Charlotte Gadberry interview with Brownie Ledbetter

Charlotte Gadberry interviews Brownie Ledbetter about her childhood in Little Rock, her involvement in the civil rights movement in Little Rock, and the influence of the image of the "Southern Lady" on women in Little Rock.
On-site file includes transcript and audio recording. Sound quality is extremely poor.
INTERVIEWEE: Brownie (Mrs. Cal) Ledbetter INTERVIEWER: Charlotte Gadberry DATE: 12-11-78 TOPIC: The Impact of the Image of the "Southern Lady" on Little Rock Women CG: An interview with Brownie Ledbetter at her office at the panel of American Women, 22nd and Main, Little Rock, Arkansas on December 11, 1978 at 12:00 noon by Charlotte Gadberry on the topic Little Rock Women- Let's just start out with a brief biography of where you were born and who your parents were. BL: I was born in Little Rock April 28, 1932. We lived at that time on Pearl St. which is about eight blocks from where I live now and my mother was Helon Brown Williams, my Dad was William Hood Williams. My mother grew up in Stamps, Arkansas. My Dad was born in Knoxville, and they moved here when he was very young and he was the third of 11 kids. The rest of them were born here. He was in insurance, started with Louis Rosen. He was always involved in the kinds of things that I now find myself involved in. In fact my Uncle Grangier gave me, two or three years ago, a file, he still has Daddy's letters, his older brother, and he gave me a file of his speeches, and it's just embarrassing. CG: You've made the same ones. BL: Exactly. I had two reactions. One, you never really vary, no matter how much you rebel, which I did with him, and number two, things that we want to see don't get done. But a lot of the kinds of things he said within, and to, the church in the 30's are almost exactly like a lot of things I was saying in the 60s when I was more active in the church than I am now. And my Mom was a homemaker all of her life. She died when she was 39. She died very suddenly. And did a lot of somewhat more traditional things than I do, and was very active in the church, as I have been but also did YWCA and things like that. CG: Do you have sisters and brothers? BL: Yes, I was the oldest. My brother Bisha Grainger, who is E. Grainger Williams II, was always very close growing up. We were 14 months apart and he was very important to me. And then I have a sister four years younger than I, who was next in line, named Ann Quendrid whom we called Quindy and then my baby sister is June Hoes who's a teacher at Meadowcliff Elementary. She's nine years younger than I. And then when my dad died, mother died in '46, '47, my dad died in 1950 Grainger and his younger brother, Grainger and his wife Frances and their two kids moved out to the farm where we lived. We had moved there in the early 40s. Moved out from town. So there were six of us then. I was eighteen by that time. CG: So your mother died when you were 14 and your father when you were 18? BL: Yes. CG: And you lived on a farm? BL:I find this very interesting. My mom and my dad made a big decision and did a whole lifestyle change in 1941. He had lived up there on Edgehill at 2 Armistead. My perception of it is that it had never been very important to my mother. She grew up in S_______ and had had a lot of wealth but the whole position thing, country club thing was not something she liked, but she did it because it seemed to be at that point in time, important to my Dad. He had grown up on the south side of town and he was a very charismatic, very handsome, magnetic kind of guy. My view of it is that he was going to make it to the top. We lived there nine years. He began to question the values that were predominant in that kind of a life. We had a lot of servants and it was extremely different when we moved to the farm. He had bought that farm, part of the land was my mother's that her grandmother had owned down on the end of Asher which is now Stagecoach Road and is now a real estate development, called Tall Timber estate. In '37 he bought some adjacent land mother already owned and then there was an old farmhouse on it and he fixed that up for his sisters. There were four or five of his sisters, one was widowed and a couple that hadn't married and they lived there from '37 until it was renovated again for us to move there and my Aunt Fanny bought a house over on Arch, 24th and Arch. CG: Did he farm? BL: We had a dairy. Well, in '37 when he bought it there were some beautiful barns there and he was all into landscaping and he built onto that and renovated it. And he had horses and he went through a little of what he later termed "silly business", I agree with that judgement, and we were taught to ride. He loved to tell a story about himself that he decided one day that he couldn't milk horses, so we got into Jersey cattle and got very interested in the quality of that kind of milk and the butter from that cow. Here he was this urban person. But a lot of it was a question of what he called the right value system. He was very big on that and we had a lot of discussion on that, a lot of sermons, which I find myself repeating a lot off and on. My mom didn't care about that stuff anyway, in fact, one of the things that I presume since I was very young was a part of the decision to change our lifestyle was as I recall, my mom coming back from some Christmas planning party, some big deal, seemed to me it was Christmas at the Little Rock Country Club. She'd been on a committee to plan a big ball and there had been some discussion about the stags and who would get to name how many stags that would come and she came home and said "I've had it up to here, and that's not my kind of thing and I'm not going back up there." CG: So you think it was a consciousness issue? BL: Oh, very definitely. And there were a lot of twenties phrases, like my Dad said we're going to move because I don't want my kids to grow up to be drugstore cowboys, and we were not allowed to go to Smith Drugstore which was a hangout for rich kids who weren't tending to their business, studying and working. So as he began to wrestle with that change I could feel a lot of it even at that age but I'm sure a lot of it was hindsight and then we moved in December of '41, I think it was December. And my baby sister, June, was only a year old and Mama learned to cook, she'd never done that and she was in seventh heaven. CG: So she really changed her role. BL: Oh yes. She was much pleased by it. CG: Other than homemaking, what was your Mother's role? Was she the disciplinarian? BL: No, my Dad was the disciplinarian. It was very traditional in that sense. She was the day-to-day guidance person, did a lot of carting us around. One of the tragic things about moving out there was that she spent so much time in the car. We did have a school bus , which has always struck me as strange, when everybody got into the big bussing fracas over integration because I had ridden the bus from out there. We had to pay tuition because we were at that time out of the city and for a while my Father resisted that because he paid a taxes on a lot of city land, and so would go over to my Aunt Fanny's on 24th and Arch and then we would walk to Rightsell. We moved from Forrest Park School when I was in the fourth grade to Rightsell School and he did take us into school on the way to work but Mother would do all the put up and I remember one year there were four of us in four different schools and that was almost all she did it seemed like to her. Picking up all the pieces and us to, and he dealt with a lot of that when she died and realized a lot of that when it was thrown to him and had some real guilt about it, what he'd put her through, not having realized what the role was. It was very interesting, and he shared a lot of that with me. CG: Then what was his role? He was the authority in the family? LB: He was the man, yes he was very defintely, and he was very involved in our upbringing, in the sense of "always working on our values", and he spent a lot of time with me from the beginning. I can remember being six and going with him on Sundays after church to the main post office and getting the mail because he would do some work on Sunday afternoon. I would read the letters to him. He taught me to pronounce big words whether I knew what they meant or not. And he had a lot of expectations, many of which I didn't feel like of me, but he was very heavy with that on all of us. CG: Did he spend more time with you, do you think, than the other three? LB: Well, of course he died when June was only nine. She was five when my Mama died. And Quendy was just in teenage and he and my brother didn't really get on like they should because my brother was not treated fairly, in my view, we all adored him, and there was some competition. CG: And he being the only boy. LB: And also he was more retiring than I was. And my brother feels, I think, that my Father felt that I was the sharp one and he was slow. If anybody said that to me about my brother I would be furious, really. I can remember we all had to do music. It was very important. Music was a big thing and we had to take the piano. Brother had to play the violin. I don't how that all got brought about. There may have been some ___________________________, I don't know what it was, but at any rate I remember once at Rightsell some of the kids were making fun of Brother because he was carrying a violin case and I really tore into them. I ripped them up. CG: They better not talk about your brother. What did you talk about around the dinner table? Did you all eat together? BL: Yes. CG: What was the dinner table discussion? BL: Well, in my recollection, there were discussions about political issues and things like that. Also some of the things that my Dad was doing, but I'm not sure because it was always a family time. Our biggest family time was usually breakfast and supper and in the earlier days when we lived up in Edgehill, it was very different because the kids would eat in the breakfast room and Mother would eat with Daddy later in the formal dining room. That changed completely and everything was very informal and very casual when we moved to the farm. So we had at least those two meals together all the time. And my Dad liked to kid us a lot. Meals were an important time. We all loved to eat. CG: You had no servants out on the farm? BL: Yes, we had a woman who came in and did some ironing twice a week and somebody who helped Mother clean maybe once, twice a week. But it was very different. We'd had an upstairs maid and a downstairs maid and a gardener and a chauffer and all the silly business and they were all white, which was interesting. I have seen pictures of me being held by somebody who worked for us who was black. I mention that because of my interest in the race thing. CG: That's interesting. I hadn't run into