the west side in Salt Lake. Because there's never any blacks. There's only whites. There's never any Native Americans, Asians, or anything. They're all white. Only one time, during election time, I think it was the election with the last President Clinton. No, it was before that that we had a whole house full of people in here, but no blacks. So to me, my grandkids are not growing up in a black community. All their friends are white.

In almost 50 years here in Utah, what stands out as being your happiest experience, you're happiest moment? What has been delightful about living here?

The most delightful thing is the mountains. I told you number one that I fell in love with the mountains. Anybody who's ever been to Kansas would know the reason why. Enough said. I love it. And the next one was my husband. Marrying the husband that I married, because everybody don't have a good marriage. I used to tell the women that came here, and they said "Oh, your husband is so good looking." And I'm watching him. I'm not letting him go anywhere. I knew he wouldn't go anywhere in the first place, because my husband dearly loves me.

And the kids, which I thought I would never have. And for people to call me and say, "We've got this kid," or, "We've got that one," from the agency -- the children's agency in Ogden. I didn't know anything about it, but they said this fits your household. And then, when I got my one son, which was a delight window, the lady said that he would never be worth a quarter. Anybody wasn't, because we were born in England or anything or whatever. You'd need to have another child and you got another one. And we'd thought in the range of two or so, so I mean we bottled whatever and everything, but those were the happy days. I was never any more happier than to come and have the Lord give us a foundation that we never had to have federal dollars, state dollars, none of that money.

Where did the money come from to put that many kids in school? To watch over them? (Because we had a monitoring system that the board members would look out for certain students if they had trouble.) It came from donations from people.

In the earlier days, we had the Bamburger Foundation and the Travis Foundation. But that was just only for a short time. The rest of the money now come from people. What people? The people of Utah. The Black people? No. So that gives me great joy to say they supported a thing that they saw that was really good. Not the black ones, or anything -- the people of Utah. To me, that gives me great pleasure, and I'm just as happy sitting here. And if they don't remember me and put me in anything, that's why I'm calling to tell you that they did, you know. I'm not going to go out and broadcast, or say I've done all those things. I didn't really do them. How I done them, I never know. But the Lord knows.

And to kill somebody that hadn't killed anyone, that one has not, I mean, that throwed me back a long ways because I thought Utah was more observant than that. Before that there was the Priesthood. And when we had the Boy Scout thing, Jim was the President then. And to think that these boys could go, but they could not ever rise up to the thing in a national kind of organization, not something that was local, because they couldn't get the Priesthood. Now that one was another thing that hurt me and Jim. I wasn't president then. I was with the youth, over the youth. But they let that church off the hook, which they should have went ahead on, I thought. They just folded up. That's the way most people do. But they had a very good case against the church, because all the Boy Scout organizations that they had, Blacks could go, but they couldn't become whatever. They couldn't go through and be that high thing, because only if you could go to the Priesthood meetings, and Blacks couldn't go to the Priesthood and couldn't become a Priest. Then how could they ever be anything in Boy Scouts?

You said what hurt me, that one hurt me a lot. Just living in Utah knowing when I go out on jobs that people say what they done. I think they had one in the news last night about the one at the post office. These are the kinds of things that I used to have to go out. Those would hurt me because people would look me flat in the face, and you couldn't do anything about it until Lyndon Baines Johnson signed that civil rights thing.

And before then we knew the code books were written for the real estate. If the people signed it, they didn't want colored to buy their house, even if you wanted to sell it, you couldn't sell it to me. Those things hurt me. Until Lyndon Baines Johnson signed that bill. Then the biggest thing that hurt me most of all, you coming here and you heard all the things that I was doing, it was only after Ron Coleman wrote the Peoples of Utah and I got that book. I did not know that Utah had been a slave territory. It took me months to get over that. Then, when I would go out and tell people that, they wanted to have me fired from the Board of Education.

They called. They jammed the switchboards because I got on Jacqueline Oaks, and said it was too bad all of you people didn't know that Utah was a slave territory. What bothered me was that they could have come into the United States like California did. California didn't come in as a slave. But Utah had the option. They gave them the option of coming in any way they wanted. They were the only state territory that had blacks as slaves. So, when they would call me back -- the stations, the superintendent would call me in, the Board of Education would call me in -- I said I'd go back on that station because historians would call. I would say only on one condition, that they run Dr. Ron Coleman with me. Then, I would sit there and the little angel and my halo slipping, my halo half way down on mine, and trying to be a little angel, and Ron Coleman would sit and give them. You know, it's hard to believe me, but Ron Coleman was a historian.

Now that one really hurt me. But look at all of the years that I have been here, and did not know that, and why was I fighting so hard? I might have went home if I had a known earlier. So, if they were a slave territory, then when they came into the Union, they couldn't have slaves no more, and then they couldn't get paid for not having slaves, they still in Utah, no other place now, they still said blacks couldn't receive the Priesthood. So there we go. A long time, just you think about that now, a long time of not being able to hold a job, not being able to do things, going to schools, you couldn't go into the bowling alleys -- but I wanted to take my kids, which I never did. At the skating rink, you had to wait 'till eleven or twelve o'clock at night. I mean, all of those indignities you had to suffer.