{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/pr7mp4xs3g/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Oral History Interview with Dr. W. Marvin Dulaney"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/212/original/LOHI_aviarybanner2.jpg?1741032082","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2025-05-30"]}},{"label":{"en":["Interviewer"]},"value":{"en":["Childress, DaNia, 1991-"]}},{"label":{"en":["Interviewee"]},"value":{"en":["Dulaney, W. Marvin, 1950-"]}},{"label":{"en":["LCDL Collection"]},"value":{"en":["Director's Cut Oral History Project"]}},{"label":{"en":["Contributing Institution"]},"value":{"en":["Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eDr. William Marvin Dulaney was born in 1950 in Troy, Alabama. 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Marvin Dulaney Transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nCan you please state your full name, date of birth, and your place of birth?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8.0,15.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. My full name is William Marvin Dulaney. I was born in Troy, Alabama on July 21st, 1950.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=15.0,27.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then how familiar were you with Charleston before you arrived?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=27.0,30.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, before I came to be the director of the Avery Center, I was very aware of Charleston. Again, I teach African American history, and I'd read about the Denmark Vesey conspiracy; that Charleston was sort of this entry point for a lot of Africans in the international, or the Atlantic, slave trade; I knew about Septima Clark and her work - she used to be on the radio, by the way - so I knew a lot about Charleston before I came.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=30.0,71.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then just as a question in talking to you previously, you were born in Alabama, you worked in Texas beforehand, you had some experience in Ohio growing up. What were some of the similarities between Charleston and other places that you've been in the South or how different were there? Can you say the South is all the same, or how different is the South?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=71.0,88.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nCharleston was very different for me than any other place that I had lived. Again, I lived primarily in Ohio. Cold. Some history, but nothing like Charleston. And then of course, Dallas; Dallas has never been into preservation. Neighborhoods have changed significantly in Dallas. Of course, I'm obviously seeing some of the same thing here. But when I first came here, Charleston was still almost like an old southern city, large African American population. All the history was still around. There was the names of some of the Black legislators who had served during reconstruction in the state legislature and in Congress were still prominent here. We actually ran into some of the people who were descendants of those Black legislators who had been in Charleston. And during reconstruction. There were also other people who indeed had had family members who had lived here, or had been here before the Civil War and had been free African Americans. And so Charleston was like no other city that I'd been in, and no other place was Charleston. And again, that was part of what attracted me. As I said, I taught about Charleston when I was teaching in Texas as well as when I was teaching in at Ohio State. And it was like I get the opportunity to come to the place where it all began. And so I was excited to be moving to Charleston to live in this real quaint city that still looked almost like it looked in the 19th century.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=88.0,199.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what was your professional background before you came to the Avery Research Center?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=199.0,203.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nSure. I was an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington. I had taught at three places. I mentioned Ohio State. I taught at Ohio State as a graduate student. I had taught at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and then I had started, or I was actually what, six, seven years into a tenure track position at the University of Texas at Arlington. However, I had worked at a museum as a volunteer - the African American, well, actually at the time that I started, it was called the “Museum of African American Life and Culture”. It was on the campus of Bishop College, which was an HBCU in the southern part of Dallas. And so I went there because while I was teaching at the University of Texas in Arlington, the students that I was teaching was primarily white. And again, there's nothing wrong with that, but my mission, you know, was to teach African American history to African American people and to the African American community.\n\nSo that's why I decided to branch out and volunteer at the museum. And I had no idea that by volunteering at the museum, I would get so involved in what we call public history. I went there, the first thing I told the director was that all I want to do is help you with your clipping file. For the first two books that I wrote, I used clipping files. One was from Tuskegee University, the other was from the Schaumburg Collection in New York, and then the third one was from Hampton Institute. And so they were very helpful in terms of my being able to isolate and find a documentation on African Americans. And at the time, I was doing civil rights and African American police officers, and so in fact, that's what brought me to Charleston the first time too. But anyway, that was sort of my professional background. Again, I was teaching three days a week at the University of Texas at Arlington as an associate professor, and then I was volunteering at the African American Museum in Dallas on Tuesdays and Thursdays.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=203.0,353.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then you mentioned public history programs and teaching that teaching. What is some of the difference between teaching in the classroom and then teaching public history out in the community?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=353.0,361.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nSure. I had actually say there's a big difference teaching at a university. You have students who range maybe from 18 to 25 and possibly even older. They're there to get a grade, they're there to get ahead, and so you're sort of focused on doing nothing but the subject matter that you're supposed to teach, and getting them through the class and figuring out grades and doing all the paperwork that goes along with trying to get students through your course. In public history, particularly in terms of working at a museum, you're dealing with a different clientele. You're actually dealing, for the most part with the community. People are coming - all kinds of people come - to museums, so you get an opportunity to really teach the grassroots, to teach the public. One of the things that I found - again, I've been in this field since I guess, ‘69, ‘70 - what I found happening, specifically in the 1980s when I was teaching full time, was that some of the interpretations, some of the new information about African American history had not filtered down into the public, had not filtered down into, specifically, the public schools. And so as I said, my mission became to make that happen, to reach the public with all this new information, these new interpretations of, let's say, slavery and Reconstruction.\n\nWe had sort of decided to discuss and present in this field. And of course, Black history had not filtered down enough, but specifically to the public and of course, most importantly, to high schools.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=361.0,485.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nThen how did you hear about the Avery Research Center? And, did you have any prior knowledge of the Avery before you applied?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=485.0,490.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nYes, I did. I came here, which will answer one of the questions. I came to Charleston the first time in 1990, and I came here because I had heard - I was working on the book on the police, on black police officers, and somehow or another, I can't remember the source, I heard - that Charleston had had a Black police lieutenant during Reconstruction. And so I came here looking to find that out. Of course, I hit the public library downtown and didn't find what I was looking for. I came over here - I knew about Avery because of Lee Drago's book. -I had seen, or in fact, I think I had met Lee Drago at a conference - and so I knew about his book on the Avery Normal Institute, and then of course, I found out that the Avery Normal Institute had actually become the Avery Research Center.\n\nSo I came to Charleston, and I'll just tell you, I was just sort of surprised. As I came down 26 - I think I had been in Virginia at Hampton and doing research, I was on a research trip - I used to do the research trips quite a bit when I was teaching in the process of what they call earning tenure and being promoted to an associate professor – so I said, “I'm going to go to Charleston and see if I can find this Black police lieutenant there in terms of the records”. And I came to Avery. Then in 1990, for the first time, I think it was March of 1990, I came over and I always tell this story, I came over here at eight o'clock because I used to be conscientious, hard worker, I wanted to get started early in the morning. So I come over here at eight o'clock in the morning.\n\nI couldn't get in. I couldn't figure out, well, what time does this place open? I came to that front door down there. It said nothing about when it opened, and I literally figured out, I went around to the side door and I saw a sheet of paper stuck to the door that said that it didn't open until 1:30, and so I left. I think I went to the library. I went to the Charleston Library Society, and I went to the, what is that, the Fireproof building, the Charleston Historical Society to do some research there. And then I came back at about 1:30; Donald – what's Donald’s last name?\n\nSpeaker 2: \n\n[inaudible]\n\nSpeaker 3: Yeah, he was the archivist at that time. They said, “Well, he's not here.” So I waited around. He didn't show up until about three o'clock or so, and then they closed at five. And so I was just sort of disappointed that I had not really got a chance to look at anything. I actually came back the next day, and then I got a chance to sit down with Donald, and he told me about what they had here in the archives. And so that was my first time coming to Charleston as well as my first time coming to the Avery Center.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=490.0,690.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nIt's an off script question: talking about during your research trips, how has your research methods changed from 1990 to present? Because you're also working on a book, you said.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=690.0,698.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay, sure. I don't have to travel as much. Then, at that time, I literally had to go to the places looking for the documents, looking for the research that I needed. Now, of course, I can use the computer. I can literally stay home and pretty much find quite a bit of information that I'm looking for. For example, I just wrote an essay on, actually, it was two chapters for a book that's going to be published on social control of African Americans during the Antebellum period and reconstruction. So I wrote the chapters on the period on slavery, and then of course on Reconstruction, I was able to, and this will tell you how crazy I got when I retired: when I retired, I gave away all my books. I said, I'm done. So I gave about 1100 books to Paul Quinn College, which is now the college - the HBCU in Dallas - that replaced Bishop.\n\nAnyway, I gave them all my books, saying “I'm done”. Well, when I started doing some of these consulting, I found out I'd still needed some of those books. I had to go back and buy them. So when I wrote this piece on, well, these two chapters on slavery and Reconstruction, I was able to find most of the things I needed online. They publish eBooks, and so some of the old classics like say Eric Fodder’s Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, I was able to find DuBois's article, of course, it’s from the American Historical Review from 1910. I can literally find a lot of the stuff online without actually having to have the book or the journal in my house. However, I did go to the library three times because I had to find some things that were not necessarily online, specifically the books. They're still in the library, but everything has been so digitized that I don't have to make these major trips like I used to when I was actively teaching and doing research as a full-time professor.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=698.0,842.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what was the political climate in the city of Charleston and major events that occurred in the city during your tenure?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=842.0,849.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nLet's see. Well, Joe Riley was the mayor, and things were sort of slow politically, which, and I'm going to compare it to Dallas. While I was in Dallas, there was this major, let's say, change taking place where African Americans were fighting for power fighting to get on the city council. Dallas had this antiquated at-large election system where they didn't vote by districts, which didn’t allow – which literally kept African Americans from being elected to the city council and to the school board. So in the Eighties, there's this big fight to move the Dallas to a single-member district system so that more African Americans, Hispanic Americans, could serve on the city council and on the school board. Here, there were African Americans on the school board and on the city council, however, and the Democrats were in control. In fact, the Democrats controlled the state legislature, so funding, you know, was plentiful for educational institutions.\n\nAnd South Carolina had a income tax, versus Texas - which has no income tax, and relies primarily on property taxes to run everything, and sales taxes. But there was an income tax here that, I won't say made money plentiful, but it helped tremendously, specifically where you could get special funding for projects like Avery. So I think I went to the legislature twice to get special funding for Avery, or actually three times anyway, twice for the $200,000, the maximum $200,000 that you could get for special projects. Then of course, I went to the legislature to get the funding to complete the building, and so things were calm here, where had been very volatile in Dallas, a constant fight for African Americans and Hispanics to share power with the white folks here. On the surface, again, it looked like things were good politically that African Americans served on the city council and the school board, you could still see that there was still this, well, let's say there's still poverty here.\n\nThere's still a differential between the white folks and the Black folks, but it seemed that they got along better here than they did in Dallas. But the only difference was at that time, we didn't have a significant recognition that African Americans had ever done anything here in Charleston. And so that became one of the battles and struggles that Bernard, Bernie Powers and others, and I had to fight. For example, the plantations didn't talk about slavery. Drayton Hall and Middleton, they were still calling us servants at these two major plantations where indeed, we had done all the work and indeed had been enslaved. So.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=849.0,1068.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd did you face any barriers not being from Charleston?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1068.0,1071.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nA little bit. And yes, I'll say, but I think I was able to overcome these barriers. Obviously, I was made very aware - and I actually did this, I actually said something about this just before I left - I was made very, very aware that I was a “come here” rather than a “been here”, okay? And I'm sure you understand those terms. I can't remember who actually familiarized me with those terms and told me I was a come here and that Charleston would always go outside to get people and bring them in rather than relying on and using the people who lived here. So that was made very clear to me. And then also, one of the things that shocked me, again, part of what I knew about Charleston was that it used to have these quadroon balls, just like New Orleans and Mobile, and that there was still this sort of color scheme.