that. BL: No, actually, Marie Schulte, who still does I think a lot of catering around town, was our cook most of those years. When we went to the farm taught she went over to the Phillips'. She taught me a lot about cooking. But also my Dad had done things like, during the war worked a place of Jews during the Nazi thing and one of the guys that we had as a gardener and also a chauffer was a young seventeen year old Jewish guy in 1938 from Germany. I'm sure that was his involvement with Uncle Louis, who was Jewish. That was very important then and it was something we talked a lot about in the family. CG: And were very aware that it was happening at that time? BL: Yes, but I was well up into the teens before I realized that there was prejudice against Jews here in Little Rock. CG: That was going to be my next question. You were aware that there was a less desireable area in Little Rock? BL: Yes. CG: Did you have any friends from that area, any acquaintances at all? BL: Well, see, on the farm, when you live in a rural area there's not a lot of those structured lines, although they're there. And I had friends that I played with. There was one family that I particularly remember and there were seven daughters and I always thought that was terribly romantic and I would go up to their house a lot to play but it finally occured to me, I'm a little slow, that they never came down to play at our house. And so I asked my mother if they could come and she said, "Of course, any friend of yours is welcome here, but they won't feel comfortable," and she had a funny look on her face and that's one of the things I've identified in my own mind is how you learn prejudice by osmosis almost. And I kind of knew I wasn't supposed to ask but I said "Why not?" I had always been encouraged by my Father to ask questions you weren't supposed to ask, because he had done that all his life. And she told me about some of the historical kinds of stuff and that it was wrong and that we didn't believe in that. So I asked them and they really were reluctant to come to my house. CG: Did they come at all? BL: Yes. I dragged them there, literally. It was offered and they didn't want to come in the house. And so what I'm saying is what happened was that that was a learning thing. A mother had said they wouldn't feel comfortable and their response to me confirmed that and I still didn't like it but there was a learning process. Now the oldest of those girls and I were fairly close. We used to even write letters to each other and when we hit the perverbiable twelve year old time, I don't know why that is considered so significant, I mean I've got some theories about it, we went our different ways. We didn't ever go to the same school. CG: Did you question that? BL: Yes. And I tried very hard to maintain a relationship with the Davis girls but it just was not feasible. And I remember going up there two or three times after I was in early teens and not feeling very comfortable there and not feeling like I was wanted to be there. And feeling like the big lady in the white house, and all that stupid stuff. CG: All the guilt . . . BL: Yes, and trying to prove that I wasn't like that which I'm sure was not behavior that was very enticing to anybody. CG: And you went to Little Rock Central and graduated there? BL: Yes. CG: Were you in all the ordinary clubs? BL: Yes. CG: Were you in the sororities? BL: No, I bucked at that. We had sororities here in Junior High. It was wonderful and I wanted very much, over at the Eastside Junior High, 14th and Scott, it no longer is a Jr. High. It had been a high school. At any rate, I wanted very much to do that. That was the thing you were supposed to do, right? I was in the sixth grade and Daddy disapproved of sororities and fraternaties. He thought they were appalling and it was the wrong value system, and I wanted to do it. It was a peer think, and mother intervened essentially I suppose because it was important to me. And also I imagine because she had, it seems to me, a pretty good commitment to people making up their own minds and my Dad had lip service to that. CG: He wanted you to make up your mind if it was his . . . BL: If it was right. But the times I would stand up to him, which I could count on half of one hand, it generally worked. It was just that I was afraid of him, or his disapproval, it wasn't of him. So, I guess as a face saving thing, he agreed that I could go into CAT, would you believe. The CAT and the DAD and the DBS. The CAT was the top of the pecking order there so naturally that was the one I wanted to be in. _____________ So he agreed that I could do it if I only went to every other meeting and he put some other restrictions on it. I don't know whether he took me. I mean really it was kind of arrogant, but I went in. And it took about six weeks and I was thoroughly disgusted by the whole situation. Actually, I think the thing that disgusted me most, was that they smoked which was extremely hypocritical at this point in time. I was an enormous prude. I was probably the Kuafedx most rigid prude you have ever met in your life. Except in the matter of swearing. I always sworn. Anyway, I'd go to a ________ party and they'd say "Oh God, here comes Brownie, we can't tell any dirty jokes," and it was just unreal. My friends would disappear at noon at Central and I thought "Where are they going?" and one day I stumbled on them and they were all smoking over behind the cafeteria and they were just chagrined and I thought "Honest to God, what have I done to these people?" I was pretty rigid about what was right and what was wrong, I always have been I guess. I had to learn to discipline myself and not make those judgements. And our family was very definite. All the people believed one through ten, you know. If you didn't believe one through ten, you weren't good, right? And I don't think that's what he meant to convey and my Mother softened it a great deal because she was a very impressive example, as I look back, of someone who respected every person she came in contact with. I still run into people occasionally even as recently as last year, somebody saying I remember you in high school and I remember your Mom. I remember sometimes she would pick me up and take me to school and she always treated me like a person and not a child. She lived that, she did not do a lot of talking about all this. My Dad was a big theorizer, sermonizer, but those things he said were very important and had a great effect on all of us, I think. CG: So you did not join the sororities in high school? BL: No, and at that point in time we had had, the year I came in, there had already been some struggle between the school district and the parents of kids who wanted sororities and fraternatires and it was all a Heights thing. By this time I had the pecking order straight in my mind and I had been rebelling against it for some time. And that had been part of the move to the farm. I was reenforced by a lot of what my Dad said, that people live in these various kinds of ways and people on the west end think they're better than people on the east and south and all of that was important. I was very much into the kids at Pulaski Heights are snobs and I was not overly tolerant there. And so they had had this big war in the school district about allowing sororities and fraternaties because they were running the school and other kids were cut out and various and sundry other things, and because they're just wrong. And I went ahead and took rush and got a triple bid, there were three high school sororities too. DAD, DBS and I forgot what the other one was in high school. It was CAT and Sub Debs in Jr. High. It seems to me there were three in high school. CG: These were strictly social? BL: Oh yes, they were Greeks, they were sororities. Avowedly and openly and that's what they were there for. But already they had passed a rule that if you were in those sororities or the fraternaties, the PIE and the Delts, then you could not participate in school activites which I think was pretty neat. So I came in with that already having been laid down. And I took the triple bid, because one of the things they always said and I really consciously was into this, one of the things that the Heights kids said was that the only people who didn't like sororities were the kids who couldn't get in them. It was sour grapes, and so I took the triple bid and rejected all three and did a whole grandstand number there which I thoroughly enjoyed. CG: Was that the first of your many? BL: I guess, I don't know. It was a certain amount of egotistical arrogance there that I did that, but I also begun to see a little beyond that. I mean I liked some of the people I had grown up who were still in the sororities and fraternaties. I probably thought less of them but it was important to me that they thought well of me and that was the beginning of learning about some political things that also to me are tied into human relation, and I also learned about the rigidity about those kinds of structures. Because when I was up for something, whether it was Tiger Beauty or cheerleader, which I didn't make, or Football Queen or any of those wonderful, wonderful achievement that meant power in a way that's acceptable for women to wield it. They would say vote for her because she's really one of us, her Daddy wouldn't let her join. And of course that had been my decision and not my Dad's. He didn't even know I was going through rush, because by that time Mother had died and our communication was very much impaired. I never had shared a lot of personal stuff with him. I had always done that with my Mom and so he really didn't know a lot of what was going on in my head and I wasn't about to share it and I was even hiding a lot of things from him. Because he had a lot of rules about what I could or couldn't do and so I was into going around behind his back. But it was easier for them, I began to see, to accept me by saying my Daddy wouldn't let me than to deal with the fact that that had been my decision. And it was also important to me that they like me and that I be popular and all that garp. And so they would send pledges to me, people they were pledging wanted to know what it meant if they got in a sorority and they couldn't be involved in school activites and wouldn't that be sad in high school and they would say go talk to Brownie. She understands both sides. Some of the kids would come to me and I would say don't go in them. But by the same token a lot of the support I got when I ran for stuff was from those folk because they figured I was really one of them. I was okay because I grew up in that same sort of economic bracket and I resented that and I had begun to resent that a lot more and I begun to feel that Little Rock was the most snobbish place on earth. That you not only couldn't get in, you couldn't get