Travis Jackson interview
Title
Creator
Publisher
Date Created
2014-09-20
Contributor
McAdam, Eileen, interviewer
Format
Rights Holder
New City Library
Original Format
mp3
Duration
46 minutes, 20 seconds
Transcription
EILEEN: This is Eileen McAdam it is September 20th 2014. I'm at New City Library and I'm in the Cube. If you could introduce yourself and tell us where and when you were born. If you don't mind
0:17
TRAVIS: Sure I'm Travis Jackson. My son is also Travis Jackson. I use the middle initial E and he's a W. I was born in the old good Samaritan Hospital and in Suffern on Orange Avenue in Suffern, April 29, 1934. So those of you who are mathematicians can figure out
that I'm now 80 years old.
0:39
EILEEN: And what brought your family to this area?
0:44
TRAVIS: My dad was the son of a ironworker who moved across from New Jersey into New York State in Hillburn to work in the iron industry there. And my mom was educated as a teacher, oh normal school, Geneseo normal school upstate New York and actually came to Hillburn. She was hired to teach in what was then the African American school - school for African-Americans called Brook school. And he was back from World War I. He had been in France during World War I - part of the 92nd division and I think he was actually dating another young lady, but when my mom came to town he decided that he'd rather be with her.
That's how that got them together. So they were married and I'm the third of three children. My sister who's recently deceased was the oldest. My brother, Doctor Benjamin Jackson, who worked for the Food and Drug Administration was the second child born and I was the
third child born - the baby of the family.
1:55
EILEEN: So tell me what was it like growing up in Suffern?
2:04
TRAVIS I had a very comfortable childhood. The thing that was, the only thing that was wrong with it is that I was attending a segregated school until fourth grade, and that segregated
school was called Brook School. And it was the kind of school that was in many ways was a good school because all our teachers were African American, and I think they had something to do with teaching us more culture - the African American culture than later on when I had
white teachers, but the school was very crowded and it was not in good shape at all. It
had outside toilets. It had no library and I've always been a reader. My whole family were
readers and we'd have to walk across the village to the white school to go to the library.
We had no library in our school so that was kind of a bother. Let me put it that way. And I
went to the elementary school. The school district had centralized so that area of Hillburn, Sloatsburg, Suffern, Airmont had become Ramapo Central School District and actually in
1941 they centralized and in 43 this is when the school segregation case took place, and this is when Thurgood Marshall came to HIllburn. 3:33
EILEEN: Can I just go back a little bit more and hear a little bit more about the segregated school. How did it compare with the white school?
3:45
TRAVIS: The white school was interestingly enough, now it's the headquarters of the Ramapo Central school district but then it was called main school and that was a school for the white children and that was a much larger school in better shape, more room, had a library and had an ample playground outside where the Brook school, part of the playground that we had was taken by the expansion of Route 17, as it went through that part of the village. So when you stood back and looked at the two schools they were vastly unequal. In no way in the world were they comparable. They were just the opposite extremes almost. And it didn't matter so much when I was a child growing up. I think about it now and it was
not a good situation at all, but we were kind of accustomed to it and we knew - I already
had an older brother and sister in Suffern High School and we knew that after sixth grade we would be going to Suffern Junior-Senior High School. And I knew that my brother and sister had done very well there, had gotten along, had a lot of white friends. And so I was looking forward to that and in the meantime it didn't matter too much to me, except the outside
toilets. It wasn't much fun in the wintertime that I had to go outside.
5:07
EILEEN: And were the neighborhoods segregated as well? Is that how the schools ended up being across town from each other?
5:14
TRAVIS: Yes, the in fact during what amounted to petitioning the State Commissioner of Education, it was brought out by Mister Marshall that Route 17 was chosen as a dividing line between the two schools. The Brook School, the school for colored children, was on one side of Route 17 and the other school - the white school was on the other side. It was a little bit of mixing, but not really much at all. So when the school board was presented with an edict I call it from the State Department of Education, they decided to use that Route 17 as the dividing line. Any the only problem with it and its something that Mr. Marshall saw right off the bat was that as Route 17 went south there happened to be four or five families on the wrong side of 17 and if they had been assigned to the Brook School, they were white families, if they been assigned to Brook School the case would not have happened. As it worked out Mister Marshall saw that and had no problem in explaining it to the State Education Commissioner, who then ruled that the Brook School should be closed because it was the, it was a shack compared to the other school. And so he ruled that it should be closed and people who tell the story say oh well, that was wonderful and everything was all right, and I said no it was not alright because the white parents, then pulled their children out of school because they did not want them going to school with the colored children. And so it was another number of years. When I was in fourth grade, this is when this case happened,
and in my fourth grade year, my fifth grade, and my sixth grade before want to the Junior
Senior High School, I had no white children in my class at all. They had been sent either to
Sacred Heart School in Suffern - Catholic school, or there was another school that was
started by one of the Presbyterian minister. The white Presbyterian minister started
another school called the Suffern Boy's School, but a lot of the girls went there as well and
these were parents who just didn't want their kids going to school with colored children.
And it was interesting about it to me as I was in class and in sports, and so on with white children from Hillburn later on. And they had no idea what was going on. They were upset because they were being taken out of their school and we were upset because they were being taken out of their school. But it was interesting. It was an adult thing. I always said after that if you had let children have more control over what was going on the whole thing would've been much better. 8:08
EILEEN: So could you put this in historical context a little bit. Tell us what time period this went on and what was happening in the country? What were the laws that changed that enabled this suit...8:20
TRAVIS: Sure. It was 1941 the school district was centralized. In 1943 when the high school, the new Junior Senior High School opened up now there was room in the elementary schools to have all the children in Hilburn go to the main school. Before the schools had been crowded because they had also included grade seven and eight, and now seven and eight were a part of the Junior Senior High School. So it was right in the middle of the war. In
fact, I thought an interesting story about this was that I did, the research that I did I used the minutes from the Ramapo Central School District Board of Education. And when I go in the classroom or when I talk about it, I use the minutes of the meeting and in those minutes of the minutes were very revealing. The minutes, first of all in 1941, in late November of 1941 one of the board members ask that they, the board be apprised of what was happening with the Hilllburn schools. Hillburn schools both became part of the Ramapo Central school district and so this was in late November and as I say to the history students when I'm talking to them. I looked through all of the minutes after that and I never found a reference to that. I never found an answer to that question. What might've happened? And the sharper students say: 'Ah yeah Pearl Harbor.' And I say that's exactly what happened, so that was the
question about the two schools was put on the back burner for a while. In 1943 certainly it was part of what what happened because there were a number of parents who were working in war industries. In Hillburn there were a steel industries, iron industries, and so on. And up until that point many of the parents of color were afraid to do too much of anything because their jobs were dependent on them behaving themselves, put it that way. And that by 1943 it was a lot different. President Roosevelt had through Executive Order decided there should be no discrimination in industry, particularly in war industries. Now the parents, black parents
would have some, they would be able fight against any reprisals that came out of that. So, in short, the parents of color were a lot more angry now and a lot more vocal about things and wanted the Brook School closed. And I think I've made of building a big difference in terms of what happened. Now they weren't afraid anymore to do that. They knew that they could not be singled out and face reprisals from the people who ran the ironworks also were the people who ran the school board, so it was pretty easy for them to be in control of what was going
on. So there's no question in my mind or in others minds about whether this would have happened - it couldn't happen before 1943 or whether it would've happened had there not been a war going on. There was an attempt to desegregate in the early 1930s. A man by the name of Tom Alexander, who worked for the post office in New York City questioned. The school board in Hillburn controlled both schools. And there was a school board meeting they decided to build more of a recreational area at the white school and following what then the law about separate but equal Mr. Alexander, who was who black questioned whether or not the school board could do that for the white school without doing it for the school for the children of color as well because that was the period of separate but equal separate was supposed to be okay as long as they were equal and so he he approached the NAACP office in New York City. And apprised them of what was going on and they sent a man out to investigate what was happening in Hilburn and Mr. Alexander and this man, his name
is Mr. Andrews. He was one of the lawyers from the NAACP office in New York City.