\n\nOf course, I'm thinking, “Wait a minute now. This is 1994! And this shouldn't exist anymore.” However, I met a young lady who said she wanted to work with me. I was going to start this, what I call the Avery Scholars Program, and she wanted to work with me on that. Well, she said – we go to lunch, and she says to me, and again, this sort of shocked me. She says, “You're going to be all right now that I see you in person.” I said, “What do you mean?” She says, “Well, when I saw you picture in the paper, it came out dark.”\n\nAnd she says, “I said to myself, ‘Then he's going to have problems here. He's too dark.’” And she said, “But now that I see you and you're sort of in between, I think you're going to be okay.” And then I saw this again - and this was so funny: Tony O'Neill invited me to the Owls Whist Club Annual Thanksgiving Bash – you know, a black tie event. My wife got sick, so I ended up going there by myself. So I get there, I see all these white folks. I'm thinking, “Why’re all these white folks at this Owls Whist C. event with these Black folks?” Well, come to find out, they were not white. They were light-skinned Black folks, but they looked white. I can't remember the brother's name; he was sort of the main one. I later met him and got to know him, and I found out, well, this guy's not white, he’s Black. He's just a light-skinned Black person. So as I said, I was sort of shocked by that, that the color scheme was still here, where there's still this differential between light-skinned African Americans and dark-skinned African Americans. I had people telling me crazy stuff. I mentioned Tony O'Neill. Okay. Someone told me that, okay, Tony O'Neill didn't date anybody but white girls, and that he didn't think he was black. And I said, “Well, in my dealings with me, it was always clear he was indeed a person who worked for the community.” He started “100 Black Men of Charleston” - which started here, by the way, in our auditorium. So after we went to the Million Men March in October of 1995. So I didn't see that this craziness about him not thinking that he was Black and that he thought he was white. And I said, “Oh, come on.” So anyway, that was one of the things I had to overcome it sort of from both sides, where the light skin African Americans had a problem with some of the darker skin, and then the darker skinned African Americans literally had problems with the lighter skins of that because they thought they had been exclusive. I remember one person, I won't call his name, telling me about Bernard Fielding - that Bernard Fielding had been upset because he tried to date his sister, and he was too dark, allegedly, to be dating Bernard Fielding's sister. Crazy stuff. Yeah. And","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1071.0,1354.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nThen how could she describe the work of Dr. Myrtle Glascoe?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1354.0,1358.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, I saw all the things she had done to start the Center in 1990, and I was impressed that it had gotten off the ground literally from scratch, and indeed that it was a functioning historical organization or historical research center. And I was impressed. And the irony was - she and I met one time, and she did tell me, she gave me some tips. She said, “You're probably going to have some problems with the community because you’re a come-here, that this community is very closed and they don't accept a lot of outsiders.” Which by the way, I didn't have, because although I wasn't that outgoing of a person, well, I got invited to the House W Club. I got invited to the Athenians, I got invited to the Boule, and I've made it a point to go to as many meetings and community events as possible, because one of the things - as you probably know - I had to do was raise $1.2 million to finish this building. So I got out, I even let John, what's his name, Tecklenburg, dragged me into the, what is that group?\n\nIt was one of these white lunch groups. I let him drag me into that, before he became mayor, obviously. And so the Rotary Club, and I hated it because you had to go every week, and if you didn't go, you had to pay. And then of course, you had to pay to be in it. But I actually enjoyed working, being in the Sitz Club, being with the Bole, because I indeed got to meet some people who were indeed became essential in terms of working with helping me raise money for the center. Herbert DeCosta became like, I became a running buddy with Herbert DeCosta, and then he's the one who was dragging me into the Boule and the Whist Club, and he's in everything. He's in the Athenians, he's in Alpha. And so with him guiding me by the hand, he actually took me to meet the editor of the Charleston Poston Courier, and we didn't get any money. The guy took our pictures and then said, bye. I still have that picture of me and Herbert with the editor of the Charleston Post and Courier at his home where Herbert was basically introducing me to people to help me raise money for the center. But yeah, so everything started off well, very well. When I first came in, I didn't have any of the problems that Myrtle said that I was going to have or what this other woman thought I might have because I was too dark. So it all worked out.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1358.0,1557.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAgain, as a follow up to Dr. Glasgow, we're in an exhibit that focuses on the Avery's North Stars. Who are some of your professional and personal North Stars that helped guide you and helped you while you were at the Avery, in this overall, and personally as well?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1557.0,1570.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay, well, obviously Cynthia McCottry Smith; Herbert, that I've already mentioned. Tony O'Neill, Thad Bell. Let's see, Herbert Fielding, okay; Bernard Fielding. Let's see, Judge Arthur. What's Arthur's last name? McFarland. \n\nSpeaker 4: McFarland. \n\nSpeaker 3: Arthur McFarland. Larry Ferguson. I mean, what's the guy? Last name was Washington. He was on the city council at one point.\n\nSpeaker 4: Borise.\n\nSpeaker 3: Borise Washington. He got me $15,000 from the city council, Campbell, who was actually one of my students. And then of course, he became a member of the city council, and believe it or not, and I have people asking me about him, I'm blanking on his name. I guess I've suppressed it. Our US Senator?\n\nSpeaker 4:  Are you talking about Tim Scott?\n\nSpeaker 3: Tim Scott. Scott. He got us $50,000 for a project that we did through the center, and he actually was a member of 100 Black Men, and very accessible. Paid his dues on time every year. And again, I don't know what happened to him, but again, I had a great network of people, including, of course, David Rivers and Jim Clyburn.\n\nLet's just say that people were so accessible here because they were very close, because this is a sort of a real close community. It's a smaller state, smaller community, versus in Dallas where I knew a few of the movers and shakers, but here I literally got to move, meet most of them and have personal relationships with him. It was so bad that I said something in the press, what is this thing called? The President Scholar Program would come to Charleston and they would meet at the college. Anyway, I said something about Glen McConnell. Okay, you know that name for sure. Anyway, before he became president of the College, he was I guess the president pro tem of the State Senate, and I said something about him, in just a neutral way. He calls me the next day to castigate me about what I had said, and I had to straighten out that I did not say what he said - what the student said I said about him. So it was that close! That a state senator would be calling me on the phone about something I said to a student in a programming. Isn't that something? Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1570.0,1775.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what was your process in gaining funds for building renovations while maintaining funds for programs, collections and exhibits?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1775.0,1783.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, the priority became raising money for the building, and the Institute had sort of started the process. David Cohen had lent a Hand. The institute had given $50,000 to kick - sort of kick off the fundraising for the building. Then David Cohen and Jim, I'm forgetting his name, he has...his book collection is here.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1783.0,1819.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nJim Campbell.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1819.0,1820.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nJim Campbell had hooked up with the Ford Foundation and got $100,000 , and so I sort of followed up; you heard me say I got about $15,000 from Marge Washington. I got another 10,000 from the State Department of - wasn't the State Department of Archives. There was another commission to do the windows, and then I was working the institute. The Institute gave another $50,000. Then Wendell, what was his name... Who was this room named for?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1820.0,1864.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nCox?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1864.0,1865.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nCox. Wendell Cox gave us a hundred thousand dollars. And so I was getting these big chunks in, but we were still sort of running short. And the Ford Foundation, the grant was about to expire, because I think we had a three year period to match it. And so then the president at the time gave me a letter, and I went to the state legislature and I got $650,000, which sort of completed the whole process, and we were able to actually start the renovation. Now, we were, of course, getting $200,000 every year from the state legislature, supplemented by the college. So that helped with the programming that we were able to do in terms of exhibits, lectures, and just general operating expenses. And so again, I'm raising this $1.2 million, which I did with the big chunk coming later. Then from the state legislature, and then we were doing grants.\n\nI can't remember all the, we got the little small grants, $25,000 here, $50,000 there. One of the stories, I always tell that the air, I can't think of the name of that foundation, one of the heirs to the man who owned the TV Guide - you remember TV Guide, that little magazine, I forget the name of their foundation, but he came here looking for information on slavery - the heir, the son, that nephew or whatever he was, to the owner of that foundation. He came here looking for information on slavery, and he was, how can I put it? Rude and a little nasty, and I responded in kind. We had the Walter Pantovic collection. We just had got that maybe two years before, and so I was able to show him some shackles and badges and items related to the enslavement of African-Americans, and he was impressed.\n\nSo even though he and I had this sort of little nasty type of encounter, he sent me a check for $50,000, two weeks after the fact. So that just sort of blew me away, and I thought to myself, “Now, maybe I need to stop being as nasty and aggressive as I get, and be more welcoming and just let people say what they want to say rather than responding the way I did to him.” Indeed. Then we use that, then, for the Avery Scholars program for, I think I was able to hire some student interns using that. $50,000, Scholars. Unrestricted.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=1865.0,2053.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what role did the Avery Institute of Afro-American History and Culture play in your administration?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2053.0,2060.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay, a lot. It started out negative. I have to tell this story, if no one else has told you the story. I was a second choice for the position as director, but I wasn't a second choice for the position as director, as I later found out. They offered it - the position - to Dr. Emma Graham, where I think at the time was at the University of Mississippi. And she, in fact, I guess it's in the book, the new Avery book that I did. Anyway, I finished number one in terms of the Committee's vote, but they decided to hedge on offering it to me because I would duplicate Dr. Bernard Powers. They already had a Black historian, so they wanted to get somebody who was going to be in English to diversify the faculty a bit more. Rather than having two Negroes in history, we will keep our Negro in history and we'll get a Negro in English.\n\nSo they offered her the position, but she never would sign a contract. And so they sent her a final contract, I understand, in March of 1994. And then she didn't sign that, and they gave her 10 days. And then David Cohen called me and said, well, yeah, asked me if I was still interested. And I said, “Of course.” And I came in in April of ‘94 for a second interview, and everything went well. The Judge, Judge Sanders just said, “Hey, you ain't got to convince us. We just want you to come.” Okay, so I said, “Well, for sure.” Then they bring me over here to Avery to meet with the community folks again, and Jim Campbell reads me the Riot Act, tells me not to take the position that they wanted Dr. Graham. Okay. Which he should never have said that because that made me, indeed, react: “Oh, well, he's going to tell me not to take the position. Who does he think he is?” So he and I started off on the bad foot from the start, and then when I got here, of course, they tried to smooth some things over, but then the Institute was dysfunctional at that point. Who was the president?\n\nIt'll come to me, but they would ask me for things to carry out for the Center. Then I'd go to the next meeting and they'd ask for no report. And so it was like I was sort of wasting my time with the Institute, because they weren't helping us at that point. It wasn't until, maybe, I'd say almost 10 years later, that the Institute became functional again and literally started to help. They indeed came up with the second $50,000. And again, there were certain members, of course, that were functional, like Herbert DeCosta, and let me think, like Cindy, Ms. Sim  ms...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2060.0,2270.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nWalter?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2270.0,2272.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWalter Brown. Walter Brown, yes. When he became President, everything turned around, and indeed, we started moving forward. We were doing those little jazz programs and raising money and having a good time, The Institute and Avery. In fact, I started doing dinners for the Institute when they would meet, because again, they went from being dysfunctional to being a very functional organization. And like Trump said, we fell in love with each other again. And so it was great. And Walter Brown tried to convinced me not to leave. He actually went to President Sanders and said, “Make him any offer that he wants so that he'll stay.” And I left, not because I was unhappy, because I just wanted to do something different at that time. So at the end, it started out on the bad foot - negative, and as I said, it became dysfunctional. They weren't even meeting, and as I said, they asked me for stuff to do and I'd do it, and then the next meeting, they have forgotten what they wanted me to do. Okay. That president was Elmore Brown at that time. So they didn't even meet for a long period of time, but they finally started getting it back together. Ms. Simms, Ms. Kelly, and the rest of 'em came together. Then Walter Brown also helped to make a difference, and so as I said, we fell in love with each other again, and I was a happy camper to have that type of support from the community specifically - again, with the Institute leading that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2272.0,2383.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nHow would you describe the impact of the Avery Normal Institute and the role that Avery’s alumni in your work?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2383.0,2390.