out if you were in that group. And I sought out friends across all those lines and one of the neat things about Central High School to me, which was then Little Rock High School, was horribly enough all white but at least it was diverse in terms of social economic standings, was that I could meet folks from a whole different place in town, from a whole different kind of life, from a whole different income background and really appreciate them and that seeking out starting pretty much, well I guess I'd always done that but I didn't have as much freedom to do that. CG: Well, were you a debutante? BL: No, hell no. I had a pact with my best friend who still lived over there but who went away to school. Here name was Lynn Benson and she's still a very close friend and she was one of the few females I trusted, I did not like women much. If they played the roll I didn't like them. I didn't know that's what it was. And there was a lot of that traditional kind of competitance and stuff that was really bad among us. But at any rate, Lynn and I had a pact that neither one of us would do that stupid stuff about the debutante business and of course my family had made a great stand by leaving, at least I felt it was great, but it was a big thing that people noticed when they pulled out of the country club so that there were questions about me anyhow, I'm sure. Although by that time there was Riverdale and my aunt and uncle had gone into that. And I was down in college in Atlanta when the newspaper came and there was my best friend on the front page making her debut and it just undid me. So she was at Smith and I called her long distance collect and she said she sat in a phone booth five hours waiting for me to call back and I refused to call back. It really was an important thing to me also not to be alone in the decision not to do that. And then I was very detrimental about all that, folks who did that. CG: Before we get into college, what was your image of a woman, a woman's role? BL: My mother, very much. CG: Did you strive to be more like her? BL: Yes, I never could make it in my own view. I wanted to be more feminine, all those things, I wanted to do the whole mother, homemaker thing, which I loved and had done. But I rebelled constantly and I rebelled against the whole place called white gloves country club syndrome and the pedestal. I rebelled against all of that but I did not see that as a feminist thing. I did not see that as anything that related to women's movement kind of things. I was completely unaware, I didn't hear that. I knew what a suffragist was, I think I probably would have said a suffragette, I knew about that but I didn't think about it much and I had some vision of women who cropped their hair and walked aggresively and made it through med school and that was not a part of my goals. I questioned always the thing on the basis of my own individuality. I always rebelled against should what people thought I would be like. But I didn't have the sense to project it or to sterotypes that all of us are forced to deal with. I remember representing things like girls going "Oh, there's a bug," I used to imitate that and I used to make a point of whether I liked bugs or not of killing them by myself. An obnoxious person. (laughs) We had several lakes on the farm and once this guy brought out a girl that I didn't know or something that he was dating and we were going to go in the boat and she was "scared to get in the boat," and I couldn't stand that kind of a role but I never looked at it in a feminist context. CG: Did you date much in high school? BL: Oh yes. CG: You liked being around boys. BL: Yes, and I very much bought into the double standard. I was a terrible prude. And I remember dating one guy that very obviously would date somebody else every other weekend for sex purposes and I felt "Oh, this is horrible," I never saw through that thing until I was in my late 20s, eatly 30s. I thought, well, that's okay, I'm a good woman and she's a bad woman. Really, and that is just sick. But I felt the whole purity, virginity barf, I bought into that stupid stuff and my Dad did a lot of heavy programming on that because I can remember him from the time I got my period sitting down almost like regularly, once a week, and now bang, bang, bang, don't wear tight sweaters because even though you may not mean anything by it, some men will read it this way and you're very outgoing, be careful some men may see that as a come on. All those messages were very clear to me. I have a close friend who lives here who said to me once four or five years ago, "You hide your sex", and I thought that was ridiculous because I felt like she flaunted hers. Well, she's right and I've realized because I have for the last twenty years frequently been in a situation where I'm the only women, particularly politics, where I'm the only women in a meeting or in a party conference or one of those kinds of things and I'm very careful, there's just no way anybody ever gets the idea that they're going to be able to do anything with me that relates to sex. And I remember in the Young Democrats, early on in the 1960s that I was elected to the board of the thing at some point in there and we were having meetings and it was a convention where we spent the night away. I was already married by then, hadn't been married a long time. And I'd begun to notice that at 10:00 at night that people were disappearing. All the women were gone, what women were there and I didn't even know. I was such a prude I did not know that people did that. There was bad people that did that somewhere off in a distance. So then I realized that that was just a fact of life and then I begun that it was something I did not do but I would not voice this approval because I didn't believe in that. I felt it but I didn't believe in _______ it. And then I began to see the whole double standard thing but it was a long time. And always I took responsibility for any messages that I gave out about that which is absurd I think now. But it's only been about two years that I've been able to consciously stop some of that. And if some guy wants to read it that way, that's his problem. But there's no reason that I need to be careful what I say or be careful I don't speak to somebody that doesn't realize I'm married, you know, I find myself immediately talking about Cal bringing him somehow into the conversation so they get the message. Well, that's ridiculous. I should be able to be myself and if they misread what signals I'm putting out that's their problem, not my problem. But it's hard to reprogram yourself. CG: Sure, after those weekly conferences. BL: They were heavy. And my Dad didn't marry until he was 30 and he was an extremely attractive guy. And he was into all sorts of things, but then he was very heavy into the whole moral business and then when he married Mother that stopped. I've often wondered how he managed that. He had a lot of pedestal about my Mom. But he was very down to earth about it. They didn't argue in front of us, that was another thing that was very different. But on occasion, and the occasions are very big in my mind because they were so rare, when Mother would intervene, that was it. Because she chose to do it very seldom and she was about the only one that could because he was a very strong person. CG: So he was in charge except for the very rare times when she had a strong opinion. BL: Generally in some form of advocacy for us that she did it. CG: You knew you were going to college? BL: Yes. CG: Did you always want to go? BL: Yes, I wanted to go to Scott Agnes because Mother went there and in my view it was a part of trying to be the woman Mother was. It was an abominable place in my youth. CG: Is that where you graduated? BL: No, I didn't graduate. I left after three years, got married. CG: What was your major? BL: English. CG: Were you preparing for something? BL: No, I was preparing to be a wife and mother. If you study hard and do well in your grades you can carry on a brilliant conversation with your husband, right? And you can help your children with their homework, right? Never seemed very meaningful to me. CG: Back in school. I had the same problem. BL: And even though learning had always been extremely important and we had discussed issues as a regular part of family goings on and my Dad had particularly done that with me, and after Mom died it was a need he had to talk things over with me when I was the oldest one. And I went through a lot of decisions with him about the kinds of things he was doing that were related to issues, that he always related to issues or principles or values in some way. So that that kind of thing I loved and I would be in classes and want to debate and discuss. There was nothing I liked better, but that wasn't what you got grades for-there so I was very frustrated with it and also He was not very healthy because it was about two weeks after he died and I had taken on for myself an awful lot of pressure about how well I should do. Almost the last thing he said to me before he died was "You've got everything your Mother had plus a brain, go down there and kill them." And my Mother was very, very bright. She had won the first Hopkins they'd ever offered there and she was Mortar Board and all that kind of business. But he went to the ninth grade and that was it. He was bored. CG: Did he place any emphasis on formal education? BL: Oh, my God, it was the most important thing in the world. Because he hadn't done it, it was one of those self made guide type of things. But he never quit learning. He read enormously and I can remember times when he was like a kid with a new idea and I remember particularly a/cousin of mine and her husband came through, her new husband and both of them had been fantastic students up in Iowa and he wanted to talk to them about poetry, he loved poetry. And he sat cross legged on the floor in the living room until they were almost exhausted, picking their brains. CG: About poetry? BL: Yes, poetry, English, ideas, anything. He just was veracious about that and he read an unbelievable amount. He had a wonderful library. So it's interesting to me. I don't value school much and part of it is that and part of it is working in it and seeing sometimes the kinds of things we hope will happen in education. The kids get turned on and we really kind of turn them off, which may have something to do with why I'm in this kind of work, I don't know. But it was important to him, even so. Degrees were more important to him because he didn't have one and probably his saying that to me was out of some of the competiveness I feel like he had with my Mom because she had completed school. And he waited to marry her until she finished. He was seven years older and was well into working and had been on his own since he was quite young and was taking care of the