They met with the President of the Board of Education and another member of the
Board of Education and it was the kind of meeting that it was very upsetting to a lot of
people because they were told point blank that the policy of the Hilburn schools was to
have two schools, one for the one for the children of color who they referred to as colored.
And one for the white children and that's what they intended to keep. As it worked out
some lawyers from the NAACP figured out, or somebody figured out that there were two kind of school districts at the time. One was a Union free school district and one was common
school district. Hillburn schools were a common school district, but somebody in the white
Board of Education found out that segregation was still allowed in the Union Free school
districts, so I don't think the parents of color knew about this at all. But there was a
meeting that took place where the school district changed from a Common school district to
a Union Free school district for the purpose of being able to segregate the students. And this
was something. It took me a long time to research and find that out. I I think they just
pulled a fast one. I think they found out that this was possible. So I think many of the
parents of color thought they were just changing the name of the school, but what they were
really changing was the kind of school district to a school district that allowed for whatever reason, segregation. And so from the 1930s up into 1943 they still maintained the two schools and the conditions in the two schools were just as bad as they always had been. So in 1943 the war and the number of... There were, the population was always a little bit more people in the white side than in the of color side, but even now if we looked at it, there's an honor roll that lists, Hillburn was always very proud of its veterans. And there was an honor roll that lists all the people who served in the different wars. My dad was always on the one from World War I, but the one from World War II, I can go down because I know the names of people. I can go down and divide it into white and of color. And there were just as may, in fact a few more young men of color serving in the war at the time, than there were whites. And this no doubt made a big difference in terms of what parents felt they could demand. Some of the soldiers were writing home saying that we're over here doing this and doing that don't put up with this anymore and it did create some militancy that wasn't there. This was different to me because my parents were not militant and it was very hard for them to keep me out of the school. We boycotted the school. It was very hard for them to keep me out because my mom had been a schoolteacher and the were no good reasons why you ever missed school and my dad had at one time during the depression years had been not a deputy sheriff as we know them now, but a sheriff 's deputy. And had worked for the WPA during the day and at night he would work as a sheriff 's deputy. I always say he was guarding the homes of rich white people. He came down with tuberculosis. His lungs had been weakened during World War I when he was in France by mustard gas. And he always when he came home had lung problems. And finally died of tuberculosis when I was
in high school. But he knew what was going on. He always told me about the Ku Klux
Klan that paraded and burned crosses on top of the Hogencamp Mountain, which is one of the high mountains around the village. He said we sort out called them by name and laughed
at them, because even though they were under sheets we could tell who they were, by the
way they walked.
17:20
EILEEN: But there wasn't that kind of fear, they weren't doing lynchings?
17:26
TRAVIS: No. No. In fact, there was never that I know of any violence, even when the school even with the white parents pulled their children out. There were some hard feelings. There's no question about that. There were some statements given to the papers which weren't at all nice, mostly by white parents, including some of the political people, the mayor and others, but there was never any violence. And I think it would be safe to say that healings began almost right away. A lot of people, I know my aunt was a domestic worker and I know for a fact that the people she worked for. She let them have it. She let them know what she thought about the situation and think they and their children who endured her thought enough about what she said to realize that this was a reasonable thing that was happening.
18:22
EILEEN: So just tell us who Thurgood Marshall was and why he got involved.
18:31
TRAVIS: Ok. Thurgood Marshall had been appointed the lead lawyer, the lead attorney for the NAACP office, sometimes referred to as the fund. And he would show up any place where there was some trouble and need for a lawyer and where they had an NAACP branch. I don't know how long Hillburn had had an NAACP branch, but they certainly had one at the beginning of this trouble, they probably thought they would need someone. He had been arguing cases that dealt with equal pay for black and white teachers. For years white teachers were paid more than black teachers, so a lot of his work up to that point had been
equality kinds of things. Trying to make pay for teachers equal. He also had been involved in other things in the early thirties he was involved in the case, I'm not going to be able to remember it now the young boys who were accused of rape and he had been arguing cases like that in the South for the most part. And this was a case, it was not one of the cases that led up to Brown versus Board of Education. It was a case that really wasn't as legal as people make it out to be sometimes. What he ended up doing was after he saw that the thing I mentioned before how Route 17 used as the dividing line was not true. That there was some white people living on the wrong side. He commissioned, he contacted the Commissioner of Education. James Stoddard his name was. And petitioned him to close Brook School because of the building itself and because at this point, there were some new laws that did, were concerned with segregation, which were not there in the early thirties and that's what he ended up doing is making a petition to the Commissioner of Education. Commissioner of Education sent two people. One was in charge, the person in charge from Albany of buildings and grounds and the other one was the person in charge of segregation. And they came down and they looked at what was going on and there was no question in their mind once they took a look at the way Route 17 had been used and once they took a look at the two schools and saw that the outside toilets and the school not being in very good shape. The playground being next to nothing as compared to what was going on at the other one. Now the important thing was, now that there was room enough in the good school in the main school for all of the children. That was his decision that the Brook School should be closed and that the children from the Brook School should all be sent to the main school. And that's when the white parents pulled out their children and sent them someplace else. So he, you know the funny thing about this is, my wife and I went to see the Broadway play Thurgood - with Laurence Fishburne. And I'm very modest most of my life. I don't brag about
anything. But as we were leaving the play with another couple, friends of ours. I said: 'I
could've written that.' Because the way it was staged it was as if he had returned to Howard University Law School and was speaking to the lawyers. The people who were preparing to be lawyers. He was on the stage of the theater in New York City all by himself for an hour and a half, and he was lecturing. But in that lecture he gave so much information about his life and about the cases that he had argued and so on. I knew, and by this time I knew so much about him, but I think I could've written that that play. Including there's a bit about him when he was in elementary school that he was not the most attentive student that was in the school. And that he would often be sent to the basement, downstairs in the black school in Baltimore, Washington DC, and be given a copy of the history book that had the United States Constitution in it. He said there were many parts of that I memorized because it got so boring there was nothing else for me to do. And that carried through to the point when he was in law school and that he certainly used that time well as far as he was concerned.
