- Collection:
- Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement
- Title:
- Oral history interview with Willie Mae Lee Crews, June 16, 2005
- Creator:
- Crews, Willie Mae Lee
- Contributor to Resource:
- Hill, Kimberly (Kimberly DeJoie)
Southern Oral History Program - Date of Original:
- 2005-06-16
- Subject:
- Teachers--Alabama--Birmingham
School integration--Alabama--Birmingham
Schools--Alabama--History--20th century
African American teachers--Alabama--Birmingham
African Americans--Education--Alabama--Birmingham
High schools--Alabama--Birmingham--Faculty
African Americans--Education--Social aspects--Alabama--Birmingham
Alabama--Race relations - People:
- Crews, Willie Mae Lee
- Location:
- United States, Alabama, Jefferson County, Birmingham, 33.52066, -86.80249
- Medium:
- transcripts
sound recordings
oral histories (literary works) - Type:
- Text
Sound - Format:
- text/html
text/xml
audio/mpeg - Description:
- Willie Mae Lee Crews was born into a sharecropping family in Marion, Alabama, during the 1930s. She describes her childhood as impoverished, but stresses that she was instilled with a strong work ethic by her close-knit family. During the 1950s, Crews attended Dillard University in New Orleans on scholarship and then continued her education at the graduate level at Fisk University in Nashville. As a graduate student in sociology, Crews was sent to Montgomery, Alabama, to interview participants in the bus boycott. By the early 1960s, Crews had become a teacher. She describes her work at Hayes High School, an African American school in Birmingham, during the 1960s and 1970s. Crews first started teaching at Hayes in 1963; she describes it as an excellent segregated school with strong leadership and high standards for its students. Crews was still teaching at Hayes in 1970-1971 when Birmingham schools were desegregated. Here, she focuses more on efforts to integrate faculty rather than on efforts to integrate students. She describes how the school district transferred teachers in a way that favored white teachers and schools to the detriment of students at schools like Hayes. Crews also discusses the role of segregated housing in creating what she calls a "projects mentality." Social trends such as this, along with ineffective policies and the influx of poorly trained teachers, were to blame for the deterioration of integrated schools. In particular, she laments the disappearance of teaching philosophies that had stressed teaching students integrity, social responsibility, and self-confidence that had characterized Hayes High School prior to desegregation.
The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata. - Metadata URL:
- http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/U-0020/menu.html
- Language:
- eng
- Extent:
- Title from menu page (viewed on Oct. 24, 2008).
Interview participants: Willie Mae Lee Crews, interviewee; Kimberly Hill, interviewer.
Duration: 02:21:29.
This electronic edition is part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.
Text encoded by Mike Millner. Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers. - Contributing Institution:
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project)
- Rights:
-