rest of the family. His Dad had died when was he was nineteen and he was kind of being the father of that whole bunch of Williams. So he was very responsible. He was 30 years old. CG: One thing I didn't ask, that I would be interested in knowing, did you have chores at home? BL: Yes. CG: Were your chores any different from your brother's? BL: Yes they were. I know that now but I did not see it in that way at the time. All of us had to make up our beds and all of all had to clean up our rooms, which I rarely did. It was a total war about me keeping my room clean. I remember being eleven, that's an age that is interesting and I've noticed it in my own kids, it's kind of like before the storm. And I was very responsible. I mopped the kitchen floor every time and I was into cooking and I cooked almost as well as Mama at that time because we had kind of done some learning together. She had not really done much of that before and she was a super cook, though. But I was making clothes and stuff by the time I was thirteen and the way my Dad would deal with that was he'd say, "You don't need any more clothes, but I'll buy you a sewing machine and all the material you want and you can make your own things,” I remember actually having flower arrangement as a chore, which certainly I know my brother never had to arrange the flowers. And our allowance was $2.50 and we had to do the chores or not get the allowance. There were times when we did the same things, like I had a calf, a Jersey calf, which I showed in the livestock show and if that was my calf and I was going to show that calf, I was by God going to do all the work for the calf, which meant clean the stall and bathing the calf and training her and all that kind of business. And so I did that regularly. And then my brother and I both bounced a milk truck, we had two trucks on the dairy and we both bounced a truck in the summer. He bounced one and I bounced the other. So there were a lot of things that were similar. And always my Dad would, he was into a lot of danger and risk taking, and we would go on wondefful family vacations which were very important in my family. And we would go up to Petit Jean and stuff like that. He would have us jumping cliffs and all these stupid, dangerous things. And when we were in Florida, there was a place, Ft. Walton, and there’s a base, Santa Rosa Bay there and they had dredged big channels for boats to come through and ships and I can remember him saying "Go down, it was a thirty foot channel, go down and bring up the bottom. Your brother can do it so you can do it." Now I never was conscious of feeling competitive with my brother. He was very conscious of feeling that with me, but I didn't ever realize that and I think that's probably because I was female and he was supposed to be better. And sometimes he wasn't better and so mostly I felt that that was bad for him. And when there was a storm we would have to go out and ride ten foot waves. My Mother would be ringing her hands on the shore and my Daddy would be pushing us onward. Don't let that wave conquer you, right? CG: Did you enjoy that? BL: Yes, I loved it. And sometimes we would come home, he would take home movies, and we would come home and I would see this dumb cliff I jumped and panicked out of my skull. But at the time I was not that afraid. We could have slipped and dropped 500 feet. I don't know how Mother stood it. She would be about three shades of green by the end of the family vacation. CG: When did you meet Cal? BL: When I was a little bitty kiddy. He lived across the street. He insists I had a crush on him at that time but I didn't. But he was 12 and I was 9, he was three years older and that's a big gap. I was very fond of his Mom and she is such a wonderful human being. And I would go over and show her, she had a place outside her bedroom window where, when I was going to have a dance recital, I would go in my costume to show her and I would take her horrible things I baked with Marie, when we lived on Armistead . And I can remember, Marie the cook would always leave a little round ball of pastry in the fridge, she used to make pies and leave that and I would get that and pat it all out flat and put sugar on it and cut shapes and bake them and take them to Jinksie. And I had dirty hands, and I can still some that looked like they were supposed have a little band of chocolate there or something, dirt off of my hands. CG: And she loved them. BL: Yes, and she was like that for the whole neighborhood. But I saw him one summer when I was sixteen at Fair Park swimming pool and he hollered at me and said "Aren't you Brownie?" and his family loves to tell the tale about when he was sixteen and he wouldn't date anybody younger, he would only date people his age or older and he hadn't dated for two or three weekends or something, and I don't know if his Grandaddy or his parents, one of them said something about "What about Brownie Williams, remember her?" and he went "Ooo, that child?" and Grandaddy loves to tell that. But see we didn't live there and I didn't see him and then my brother worked the whole thing out. My brother, whose approval probably meant more to me than anybody after my folks had died, knew Cal at Fayetteville when he was an undergraduate student and Cal was in law school, he came back from Princeton and was in law school there and he began to write me letters in which he said "Cal says," and it would be either arguing about religion or arguing about politics, "what do you think?" and then I would write back and we had this correspondence about ideas through my brother. And then he wanted me to came home and wExhadxHx have a blind with him. CG: Did you go together very long? BL: I guess it was about a year. At breaks in school and summers. CG: And then you finished your Junior year and you were married? BL: Yes. CG: What were your plans at that point? BL: To be a wife and mother. CG: That's all. BL: You better believe it. CG: Did you move back to Little Rock? BL: He doesn't remember this, but I remember having a big session where I said when we get married we never will live in Little Rock because I saw all the wrong things. And it took me a while living away and around to realize that those things happen everywhere and that there's always a pecking order wherever you live. CG: So you did live in other places? BL: Yes, we lived in nine different cities the first seven years we were married because he was in school and the army and different things. CG: Then you moved back to Little Rock. BL: Yes, but both the boys were born by then. CG: When was your involvement with the Civil Rights Movement? BL: We were in Germany when the '57 thing happened. He was stationed there and I had been very critically involved. Felt like I was more involved, there looking back I see i wasn't much involvement because from the beginning Virgil Blossom had been the school superintendant and used to come out and talk to my folks. I can still remember that session on the porch at the farm where he was talking about the reason we would start at high school here to integrate rather than in elementary. I think a lot of people felt that prejudice was in adults and not in children and that teenage kids were more likely to be different or stand up to their parents and that was pretty much, as I recall, his reasoning. I remember having a discussion about that. And my uncle, Henry Rath,* was running for the school board on a pro-integration ticket and we got peripherally involved in that and I am proud of him. And Wayne Upton, he and Wayne Upton, and that was during the time with the recall petition of school board members. But in the beginning we thought it would go well, and particularly when the two of them won that August and then we went off to Germany and were stunned when Faubus did his number because nobody really expected him to come down on that side. He had been a very moderate governor, been liberal for southern governors because in the Supreme Court decision, he hadn't ranted and raved. He'd said it's up to every individual school district. We were all nodding our heads that that's the best you could say which is absurd, but that's what we all thought at the time. So when we came back here, we came back from Germany in December of '57. Cal was enrolled at Northwesternto work on his doctorate and we were to live in Evanstown and we were flown back by the army and drove across a wild winter storm. I remember we were stopped on the New Jersey turnpike and Granger, my oldest, Bish we called him then, was just 11 months old when we came home from Germany. He was born over there and he was sick all the way. Then we found a place to live in Evanstown, about five minutes from the border of Chicago and then came home for Christmas and went back up there. Jeff was born up there and then we came home finally in '58, '59, some where in there. And Frances, my aunt had been very involved, as had my uncles, and they kept me up on what was happening and so I went down to what was then the Women's Emergency Committee. Irene Sanuels was director and I said "I volunteer for whatever there is to do." My first involvement was, at that time Sarah Murphy was running for the school board and I got involved in her campaign. From sending postcards to calling to doing the usual things you do in campaigns. And I don't know what year that was because almost simultaneously or right behind that, had to be behind that, in '62, I got involved in Senator Fulbright's campaign and that started a long line of campaigning. I learned how to do precinct work. We'd never dealt in precincts in campaigns in this state at that time. Traditionally what you did if you were running for office, you went out and rented a room at the Marion, got you some cards, and maybe a Watts phone if you were running over a number of counties or statewide, eventually got around to yard signs, called up all your friends and the organizing was generally along those kinds of relationships. Somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody or you might have a thing, all doctors for Fulbright, or something like that. And because of the school board races I had learned some skills from Irene and Sarah and working along with Pat House and some of those folks, just plunging in. And it was a part of the Council on Community Affairs Coalition which was sort of middle class younger black membership at that time. Challenging the old bootal system. The folks that had been more or less, crassly put, selling votes to white politicians which was an old system that had been around a long time and one of the only ways that blacks could function as political leaders in an acceptable manner. And then my Dad, see, had been very involved with McMath in the early McMath days because my uncle was Earl Riggs who married my mom's twin sister. She's still living in Hot