23:33
EILEEN: So here you are a 4th grader and all of a sudden your going to a different school. Do you remember what that was like for you, or what you thought was going on?
23:44
TRAVIS: Well, first of all it was pretty nice because it had a library. It had a playground and those were the things I think fourth and fifth graders, sixth graders probably think about more than anything else. I had kind of been shielded from the trouble. We did have to go to New City. I think it must have been Children's Court because we were declared truant. Because our parents kept us out of the Brook School. I neglected to mention that before, but our parents of kept us out of Brook School to make a point - to boycott the school. And we had to, we had to go, probably later on in the South they would have called it a freedom school. But it was classes in our church, so that we wouldn't be without school. We would still be
doing some learning, put it that way. I don't think we did too much at that point. But I was aware of those things that were going on, but when we finally got to go. I questioned the idea, where are the white kids, but it didn't bother me that much because as I said, I knew that in a couple years I would be going to a good Junior Senior high school. That new what was then a Junior Senior High School was half the size of what it is now. Because they were not, this is the days before the Thruway the population hadn't expanded that much. So I knew that I was going to be able to go to a really nice school that had a gymnasium and an auditorium and all of those things. Of course the main school, the white school was a nice school, as I say it had a library and it had a cafeteria and it had a playground. And I guess we did some learning too, but those other things were what you care about at that point.
25:37
EILEEN: And which teachers got to stay and which teachers had to go?
25:41
TRAVIS: There were in the original school, Brook School there were all black teachers and all white teachers in the main school. And because of the fact that this was the first year that the school district now had the junior-senior, had the K-12 divided into K through six. There were other K-6 schools and there then there were 7-12 schools and for a couple of years people who had been teachers at the Brook School became teachers at the main school. Honestly don't know what happened, there were a couple others that I don't know what happened. Couple of them were reassigned to different schools, but my fourth grade and fifth grade teachers were both African-American and had been at Brook School. In fact, my fifth grade teacher had been a principal - teaching principal at Brook School. And I later found out about her family. Her name was Savory and her sister was the kindergarten teacher. They had both come up from Alabama and the sister's name was Mrs. Gunner and her husband was Reverend Byron Gunner and I didn't know this until many years later, in fact a few years ago. That he had been very active in civil rights and he came to Hillburn and actually became the minister at the Hillburn Presbyterian Church. And I found out that Dr. DuBois and others met in upper New York State, actually in Canada to, when they were forming the organization that led into the NAACP. Reverend Gunner was there and he was a contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois who was quite, quite the person in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, I should say. He was there. Mrs. Savory, or Miss Savory and Mrs. Gunner were the
children of a man named William Savory who was born in slavery and had been saving up his money because he was skilled and as many slaves did they on their own time made enough money to buy their freedom. And he was saving up enough money to buy his freedom and his children and so on. And then the war ended and the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and he took the money and he started a school. He and a couple of
his friends started a school which became Talladega University and I never knew this. This is what's so much fun to me about history. I never knew this until I started to research and find out about Miss Savory and Mrs. Gunner. There were other schools. There was Sloatsburg, Airmont, Suffern, Hillburn. At the time there were only four elementary schools and I'm pretty sure that the other of color teachers were. They weren't let go. They were given a job some other place as far as I know. But that was always a concern. What would happen to the people when integration took over.
29:09
EILEEN: So we kind of covered one thing on our long list here. But I don't want to move off of it. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
29:24
TRAVIS: As happens with children when I went to seventh grade I had six years of wonderful
schooling and friendships, and so on. There were kids from, white children from Hillburn
that I became very close to. We all played sports together. There were a lot of children
from other parts of the school district that I became very close to and stayed close to for
many years. We're all at an age now where I've lost a lot of them. But it was something that I
found that they never, they didn't think about, they never knew about. The kids from Hillburn
and also the kids from the other parts of the school district had no idea what was going on. They had no idea about how we, I'll say we were being treated, whether it was right or wrong or whatever until many years later. I find that I didn't discuss this a great deal when I was in
high school. Not nearly as much as when I was in college. And then to discuss racial problems, and so on, history. And even there I didn't spend an awful lot of time discussing it. It wasn't until I got on, began teaching because I didn't want to teach children the same way that I had been taught about the Civil War and Reconstruction period and so on. Cause I knew that wasn't right. And so I kind of sit back every so often and think about where was I when a lot of this stuff happened. Where was I in 1957 during Little Rock. Little Rock 9. And then I realize I was in Korea then. And then I think about when I was in college and I say where was I when a lot of these were going on. I was preparing to be a social studies teacher, a history teacher and I never can remember discussing this in my education courses any of my history classes - at all. And again when you get older, you begin to figure out things. I found that my area that I'm really interested in is Reconstruction, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. And I always felt that it wasn't taught correctly, but I never really was able to say what was the correct thing. So in my adulthood, I've been reading everything I can read on the whole idea of what happened during Reconstruction and I've come away believing that not the Civil War but the period of Reconstruction is what left us with all of the racial problems that we have. It wasn't the War at all. I don't want to say at all, but it was really the period of Reconstruction. And I think growth on my part is being able to take some of what happened to me as a child, as a young adult and so on and see it in terms what was going on in history. The first history, African American history teacher I ever had was when I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago. A man by the name of John Hope Franklin and I was in my late twenties, early thirties. The first time I ever had a Black history teacher and he was the one to have, though, because he was the one who is probably the greatest African American historian that that has ever lived. But at that point with me it was again saying where was I when all this stuff happened. I had to be around here
someplace, but why didn't I, why wasn't I learning it, why wasn't I reading about it. Why wasn't somebody helping me understand it, or helping me learn to read about it. History, this is not necessarily a question, but history to me has been very important. I didn't know much about the World War I. There were two black divisions in World War I. My dad was in one of them. He was in France for a long time and he was gassed as I mentioned before and I really didn't know about it because everything I ever read on World War I never mentioned the black divisions and I didn't know much about the Civil War soldiers until I was an adult and began to try to read about what part they played and that many people, many historians think that enlisting the black soldiers from both North and South brought the war to a close. And I've come to believe that too, that they're terribly important contributions that they made. So I always have the feeling about whenever I can do it, I go into history classes. If I'm invited in and talk about that the Hillburn desegregation thing, but also talk about what was going on in other kinds of history.
34:28
EILEEN: So you went on to be a teacher? A Social Studies teacher?