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, like I said, I keep mentioning certain people like Herbert DeCosta and Grace Kelly and Ms. Simms - that they were, well, actually, that actually went from bad to good a little bit too, with, again, people I was able to work with when I came. The Institute was very prominent here. They indeed were volunteering and being docents. They had a table right in the main office where they would come in every day and sit down; Elmore Brown, and about three or four other guys, I can't think of their names now. They would come there and sit down and they would harass the young women students. I remember Cherice Jones telling me that one of them said that - I'm not going to put this on the record, but - basically sexually harassing her. And so, I moved the table out, and I moved it, actually moved it in here; this room, when I first got here, it wasn't finished, so there was no heat and no air in here, and that stopped them from coming every day and sitting around and BSing.\n\nSo that was sort of a bad situation. But as I said, over time, then things improved with Herbert DeCosta, even Elmore Brown, who, as I said, he and I didn't really get along that well, but he was the President, and so I worked with him. He and I disagreed over, for example, how to renovate the auditorium. He wanted to just leave those brick walls with no sheet rock: nothing there other than, I think, well, you see how the windows are now. Basically do those windows and seal them, which we did with one of the grants.\n\nAnd so he and I disagree. I said “No!” I said, “You don't have to be in here in the summertime, and in the wintertime, when all this air is coming into this building.” Where we had, when I first got here, it was a pocket of air over the top of us, because there's no air and nothing up here. We were just on the second floor. Then also down on the base, ground level, nothing. And so we had air, cold air and hot air - cold air in the wintertime - all above us, and then below us, hot air and sweating in here, in the summertime. So I said, “No, we need to put sheet rocks so that we can seal the building, in order to protect the collection.” So one of the things that we did was we got humidifiers and specifically put 'em on the second floor in the area of where the collection was to try to reduce the humidity in the building.\n\nSo he and I disagreed over that, but we compromised. You see what we did, and I think that's nice. What do you think, Tony?\n\nSpeaker 4: I think it’s good.\n\nSpeaker 3: Yes, we compromised and we sealed that room, but we indeed left that brick because he was into the aesthetics of the brick. And I said, “Well, the building didn't look like that, Elmore.” When the kids were here, it was sheet rocked, and we had evidence of what it looked like in terms of when people were here and it was a school, and they just tore all that off. And so I've actually seen other places where they do leave the brick exposed, but it wasn't like that room; I tell you, that room was a trip, in terms of the controlling the temperature in it. I don't know whether you remember - we got some money from the Institute. I'll tell you, the Institute did come up with money. Constantly helping us out.\n\nSo we got some money from the Institute. We bought some removable, so, like, mats, that we could put over the art piece in there, okay? I don't know whether you've ever seen the art piece. No? Okay, you came too late. Anyway, we had, I think in 1992, maybe ‘93, during the Spoleto Festival, they did art in places that they called “places of the past”. So we had the whole floor covered with this big art piece by Houston Conwell. It was called, I think it was called, something like “The Lowcountry”. It had a map of the Lowcountry, showing the Gullah Geechee influences and the slave trade and so on. So it was a historical map, but it took up the place of the whole room, where you couldn't walk on it because it was made out of eggshells and indigo dye. So we found a mat and put over it so that we could use the space.\n\nWe got window units that we put in the windows to cool it off, and then indeed, to even heat it up in the wintertime, and it worked. We were able to start using that room, even though we didn't have any air conditioning, and the room wasn't sealed and didn't have any sheet rock, and it was just a terrible place to be. Well, we had some major events in there, even in that state, but if you got more than 50 people in there the air conditioning just failed. So we were embarrassed. The number of times when we were using that room, when we just got too many people in there, and it just negated the air conditioning from the window units...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2390.0,2761.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nHow did you manage your professional and personal obligations?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2761.0,2766.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, I actually never - and I'm being halfway facetious - I actually never thought about it that way. I always thought that this is who I am. This is what I do. So I was sort of 100% into doing stuff here at Avery. Of course, I had a wife. My son was away at college, and I don't know.... You see, I'm wrestling with that question, because I never thought about personal obligations in the sense of being concerned about.... Well, you see, I'm wrestling with this question. Let's just say I took care of the house, you know, cut the grass, mopped the floors - I guess did what I needed to do at home -  but I admit I spent more than 50% of my time here at the Center, because I just felt that it was required and that I needed to get this done. Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2766.0,2842.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then how were you able to network with other organizations and get the support for the Avery?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2842.0,2847.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nSure. You heard me mention that I joined a number of organizations. Well, when I got here, the Rotary Club, the Boule, the Club, and of course the irony was that - and then even when I would network with, say, the South Carolina, in fact, I was a member of the South Carolina African-American Heritage Commission, let's say - I worked with the State Department of Archives and History. None of that really produced any substantial funding for the Center. And in fact, I think that's part of why I quit the Rotary Club. I just told John - I think I did one reception for the Rotary Club here, and then it was almost like money was going out, but they weren't reciprocating. In fact, I was doing stuff for the Rotary Club because you know how they do - when they have two or three African Americans, they try to make us do all the work to present a better image of who they were.\n\nBut as I said, they did virtually nothing to support the Center. As I said, I think maybe two or three of them came to - we did three dinners that were supposed to be fundraising dinners, how the NAACP and her league would do these fundraising dinners. Well, we did three. In fact, I guess I need to tell you the story of how we ended up doing those three dinners. During my first day on the job, August of 1994, a woman by the name of Esther Ferguson came to visit me, and she gave us $10,000 to do a fundraising dinner. Okay. Three of them - she spread the $10,000 over three years, to do these three fundraising dinners. Then she sort of helped to pick the speakers, and she just became a nuisance.\n\nSo, it became so bad that in the third year, I was going to give her the money back because she was such a nuisance and caused us so many problems. So much. So, I remember the president's wife got involved with the second dinner, and before it started, I heard Judge Sanders saying to her. She was over here decorating. She did a night job of decorating, again, the auditorium with the mats and the air conditioners in the window, and I heard Judge Sanders saying to her, \"You need to get out of there. Esther Ferguson's on her way.” Cause that’s how big of a nuisance she was. So the third year I tried to turn the relationship in terms of planning the dinner and having to work with her over to Oliver, who was the building manager. It didn't work out. She was offended that I would turn over working with her to one of my staff members rather than doing it myself.\n\nSo she insisted that I work with her. So I got sick. One of the things that happened while I was here, maybe the first couple of years or so, it got so cold in this building that I developed some type of allergy from being down in the office in the wintertime with no heat. Basically, the heat didn't work, didn't function well, even on the second level, so I developed some kind of allergy that I couldn't figure out. I went to Thad Bell, my doctor, and he gave me medicine – Zyrtec and that kind of stuff - to try to solve it. So I was out one day and I was supposed to meet with her, and so I called her and told her I couldn't come. So she says to me on the phone, “Oh, I know you're just operating on CP time,” and I was offended. So I called Judge Sanders, and he wasn't in his office.\n\nSo I spoke to his assistant and I said, “Tell Judge Sanders, I'm going to get Mrs. Ferguson that money back I've had about enough.” So next day there's an a APB out for me, that I needed to see Judge Sanders and that I should not see her. Cause that’s where I was going - to give her her money back. He said that I should not see her until I talk to him. So he brings me into his office, and I always loved telling this story. He says, “Marvin, let me tell you something. Do you know that every day I come in here to this office as president, I get me a teaspoon of shit, and I eat it,” he says. “And that gets me ready for the shit I got to eat all day.”\n\nSo I'm unnerved that the president is telling me this craziness about eating shit! So it just sort of disarms me because I'm going in there mad, ready to tell him what I'm going to do. So he tells me that story, and like I said, just, I don't know, just changes my whole demeanor. I'm mad angry, and I'm ready to tell this woman off. And so he said, “Don't you go say anything to her. I'll deal with it.” And he said, “You’re not giving the money back.” And so that ended. She didn't come to the dinner. We actually had a nice dinner, one of the best ever, because she wasn't involved. And then that ended it. But the three years we were doing it, it was literally hell. And the irony was Mrs. Whipper told me after she found out I, because she actually invited us out, Elmore, Mrs. Whipper and some of the members of the Institute, to her house in Secessionville. I didn't know what Secessionville was and what that meant. And we were going over there to her plantation. So Mrs. Whipper says to me while we were over there, “You've hit the golden lode here. She's one of the best fundraisers and givers in the city.” Little did she know that you paid a price to deal with her. So anyway...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=2847.0,3277.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then how important was it to work with young children, with the Avery Scholars program, and how were you able to expand it?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=3277.0,3283.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. We got a grant, I'm trying to remember who facilitated that. We got a $30,000 grant, and we bought the van. We had a decorated with “Avery Research Center” on the sides and on the back, so we could advertise the Center. And then what was left, I decided to use to recruit kids. I think we were working, we decided to work with fifth graders at - I'm blanking on the name of the school. It’s on the East Side, named after one of the first Black congressmen, the first Black council members, and I should know it. His son got a lot involved with Avery.\n\nYou don't know who I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Anyway, so we decided to work with the school over there. Bernard Powers's wife was actually the principal, so I thought that would've be a good way to work with her. And then with this particular, okay, I think the last name was Frazier. Frazier Elementary School over on the east side. And so we recruited 10 students, and what I was trying to do was recognize academic achievement. Typically, the athletes get all of the attention. So now I want to give some attention to students who are getting good grades and achieving. So as I said, we used the remainder of that grant to sort of fund the program. I ended up doing a lot of it myself the first year, because the woman who told me about my skin color, she didn't follow up. And so I did a lot of it myself the first year.\n\nThen I think we were able to raise some money again, I'm going to say from the Institute, to do it a second year and expand it. So that we did one - the Frazier. We did one in elementary school in North Dallas – Dallas? North Charleston, and we did one on James Island. We just did it through Tuesdays - Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. And again, I think the money came primarily from the institute to expand that program, and the money primarily was for hiring sort of a coordinator for the Every Scholars program so that I wouldn't have to do it myself. Then of course, we fed them and brought them here, and they worked on projects. We bought games and things that they could use - bought them books and so on. So they were here about an hour on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays. Then we took 'em back home.\n\nSo we picked them up at the school, and then we sort of took them home. So it went well. We won an award in 1998, for the Avery Scholars program, for its being innovative and literally working with the community. Again, that was part of my mission, was to indeed reach out to the community and take history, give, provide them history and culture, and I thought by starting with these fifth graders, we would indeed at least send a message to the community that Avery was interested in working with the people, particularly the kids from the community, and we weren't just an academic institution.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=3283.0,3514.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then speaking of that, what role does Avery play in supporting the Charleston community?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=3514.0,3519.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, wow, you might say, not only did I think that we supported the Charleston community, I think we supported the state of South Carolina. One, were always a place that they could meet, in terms of the community organizations. I told you, for example, 100 Black Men met here, and started here. There were several other community groups that met here at the Center. So we made the space available for community meetings; we offered classes, we offered camps, and we tried to open the center up to various organizations and groups and let them know that they could come here.\n\nFor example, I got in trouble - not real trouble - the Nation of Islam met herem for about two months or so. They had said they had lost their space or something was happening. So I let them meet here on a Sunday, which of course meant that I had to come in and let them into the building. Well, then I got confronted then by one of the members of the Institute about the Muslims taking over Avery. And I said, “The Muslims are not taking over Avery. I'm just letting them use the building.” But again, that was a way of reaching out. We would go out to schools and do programs. I think I've probably spoke at every High School in the community, selling history and telling them about the Avery Center when we were working with 100 Black Men, they used the Center to do a mentoring program on Saturday mornings - again, which meant I had to come here and be here on the Saturday boards that we did the mentoring program.\n\nWe did a Heritage Bowl or a College Bowl that I understand - and I don't remember her - that Dr. Butler said she won in. I forget what year. Well, I actually brought that from Dallas because we had done a Heritage Bowl with the museum in Dallas. I brought it here, including a little buzzer unit and everything to run it, but I don't remember her winning it. I have to go back and check my records and the few that I still have with me from the Avery Center, but she said she won it in, what, ‘96 or 2000-something? Anyway, I'll have to check that out. We did run it. So again, a way of, once again, trying to reach out to the community and teach history. We worked with the Gullah Geechee project. The Avery Center sponsored - working with the National Park Service - we sponsored the Gullah Geechee Project where they indeed met here and did the coding of the information that they were gathering from doing the community programs in Beaufort, where is in Orrie County, and of course here, where they indeed were gathering information on how to preserve the Gullah Geechee language.