Springs. And they had come back, Uncle Earl and Sid and a bunch of others had come back as veterans after WWII and had cleaned up Hot Springs and Uncle Earl was mayor and Sid was prosecuting attorney and done all that business. Then when they were looking at whether or not Sid would run for governor, they would meet at our house on the farms. It was not all the way into Little Rock and they would come over and my Dad would have some folks out from Little Rock and they would discuss the possibility of Sid's running, so I had always liked politics and myxmiH it had, in my mind, pretty much been around the issue of race. CG: Politics had been? BL: Yes, that was the crucial issue. My Dad had been very involved in that CG: You've been real active politically. Have you ever thought about running for a political office? BL: Yes, I've thought about it. Of course people have always said, "Well, she holds back because Cal runs" and some of that was true. I also felt like it had been a goal of his since he was a little kid and I didn't think of myself as a candidate, I thought of myself as a campaigner because that's the way I got into it and I had run almost all of his campaigns for him. And I got a lot of skills by doing that, mostly coming out of the work we did on school board issues where we were hauling folks for the polls and breaking things down by precincts and systematically doing some of the more sophisticated kinds of campaigning and I had used those skills with candidates in the Democratic party. And pretty much that had been my kind of stuff and I had done a lot of party work. I was into party reform and I didn't think of myself as a candidate until up in the 70s when my national involvement in Women's political causes and those kinds of things, when it demonstrate was kind of like it had been in black civil rights that you have to dKmHxixaXK if you were really anybody, it's like you have to run if you were really anybody. And I felt the pressure of that and might have gone that way in other situations. I think now when Cal is pretty much through with the candidacy thing and that's not a factor that I have some question about how effective you can be in that kind of a ring, particularly after the current election and the election before this national election. And candidates that I have worked for from Fulbright to McGovern to Cal to various other kind of folks who really advocate what I think is important to win and it's more difficult to win if you advocate and also tv has made it extraordinarily difficult because you need very different kinds of skills as a candidate from the kind of skills that I see as important in office whether it's an administrator, or governor kinds of things, or whether it's in a legislative body. Legislative bodies I like very much. I like to do that, I like to give and take of it. I've had some experience with that on the National Credentials Committee where it was very controversial but it was a give and take. I enjoy it, I think it's exciting, I think you can accomplish things. I like that better than the other, governor kinds of things, but the problem now to me is that I've got a lot less patience with the slowness of that or being able to vote on any issues that are really urgent or real important. Maybe that's part of the race thing because it was such a clear cut moral issue, you don't often have those in politics. If that's an issue, it's very clear where you come down. So much is watching, I had a lot of vicarious experience through Cal, watching some of the things he had to take a rap on, and take a risk on and the damned issue wasn't worth it. Whether they're going to have brucelossis shots county wide. But it's by God important to those people who live in that county, to the cattle industry and so you do some trading off and those kinds of things. I'm not sure that I would have the patience for that. I've always been an organizer and I feel very strongly about what has to happen to women and I'm not sure it would be something I would enjoy. Although I feel strongly that nothing's really going to change measurably until women are in those positions. I think it's very difficult for women like myself to win. Very controversial sort of person. CG: And strong. BL: Yes, and that's a threat. You'd have to have a really wham bang campaign, it would take a lot out of you. Different kind of style of campaing than really is acceptable here. And it's all so much mush, a lot of it now as you go on tv and you deal with the symbols and not the issues. You make people like you. Which I admit I have trouble with that. I understand that has to be done and I'm certainly not above doing it myself. I don't think it's anything wrong, but I think you akuse that to pursue issues and I think the thing that was so important to me about politics and I think maybe started out with Bill Fulbright, was that you used the office to teach people, to educate people about issues that you felt responsibility which he always did and that is gone. I don't see anybody doing that. If anybody tries that they ain't going to last very long. It may come back to that and we understand how they use tv differently and I don't know what the way is but I think tv is important in that people don't have to deal with institutions and structures as much and can make up their own minds when some guy's talking in their living room but the bad part of it is is the guy doesn't appeal to different constituencies, he tries to appeal to individuals and he tries to be all things to all people, which has always been a danger in politics. I don't like that. I would just really enjoy running for office and saying "Hey, here is what I believe and if you don't agree with that, why you should not vote for me." CG: I'd like to hear someone do it. It would be so refreshing. BL: It would be refreshing, however, I don't know whether that person would win or not. I always have a sneaky feeling maybe they might. I think people resent the lack of substance in discussion. I've been involved so long in politics and every year been in somebody's campaign and this year I wasn't at all and I did not miss it at all. Did not miss it. Their folks would have me working in Ray Thornton's campaign, did not work in Ray Thornton's campaign at all because he wouldn't go with us on ERA. And the funny thing is I thought I would miss it because I've always felt that that's really where the action is in terms of real change. And I can see all the pieces of the rest of it where you work outside the system to push the system and you work through the church and you work through this or that and I think all those things are very important and very valid. But every time I've done that and pulled back, I have found myself in the past being in the middle of politics because in the final analysis that's whereit's going to be. Well, I'm beginning to wonder now if it really is. Because nothing is really happening there and in the last elections, in which the Republicans and Democrats didn't sound very different and where we advocated Republican sorts of things with all the talk of cutting government spending, which I'm not opposed to that, I just think the priorities are wrong. We got plenty of money if we'd just put it on the right things. CG: You're political involvement, was it on the civil rights basis in the 60s? BL: Pretty much, that's the way I saw it. I wouldn't go with a guy that was. And everything was polarized then along that issue so that it must have seemed that way to all of us. Even tho the candidate sometimes I worked for would not come out straightaway and say it. I wouldn't work for somebody without having heard him on that issue. CG: What other/organizations were you involved in? The Women's Emergency Committee . . . BL: Well, the tail end of that, that was organized and had been going for a long time when I got back here and it disbanded shortly thereafter. I kept on until I was, Pat House and I one year and then by '68 I was the only white woman left over there and it was white women essentially that were the activists in there, not just Women's Emergency Committee but that whole thing. The workers and doers and activists were white women and black men and that's another whole interesting issue. Why it was that we were there and in looking back, I had to walk through all of that before I ever dealt with feminist and I think a lot of my involvement there was a vicarious kind of thing. Of course I had always been concerned about that issue. CG: How did Cal feel about your involvement in that area? BL: He was generally very proud that I did it and he was supportive of me. Sometimes he would worry about my activities being so radical it would hurt him politically. There were things he didn't want me to join as a front. Sometimes I honored that and sometimes I didn't, it just depended on how important it was to me. CG: So Cal was supportive of your . . . BL: Yes and he's been one of the main reasons that I could be a feminist and it's very interesting as I look back because I was very much socialized into the traditional mother, homemaker kind of thing. I always felt inept, not as a homemaker, I loved that part, I loved to cook and all that business and I loved mothering, much to the horror of my children on occasion. "Mother, go back to work, for God's sake, get out of my brain, you're screwing me up." But the lady bit and the feminine bit, I was big, I was direct and aggressive and those things were hard and I always felt very self conscious about that. It's like playing a new role, starring in the movie "Mrs. Calvin Ledbetter, Jr." And I can remember very consciously writing the name and it's like changing your whole identity and he never was into that. He never made those kind of requirements. Of course I wasn't very healthy, my Dad had died and I'd been miserable, great Scott, it was a terrible mold, the ideal girl and I douldn't stand it and I didn't want it and I didn't feel it and they couldn't hammer me into it and I was on probation the entire time I was there. So I wasn't overly healthy when I married and that's a miracle that the marriage lasted but at any rate, I would say things like "Can I go downtown?" and he would say "Well, I guess so, you can walk, can't you?" He never expected all those things. He never expected me to be submissive and I was trying and for the first year or two I felt really that he didn't love me because he didn't require those things. I Couldn't have put that lable on it but that's really what it was. CG: He didn't worry about you going places that most women didn't? BL: Well, he was not protective of me, he did not make requirements on me, he did not comment on the fact that the house was a pile of garf half the time. He would just push it aside and sit down. He would say "My God, I don't know how you do it. I couldn't stand to do this kind of