34:32
TRAVIS: Yes. I did. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I attended Syracuse University for a year after high school and I was studying architecture. I really wanted to be an architect and I was not ready. Let me put it that way. Most of the people, I didn't know this. Most of the people in my freshman class in the school of architecture at Syracuse University had been had a year at least, maybe two years of Liberal arts to begin with and architecture at Syracuse was a five year course and I loved it. I love being able to design. I always wanted to do that but it took me a short while to realize that I spent all my money and my mother 's money in the first year. I couldn't afford to go back to Syracuse, so I decided to transfer Cortland in a reside chose Cortland was because it was close to Syracuse. Oswego was about the same difference distance, but that was north that was more snow and I decided to, I transferred to Cortland. And I wasn't really sure at the time that I wanted to teach, but at the time the state colleges were affordable. I was able to work my way through the state college. My brother had done the same thing. He wasn't sure he wanted to teach, but he went to State University at Albany and then got a Masters from our RPI in biology of all things from RPI. Then he had gone to work and gotten his doctorate from New York University. So in the back of my mind I figure well maybe I can do something like this. So I decided to to go to the teacher 's college, and but when I really got interested in teaching was. I got drafted, I shouldn't have gotten drafted because I had already was going to graduate in January, my fifth year of college. And I got drafted. My friends at the Nyack draft board. I was planning on what they called volunteering for the draft anyway at that point. Because I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I got drafted. I had basic training and I got shipped to Korea. I found out something about the armed forces at that point. There was only one other African American in my platoon besides me. And we were the only two people from our platoon to get shipped to Korea and we asked about it we found out that there was a quota overseas. In overseas areas they were supposed to keep up a certain percentage of African Americans. So I had
to go to Korea. I was there for 16 months and mostly I was in the infantry. I was training, running up and down the hills, and so on. Then was no shooting going on at this point. This was 1957, but it still wasn't a very fun place to be. I got asked to work in the Army
Education Center and that became my full-time job, and when I was there we had a
department of the Army advisor who had been an enlisted man in the Navy during World
War II and he wanted to do something. He had heard that every so often, the Army desire, gets rid of his undesirables. And this time they decided if this group of men hadn't, they didn't score high enough on what was called the Army general classification test. And he convinced the Colonel in charge of our our section there that we should relieve them from duty for seven weeks and teach them. And I was the person who would teach them. What amounted to about eight grade level courses in English, Social Studies...English, history, geography, math and science. And they were relieved from duty for seven weeks and they came to the education center every day and I taught them. And talk about, I've never had a group this motivated because these were World War II and Korean veterans and they were on the verge of losing their welfare. They were on the verge of being thrown out of the army, so they were the most motivated students that I ever had. But it was a wonderful, wonderful experience for me and showed me that I might like being a teacher. So when I came back I had a semester to go. I finished up my semester and actually even before I finished up my semester I was hired by the superintendent in Suffern, really as the first African American teacher on the secondary level. There had been some in the Hillburn school, but I was hired even before I went back to finish and in fact I got a raise. Then I started teaching at Suffern the next September and I stayed there for ten years. During that time we were married, and then I was offered a fellowship at University of Chicago. I went out there, we went out there for four years, two years I tried to finish a doctorate degree there, but I was there at the wrong time. Politically, it was not a good time to be there. I came back to Suffern to teach. One of my high school teachers who had been instrumental in getting me to Chicago asked me if I was ever going to finish the degree. He was now at the University of Massachusetts and I said I tried Fordham and I tried NYU, and they wanted me to start all over again. And I ...
EILEEN: This is the degree for your doctorate?
40:22
TRAVIS: Yeah, this is a doctorate. I wanted to finish it and I tried Fordham and New York University. They wanted me to start over again. My friend, his name was Bill Roche knew what I had already gone though. I had done everything in Chicago, except the dissertation. He knew what I had done out there and once he decided that I could write. He fixed it so I could be a student at UMass and I never really was on campus. I wrote and I did my research. I did all that and finally I got to the point where had a dissertation and I did it. And I got my
degree from University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I came back, I actually came back
to Suffern for a while and was there and then a fellow that I worked with in Suffern. He was
acting principal for a year and I was his acting assistant principal for a year and he took a
job in Ridgewood, New Jersey. And a couple years later I went down there to join him.
So I finished my - I had a total of twenty years in Suffern, New York State. And fifteen
years in New Jersey - in Ridgewood, New Jersey. And that was a good move for
me. We had worked together before. In fact I was reminded of it. I was afraid that if I
didn't get away from my home today in time the elementary school that is nearest is a blue
ribbon school and they're having a parade which I never thought of. They're having a parade around the neighborhood, but when I was in the Ridgewood, the year before I left we were
declared a blue ribbon school, which is a wonderful thing.42:00
EILEEN: What is a blue ribbon school?
TRAVIS: Actually, I'm not sure the agency is. But you apply and they come visit and they look
at your curriculum and they look at all the things like that. And if you're above everybody else you become a blue ribbon school. And I said to my wife today that boy when we became a
blue ribbon school in Ridgewood, we didn't have a parade. They have a parade today, which is nice. It's a good feeling to. It's somebody else looking at your school and saying your doing a good job. That's nice.42:38
EILEEN: So what did you teach?
42:41
TRAVIS: I taught. Of course when I started at Suffern I taught a course called CORE. It has no relationship to the CORE that we're hearing about now, the testing. This was English and Social Studies core, and I taught seventh grade for a while and I taught eighth grade for a while. And seventh grade was New York State history and English. And eighth grade was American history and English. And this was just what I wanted to do. We had a woman who was teaching at Suffern when I first went there that I learned so much from - the name is Hazel Hertzberg. And she left Suffern and became a professor at Columbia, but she had done so much work on the state level, and we did a lot of this in Suffern at the time. It was a very exciting time. We'd get together on our own time, you know, nobody had to pay us to do that. We'd spend some time together in the summer. We'd do things like that and it always pointed towards improving the learning of the children that we had. The seventh grade social
studies became a wonderful, wonderful course where we divided it into a kind of an
anthropological approach when we studied the Iroquois Indians, sociological historical approach when we studied what was called the homespun age. Our last big unit was on the city so that was more of a sociological thing. The kids were learning something about those three areas, as well as learning the content. And that was very exciting to me. I just grew so much during my early years there were a whole bunch of people at the time who would get together and I thought later on I became a union leader. That was probably opposed to that. People doing it for nothing, but when I started teaching it was it was wonderful. It was just what I needed and what I enjoyed.
44:34
EILEEN: Believe it or not, we're out of time. It's already been 45 minutes, so we didn't get to some of your other things, but is there anything you wanted to say in the last minute that...
44:48
TRAVIS: I think I've been talking for a while. I guess maybe what I'd say now is that my life has wanting to learn history and wanting to share what I learned with other people because I think it's important for people to understand what has gone on in the past and what we've all been through. I always found that students were very interested in that. When we started teaching history in a way other names and dates and places I think it was the kind of thing that we needed for a long time. And unfortunately that's the way I was taught and I didn't know enough at the time to look beyond that, didn't know enough to sit down with my dad and ask him to tell me about his experiences in France and sit down with my mom and ask her to tell me her experiences about being the daughter of a man who was born in slavery, who married a white woman who had ten children, three of the children lived as black, seven of them lived as white, and my mother didn't want to talk about that to begin with, but I really wanted to know more about that kind of thing. I've been able to find a lot of those answers in the study of history.