\n\nSo then we did a statewide study of the teaching of African American history, and we went to 10 school districts in the state of South Carolina to see what was happening with McKinley Washington's bill that he had passed, I guess in 1984, that required schools to teach African American history. We participated in the Rosenwald School Project and indeed helped the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission to go around the state documenting where there were still Rosenwald schools. Let's see, there was a group - they called themselves the African American Heritage Association - they started a project, again meeting here, to put gravestones on the graves of former USCT - United States Colored Troops - soldiers had died in Charleston. I know we helped with two of them. In fact, the sort of ironic, the first one we did was I think was at Magnolia Cemetery, and I can't remember the officer's name, but we helped with that project, and that project was significant because they put a six-foot obelisk on this brother's grave, up in Magnolia.\n\nSo at the same time, I was dealing with the College building its library, on the site of the Catholic school - I can't recall the name of it - that was across the street from the College, on Coming Street -  Coming and Calhoun. Bishop England. They tore Bishop England down, so the College decided to build their library. Well, when they started digging, guess what? They dug up graves there. So Alex Sanders, Judge Sanders, dragged me into this project to try to commemorate that space where they indeed had desecrated the graves of these Antebellum and post-bellum people who had been buried in the three cemeteries on that site. Again, Bishop England had already desecrated it by building the high school over it, but now the College was doing the same thing. So when I saw this obelisk that the African American Heritage Association did on this brother's grave - six feet tall, beautiful piece - so I was trying to figure out how to use the funds that we had.\n\nI thought we had a hundred thousand dollars at first - that there indeed had been this money left over from the construction and the renovation of the building. That's what I was told by the Foundation, that we still had a hundred thousand dollars left over. So we put out an RFP for an artist to do the project. Then, lo and behold, after we did the RFP, the Foundation says, you really don't have a hundred thousand dollars left. In fact, you don't have any money left from the renovation funds. So Tim Scott got us, let's see, $7,500 in accommodation tax funds. Then I got another $7,500 from the city accommodations tax fund. So I had $15,000. So after the African American Heritage Association did that project at Magnolia, I asked them, how much did that cost? They said, well, this is only $10,000. So I said, “Well, I got $15,000. Let me see. What can I do with that?” So indeed, I went to the same company and they came up with that. You've seen the piece behind the library? SPEAKER 4\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=3519.0,3958.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=3958.0,3958.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nYes. William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. Well, we did that, I want to say 2006 or something like that, to commemorate the three cemeteries or four cemeteries, but that were there on that space behind the library. So indeed, we were doing all kinds of community projects. We worked with the MOJA Festival, to designate the memorials and the monuments that they were going to put around the city, commemorating African American historic spots. We would do the research for that. We did the research with the calendar that was done every year by, I guess it was Southwestern Bell, or Southeastern Bell. So indeed, we were very, very engaged in trying to promote history in the community.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=3958.0,4017.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nThank you. And then what influenced you to explain the mission of the Avery? To include focusing on collections that highlighted grassroots work?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4017.0,4027.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay, say that question again.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4027.0,4029.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nWhat influenced you to expand the mission of the Avery to include focusing on collections like Grassroots - like your everyday people, not just Averyites?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4029.0,4038.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nAlright. Well, I was being strategic and political when I sort of announced that mission that we were going to collect the records and documents from the grassroots. Of course, the image of Avery was that it was only concerned about the people who had graduated from Avery, either from when it was a Normal Institute or a high school - and also, again, that skin color thing, was that it only collected the records of the light-skinned folks in Charleston. So by focus, by announcing and changing our mission to collecting the artifacts and documents and archives of the grassroots, I literally was changing the focus to say, “No, we want everybody's collections, not just people who went to the Institute or who went to the high school. We want everybody's records and collections.” And indeed then, and I benefited. Well, we benefited - Avery benefited - by my saying that, let me tell you again, I can tell you these stories.\n\nBill Saunders, okay - dark-skinned brother – said, literally told me at one point, I think we did a project with him. Felice Ferguson interviewed him, and then we eventually got his collection. Well, he says to me just before he donated his collection, he says, “Look, I see that Avery's doing XYZ, and I think I'm going to go ahead and donate my collection. Because I used to think that Avery was only for those light-skinned folks, but I see y'all seem to have gotten it together, so I'm going to donate my collection to the Avery Center.” So I thought that was a coup, you know? A victory, that a dark-skinned brother understood that we, indeed, were open to everybody, and we didn't just collect from Institute graduates or from light-skinned folks. Again, that was the rap in the community - that's part of why people didn't think that they should support us - because we “just for those light-skinned people or those people who went to Avery”. That wasn't true.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4038.0,4194.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd did you have to balance your new vision with the Averyites’ vision of what they wanted to collect? Like, how did you manage the...?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4194.0,4201.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, I told them what I was trying to do, that I thought that we would benefit by expanding the base of the people who supported the Center, that it would bring in more money, it’d raise our profile in the community. Cause again, as I said, I was going to the high schools and some of the middle schools in the first place, and there were more people in there than people who were from the Institute. And so I thought that was, and they accepted it. Lucille Whipper actually told me that she was really pleased, in terms of how the profile of the Center had been raised by my doing as much work in the community and reaching out to all the people that I did. Hey, I don't know whether you know the story about her organization, the South Carolina Woman's Baptist Missionary in Educational Association, the WBMEA. Are you familiar with that story? \n\nSpeaker 4: No.\n\nSpeaker 3: Okay. Let me share that story with you. We got their collection here, by the way, the Woman's Baptist Missionary and Educational Association of South Carolina. I don't know how long they've been here. Anyway, Mrs. Whipper came to me and said that she wanted to write the history of their association. So I wrote a grant to the South Carolina Humanities Council, and we got $15,000 to do it. I hired, oh, she wanted a women’s historian to do it. So I said, “I don't have any problem with that. I'm glad that I don't have to do it.” So I think I hired - I can't think of the woman's name now, she disappointed me so badly. So we paid her probably the bulk of the $15,000 to write the history. She actually took the records out of the building, of the Baptist Women's Association. Then she disappeared. Literally, she left town. So I had to around and find out where did this woman go.\n\nI finally found out she was in Washington DC, so I got up on a Sunday morning at five in the morning, jumped in the Avery van and drove to Washington DC by - I think - one o'clock. I was banging on her door, “Where's my records?” I shocked her by showing up without - I did not have a phone number anyway, I just was hoping that she was going to be home. So she indeed had the records in the closet. So I grabbed the records, about five boxes of stuff, put it in the van, drove back to Charleston, and was back home at two o'clock in the morning.\n\nSo all the money's gone. This woman’s taken the money and ran, but I got the records back. So what do we do? Me and Mrs. Whipper sat down. Mrs. Whipper wanted to sue her for taking the money and not producing the book. So I assigned it to Aletta Smalls and Damon Fordham. I'm disappointed with what they produced, especially Damon. Damon came back and told me he couldn't find enough information, and so - I'm going to just say they did a half-assed job, okay. So I don't know why I did this: I decided on a spring break to - I went to Dallas, to see my son - and I took the records with me. I simply looked through these records to see what we can do with them in terms of, particularly, improving what Aletta and Damon had done. So I actually went back to work on my book on Dallas, but I took these records. Just, I just wanted to go through 'em and see what they were missing.\n\nSo I had never really looked at 'em closely. I looked at 'em closely, and they were perfect. They went all the way from the 1880s up to the 1960s! Really detailed and photographs and everything, a great collection. So I said, “What the hell's wrong with them? They can't?” Particularly Damon, who claims to be a historian. He's one of my MA students! Anyway, so I sat and went through those records and I actually started pulling some things together ,while I was on spring break. I just completely stayed at my son's house, didn't even go out to do the research on my book. Came back and I found the Palmetto Leader, I don't know whether you're familiar with that newspaper - it's in the collection. So it went from, I guess, early 20th century up to about the 1950s. So I started going through that and lo and behold, they reported on the Woman's Baptist Education and Missionary Association constantly. Just all kinds of articles in there about that organization.\n\nSo I sat down, I wrote the book. I took what Damon had done and what Aletta had done, and just reshaped it - used pictures, and wrote a nice little book. About a hundred pages. Got a publisher for it, and I think we published a thousand copies, maybe more than that. Anyway, I went to Mrs. Whippers' convention that year.... Where was it at? Someplace upstate, because.... Seneca, maybe. Seneca, South Carolina. I went to that convention and introduced the book. She was so pleased that, indeed, they now had a history of their association and, indeed, she thanked Avery for pulling that together and making this little project successful, so that she wouldn't have egg on her face. Yeah, I even sat around and-","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4201.0,4594.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nHow long did take you to write the book?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4594.0,4595.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nHuh?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4595.0,4596.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/53","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nHow long did it take you to write the book?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4596.0,4601.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/54","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nMaybe a couple months, because I stayed - again, I always say, I spent too much time here. I would stay after work and go through the Palmetto Leader, reading every issue of the Palmetto Leader that was available in microfilm down there in the library, and so that sort of helped me pull it together. You haven't seen it, have you?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4601.0,4623.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/55","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nNo.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4623.0,4624.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/56","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nI'll send you a copy – a kept a couple copies of it - but it is a good piece. Yeah, we used to sell it in the gift shop.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4624.0,4634.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/57","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then as a follow up, how did you decide on what collections to purchase, including the Walter Pantovic collection?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4634.0,4641.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/58","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, typically we did not purchase collections; we didn't have that type of a budget. I got lucky. I'm trying to figure out how we developed that relationship; I'm trying to remember. We had a good officer or development officer in the Foundation, and somehow or another, he worked out a relationship with Coca-Cola, and he made it so that I got real close to one of Coca-Cola's development officers too. So I remember going up to the Coca-Cola, going to the Coca-Cola Foundation in Atlanta, meeting him having lunch and telling them about this project that we were doing. We did a project - I don't know whether some of those brochures are still left around - we did a project that we called the National African American Museum. Again, this is before Joe Riley started this project. It was a collaboration between the Historic Charleston Foundation, the City of Charleston and us.\n\nWe had four components in it, and we did this nice brochure. It included the Aiken Red House, the Aiken Red House has the slave quarters behind it, the McLeod Plantation, Avery, and those slave market, those sort of fore sites as a part of this sort of multi-site museum. And we did this, again, this national brochure. So I sold Coca-Cola on that project; they gave us $250,000 to fund it. So Walter Pantovic started calling me - I can't remember exactly when - telling me about all these artifacts he had related to slavery: shackles, badges, documents, manillas. You know what's in that collection. So I said, “Well, look, I'll buy them. I'll buy those – I'll buy all of them.”\n\nOnce we got that Coca-Cola Foundation money - $250,000, I think - altogether, we may have spent $50,000 to $60,000 just buying his collection. Again, it was worth it, because the objective was we were going to buy all those pieces and then use them in the Old Slave Mart, once it opened. Of course, the city went in a different direction; then, this collaboration just sort of broke apart after the director of the historic Charleston Foundation left and went to Maryland. And so then Joe Riley decided to do the International Museum, and they opened the Slave Mart sort of out of the blue, and didn't collaborate with us in terms of what we had initially planned, having this multi-site museum. So we used the money from Coca-Cola to buy the Pantovic collection. I think we may have bought a couple others - I can't remember exactly what they were - but the Coca-Cola money? Let's see. We hired Annette Teasdale on a sort of three-year contract to do the educational part of advertising and promoting the African-American National Heritage Museum in the community, and particularly with the schools. So, that's how we spent the money. Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4641.0,4885.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/59","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then as a semi-follow-up, you mentioned the Old Slave Mart, and you was also on a lot of different board committees and, one, going through your archives - you talked about “We Shall Overcome”. How were you using that as an entry point into understanding Black Charleston, and a gateway to understanding present-day issues?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4885.0,4902.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/60","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nSure, okay. There's a film - have you seen the film called We Shall Overcome? DaNia Childress\n\nNo.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4902.0,4908.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/61","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nNo.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4908.0,4908.