house work." None of those kinds of demands are just a part of it. He doesn't want that responsibility. CG: gts his family that way? BL: No. Very traditional. His mother's very submissive. It's very interesting. He just never bought into that. He's a loner kind of person. CG: Is your relationship with your mother-in-law . . . BL: Oh, I love her. It's neat. Really Cal's family taught me more about tolerance that my own. My own believed in it in principle, but were not too sharp at practicing it. And neither was I. And here I was marrying into this family who disagreed with us across the board philosophically on things like the race issue and other liberal kinds of economic and social policies, and that sort of thing. And they were tolerant of me and it taught me a great deal. And here were people who didn't agree with me, people that didn't believe the list one through ten and you're good, and yet they were good people, I could see that. So they've been very important to me. CG: Did you have any guilt feelings leaving your family, leaving your children at the sitters while you went out and did community sort of activites? BL: See, we moved around so much the first seven years that there really wasn't time for me to get involved in a community to any great extent. I had done the whole gray lady stint here. Well, we waited five months before Cal went in the army in '54. We were waiting every day to hear from the army and that strung out for a long period of time. We lived over at the Capitol Apartments before that went on to the state at that time and I had whole days on my hands. There was no way to start a family because the rest was so uncertain. And so I did full time volunteer work 40, 50 hours a week at the Veteran's Hospital as a Gray Lady. I got terribly involved in that so I had some outlet for those interests but I never thought of them in terms of paid jobs. Then when we came back here I had a real fear that I would get bored because moving aroung had been exciting. But I never have been. And by that time I had mellowed to the extent that I could see that Little Rock was about like every other place in terms of people's attitudes. And I value the relationships I had here and I felt that I could be more effective at home if I really wanted things to change than I could be any where else because of those relationships, my family, my mother's family had lived in south Arkansas for generations and those kinds of things. I felt I knew the culture and I knew what was important to people and that those are things you can't learn coming in from outside. Of course that was in the 60s and my daughter was born in '62 here, so when I first got deeply involved she was three months old, and it was in the Fulbright campaign. I did a lot of it out of the house and Betty Fulbright used to kid me because she would get tickled and I'd come down to headquarters and she'd say "What about snow?" She had a granddaughter exactly the same age and I would say "Well, I left her a screaming bowl of jelly on the front lawn. Mama!" and I did have some guilt and I was always into the whole super mom bit for years, where I had this vision that people would say "She works so much in the community, but her home is wonderful and her children are so well behaved," and all that. I bought into that. That was the next stage after homemaker period. CG: Have you and Cal consciously raised your children any differently than you'd been raised? BL: Yes, well, I don't know how different it is because those values were important in my family and because by the time we moved to the farm, things were less structured and so that essentially I see myself as doing pretty much the same things. We had that whole business of "You've got to be responsible for yourself," which was probably the heaviest thing in my family. And it's that way with our kids. Now, of course our kids came through the hard times in the desegregation process here which we're certainly not through yet. But the hard times we are, the physically dangerous times we're through. And that was hard and to raise your kids so that they believed some things that are different from their peers or different from the culture at large or what it seems to be, it's kind of hard to pin it down, is in some ways doing them a disservice in terms of their acceptance by their own peers and my kids have had those kinds of troubles. And I had them. Some of my family has always said to me that it was easier for me to have values different from my peers because that I had that kind of strength or enjoyed that kind of thing and that it was harder on my sisters to refuse to do the social stuff. And my sisters went into cotillian and did some of those things that were horrifying to me and I was very judgmental about that. I have kind of sought out those kinds of things. I'm somewhat judgemental there. And so I had to think through that with my own kids and particularly my oldest who was not overly outgoing, very bright and very perceptive and went through the hardest part of the time, he's now 22. And really there were some hard times, but looking back, keeping them in school, going through that, trying to support what we thought was important and yet they're the ones that had to take the flap in the school, not me. I wasn't there in physical danger. CG: Did your children join cotillion BL: My boys wouldn't do it, and I thought it was horrible. And I always claimed that I was given the option because it was important to me that my mother had intervened and let me go into CAT because I begun to see that if I had not had that thing to resolve myself at the age of fourteen, that I would have behaved very differently when I got up to the Jr. League thing. That was an important thing to me. We came back here and I was still into being Mrs. Cal Ledbetter, Jr. and went in the Jr. League but I really was more to the point that I thought you could join and change things. I was into coming back into my culture and being with my relationships and Cal would be out there at UALR and would have this intellectual stimulus. And then I got in the Jr. League and I'd never been in a sororiety in college. One of the reasons I went to Agnes Scott was because they did not have sororities. That and my mother went there, I believe those were the only two reasons. I thought it was academically good and it was, I just couldn't cope with it because of all the social stuff, but at any rate, I learned probably more about how people change and why and if in that whole Jr. League thing because I was a provisional and there were 16 or 18 of us and one of the provisional lectures was from Moot Eubanks or Louis McLean, one or the other of them did it every time, and we they said we only take girls of Christian, I don't know what word they used, lineage or some damn thing and it was appalling to me. I could not believe that that was real. CG: This was as a provisional? BL: Yes, so I commenced to talk to some other folks about that, first the provisional and then some members and you know we worked six years trying to change that and what made it such an important learning experience for me was that there were like 140 members in those days, I don't know how many there are now and it was kind of a self contained thing and it was a very disciplined thing because the carrots were there. It was a volunteer experience that was important because if you didn't do your volunteer job and you didn't do it well, then you were out and you lost your social prestige and that was a heavy carrot. So I begun to see all that stuff and how the power worked and at the same time it was not supposed to be a value that said you can't exclude Jews. In Little Rock we didn't do that, even in our sororities in high school, fraternaties we had had Jews which is unusual and so we didn't have any Jewish prejudice here. That's a joke. We did and I begun to see that whole business of people saying one thing like we are not anti-Semitic in the Jr. League and really believe that. And we had started the panel by that time which was very important. We started that in '63 and so we did everything we could to change it structually and from within we had petitions, we tried to have open discussions, we had the panel program. Everybody cried when Barbara Phillips told about what it felt like to be excluded. And we went through all of that and I did my job and won a little diamond pin for selling the most tickets and I took my ______ and I did my volunteer work and I ______ to things and then we decided to propose Sally Phillips who was my Dad's business partner's daughter, so I had some investment in that. And she had grown up about as acceptable as anybody could. Only thing wrong was that she was a Jew and I begun to see this in many other Jewish families. And I had some close friends in that community and they would level with me and would not level with folks who didn't agree with them. That became increasingly a problem so I thought, I'd had one fracas with the church Women United where they asked the Jews to leave. Just unbelievable. You don't believe in Christ, so we'd like to have your dues, but this is a Christian organization. It was just absolutely done in the most appalling manner. So I was feeling very strongly about that then and that tied into me very much in the same way that racism had. And so we worked long and slow and through the system and making things clear and being open with our communication and analyzing it very thoroughly, each step that we took and ended up instituting the straw vote, that's when that came about, our bunch did that, there must have been 15 or 16 of us that worked hard and planned thoroughly to bring that about and I guess it took me three, four years to see that that was not going to work, but that it was important to go through those steps so people would have to admit and deal with what it was that really was blocking them and that's one of the things that's legal about prejudice, whoever it's against. So there were eleven of us who committed to going all the way through with that thing and as you know you can propose somebody three times and Sally was proposed and turned down the second time. First thing we did was propose Trudy Levy and they refused to accept her too. And I remember being in the secret admissions committee. People kept saying well you don't understand because you were never in a sororiety. If you',d been in a sororiety, it wouldn't hit you so hard, but Louise McLean said things like "Well, now their children will be 75% Jewish" and I could not believe my ears and I had committed going into that thing, to be positive, trust people, do not come down, do not be judgmental thing and I had done pretty well until that happened and I remember saying out in the meeting, "Well, Hitler had it down to l/16th." But I begun to see that unless you blew it, it never