EILEEN: Well that sounds like something very interesting. We'll have to wait until next time.
TRAVIS: Okay, alright.46:19
0:17
TRAVIS: Sure I'm Travis Jackson. My son is also Travis Jackson. I use the middle initial E and he's a W. I was born in the old good Samaritan Hospital and in Suffern on Orange Avenue in Suffern, April 29, 1934. So those of you who are mathematicians can figure out
that I'm now 80 years old.
0:39
EILEEN: And what brought your family to this area?
0:44
TRAVIS: My dad was the son of a ironworker who moved across from New Jersey into New York State in Hillburn to work in the iron industry there. And my mom was educated as a teacher, oh normal school, Geneseo normal school upstate New York and actually came to Hillburn. She was hired to teach in what was then the African American school - school for African-Americans called Brook school. And he was back from World War I. He had been in France during World War I - part of the 92nd division and I think he was actually dating another young lady, but when my mom came to town he decided that he'd rather be with her.
That's how that got them together. So they were married and I'm the third of three children. My sister who's recently deceased was the oldest. My brother, Doctor Benjamin Jackson, who worked for the Food and Drug Administration was the second child born and I was the
third child born - the baby of the family.
1:55
EILEEN: So tell me what was it like growing up in Suffern?
2:04
TRAVIS I had a very comfortable childhood. The thing that was, the only thing that was wrong with it is that I was attending a segregated school until fourth grade, and that segregated
school was called Brook School. And it was the kind of school that was in many ways was a good school because all our teachers were African American, and I think they had something to do with teaching us more culture - the African American culture than later on when I had
white teachers, but the school was very crowded and it was not in good shape at all. It
had outside toilets. It had no library and I've always been a reader. My whole family were
readers and we'd have to walk across the village to the white school to go to the library.
We had no library in our school so that was kind of a bother. Let me put it that way. And I
went to the elementary school. The school district had centralized so that area of Hillburn, Sloatsburg, Suffern, Airmont had become Ramapo Central School District and actually in
1941 they centralized and in 43 this is when the school segregation case took place, and this is when Thurgood Marshall came to HIllburn. 3:33
EILEEN: Can I just go back a little bit more and hear a little bit more about the segregated school. How did it compare with the white school?
3:45
TRAVIS: The white school was interestingly enough, now it's the headquarters of the Ramapo Central school district but then it was called main school and that was a school for the white children and that was a much larger school in better shape, more room, had a library and had an ample playground outside where the Brook school, part of the playground that we had was taken by the expansion of Route 17, as it went through that part of the village. So when you stood back and looked at the two schools they were vastly unequal. In no way in the world were they comparable. They were just the opposite extremes almost. And it didn't matter so much when I was a child growing up. I think about it now and it was
not a good situation at all, but we were kind of accustomed to it and we knew - I already
had an older brother and sister in Suffern High School and we knew that after sixth grade we would be going to Suffern Junior-Senior High School. And I knew that my brother and sister had done very well there, had gotten along, had a lot of white friends. And so I was looking forward to that and in the meantime it didn't matter too much to me, except the outside
toilets. It wasn't much fun in the wintertime that I had to go outside.
5:07
EILEEN: And were the neighborhoods segregated as well? Is that how the schools ended up being across town from each other?
5:14
TRAVIS: Yes, the in fact during what amounted to petitioning the State Commissioner of Education, it was brought out by Mister Marshall that Route 17 was chosen as a dividing line between the two schools. The Brook School, the school for colored children, was on one side of Route 17 and the other school - the white school was on the other side. It was a little bit of mixing, but not really much at all. So when the school board was presented with an edict I call it from the State Department of Education, they decided to use that Route 17 as the dividing line. Any the only problem with it and its something that Mr. Marshall saw right off the bat was that as Route 17 went south there happened to be four or five families on the wrong side of 17 and if they had been assigned to the Brook School, they were white families, if they been assigned to Brook School the case would not have happened. As it worked out Mister Marshall saw that and had no problem in explaining it to the State Education Commissioner, who then ruled that the Brook School should be closed because it was the, it was a shack compared to the other school. And so he ruled that it should be closed and people who tell the story say oh well, that was wonderful and everything was all right, and I said no it was not alright because the white parents, then pulled their children out of school because they did not want them going to school with the colored children. And so it was another number of years. When I was in fourth grade, this is when this case happened,
and in my fourth grade year, my fifth grade, and my sixth grade before want to the Junior
Senior High School, I had no white children in my class at all. They had been sent either to
Sacred Heart School in Suffern - Catholic school, or there was another school that was
started by one of the Presbyterian minister. The white Presbyterian minister started
another school called the Suffern Boy's School, but a lot of the girls went there as well and
these were parents who just didn't want their kids going to school with colored children.
And it was interesting about it to me as I was in class and in sports, and so on with white children from Hillburn later on. And they had no idea what was going on. They were upset because they were being taken out of their school and we were upset because they were being taken out of their school. But it was interesting. It was an adult thing. I always said after that if you had let children have more control over what was going on the whole thing would've been much better. 8:08
EILEEN: So could you put this in historical context a little bit. Tell us what time period this went on and what was happening in the country? What were the laws that changed that enabled this suit...8:20
TRAVIS: Sure. It was 1941 the school district was centralized. In 1943 when the high school, the new Junior Senior High School opened up now there was room in the elementary schools to have all the children in Hilburn go to the main school. Before the schools had been crowded because they had also included grade seven and eight, and now seven and eight were a part of the Junior Senior High School. So it was right in the middle of the war. In
fact, I thought an interesting story about this was that I did, the research that I did I used the minutes from the Ramapo Central School District Board of Education. And when I go in the classroom or when I talk about it, I use the minutes of the meeting and in those minutes of the minutes were very revealing. The minutes, first of all in 1941, in late November of 1941 one of the board members ask that they, the board be apprised of what was happening with the Hilllburn schools. Hillburn schools both became part of the Ramapo Central school district and so this was in late November and as I say to the history students when I'm talking to them. I looked through all of the minutes after that and I never found a reference to that. I never found an answer to that question. What might've happened? And the sharper students say: 'Ah yeah Pearl Harbor.' And I say that's exactly what happened, so that was the
question about the two schools was put on the back burner for a while. In 1943 certainly it was part of what what happened because there were a number of parents who were working in war industries. In Hillburn there were a steel industries, iron industries, and so on. And up until that point many of the parents of color were afraid to do too much of anything because their jobs were dependent on them behaving themselves, put it that way. And that by 1943 it was a lot different. President Roosevelt had through Executive Order decided there should be no discrimination in industry, particularly in war industries. Now the parents, black parents
would have some, they would be able fight against any reprisals that came out of that. So, in short, the parents of color were a lot more angry now and a lot more vocal about things and wanted the Brook School closed. And I think I've made of building a big difference in terms of what happened. Now they weren't afraid anymore to do that. They knew that they could not be singled out and face reprisals from the people who ran the ironworks also were the people who ran the school board, so it was pretty easy for them to be in control of what was going
on. So there's no question in my mind or in others minds about whether this would have happened - it couldn't happen before 1943 or whether it would've happened had there not been a war going on. There was an attempt to desegregate in the early 1930s. A man by the name of Tom Alexander, who worked for the post office in New York City questioned. The school board in Hillburn controlled both schools. And there was a school board meeting they decided to build more of a recreational area at the white school and following what then the law about separate but equal Mr. Alexander, who was who black questioned whether or not the school board could do that for the white school without doing it for the school for the children of color as well because that was the period of separate but equal separate was supposed to be okay as long as they were equal and so he he approached the NAACP office in New York City. And apprised them of what was going on and they sent a man out to investigate what was happening in Hilburn and Mr. Alexander and this man, his name
is Mr. Andrews. He was one of the lawyers from the NAACP office in New York City.