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/62","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nNo. William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. There's a film that traces the history of the song “We Shall Overcome”. It started out at the Cigar Factory over on East Bay Street, where there was a strike of the cigar workers, and they sang that song. They sung it differently; it was called “I Shall Overcome”, which I think is the original spiritual, that. “I Shall Overcome”. So they started singing that song during the cigar strike in, I think, 1945 or something like that, at the Cigar Factory over there on East Bay Street. Anyway, I'm trying to remember who was involved, but once again, we're collaborating, I think, with the Historic Charleston Foundation and one other historical agency in the city. Let me think who that was.... Anyway, they wanted to start a project to sort of document and publish a book and do a documentary on “We Shall Overcome” and how it actually started here in Charleston, and then, of course, became the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. And then of course it also had international ramifications because they sung it in South Africa, they sung it in Poland, and so we wanted to sort of capitalize on, once again, Charleston being the origins of the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. So that's how that project got started. And once again, we're – Avery is - in the middle of it, because, one, we had some of the documentation on the cigar strikes - Cigar Factory strike - from 1945. And so we were going to use our archives as a way of developing this project, which was supposed to result into a documentary, as well as a book, about “We Shall Overcome”. In fact, I think we were actually worked with one of the guys who used to sing the song at Highlander. So we were trying to tie all of this together - I think he was involved in the whole project. I can't think of his name, no, but he published a book called Ain't You Got A Right To The Tree of Life?; I think it's in the Avery collection. So again, just one more project that we took on, literally to promote African American history, and of course, literally, to promote the origins and history of Charleston in Black history throughout this country.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=4908.0,5082.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/63","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what led to the publication of Charleston's Avery Center: From Education and Civil Rights to Preserving the African American Experience?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5082.0,5089.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/64","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. Lee Drago was real close to him, to the Center. In fact, did a lot of the research and worked with Herbert DeCosta to document the school - and of course, he wrote that book on the school. I guess it was published in the Seventies. Okay, well, several people criticized the book, that - the original one, it's in the archives on the shelves - so several people criticized the book, saying that Lee had gotten it wrong, and so Lee got sick and he called himself redoing it, but it was like he couldn't get it done, and he was aware of the criticism. So he asked me if I would take it on and do the revision of it and make the corrections. I think Cindy gave me some corrections and who else? I think Mrs. Whipper gave me some corrections. And so basically, I went through it and did all of the corrections, got a publisher for it, then rewrote the last chapter - Lee and I sort of wrote the last chapter for the book, to sort of update it. So that's why I took that one on, and again, that's part of why I decided to leave: that during the course of my, I'd say my last five years here, I essentially published three books. We did a book on Edwin Harleston. Have you seen that one?\n\nSpeaker 2: Yes.\n\nSpeaker 3: Okay. We did that book. So guess who helped pull that together? Basically, we did Lee's book. Then, of course, we did Mrs. Whipper’s book and guess who's doing all of this work? And I'm thinking, and I was just telling my staff at the museum that part of why I went back to Dallas was not so much to leave the Center - because I'm enjoying myself here at the Center - but to finish the book I was doing on Dallas and to earn promotion to full professor. You know, back in those days, I was concerned and caught up in that academic stuff about being a full professor.\n\nYou know, when I was chair - I was chair of the history department for six years, so while I was chair of the history department, Bernie got promoted to full professor. And again, we had this sort of natural competition. So I said, “Well, I got to get this book out so I can get promoted to full professor.” Because the hierarchy is you start out as an assistant, then you get promoted to associate with tenure – so, I was an associate with tenure, but I needed to go to the next level. But essentially, and the irony of it was, or it is now, that’s stopped being important to me, that, in terms of being promoted to full professor; that indeed, doing the public history became more important. And that, indeed, that's part of why I'd say I am who I am, that I love to do the public history, to work with the community, to collect archives, to do public programs, and to spread the information and teach people history. You get caught up in the academic side, it limits what you can do, and I don't want that limitation. So full professor, forget it. I should have stayed here.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5089.0,5328.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/65","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then how did you manage being the chair of the Department of History while working at Avery?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5328.0,5332.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/66","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. It was hard at first because I was splitting two places. So Judge Sanders and David said I could hire a director. The first person I hired was a friend of mine from Dallas. He stayed six months and was gone. So because his wife wanted him back in Dallas - she refused to come here, he refused to move here, so he had no choice but to go back. Then of course, I hired Karen, Dr. Chandler, and that was working for two years. And so she just took the pressure off me. She handled everything so well, and she was in Arts Administration, and so she was the right person to come in and do what she did, particularly in terms of starting the Charleston Jazz Initiative. But again, things didn't work out, and so I ended up having to come back. And again, it was sort of ironic that I ended up having to come back right at the point where we were sort of finishing up the renovation project, and I remember standing - being in the auditorium - when we were celebrating that we finished; Judge Sanders had left, so we had a new president, and then of course, Jim Clyburn was here, and we had just, I think Mayor Riley came in to celebrate our finishing the renovation project.\n\nAnd again, Karen should have been here, because she indeed sort of got us through it. I raised the money, but Karen got us through the actual work, even though I was involved at the beginning, as I said, working with the Institute and trying to figure out, well, what are our plans? What are we going to do in terms of, as I said, that auditorium and the piece on the floor? You know what? There's a circle right in the ceiling. Okay, all right, good. So most people won't know that we actually had planned to do this art piece on the floor, similar to the one at the Schaumburg Center by Houston Conwell, but we're going to put it in permanent and durable material, but it didn't work out. I went all the way to New York trying to track him down, and we couldn't get him to agree to come back and do it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5332.0,5488.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/67","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what was your vision for Avery when you began, and then when you left?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5488.0,5493.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/68","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nGood question. My vision for Avery when I began was to make us more accessible to the public. As I said, I came in and the expectations for the center were not that high from the community. They thought we were this little museum that didn't reach out to the public, and only open to certain people in the community - that we didn't do anything for anybody other than ourselves. Nobody came here. We were closed most of the time. So, I came in with this vision to make this truly a community center and to open the doors to the public that I increased the hours, I increased the hours. I opened us up at 10, no, actually, I opened us at nine. We were open from 9 to 5. When I first came here, we were open – they opened - at 1:30, and they closed at four or five.\n\nSo again, you heard what I said in the other room about how when I first came here at eight o'clock in the morning thinking I was going to get in, and the place didn't open until 1:30. So one of my goals was to increase our hours – because, basically, if a researcher comes here, he or she needs to be able to be in the place longer than three and a half hours. Come on! So, increase the hours. We open at nine, close at five. I opened us on Saturday. I think we opened at, was it 11 o'clock on Saturdays? Maybe we were 10 to 5 on Saturdays, too. So we opened six days instead of just four. And so that was one goal - to open us up and make us a real research center, indeed. Bring in the public. \n\nWhen I left – hmm. One of the things - and I think you have a question in there today - in effect, was to get more money, too, so that we could do more public programs. We had really become, we had been open, but we really couldn't afford a lot of the things that we were doing. David Cohen was always on my case about the budget. I busted the budget, I want to say, three years straight. That is, you know, the library, of course, has a much bigger budget, and so he would have money left over, so he would indeed then just transfer money to our budget at the end of the fiscal year to cover by going over by $10,000. But I actually sometimes went over deliberately, because I thought, well, I'm going to send a message that this budget that we have is not enough for the things that we need to do as a research center that wants to do public programming and be the only place in town that deals with the African American experience. And so I busted the budget deliberately a couple times just to send that message and so that they would increase our budget so that we could do more things, and again, collect, do more with our archives, do more public programming, and indeed be a community resource rather than just a place that just sat over here. Nobody came to it. Nobody even knew we were here. That was the other thing we needed to do. We had to do a lot of marketing. The Historic Charleston Foundation, let's see, the Preservation Society, they had a higher profile than we did, and they didn't even address African American history. So I thought we should be on the same level with these organizations in town rather than, again, being a little place over there that nobody comes to for the Blacks. So that was my vision, to raise our profile constantly, and we did things again. When I left, again, I was working 50, 60 hours and six, seven days a week. We started doing a program on Sunday called Jazz-ma-tazz – you know, Quentin Baxter, I think Lonnie Hamilton, even, came over, and they would come and jam on Saturday. Did you come to Jazz-ma-tazz? Yeah, we did Jazz-ma-tazz. A lot of fun to do the music and also have a little of refreshments, and so it's just nice. It made the place someplace you wanted to be rather than just this place where you just came over and you sat down and you did research.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5493.0,5790.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/69","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAs a follow-up - mentioned it before - what would you have done if you had an unlimited funding stream?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5790.0,5794.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/70","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWell, you've been hearing what I'm saying. Like I said, I would've upped the programming. I'd expanded that Avery Scholars program. I kept publishing a journal. We published the journal. We did five issues. They kept publishing. The journal expanded the Avery Scholars program, and we did Artists of the Month series. I forgot to mention that. Did you know about that? SPEAKER 4\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5794.0,5826.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/71","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5826.0,5826.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/72","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nYes. William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. Artists of the Month series, we started that. We had a, what did I call that program? We had a program where we would allow young scholars to come to use the archives. We'd put them up in the College's housing, and we'd give 'em, I think, $100 - no, we gave them more than that - a $250 stipend, to come and do research at the center. I would've definitely expanded that because the irony is, again, I've had people who I don't even remember say - and who have sent me books - that they, because they used our archives to publish them.\n\nOne of the consulting jobs that I took after I retired, you hear me saying “after I retired”, ha-ha, was with the Fort Worth Independent School District. So I go to the meeting, the first meeting with the school district Social Studies department, and there's this young Black guy there. He's a professor at Spelman, and he says, “I know who you are. You don't remember me, do you?” I said no. He says, “Well, I took advantage of that $250 scholarship that you gave a research fund that y'all gave, and I stayed in Charleston a week doing research.” He sent me a copy of the book, and I didn't even remember who he was because it had been so long. And I've had a couple other people that I've seen, ASALH meetings who've come. But again, so I would've expected to continue to do those type of programs to bring people to Avery and, indeed, to write - to reach out to the community. Just think where the Scholars program would be now, because basically with funding, we could have hit every elementary school in the city - on the island here - well, not the island, the Peninsula.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5826.0,5948.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/73","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what were some of your greatest accomplishments and challenges?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5948.0,5953.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/74","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nThe greatest accomplishment? You know what the first one is, right?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5953.0,5957.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/75","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nRaising the money?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5957.0,5959.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/76","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nRaising the money, and finishing the building. Okay. I'd have to say that that dwarfs everything else. We're sitting in this room that, when I first came here, had a bare wood floor, nothing but the brick - you could see the brick - no heating or air conditioning. So getting that done, I felt, in fact, that sort of a part of why I went to the History department. I felt that I've done the major thing. I've raised the money and got the building finished. So that's why I decided to go ahead and do the history department after they asked me to do it. Then I'd say the second thing would probably be the statewide study that we did of the teaching of African American history in South Carolina's public schools. That was a good project. It got us out into the state and people came to know who we were and who we were at that time and what the Center could do. And we got a nice grant from the State to do that project.