really changed. You have to know what you're doing, you have to plan it. Then we proposed Sally a second time, we were trying to make them deal with the real reason and they put things down like Tad was loud and so forth and so on. So when she was turned down the second time, I resigned and we had enough good folks on the board, which I was on the board, that my letter was read aloud to the board and I worked a long time on that letter about why it was important to resign and not be a part of a group that excluded someone on the basis of Christianity when in my understanding, in my Christian beliefs, you couldn't exclude people in the name of Christ, that's not what it was about and so that was very important to me. So we got that real loud and then it all hit the fan. So then the remaining ten proposed Sally a third time and then when she was turned down a third time a clearly on the basis of being Jewish, it forced them to deal with it, and they resigned. CG: So eleven of you altogether? BL: Yes. CG: And it became a very current affair in all of Little Rock, didn't it? BL: Yes, and it had some fall out. See half way through that thing I begun to question the validity, the whole concept of what the Jr. League m£ and everything else built on the kind of exclusivism. I could see that it was effective but I kept asking myself what are you doing. Is it worth this kind of stress and long hours and time and then I decided that it was because it was the top of the pecking order in the community for women and it was an important part of the establishment. And that if we could break through there that perhaps there would be some effect on the whole pecking order and there was a lot of fall out. Man, I'm telling you, Rotary took in Ozell Sutton and the Little Rock Club took in some Jews and things begun to happen because they were afraid "Oh my God, they'll hit here next, there's a whole conspiracy going on!" And there were letters in the paper that said I was a Judas goat and stuff like that. CG: Did those things bother you? BL: No, I got tickled by them because they were no real threat to me. If I had been through what some people had been through during the burning, bombing '57,'58 things I probably would have been a lot more afraid. I didn't have to go through that. CG: There was no physical threat? BL: No. CG: But was there not social ostracism? BL: Yes, but I feel like some of those people respect me because I stuck to my guns, even though they don't agree with me. And I still value a lot of relationships with people I have there. And I've had to learn and it's an important thing and it's always been a important principle but I had to learn to practice*it. That they're super folks in up as well as down and then you can get through all the patronizing stuff about people who are disadvantaged or somehow worth more of your time or even ______ for God's sake worth more than more as human beings because that is not true. And so I was walking through some of that and it's important to me. I have always craved diversity and I love to work with somebody who disagrees with me on something else. I did that in politics. One of the things that attracted me to politics is working with somebody on this campaign where we agree when we had been at complete odds, say, on desegregation or something. But those kind of bridges are very important. I really like that. CG: Your activities with the Civil Rights Movement were in the 60s. Through what, '68? BL: Yes. CG: And I'm sure continuing, but I mean as a formal thing, you more or less moved into the women's movement. Was that just a natural progression do you think for women in Little Rock? Or for your as an individual? BL: Well, it was for me and it was for many women that I know of that I talked to across the south. And there is a wonderful book which you may have read called "Southern Lady From Pedestal to Politics" where she talks about that pecking order and how you have to undo one step at a time and we started at the bottom. And it was really, looking back, as if I couldn't deal with myself until I had dealt with that race stuff. I mean if the pecking order went white master, woman, children, slave, then that's her contention and it fit the pattern of what I had done. For instance another book that was very important to me was "Fillers of the Dream" which Sarah Murphy and I . . . it's a wonderful book by Lillian Smith. Sarah Murphy and I got a hold of that thing when she started the panel back in '63 and we were looking at stuff to train ourselves for doing that. And that book I just went bananas over, ended up buying eleven and we had everybody reading it and it was superb, it deals with all the myths in the south and how they get kind of _______in and how that affects and what we do as a result. Well, in '75 when I started this particular model, it's varied some since then, that we work under here now at the panel where we have all professional staff, I was hiring folks on the basis of their sensitivity to racial prejudice or any kind and their experience inyinter-racial setting. I felt like the group skills and some of the other kinds of things we could teach a lot easier than we could teach that. So I didn't have any kind of degree requirements or anything. They hadn't walked through this whole panel thing. So what could I give them? So I got out that old "Fillers of the Dream" and I thought well I better read myself, this was 1974, '75. I could not believe all the feminist stuff that was in there. I had never seen it. Well, they had the whole pedestal and the whole ... I understood that and I reacted against that symbol of what a lady was supposed to be as I always have, but I'd never saw it in the context of women's rights. CG: While we're talking about ladies. What is your definition of a Southern lady? BL: It's somebody that fits the role that society expects. She has to be very much into meeting others people's needs, she should be somewhat elegant, she should understand about the propriety of things, she should never be loud, it's mostly in terms of don'ts. Agnes Scott had it written out in her damn what do you call those books you get? Well, I'd always block that out. That catalog. Anyway they had the ideal Agnes Scott girl, had this list and it was all those things plus a brain and the brain did look somehow in conflict. Good student, or something, I've forgotten. But demure, indirect, moral, supposed to provide the morals for everybody because we're not in the real world, right? Men are in the real world and they have to deal with it. Like in that Southern Lady book she talks about she has a letter from a minister who hadn't married and he said "I've got to find a wife to keep me moral," so that's our role, right? Actually I ended up in a very traditional kind of place if you think about it. Because women are supposed to tend to relationships and here I am in human relations and that's essentially what we're looking at. And that was okay, that was a place I could kind of squirt into and still be acceptable because I like to be accepted. CG: Well, we all do. BL: Sure, but it's more important to me than it may be to other activists, I don't know. CG: Do you feel activism is the major way that change can be accomplished in human relations? For instance like the women's caucus or now, there are some groups more activists than others. BL: Oh, you mean through those groups? CG: Yes. BL: No, I don't think that's the only way- at all. In fact, I got very involved in the caucus when we began in '73 the national influx of caucus to spread out and the membership organization that looked at training women in politics and talking them into running and expousing certain issues that were women's issues. And that was a very important part of my learning and my own involvement and then in '75 I dropped out essentially and it was a very difficult thing for me to do because I would have run for office in the national group but I couldn't see any value to it except some lovely recognition which I adore. But I can only live with that if I'm doing something real withal and I didn't see that you could do anything real and it pretty much evolved in my mind aroung the fact that the women would not commit to any more than $1.00 dues a year and I felt there was no real commit ment there and I began to look at more traditional organizations that had also had those same dues wars across the women's groups in the country.It was very interesting from the B&BW to the League Women Voters to the newer groups like NOW and the Caucus to very traditional kinds of aid, _____ those kinds of folks. And all of them were having dues wars and it all had to do with raising the dues in order to deal with the ERA effectively and some portion of the dues generally was committed to ERA. In the Caucus it wasn't. That was clearly our priority. So I begun to see that the traditional organizations made it with that dues raise and the new ones didn't and probably in my mind the reason was that it was some kind of a primary unit for folks by that I mean important to them socially, not just social country clubs, it met other kinds of needs and it was something they got some strength from, so it seemed to me a more important place to work and I had a real feeling that I should stop playing around with the glory unless I could do something real and try to build some strength at home for ERA and that's been a rough road. And I had already joined the BBW before that time and so I thought well we should talk with women and see where their concerns are because we knew the BBWs were very terrified of the issue even though it had supported since 1937, so I did that instead. Now when you say to me is that the only way, activism? CG: No, I didn't say only way, I said do you feel that is the most successful way. BL: It is but I mean as an individual act, it's not necessarily as an activist group. I mean I certainly need the support of groups like the caucus and other feminist groups and I'm on the national advisory committee for the caucus and stuff like that. I'd die if those ties were cut but I don't see that as a place to work as effectively because I don't see that there are women in enough numbers ready to do the kind. . . I was political action chair for the caucus and I never could get really structured stuff going in the states because it was too much of a threat to their lifestyle. It was too much of a risk and we were not asking huge things, we were simply asking for simple organizations and commitment of resources and money and it was too much of a threat to the women themselves and too great numbers for that to be worth trying to pursue it. We were closet feminists, we weren't ready. CG: Your position now at the Panel of American Women is . . . BL: I direct the staff. We have three grants and we're shooting for our fourth. Essentially our