They met with the President of the Board of Education and another member of the
Board of Education and it was the kind of meeting that it was very upsetting to a lot of
people because they were told point blank that the policy of the Hilburn schools was to
have two schools, one for the one for the children of color who they referred to as colored.
And one for the white children and that's what they intended to keep. As it worked out
some lawyers from the NAACP figured out, or somebody figured out that there were two kind of school districts at the time. One was a Union free school district and one was common
school district. Hillburn schools were a common school district, but somebody in the white
Board of Education found out that segregation was still allowed in the Union Free school
districts, so I don't think the parents of color knew about this at all. But there was a
meeting that took place where the school district changed from a Common school district to
a Union Free school district for the purpose of being able to segregate the students. And this
was something. It took me a long time to research and find that out. I I think they just
pulled a fast one. I think they found out that this was possible. So I think many of the
parents of color thought they were just changing the name of the school, but what they were
really changing was the kind of school district to a school district that allowed for whatever reason, segregation. And so from the 1930s up into 1943 they still maintained the two schools and the conditions in the two schools were just as bad as they always had been. So in 1943 the war and the number of... There were, the population was always a little bit more people in the white side than in the of color side, but even now if we looked at it, there's an honor roll that lists, Hillburn was always very proud of its veterans. And there was an honor roll that lists all the people who served in the different wars. My dad was always on the one from World War I, but the one from World War II, I can go down because I know the names of people. I can go down and divide it into white and of color. And there were just as may, in fact a few more young men of color serving in the war at the time, than there were whites. And this no doubt made a big difference in terms of what parents felt they could demand. Some of the soldiers were writing home saying that we're over here doing this and doing that don't put up with this anymore and it did create some militancy that wasn't there. This was different to me because my parents were not militant and it was very hard for them to keep me out of the school. We boycotted the school. It was very hard for them to keep me out because my mom had been a schoolteacher and the were no good reasons why you ever missed school and my dad had at one time during the depression years had been not a deputy sheriff as we know them now, but a sheriff 's deputy. And had worked for the WPA during the day and at night he would work as a sheriff 's deputy. I always say he was guarding the homes of rich white people. He came down with tuberculosis. His lungs had been weakened during World War I when he was in France by mustard gas. And he always when he came home had lung problems. And finally died of tuberculosis when I was
in high school. But he knew what was going on. He always told me about the Ku Klux
Klan that paraded and burned crosses on top of the Hogencamp Mountain, which is one of the high mountains around the village. He said we sort out called them by name and laughed
at them, because even though they were under sheets we could tell who they were, by the
way they walked.
17:20
EILEEN: But there wasn't that kind of fear, they weren't doing lynchings?
17:26
TRAVIS: No. No. In fact, there was never that I know of any violence, even when the school even with the white parents pulled their children out. There were some hard feelings. There's no question about that. There were some statements given to the papers which weren't at all nice, mostly by white parents, including some of the political people, the mayor and others, but there was never any violence. And I think it would be safe to say that healings began almost right away. A lot of people, I know my aunt was a domestic worker and I know for a fact that the people she worked for. She let them have it. She let them know what she thought about the situation and think they and their children who endured her thought enough about what she said to realize that this was a reasonable thing that was happening.
18:22
EILEEN: So just tell us who Thurgood Marshall was and why he got involved.
18:31
TRAVIS: Ok. Thurgood Marshall had been appointed the lead lawyer, the lead attorney for the NAACP office, sometimes referred to as the fund. And he would show up any place where there was some trouble and need for a lawyer and where they had an NAACP branch. I don't know how long Hillburn had had an NAACP branch, but they certainly had one at the beginning of this trouble, they probably thought they would need someone. He had been arguing cases that dealt with equal pay for black and white teachers. For years white teachers were paid more than black teachers, so a lot of his work up to that point had been
equality kinds of things. Trying to make pay for teachers equal. He also had been involved in other things in the early thirties he was involved in the case, I'm not going to be able to remember it now the young boys who were accused of rape and he had been arguing cases like that in the South for the most part. And this was a case, it was not one of the cases that led up to Brown versus Board of Education. It was a case that really wasn't as legal as people make it out to be sometimes. What he ended up doing was after he saw that the thing I mentioned before how Route 17 used as the dividing line was not true. That there was some white people living on the wrong side. He commissioned, he contacted the Commissioner of Education. James Stoddard his name was. And petitioned him to close Brook School because of the building itself and because at this point, there were some new laws that did, were concerned with segregation, which were not there in the early thirties and that's what he ended up doing is making a petition to the Commissioner of Education. Commissioner of Education sent two people. One was in charge, the person in charge from Albany of buildings and grounds and the other one was the person in charge of segregation. And they came down and they looked at what was going on and there was no question in their mind once they took a look at the way Route 17 had been used and once they took a look at the two schools and saw that the outside toilets and the school not being in very good shape. The playground being next to nothing as compared to what was going on at the other one. Now the important thing was, now that there was room enough in the good school in the main school for all of the children. That was his decision that the Brook School should be closed and that the children from the Brook School should all be sent to the main school. And that's when the white parents pulled out their children and sent them someplace else. So he, you know the funny thing about this is, my wife and I went to see the Broadway play Thurgood - with Laurence Fishburne. And I'm very modest most of my life. I don't brag about
anything. But as we were leaving the play with another couple, friends of ours. I said: 'I
could've written that.' Because the way it was staged it was as if he had returned to Howard University Law School and was speaking to the lawyers. The people who were preparing to be lawyers. He was on the stage of the theater in New York City all by himself for an hour and a half, and he was lecturing. But in that lecture he gave so much information about his life and about the cases that he had argued and so on. I knew, and by this time I knew so much about him, but I think I could've written that that play. Including there's a bit about him when he was in elementary school that he was not the most attentive student that was in the school. And that he would often be sent to the basement, downstairs in the black school in Baltimore, Washington DC, and be given a copy of the history book that had the United States Constitution in it. He said there were many parts of that I memorized because it got so boring there was nothing else for me to do. And that carried through to the point when he was in law school and that he certainly used that time well as far as he was concerned.
23:33
EILEEN: So here you are a 4th grader and all of a sudden your going to a different school. Do you remember what that was like for you, or what you thought was going on?