\n\nMy biggest problems, of course, I'd have to say was staffing. I am not a taskmaster, I just asked that people do their job. But there was a culture when I came that disappointed me and frustrated me. You heard a couple of the stories already, how I had to literally take the brochure and redo it by myself, when somebody claimed it was theirs. Then the fact that there was no vision, either, sometimes that here we were, as I said, when I first got here, with an old TV with no knobs on it, that you had to plug it in to turn it on and unplug it to turn it off, and this old VHS player, the kind where you top loaded it, and it wouldn't work half the time, and this was the image that we were presenting to the public. And so it's like the staff at that time didn't get it. That, oh, the other thing: I don't like working in filth, in dirt.\n\nTwo things. My son and I actually came in here - and I don't know why we weren't getting regular cleaning - my son and I actually came in and cleaned the carpets on the second floor. Steam cleaned 'em. That stairwell leading out the back door, I guess it hadn't been cleaned in five years because the railing just filthy. So we cleaned at the stairs, filthy. We mopped and cleaned as much as we could. The carpet in the main office in front of that little counter - they used to have the coffee there - and the coffee had been spilt. And so the coffee, there's a coffee stain, and so my son and I, we had to actually shampoo that area to get all the coffee stains out of the carpet. And so we actually, not only did we do the hallway when we steam clean, we rented a steam cleaner, but we did the offices on a Sunday, the two of us.\n\nSo again, I was frustrated that they would walk around in this dirty carpets and we were bringing people in to see the new tours, and the place was just filthy, and I just couldn't live with it. And then, as I said, I didn't know how to go about to get the College to do it because, plus, as I said, the staff didn't seem to care at that time. So that made me real frustrated. So I thought, “Well, let me at least show, illustrate, what needs to be done to move Avery to a different level and not be this second-class place, where we got these old men sitting in the office at a table who were sexually harassing the young women that were working as interns, and jiving all day.” So I think I moved is forward.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=5959.0,6244.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/77","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd is there an exhibit and program that stands out to you during your tenure?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6244.0,6253.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/78","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nI actually thought about this in advance, and I’d have to say, I don't even know what to call it - well, I'm not going to use that one. I'll say the Artists of the Month series was probably, I think, one of the best things that we did, because you had all these local artists here, but they had no venue to show their work. The Gibbes was not going to show their work. The Charleston Museum was not going to show their work. You know, they'll do Jonathan Green, but they’re not gonna do - weren't going to do Sonia Shekar, who else? Some of the other people they didn't want to do - Ben Jones. Let's see.... Anyway, so we showed some of these local people. Then the best thing that we did, we bought a piece of their work, and I think it's still in the collection here at the Avery Center. So I think just by reaching out and working with these local artists, we did something I think that was important - that probably had never been done before - where we showed the work of local artists, specifically, down there in the changing gallery. We did a couple up here, but mostly we used the changing gallery to do local artists.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6253.0,6341.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/79","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what do you think is the under-told aspect of the Avery Research Center?\n\nSpeaker 3: Under-told?\n\nSpeaker 2: Something that's not told enough about the history of the Avery Research Center?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6341.0,6351.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/80","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nI think about the fact that we were so involved in the community, and that we tried to do so much in terms of spreading African American history. I think that hasn't been told at all. That they see the Center today and - no criticism, but they don't know how involved it used to be in the community; that indeed we were the place that for meetings, for programs, and just in general, people would bring stuff to us. Again, like, that statewide study of the teaching of African American history, they indeed thought that Avery was the place that things got done, okay? Mrs. Whipper and her book, we got that done. So that's under-told. I don't think people have realized the potential that the Center still has, based on what it used to do in the past. Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6351.0,6423.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/81","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then what do you want visitors leave with after visiting the Avery Research Center?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6423.0,6430.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/82","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nExplain that. Say that again.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6430.0,6431.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/83","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nWhat do you want visitors to leave after they've come to visit the Avery?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6431.0,6435.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/84","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\n“Do you want them to leave?”\n\nSpeaker 2: Yeah.\n\nSpeaker 3: That used to be, I think we at one point did a survey to see the perception that people had or what they learned once they came and went through the building. So one, what we used to hope that they learned was about the history of African Americans in the low country. That was sort of our focus. We had the Gullah Geechee culture exhibit. Is that still downstairs in the nook? We used to have sweetgrass baskets down there, the Gullah Bible - oh, by the way, that's another one of our achievements: we helped to get the Gullah Bible published.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6435.0,6480.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/85","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nWe have that more on the second floor now.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6480.0,6482.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/86","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. That’s what I meant. \n\nSpeaker 3: I  meant on the second floor in the nook, right outside the main office.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6482.0,6486.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/87","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER  2\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6486.0,6487.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/88","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nIt's still there. Okay, okay. And then of course, we want them to know about the history of Avery Normal Institute, which I think was unique. That this was, you know, a school. In fact, that was part of the story that we told when we would do the tours: that Avery was started in that time when Black leadership wanted African Americans only to become carpenters and bricklayers, and people who worked with their hands, and because the belief was we didn't have the aptitude and the mental capacity to study liberal arts and to be teachers and to be professionals. So that was one of the stories that, in fact - that Lee Drago's book tells that story too about the lack of the belief that African Americans lack the aptitude to become professionals. So Avery was the counter to that. So we want people to understand that we fit directly into the history of African American education in this country. Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6487.0,6566.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/89","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd what were some items that were sold in the Avery gift shop?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6566.0,6569.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/90","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay, the Gullah Bible. Okay. We sold Lee Drago's book. We, of course, started selling Mrs. Whipper’s book.... Hmm, I'm trying to think. I think we sold some t-shirts at one time. The main thing was that we sold a lot of books, because that was the main thing that people bought from us - Lee's book in particular. We sold a lot of those, and we sold some cards. Oh, we did some mock slave badges. Have you seen those? SPEAKER 4\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6569.0,6616.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/91","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6616.0,6616.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/92","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nYes. William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. Then we sold the cards with the pictures of the badges that we bought from the Walter Pantovic collection and what else were sold. That's about all I can think of right now. But we had some nice items that people could buy. Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6616.0,6636.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/93","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd that what have you done since leaving the Avery Research Center?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6636.0,6639.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/94","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nWorked! Ha-ha. No, I'm kidding. Let's see. You heard me say I went back to Dallas because I actually sort of needed to be there to finish this book on the history of African Americans in Dallas. So I'm going to just tell you the whole story. I get back to Dallas and I've made up my mind: I'm done with museum work. I actually stayed away from the African American Museum for three years. The director tried to draw me back in by putting me on the schedule to do a lecture on at the museum on Juneteenth. He didn't tell me, so I didn't show up. So I didn't even know about it until I ran into a friend. Then he said, “How come you didn't show up for that lecture was supposed to be due on June 19th?” And I said, “What lecture on June 19th?” He said, “Well, you were on the schedule and I went looking to see you, and you weren't there, and you didn't even show up.” I said, “I didn't know anything about it.” So he stopped doing that. \n\nSo, in 2011, there's a community organization. There's sort of like the Institute in Dallas. They call themselves the African American Education Archives and History Program. So they asked me to help them with an oral history project. So I didn't know they were going to do it through the museum. So I got drawn back to the museum because I helped to train the people to do oral histories through that project. I helped them write a grant - we got a grant of $20,000 from the Texas Committee for the Humanities to do this oral history project with African Americans in Dallas County who had participated in the Civil Rights Movement. We bought a camera and started the interviews. We brought in a specialist - I did some of the training, and we brought in a specialist who ran an oral history program at Baylor University in Waco, so he did some of the training. So they started, they identified about 50 people that they were going to interview. They started - I'm on my way to Baton Rouge, and I get a phone call from one of the persons I trained to do the oral histories. He couldn't work the camera. I said, “Wait a minute.” I said, “All you got to do is push this button on the back to start the camera to do the oral history.” Well, somehow or another, he pushed the wrong button because the camera also took pictures in addition to recording. So I get back and I look at what he did, and it's a series of pictures on the picture, not a recording. So I say, “Oh my God, he blew that one.” Then they go to the next interviewee and I get a call: “We don't have anybody who's available to do this interview.”\n\nSo I was living in Arlington at the time, so again, that's part of why I wasn't at the museum, because I wasn't going to be commuting back and forth from Arlington to Dallas. Heck, it was a drive, and particularly in the bad times of day - rush hour. So I go, I do it. Next thing I know, I'm doing the third one, I'm doing the fourth one, I'm doing the fifth one. Then I end up doing 35 of these interviews except for the, I think my son did one, and then another one of the educators did one because he wanted to interview the former superintendent who was there when they desegregated the public schools. So I did 35 interviews, and this is in 2011, and the project turns out quite well. So I was encouraged. We did most of the interviews between August and October. Then, in December, one of our videographers put together a little piece to show clips from the interviews, and the people showed up to see themselves, and it went very well.\n\nSo I'm still not gung-ho about going to the museum. And then I had taken on another job as chair of the history department at UTA, and again, I served as chair from basically 2011 to 2016, and I said, I'm done. I'm going to finish this book. I retired - no, no, I was supposed to retire - again, June 30th, 2016 was my retirement date. Well, while I'm there, when I came here again, I'm going to have to take you back a little bit. I came here in ‘94 shock people that I left from Dallas, particularly leaving the museum. The museum had just opened this brand new building - November, 1993 -and I'm unofficial staff volunteer. So I come here in ‘94.\n\nIn ‘95, they start trying to get me back to Dallas. Okay. The director of the museum said that the provost at UTA had come to him and said, I'll give you whatever you need to get Marvin back to Dallas. So they hire a good friend of mine as provost at UTA, Dr. George Wright. We actually, did we bring George here? No, I was in Dallas. Dr. George Wright, good friend. He became provost. So he lures me back for the interview, and I say to him, I had had an experience where the white folks in the history department were pissed off because the dean had tried to hire a sister to beef up the university's minority representation on the faculty, and they had went ballistic. And I said, well, I'm not coming back to any of this because if you're going to pay me X, because he gave me this big salary figure.\n\nI said, “If you're going to pay me that, they'll be trying to kill me, and mad at me the whole time that I'm here ‘cause I make more money than they do.” And he said, “Well, here's what I'm going to do. Write me a proposal for a center for African American Studies. I'll make you the director of that. And that way that gets you out of the department. You can still teach history, but you'll be mainly the director of the Center, and then that'll justify the $100,000 I'm going to pay you to come back.” So I write the proposal. They actually publish it in the newspaper for the university, but in the end, my wife says, “We're not going back.” So I said, “Thank you. We're not going back.” I stay here. We'd only been here a year, two years. Anyway, at that time. So when I go back, they found out I was coming back in 2008. And so the brother who was head of the Minority Student Affairs area sends me this proposal. He says, “When you come back, we want you to help us get the Center for African American Studies.\n\nAgain, I go back in 2008, we get the audience with the President. Of course. Here's the thing: the proposal he sent me was my proposal then what I had written in 1996. So I laughed. I said, “Damn, they still got this.” So I go back, we don't get an audience with the president for the proposal until 2011. He accepts it, funds it for three years. So I serve on the search committee. We get a director for it. I'm done. Well, I get ready to retire. In June of 2016, I get a call from the provost. She says, “Do you know that the director of the Center for African American Study is leaving?” I said, “Oh, yeah.” She says, “Yeah, who do you think we can get to replace her? “And so I give her some names, and so then she calls me back. She says, “I heard you're the best person to direct the Center of African American Studies.” I said, “No, I am not. I'm retiring June 30th.” She said, “Well, what do I have to do to keep you, to make you interim a director of the center?” So she offers me this big salary, and I said, “This time I'm going to take it.”