objectives are to decrease prejudice of any sort, racial religious income, sex, whatever, anything that limits people from reaching their full potential. With maybe the flip side, positive side of that open to stimulate autonomy in folks. What's that old adage about . . . it's a Churchill quote, but he was quoting somebody else about democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. Well, I really believe that and I think that the only solution is not HHfcxiaf a benign dictator or all those other trite things people say but when folks have enough autonomy to control their own lives and be responsible and give input into governments on some sort of equal basis. When there's enough trust and enough confidence in people's individualist to really fulfill their own potential that we ha-de enough skills as human beings to do that right and that as long as we are short on confidence or self esteem that there's not much of a chance for our skills. And there's always a place for tyranny and there's always a place to exploit the fears that we have about who we are and that's what happened with the women's movement and that's what's happened with ERA. Because even through ERA's not a threat to home and family and God and all those silly things people are afraid that there is some threat to that. And ERA's become a symbol for that and so right wing and exploit those fears. And it's just like we were hunting commies in the 50's and now we're hunting homosexuals and how in the world that relates to ERA, there's absolutely no logic to it but you can sell that if people are afraid. Maybe it's that I was born in '32 with FDR you know, he was a hero of mine, he said "You have nothing to fear but fear itself," God was he ever right! Have a little fear of man and he can screw you around any number of ways. The whole trip into the development! of autonomy is not to be afraid. CG: But all of us have our hidden fears, don't we? BL: Hell, yes. And it's a question of always asking yourself if you're really right or if you're just being dominant or if you're just being stubborn, power hungry, recognition seeking, see that's a big thing of my Dad's, whenever I would get recognition, he'd say "Glory hog, why don't you do well in this subject and that subject?" and it was a badgering kind of thing that he did to me but it was also important. I think it was harder on the others, probably. CG: I haven't asked you about your church affiliations and your involvement in church activites. You have been active in your church, have you not? What church are you a member of? BL: I'm an elder at St. Andrew's Presbyterian. I'm on the outs right now. I'm not overly happy about some things that are going on there. Being a Presbyterian is probably more of a primary unit to me than anything else and it's always been that way in my family. I rebelled against everything else but that growing up, which is funny to me, looking back. I never rebelled against the church because it was presented to me very differently and because my earliest recollections, for instance on the race thing, or sitting in Sunday School at 2 or 3 years of age and looking at the picture of Jesus with all the little children, all that business. And those ideals were always held up to the church even though it never lived up to the ideals. And there were times when I was hostile about that but that's a familiar place, it's a family place. In fact I have more emotion about things that go wrong at my church than I do in anything else so I know it's more important to me. But we had a minister that was very significant in my life named Allen Anderson in the 50s and I remember we came back, it was the 60s I guess that Allen was here, we came back from Chicago and I did my little arrogant number, I went out and I said, which I'd said to every other minister when I was home, "Now I don't believe all this barf, but it's familiar and I like to be here, I like to sing the hymns, I like the people, I like to be in church, I like the prayers, but I don't believe all this barf" and mostly they would pat me on the knee and say "That's all right dear, Jesus loves you," or some obnoxious, patronizing thing and Allen just roared with laughter, just treated me like the arrogant person that I was and said "What is all this barf you think you're supposed to believe?" and I began to list all these very fundamentalist kinds of things and he said "Whoever told you you were supposed to believe that? Where are you coming from?" and it really made me think and he got me into which is as much a part of my activitism as anything, he got me into looking at some of the Christian Existentialists and looking at some contemporary theology and that was very important to me and I got very involved. Matter of fact, I swear I went back and did a resume a couple of years ago and the largest percentage of my training in terms of group work and in terms of sensivity that stuff and all of those kinds of things/have been helpful to me in this job have Presbyterian through ghxixiian church. They sent me off to a couple of days sensivity thing. We did a 12 hour communication workshop in the 60s in the Presbyterian church that was superb, one of the best workshops I've ever seen. I went through that. I ended up training for that and working in that. People like Bill Fogleman and Allen, Chal Henderson and a number of those guys, ____________, who were very strong in the mid 60s here in the Presbyterian church and in the Presbytery. Since we left the church I grew up in I related, except when Allen was here, more to the church at the Presbytery or the regional level than I have the local level which I've missed since Allen's been gone but there are some people that are very dear to me there at the church. I'm going out and teaching adult Sunday School right now but I don't stay for church. I race home and listen to Jim argue on the tube. CG: You would be an interesting Sunday School teacher. (laughs) What would you change about your life if you could do anything over? Is there anything you would change? BL: Oh Lord, I would realize what being a woman is thirty years earlier and I would have other kinds of goals for my life. I hope and think and am sure that I would still choose the marriage and the family that I have. I don't see that as a conflict and I resent the fact that people that's a conflict. It's not a conflict for a man, I hope, and it shouldn't be a conflict for a woman. But people should have the sort of unfettered option to choose that and I think if that happens we will have much better kids and we'll have much better parents. I happen to love being a parent but everybody doesn't and everybody shouldn't have to be. I probably would have gone into law, something like that. CG: What if a young person came up and ask you for advice about what goals they should set for their life, what would you tell them? BL: I'd just say "You ought to set your own goals, whatever they are and you ought to really look at all the options that you've got. And you ought to take all the time you need to make that decision." I think one of the worst things we do to kids now is apply all this kind of pressure and they feel like and they have to go through school/to choose their major freshman, sophomore year, and be through in four years, and to be ready for life. And I know now that you don't ever get ready. You're always learning, I hope, and you're always looking at other options. Of course if you have enough economic freedom to do that, and I have had and I've been lucky there. Everybody doesn't. It would be nice if we did. CG: One last question. What has been your proudest accomplishment? Is there any one thing that stands out? BL: I don't know. A lot of things. I was pretty proud of that Junior League, actually because it worked. I'm proud of what the panel has become. There have been a lot of people involved in that and I'm hoping to build it into an even broader agency. That's given me a lot of chance to work and develop volunteer skills into professional skills. I think my activity in the caucus and gettin elected by women to leadership is something that's made me very proud because I had to learn to form close relationships with women and I didn't do that until I was in my thirties. Obviously looking back, it's I didn't like what you were supposed to be and so I didn't like women who were what they were supposed to be. It's more complicated than that, I'm sure, but one of the neatest things that's come out of the women's movement is having close women friends which I didn't have with very rare exceptions. And that's been important, sharing that kind of experience. CG: Is there anything you'd like to add? I'm sure we haven't even begun to touch . . . BL: Oh, I know what one of my proudest accomplisments is, is this staff and the kind of project that we've put together as a group. I mentioned earlier that in '75 we started a whole new thing. It was a slower transition than that because we had been a volunteer group and then Sarah Murphy got us the first funding we ever had to speak of in '71 and that gave me a chance to work and I'm very grateful to her for that. And it was still training grounds for volunteers and some were part time and slower over time a lot of things happened. One is 75% of the women were working, two is women like me and like Sarah and like some of us who are older who were in involved in it at the front, people like us growing up in more recent times were doing other things. They saw more options than we saw. So there were a lot of reasons, but whatever volunteerism became a different thing in my head. I'm not against volunteerism but I see that it has exploited women in lots of ways. And I also feel like people have a right if they only want to volunteer like 10% of their time, that's their business and you can't put together a really professional staff in that way. You can't do this whole guilt trip on them and say by God we need you here because. And I wasn't willing to do that any more. Beth Rule had down it for a while and she wasn't willing to do it any more. So when we made the break to do this it was interesting to see to try and experiment if we could have people as diverse as those who werein schools on staff coming from all different kinds of backgrounds. Different economic backgrounds, different regional areas, different races, different religions, totally different life experiences. And if we could make it then what we were doing was real. If we couldn't we'd have been going in schools and telling the kids that diversity was a neat thing. And it's been a struggle but I feel like we're really doing that and we accept each other and we've built a certain amount of trust. There's nine of us now. CG: I'd say that was quite an accomplishment. BL:Well, that's my favorite one I think. CG: Very good, Brownie, thanks for your time.