23:44
TRAVIS: Well, first of all it was pretty nice because it had a library. It had a playground and those were the things I think fourth and fifth graders, sixth graders probably think about more than anything else. I had kind of been shielded from the trouble. We did have to go to New City. I think it must have been Children's Court because we were declared truant. Because our parents kept us out of the Brook School. I neglected to mention that before, but our parents of kept us out of Brook School to make a point - to boycott the school. And we had to, we had to go, probably later on in the South they would have called it a freedom school. But it was classes in our church, so that we wouldn't be without school. We would still be
doing some learning, put it that way. I don't think we did too much at that point. But I was aware of those things that were going on, but when we finally got to go. I questioned the idea, where are the white kids, but it didn't bother me that much because as I said, I knew that in a couple years I would be going to a good Junior Senior high school. That new what was then a Junior Senior High School was half the size of what it is now. Because they were not, this is the days before the Thruway the population hadn't expanded that much. So I knew that I was going to be able to go to a really nice school that had a gymnasium and an auditorium and all of those things. Of course the main school, the white school was a nice school, as I say it had a library and it had a cafeteria and it had a playground. And I guess we did some learning too, but those other things were what you care about at that point.
25:37
EILEEN: And which teachers got to stay and which teachers had to go?
25:41
TRAVIS: There were in the original school, Brook School there were all black teachers and all white teachers in the main school. And because of the fact that this was the first year that the school district now had the junior-senior, had the K-12 divided into K through six. There were other K-6 schools and there then there were 7-12 schools and for a couple of years people who had been teachers at the Brook School became teachers at the main school. Honestly don't know what happened, there were a couple others that I don't know what happened. Couple of them were reassigned to different schools, but my fourth grade and fifth grade teachers were both African-American and had been at Brook School. In fact, my fifth grade teacher had been a principal - teaching principal at Brook School. And I later found out about her family. Her name was Savory and her sister was the kindergarten teacher. They had both come up from Alabama and the sister's name was Mrs. Gunner and her husband was Reverend Byron Gunner and I didn't know this until many years later, in fact a few years ago. That he had been very active in civil rights and he came to Hillburn and actually became the minister at the Hillburn Presbyterian Church. And I found out that Dr. DuBois and others met in upper New York State, actually in Canada to, when they were forming the organization that led into the NAACP. Reverend Gunner was there and he was a contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois who was quite, quite the person in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, I should say. He was there. Mrs. Savory, or Miss Savory and Mrs. Gunner were the
children of a man named William Savory who was born in slavery and had been saving up his money because he was skilled and as many slaves did they on their own time made enough money to buy their freedom. And he was saving up enough money to buy his freedom and his children and so on. And then the war ended and the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and he took the money and he started a school. He and a couple of
his friends started a school which became Talladega University and I never knew this. This is what's so much fun to me about history. I never knew this until I started to research and find out about Miss Savory and Mrs. Gunner. There were other schools. There was Sloatsburg, Airmont, Suffern, Hillburn. At the time there were only four elementary schools and I'm pretty sure that the other of color teachers were. They weren't let go. They were given a job some other place as far as I know. But that was always a concern. What would happen to the people when integration took over.
29:09
EILEEN: So we kind of covered one thing on our long list here. But I don't want to move off of it. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
29:24
TRAVIS: As happens with children when I went to seventh grade I had six years of wonderful
schooling and friendships, and so on. There were kids from, white children from Hillburn
that I became very close to. We all played sports together. There were a lot of children
from other parts of the school district that I became very close to and stayed close to for
many years. We're all at an age now where I've lost a lot of them. But it was something that I
found that they never, they didn't think about, they never knew about. The kids from Hillburn
and also the kids from the other parts of the school district had no idea what was going on. They had no idea about how we, I'll say we were being treated, whether it was right or wrong or whatever until many years later. I find that I didn't discuss this a great deal when I was in
high school. Not nearly as much as when I was in college. And then to discuss racial problems, and so on, history. And even there I didn't spend an awful lot of time discussing it. It wasn't until I got on, began teaching because I didn't want to teach children the same way that I had been taught about the Civil War and Reconstruction period and so on. Cause I knew that wasn't right. And so I kind of sit back every so often and think about where was I when a lot of this stuff happened. Where was I in 1957 during Little Rock. Little Rock 9. And then I realize I was in Korea then. And then I think about when I was in college and I say where was I when a lot of these were going on. I was preparing to be a social studies teacher, a history teacher and I never can remember discussing this in my education courses any of my history classes - at all. And again when you get older, you begin to figure out things. I found that my area that I'm really interested in is Reconstruction, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. And I always felt that it wasn't taught correctly, but I never really was able to say what was the correct thing. So in my adulthood, I've been reading everything I can read on the whole idea of what happened during Reconstruction and I've come away believing that not the Civil War but the period of Reconstruction is what left us with all of the racial problems that we have. It wasn't the War at all. I don't want to say at all, but it was really the period of Reconstruction. And I think growth on my part is being able to take some of what happened to me as a child, as a young adult and so on and see it in terms what was going on in history. The first history, African American history teacher I ever had was when I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago. A man by the name of John Hope Franklin and I was in my late twenties, early thirties. The first time I ever had a Black history teacher and he was the one to have, though, because he was the one who is probably the greatest African American historian that that has ever lived. But at that point with me it was again saying where was I when all this stuff happened. I had to be around here
someplace, but why didn't I, why wasn't I learning it, why wasn't I reading about it. Why wasn't somebody helping me understand it, or helping me learn to read about it. History, this is not necessarily a question, but history to me has been very important. I didn't know much about the World War I. There were two black divisions in World War I. My dad was in one of them. He was in France for a long time and he was gassed as I mentioned before and I really didn't know about it because everything I ever read on World War I never mentioned the black divisions and I didn't know much about the Civil War soldiers until I was an adult and began to try to read about what part they played and that many people, many historians think that enlisting the black soldiers from both North and South brought the war to a close. And I've come to believe that too, that they're terribly important contributions that they made. So I always have the feeling about whenever I can do it, I go into history classes. If I'm invited in and talk about that the Hillburn desegregation thing, but also talk about what was going on in other kinds of history.
34:28
EILEEN: So you went on to be a teacher? A Social Studies teacher?