\n\nSo I take it on and at the search committee at the same time so that I can get this done and be out of there. My goal still is December then 2016 to stop working. I go there and there's not enough money. They've lost some of the money if I don't know how that happened. So I make a proposal to the provost for $30,000. I said, “For me to stay, I need this extra $30,000 in the budget so that we can do X number of programs,” and so on and so on. And she agrees to it. The weekend, the Friday before Memorial Labor Day – again, it’s September. School has just started. So I go in next Tuesday, because we're off Monday for Labor Day. I go in the next Tuesday, and the dean says to me, “Do you know the provost quit and cleaned out her office?” I said, “What?” I mean, they said, “She just literally left. She had a disagreement with the program, with the president. She's gone. Her office is clean.” So I'm thinking, “Are you kidding me? I done just negotiated with this woman for $30,000, now she's gone.” So I actually had to go back. It took another six weeks to get that $30,000. Well, the good thing was she was also chairing the search committee for the new director for the center. So the new provost made me the chair. I said, “I know I'm going to get this done now so that I can this get out of here”. By December, we interview - we bring five people to the campus. We get through all the interviews in November, and the president still hasn't made a decision about the - we recommended three candidates - candidates that we recommended. He said he didn't want them ranked because he just wanted to pick from what we offered.\n\nSo I said, “Oh my goodness, this is going to be bad. He's going to try to get somebody who can't get here until next September or next August, and I'm not going to be here until next August.” And so he picked the person that was already on campus, and I remember thinking to myself when he announced it that I was like the brother in the movie Amistad. I don't know if you saw that movie Amistad, where the brother says, “Make us free! Make us free!” I said, “Oh, my goodness. They have made me free, as of December 31st!” So I'm gone December 31st, 2016, and I'm home every day taking it easy, and then my two of my students send an RFP to do some work with the Fort Worth School District, and I said, “I ain't interested in this.” I delete it from my email. Then I get it a third time from a colleague at TCU, and I said, “What are they trying to do? They know I'm retired.” So I look at it and I said, “Okay, okay. I'm going to send them a bad proposal so that at least I can say to my former students and to my colleagues. ‘Well, I sent them a proposal and they turned it down.’”\n\nThen I sent it in late. I was actually coming here to Charleston the first week of February. I don't know. I don't remember what I was coming. But first week of February, 2017, the proposal was due on that Friday. Now, I caught my plane to Charleston on that Thursday. I put the proposal in – sent it by Federal Express – thinking it ain't going to get there in time anyway. On that Thursday, well, it got there on time. I get called in for an interview. I get there to this interview, and it's one of my former students on the interview panel who was in the history program at UTA. The Director of Social Studies had taken a workshop from me on African American history. So then I get picked, but they also picked a brother who had come here and who recognized me then at one of the first meeting for having given him the fellowship to come here to do research. So he and I worked together on that project for three years.\n\nSo I upgraded the curriculum, adding more African and African American history content to social studies, language arts, and history for the Fort Worth School districts and their three-year project. I wrote the curriculum, and then I taught the teachers how to teach it. Okay. So that was three years, I guess this was 2020. Then I get a call from a sister I knew who was working with the Dallas Independent School District saying that they're creating a Black History course, and Dallas, now, had had a Black History course since 1935. There's an article on it in the Journal of Negro History about them, how they taught their Negro History course back in 1935 in Dallas. So I'm thinking, “What in the world's going on? They don't have a Black History class now?” Apparently, they had done that in many institutions. Once the pressure came off, they stopped teaching Black history.\n\nSo I didn't plan to get involved with this. I said, “Well, I'm going to send you my two syllabi for the course.” I used to teach the courses I used to teach at UTA. I sent 'em to her. A month goes by. Then my friend Robert, who was the director here, Robert Edison, he calls me and says, “Man, can you come to this meeting? They're going to discuss designing and developing this Black History course for the Dallas Independent School District.” So I called him and he came here for me. That's the kind of friends we are. So I go, because he called me. I go to this meeting, and they're still wrestling with trying to meet the state requirements for the course. Cause they had to have certain content, and then the state didn't have any requirements because the state had never taught a Black history course. Can you believe that? The state of Texas had never implemented a Black history course. So I worked with them for six weeks to get it together.\n\nActually, this isn't 2020 when that happened. This is 2019. So we have to submit it to the State Board of Education, some curriculum committee, for approval. I drive all the way to Austin and testify for the course, and they adopt it. So then of course, two years later, three years later, the governor tries to get rid of it. But we also, then, taught in 2020 - we started training the teachers and showing them how to teach Black history at the high school level. So then I get called back to the museum, officially, in 2020. The director told me, “Well, he was in bad health. He had a heart attack. Prostate cancer. He's on a cane.” He said, “Would you come in and help?” This is during COVID -  just before COVID. February, 2020. So I said, and I agreed to come in to help me. He said, “Coach, I need to retire. I just need you to be here until December, 2020, when I'm going to retire.”\n\nCOVID hits in March, and I think I hit the jackpot because I don't have to go in. Everything shuts down. I said, well, I ain't even got to go in there. I write an article that the Texas State Historical Association. During that period, from March to May, I write this on nice article. I said, “I'm on my way to getting this book done.” Well, in May, the museum gets a grant from the city, or an allocation from the city, to do renovations in the building. So guess who has to go in and supervise the renovations? I had to hire five people to work with me to move stuff around so that the construction company; I was surprised the construction company wanted to come out and do that work during COVID. So we get it done. We reopen the Center, I guess in September of 2020, and I ended up being in there another two years rather than December, 2020. So that's what I've been doing since I left Avery.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=6639.0,7754.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/95","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAlright, and then before I ask my final question, is there anything you would like to include that wasn't touched on or talked about, from your time at Avery?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=7754.0,7763.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/96","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. I actually did think of about a couple things that I didn't mention, but they've sort of gotten lost in the mix now. What was those two things that I thought was important that we did here? It takes a moment. See, when you get old as I am, the memories come and they come and they go. I've mentioned some of the high points: the Avery Scholars program, the work with the National Park Service, the statewide study working with the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission. Oh, we had an artist in residence. Do you remember? Do y'all have the record of that? I think he was from Nigeria. DaNia Childress\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=7763.0,7831.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/97","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nYes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=7831.0,7831.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/98","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nYes. William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. He came and did some work with us. In fact, he worked down in the basement before it was finished. He could literally do what he wanted to do in terms of the painting and designing work that he did. Balaji Campbell, you remember, did you know about him too? \n\nSpeaker 2: Yes. \n\nSpeaker 3: Okay. And the problems we had with him?\n\nSpeaker 2: Not the problems. \n\nSpeaker 3: Oh my goodness. Balaji was going to, I guess, the University of Rhode Island or Rhode Island College - didn't have a Green Card. So when we hired him for, we had a visiting professorship, and when we worked with, oh, well, that's a good story. We worked with the Gibbes and the Boule to bring the Walter Evans art collection here. Okay. It was at the Gibbes. Of course, it's such a big collection we obviously didn't have the space here for it. It was one of the best African-American art collections in the country. So the Boule co-sponsored it. They put up $10,000, which was really special because Leonard Davis, you know that name?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=7831.0,7917.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/99","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nNo.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=7917.0,7918.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/100","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. Leonard Davis, a member of the Boule, his uncle, his uncle Wendell Cox. Wendell Cox, the one, Wendell Cox is the one who gave us the a hundred thousand dollars. And so Leonard Davis is his nephew. So Leonard Davis was doing a summer fall where summer winter thing, he would be in Detroit during the summer, and then he'd be here in the fall, worked with Larry Ferguson, then his dentist office. So Leonard Davis brought the Walter Evans collection to the Boule, and of course, they asked if Avy would participate, and the director of the Gibbes at that time, whose name I don't remember, agreed to do it. And so the Bole agreed to do it. I went out of town and Mr. Bole meeting, and they voted not to do it. So I had to come back and just act like a fool in the meeting, telling them that y'all are driving all these Cadillacs and Lexuses and BMWs, and you can't give $200? Or something like that. It was a small amount when you get right down to it to fund this exhibition that was going to be at the Gibbes. And so they re-voted and agreed to do the $10,000.\n\nAnd so it was a big event. We had a nice reception at the Gibbes. I think they probably had never had that many Black people at the Gibbes Museum of Art. And of course, it was a Charleston affair, you know. We were tuxes and ties - black-tie. Like I said, that's one of the things that Charleston just fascinated me. From Thanksgiving or the day before, even before Thanksgiving to January 1st, just about five or six black-tie events: Boule, Athenians, Cues. Then of course, the irony is capped with this dinner that they were, this dance that they did for the alumni of, what's the name of the high school – the Black high school? SPEAKER 4\n\nBurke.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=7918.0,8069.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/101","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nBurke.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8069.0,8069.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/102","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"SPEAKER 4\n\nBurke. William Marvin Dulaney\n\nBurke. Yeah. The Burke alumni would do this dance either New Year's Eve, was it New Year's Eve or New Year's Day? So it starts the Eve before Thanksgiving. It runs all the way to New Year's Day. All these events except, and all of 'em were black-tie except, for the Burke High School alumni party. That used to just fascinate me, that those type of things, those type of parties and events would go on. And Leonard Davis, I think would come back for that also. And again, the Boule, that's their thing: black-tie events. They'd have two events every year. They do this fall, the thing in December. Then they do something for the wives in February. And of course, I called them on that, that we're spending all this money, $20,000 in these hotels downtown for these events. And I said, we should be giving this money for scholarships. So finally, they actually developed a scholarship program, and we actually did one of the programs, oh, actually there's several of the programs here at Avery where they gave out the scholarships to deserving students. So just had to mention that we brought the Walter Evans collection in conjunction with the Boule.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8069.0,8161.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/103","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd then, this is my final question.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8161.0,8163.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/104","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8163.0,8164.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/105","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nThe Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture recently received funding from the Mellon Foundation in recognition of the 160th anniversary of the Avery Normal Institute, and the 40th anniversary of the Avery Research Center, under the goal of recognizing the institution's liberatory legacy. In your opinion, how would you describe the liberatory legacy of Avery, and how can we continue to tell the history of the Avery Normal Institute in the Lowcountry?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8164.0,8190.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/106","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay, good. We have been very liberatory in the sense of we've been providing information, particularly on Black history and Black art and the Black experience to the community, which I think history and knowledge itself is liberating. So we've been the main major institution, before the International Museum, that was doing that in terms of presenting and telling the story of African Americans in Charleston. And I think we've been very, very successful in doing that. We can continue to do it by indeed, keeping up with the times. Now, you heard me mention that now you don't have to go through a library in many places. In many cases, you don't even have to come to the archives. You can find a lot of the information online. So I think Avery probably needs to upgrade its online presence. I've looked at the Facebook page and I've looked at the website, I think - and we're trying to do this at the African American Museum - that we African American institutions like Avery and the African American Museum, we need to do things like blogs.\n\nI understand Georgette told me she had a blog, or Avery has a blog. So we need to indeed have a greater online presence in terms of telling our story. We need to do documentaries. One of the things I like about Skip Gates: every year he does a different documentary that tells our story, and for most people who are not going to the library, who are not coming here. So if we can develop some type of educational series, I think that would help us to continue to be the place that provides liberatory information to the public and to the community.\n\nAnd then we got to reach the social media that young people use. They don't do Facebook anywhere, from what I understand. They do TikTok and all this other stuff, which I don't know anything about. So I think we need to reach those platforms in order to get to storytell. I, frankly, I don't even know how to do that. I see the TikTok where they're primarily presenting these little short videos, which I think most of 'em are just silly, and I can't watch 'em and I won't watch 'em. But I think we need to figure out a way how to make those videos on TikTok and those other platforms educational, so that way we continue to tell our story and the new platforms and in new formats. Yeah. Okay?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8190.0,8375.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/107","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nOkay. Thank you so much for your time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8375.0,8389.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/108","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nSure, sure. Yeah. But are you still recording? I would like...\n\nSpeaker 4: The camera's actually still...I can turn this back on, too.