34:32
TRAVIS: Yes. I did. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I attended Syracuse University for a year after high school and I was studying architecture. I really wanted to be an architect and I was not ready. Let me put it that way. Most of the people, I didn't know this. Most of the people in my freshman class in the school of architecture at Syracuse University had been had a year at least, maybe two years of Liberal arts to begin with and architecture at Syracuse was a five year course and I loved it. I love being able to design. I always wanted to do that but it took me a short while to realize that I spent all my money and my mother 's money in the first year. I couldn't afford to go back to Syracuse, so I decided to transfer Cortland in a reside chose Cortland was because it was close to Syracuse. Oswego was about the same difference distance, but that was north that was more snow and I decided to, I transferred to Cortland. And I wasn't really sure at the time that I wanted to teach, but at the time the state colleges were affordable. I was able to work my way through the state college. My brother had done the same thing. He wasn't sure he wanted to teach, but he went to State University at Albany and then got a Masters from our RPI in biology of all things from RPI. Then he had gone to work and gotten his doctorate from New York University. So in the back of my mind I figure well maybe I can do something like this. So I decided to to go to the teacher 's college, and but when I really got interested in teaching was. I got drafted, I shouldn't have gotten drafted because I had already was going to graduate in January, my fifth year of college. And I got drafted. My friends at the Nyack draft board. I was planning on what they called volunteering for the draft anyway at that point. Because I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I got drafted. I had basic training and I got shipped to Korea. I found out something about the armed forces at that point. There was only one other African American in my platoon besides me. And we were the only two people from our platoon to get shipped to Korea and we asked about it we found out that there was a quota overseas. In overseas areas they were supposed to keep up a certain percentage of African Americans. So I had
to go to Korea. I was there for 16 months and mostly I was in the infantry. I was training, running up and down the hills, and so on. Then was no shooting going on at this point. This was 1957, but it still wasn't a very fun place to be. I got asked to work in the Army
Education Center and that became my full-time job, and when I was there we had a
department of the Army advisor who had been an enlisted man in the Navy during World
War II and he wanted to do something. He had heard that every so often, the Army desire, gets rid of his undesirables. And this time they decided if this group of men hadn't, they didn't score high enough on what was called the Army general classification test. And he convinced the Colonel in charge of our our section there that we should relieve them from duty for seven weeks and teach them. And I was the person who would teach them. What amounted to about eight grade level courses in English, Social Studies...English, history, geography, math and science. And they were relieved from duty for seven weeks and they came to the education center every day and I taught them. And talk about, I've never had a group this motivated because these were World War II and Korean veterans and they were on the verge of losing their welfare. They were on the verge of being thrown out of the army, so they were the most motivated students that I ever had. But it was a wonderful, wonderful experience for me and showed me that I might like being a teacher. So when I came back I had a semester to go. I finished up my semester and actually even before I finished up my semester I was hired by the superintendent in Suffern, really as the first African American teacher on the secondary level. There had been some in the Hillburn school, but I was hired even before I went back to finish and in fact I got a raise. Then I started teaching at Suffern the next September and I stayed there for ten years. During that time we were married, and then I was offered a fellowship at University of Chicago. I went out there, we went out there for four years, two years I tried to finish a doctorate degree there, but I was there at the wrong time. Politically, it was not a good time to be there. I came back to Suffern to teach. One of my high school teachers who had been instrumental in getting me to Chicago asked me if I was ever going to finish the degree. He was now at the University of Massachusetts and I said I tried Fordham and I tried NYU, and they wanted me to start all over again. And I ...
EILEEN: This is the degree for your doctorate?
40:22
TRAVIS: Yeah, this is a doctorate. I wanted to finish it and I tried Fordham and New York University. They wanted me to start over again. My friend, his name was Bill Roche knew what I had already gone though. I had done everything in Chicago, except the dissertation. He knew what I had done out there and once he decided that I could write. He fixed it so I could be a student at UMass and I never really was on campus. I wrote and I did my research. I did all that and finally I got to the point where had a dissertation and I did it. And I got my
degree from University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I came back, I actually came back
to Suffern for a while and was there and then a fellow that I worked with in Suffern. He was
acting principal for a year and I was his acting assistant principal for a year and he took a
job in Ridgewood, New Jersey. And a couple years later I went down there to join him.
So I finished my - I had a total of twenty years in Suffern, New York State. And fifteen
years in New Jersey - in Ridgewood, New Jersey. And that was a good move for
me. We had worked together before. In fact I was reminded of it. I was afraid that if I
didn't get away from my home today in time the elementary school that is nearest is a blue
ribbon school and they're having a parade which I never thought of. They're having a parade around the neighborhood, but when I was in the Ridgewood, the year before I left we were
declared a blue ribbon school, which is a wonderful thing.42:00
EILEEN: What is a blue ribbon school?
TRAVIS: Actually, I'm not sure the agency is. But you apply and they come visit and they look
at your curriculum and they look at all the things like that. And if you're above everybody else you become a blue ribbon school. And I said to my wife today that boy when we became a
blue ribbon school in Ridgewood, we didn't have a parade. They have a parade today, which is nice. It's a good feeling to. It's somebody else looking at your school and saying your doing a good job. That's nice.42:38
EILEEN: So what did you teach?
42:41
TRAVIS: I taught. Of course when I started at Suffern I taught a course called CORE. It has no relationship to the CORE that we're hearing about now, the testing. This was English and Social Studies core, and I taught seventh grade for a while and I taught eighth grade for a while. And seventh grade was New York State history and English. And eighth grade was American history and English. And this was just what I wanted to do. We had a woman who was teaching at Suffern when I first went there that I learned so much from - the name is Hazel Hertzberg. And she left Suffern and became a professor at Columbia, but she had done so much work on the state level, and we did a lot of this in Suffern at the time. It was a very exciting time. We'd get together on our own time, you know, nobody had to pay us to do that. We'd spend some time together in the summer. We'd do things like that and it always pointed towards improving the learning of the children that we had. The seventh grade social
studies became a wonderful, wonderful course where we divided it into a kind of an
anthropological approach when we studied the Iroquois Indians, sociological historical approach when we studied what was called the homespun age. Our last big unit was on the city so that was more of a sociological thing. The kids were learning something about those three areas, as well as learning the content. And that was very exciting to me. I just grew so much during my early years there were a whole bunch of people at the time who would get together and I thought later on I became a union leader. That was probably opposed to that. People doing it for nothing, but when I started teaching it was it was wonderful. It was just what I needed and what I enjoyed.
44:34
EILEEN: Believe it or not, we're out of time. It's already been 45 minutes, so we didn't get to some of your other things, but is there anything you wanted to say in the last minute that...
44:48
TRAVIS: I think I've been talking for a while. I guess maybe what I'd say now is that my life has wanting to learn history and wanting to share what I learned with other people because I think it's important for people to understand what has gone on in the past and what we've all been through. I always found that students were very interested in that. When we started teaching history in a way other names and dates and places I think it was the kind of thing that we needed for a long time. And unfortunately that's the way I was taught and I didn't know enough at the time to look beyond that, didn't know enough to sit down with my dad and ask him to tell me about his experiences in France and sit down with my mom and ask her to tell me her experiences about being the daughter of a man who was born in slavery, who married a white woman who had ten children, three of the children lived as black, seven of them lived as white, and my mother didn't want to talk about that to begin with, but I really wanted to know more about that kind of thing. I've been able to find a lot of those answers in the study of history.
EILEEN: Well that sounds like something very interesting. We'll have to wait until next time.
TRAVIS: Okay, alright.46:19
Interviewer
Interviewee
Location
New City, NY
Citation
Jackson, Travis, 1934-, “Travis Jackson interview,” accessed May 6, 2024, https://rocklandroom.omeka.net/items/show/84.