\n\nSpeaker 3:  Okay. I would like, indeed, then since you mentioned it. We had an interesting relationship in terms of Avery's relationship with ASALH. As I said, I came here and Bernie Powers and Alpha Ba, we started the branch here in, I guess in 1995, and we started doing the Carter g Woodson luncheon with the mats down in the auditorium. So we did that every year for at least 10 years, a Carter g Woodson to kick off Black History Month here at Avery. So after the 96, no, before the 96 conference, we published at least two versions of the Avery review. So again, in part of my tenure, you got to publish. You know - “publish or perish”. So I had a essay that was supposed to be published in the Journal of African-American History, but they couldn't get it out.\n\nIt was at Morehouse edited by Alton Hornsby, and he couldn't get it out. So I went to the spring meeting of the association, in Washington DC, in 1996 with an offer. I got David Cohen and the provost to agree to put up $10,000 so that we could publish the Journal of African-American History. Well, they told me, “No way.” They said Carter G. Woodson said that he never wanted the journal to be at a white institution. So they looked at us - since Avery is part of the College of Charleston - as being a white institution. So indeed they just pushed us aside and said, “No, we ain't going to let you do it,” and they were nasty about it too. So I left there just a little bit angry that here we are offering to do this, because they couldn't get it out. In fact, part of the lawsuit against me was about the journal, but that's another story.\n\nI don't want to go too deep in that. But so they come here in September of 1996 with the conference, and as I said, we got it covered. As I said, the word got out that they had the best conference ever in Charleston, that Charleston put on a good show. They laughed about. One thing, I had a relationship with the former police chief. Oh my goodness, I've forgotten his name. The first Black police chief here. \n\nSpeaker 4: You talking about the Jewish guy? \n\nSpeaker 3: Yes. Jewish black guy. Reuben Greenberg. Greenberg, Reuben Greenberg. I had a relationship with him. They were doing this “weed and seed” project around the country. He had bought these buses with “Charleston Police Department” written on the side of them. So he let us use their buses for the tour and to get people back and forth to places in here in Charleston from the hotel to over example. So the word I got back was, “Yah, we didn't mind riding in those police buses, but people thought we were convicts and criminals going to jail, riding in the Charleston police buses.” So again, very, very successful. And as I said, we kept the branch going out of here. I went back to Dallas and we had actually tried to start a branch in Dallas in 1990. I actually found the letter I had written a asking for information on how to start a branch in Dallas. Then of course, I came here and they never followed through. So when I went back, I decided to follow through, particularly after I became the chair of the history department; I could use some of the resources from the history department to support it. That's another story.\n\nLet's see. When I went back to UTA - and I'm going to come back to Al in a minute, they were going through some financial crisis. They took our phones out of our offices. They took our trash cans out of our offices. They made us pay for copies - you could only make 50 copies a month on the department copiers. And so it was just crazy in terms of the way they were cutting the budget to make ends meet. So I go back at the same time that they vying to become a Research 1 university. Y’all understand? Research 1: they were trying to be like Harvard and Columbia, Yale, and, I guess the College of Charleston, I believe, is also a Research 1. We were - the UTA had -started out as a community college, no dormitories. But when I got back, they had built dormitories. They had changed the whole culture of the campus.\n\nI remember I was sitting in my office on a Friday, the first year I was back, I hear this noise, this drumbeat. I said, “What in the world is that on a Friday afternoon?” So I'm thinking, “What in the world is that?” Well, I had to go find it. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I go over to near the student center and the Black Greeks are outside, stepping – you know, with deep bass drum beat. I'd never seen that on that campus before because normally, since UTA when I was there the first time around, was a commuter campus; campus would be dead after one o'clock, there'd be nobody there, and then, especially on a Friday. So here are students, still on campus on a Friday evening stepping, playing loud music on campus, like a normal campus, like an HBCU. So I was impressed. So once I became chair of the history department, though, I came in with this sort of austerity attitude because as I said, they taking the trash cans, they're taking the phones.\n\nThe joke became, since we were trying to be Research 1, that we were going to get the phone call - they're telling us that we were Research 1 - but nobody's going to answer the phone. Nobody had a phone in their office. So they would say, then, “We tried to call y'all, but nobody answered the phones.” So anyway, I become chair of the history department, and lo and behold, I came to realize I couldn't figure out what the previous chair had been doing. We were doing online courses. This is the beginning of online courses, Zoom and all of that stuff, and that generated an extra $20,000 a semester. So I'm thinking, “What is it? He had cut the staff,” I said, “What, wasn't he using this $20,000?” So guess who started using it in the community? Supporting, sending money to ASALH, paying student memberships, taking students to the conferences, and so on.\n\n$20,000 a semester, no strings attached, based on our doing online courses. In fact, UTA grew, then, to over 50,000 students, because we had this online component. Well, we had students in China, we had students in Saudi Arabia, because we could do online courses. So great. So I came at the right time because I spent that money. I decorated the office, I bought new desks, I bought new computers for everybody. And the joke used to be that since travel money was so tight that if you were given a paper, they'd give you 50% of your expenses, which still wasn't encouraging. Or if you were chairing a session at a conference, they'd give you 25%. Then if you were just going to be a comet, they'd only give you 10% of the expenses. So guess what? I had $20,000 a semester. I paid 100% for people to go to conferences to do research, travel.\n\nSo I just turned everything around by coming in and moving, using the money. I don't know why the previous chair didn't use the money. And again, we could have put phones back at everybody's office, but by that time, everybody had cell phones anyway, so it didn't really matter, but it just mind blowing that he didn't use the money in a way that would benefit the department and benefit our students. So I actually helped to start the ASALH branch. Anyway, we were at a meeting at the museum of our branch, and we were trying to figure out a name for it. Okay? I proposed Antonio Maceo Smith, who was the president, a civil rights leader; Juanita Craft, another civil rights leader;  big names. And so somebody put my name up and I said, “No, no. Absolutely not.” And so would you believe they put it to a vote? I voted against; it won by two votes, and I was embarrassed because I had people at the National - other members across the country - talking about, “How the hell do you have a branch named after you?” I said, “Well, I don't know. I voted against it, but I have to live with it.” So anyway, that's my story about ASALH, in spite of everything. And as I said, I was president for three years, and my last year I had this lawsuit that I had to deal with. So that's part of why I've suppressed all of it. Changed my phone number and everything, so they can't call me.\n\nBut Avery, again, started the ASALH branch right here in this building. And as I said, we did the Carter G. Woodson Luncheon 10 years in a row, starting that out as something that Avery could sponsor and support, and again, helped another organization grow. I said, again, 100 Black Men was here, the associate. I know the story I wanted to tell when I got here. You remember Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad in 1994 were going around the country, calling out the Jews about their involvement in the slave trade. Okay, so some Jews and African Americans in Washington, DC - no, Boston - in Boston, started an organization called Operation Understanding, where they brought Jewish students and African American students together to a discussion, and also to travel around the country to learn each other's history again, to counter what Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad was doing. So believe it or not, we started one here, started right here at Avery, and I was on the board for, I got off of the board, and I stopped having them meet here, because one of the members - now we're about understanding, working together. One of the women members came to me, upset because her daughter was dating a Black guy, and just wanted me to have sympathy because she didn't like what was going on. And she said something to the effect that “You ought to stay, we ought to stay with our own kind.” And I said, “I'll be damned. Here we are in this situation where we're actually trying to get these kids to work together, and you are on the Board saying this kind of stuff.” And to say it to me like I'm supposed to be understanding? That I'm going to tell the brother, “Stop dating that Jewish girl”? I said “Hell no.” So I just stopped. I said, “I'm done. Y'all can't meet here anymore either.” Anyway, one of the great things though, the Operation Understanding group from Boston came here in ‘94 and toured the city. Went to the plantations: Middleton, Drayton...\n\nThey then went back and they wrote a letter to the Charleston Post and Courier, and they said that while they were at those two plantations, they never mentioned slavery! That, indeed, they had called the people that had been enslaved there “servants”. These students were, you know, smart enough to know that the people who worked on those plantations were not servants. So they wrote a letter to the editor of the Post and Courier. Post and Courier published it. And so then the - let's see, what's his name? Charles Duell. What was the other guy? Charles Duell was the head of Middleton Place, and I can't think of the other guy who was head of Drayton. They were embarrassed. They had egg on their face. So they called me and Bernie. And so Bernie and I went out to work with them to try to clean up their presentations so that they indeed would tell the truth about those plantations, that indeed they were slave labor camps. Come on!\n\nAnd so I know at Drayton, they did a nice little cabin, okay? And then they put the names up of all the people who had been enslaved there. And then I think Charles Duell at the Middleton started having an annual reunion of some of the people's descendants of the people who had been enslaved there. So I think Bernie and I helped bring them into the 21st century and stop them from telling these lies about what those plantations were about. Cause they would talk about the furniture and the architecture and all this stuff, and not talk about the people who did all the work. Oh, then the last thing was - then I'm going to shut up now - the last thing was, we indeed had to - Bernie and I had to - reeducate the tour guides. They wouldn't talk about our being here either. And I think the thing that shocked me when I first got here was there was nothing - literally, no monuments, no memorials - about Black people in Charleston.\n\nWe had been the majority of the population. That's part of why I came here. I knew all the history was just so prevalent and strong that you walk down the streets, the Denmark Vesey house down the street and so on. So I was shocked that there was not a single monument or memorial in the city, other than the, I think they did start placing those little memorials through the MOJA Festival in various places, but you couldn't even see 'em. Did you know that there's a memorial in front of  what was the Holiday Inn at the corner of Meeting Street and Calhoun? There's a little memorial there - hidden by the hedges now, so you don't even see it. Yeah. Of course. They eventually have done the one to Robert Smalls. To J. Waties Waring, but before that, nothing. Guess who did the first memorial to Black folks in here? In this city? Who? Who did that? DaNia Childress\n\nAvery?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=8389.0,9392.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/109","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAvery?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=9392.0,9392.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/110","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAvery? William Marvin Dulaney\n\nYes, we did! That memorial behind the library was the first one that was done to recognize the city's black history. And again, I had to use some accommodations - tax funds - to get that one done. And in fact, it was a big affair. The mayor came out; George Benson came out and spoke. Bernie wrote a nice little piece, and so it was a really nice affair when we did the memorial for the cemeteries behind the library. Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=9392.0,9426.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/111","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nAnd this is my final question. William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=9426.0,9428.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/112","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=9428.0,9428.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/113","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. DaNia Childress\n\nCan you talk about the work of Oliver Smalls?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=9428.0,9431.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/114","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nOkay. I hired Oliver - well, Oliver was primarily in the library and the archives, that's where he worked. But he had had an association with Avery for a long time, even before I got here - I think he had actually worked with Myrtle. Then when Myrtle retired and went on that leave, he actually became Interim Director - did a decent job. He kept the place open. They kept doing some programs; not enough, but Oliver had a second job, and so he would get out of here at four o'clock, and of course he'd come in in the morning, early in the morning, to make up for leaving before five. But he'd get out of here and you didn't see him until the next day because he had a second job. But he'd done some great things. I say that because indeed, I can sort of cite some of the things.\n\nHe put us on the College's phone system. For example, we had a 727 phone number when I first got here: 727-2009. I am surprised I remember that number. Well, with Oliver, we got on the 953 system with the College. He got the - what are they called? The wire, extended so that we also could access the Internet through the College's system. He got us, and again, this is important, he made sure that the housekeepers from campus came here twice a week to clean up. We didn't have that before. That's why my son and I were in here steam cleaning the carpets and cleaning down that back stairwell, because indeed, we didn't get that type of service from the campus. See, Oliver developed some of the - well, that card that's in the gift shop, I saw it out on the table with the two badges on it - Oliver had that put together. But Oliver was sort of the building manager when I first came. I hired him. David gave me a new line, and so I used that to bring in Oliver to sort of help me out. Plus, he knew everybody, so it was good to have him onboard, working on the behalf of the Center. Plus he knew all the people on campus, and he could indeed talk to them, to get us some tables and chairs and just all these little things that you don't think about, but that's important. So Oliver did a great job. Yeah, I was really pleased with bringing him in to work as our building manager at that time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=9431.0,9610.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/115","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"DaNia Childress\n\nThank you.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=9610.0,9611.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837/transcript/94364/annotation/116","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"William Marvin Dulaney\n\nYes, you're welcome. And I've talked to y'all too much, huh?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3724/collection_resources/172906/file/311837#t=9611.0,9618.0"}]}]}]}