Exchange Place: How A Small Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation
Season 1, Episode 5: Two Paths Cross

MAY 19, 2023 | THE 431 EXCHANGE; MYA CARTER (HOST); KEVIN GULLAGE (MUSIC)

TRANSCRIPT:

[Dear Audience, this transcript corresponds exactly to the Youtube Podcast version that has a slightly different structure for the opening three minutes. Therefore, while the words correspond perfectly the timecode is off by 30 seconds or so. Thank you for your understanding. Thank you.]

[00:00:00] Mya Carter: When Alice Geoffray came for her first in-person job interview with Father Timothy Gibbons for a position at the Adult Education Center, public schools were not yet involved in the War on Poverty programs that Lyndon B. Johnson had just introduced to the country. The kind of program Gibbons was planning—one centered around civil rights and educational equality and with the goal of integrating White offices—seemed ahead of its [00:00:30] time to Geoffray, perhaps too far ahead. Geoffray knew that landmark civil rights legislation had passed in Congress, and while she supported it, she didn't necessarily think that would change things in New Orleans in the near term. She had witnessed first-hand the antipathy towards integration in the New Orleans Public School System where she worked. She had experienced first-hand the intransigence to changes in [00:01:00] policies in the eleven years since the passage of Brown vs. Board of Education. Seemingly endless actions in the courts had slowed the process of integration to the extent many still wondered if it would happen at all. When she arrived at the job interview, Geoffray never imagined she would be an active participant in societal change that was now blowing like a storm wind. But as she talked with Gibbons, [00:01:30] she was stirred by the plan he was proposing, one that would lift poor women out of poverty. As a working mother and sole support for six of her seven children, Geoffray was waging her own war on poverty.

The 431 Exchange presents Exchange Place: How A Small Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights In New Orleans and the Nation. Exchange Place is the story of a school whose mission was to [00:02:00] train mostly African American women the skills they needed to integrate the secretarial offices of the Deep South between 1965 and '72. Those offices were not just segregated, for the most part they were completely off limits to women of color and many were fighting to ensure the workplace would stay that way for years or decades to come. The first season of the podcast tells the inspirational biographies of four of the school's graduates who [00:02:30] changed the moral skyline of their city, how they did it, and how the school's teachers and supporters struggled to overcome the massive forces arrayed against them.

Episode 5: Two Paths Cross

Years later, when Geoffray began writing her memoirs about the Adult Education Center she said the summer of 1965 was the beginning of a journey "so incredibly incredible" her whole life up to that [00:03:00] point had prepared her for the experience.

Back in the day, though, the summer began as it always did. Like their students, teachers were free for three months of summer vacation. However, teachers were unpaid. Given the size of her salary compared to the size of her large family, Geoffray had to look for a part-time job or two or three every summer to make up for the loss of income. She recalled [00:03:30] how a teacher-turned-comedian joked he had changed professions early in life because he hadn't been able to teach his children to stop eating in the summer when schools were closed and he wasn't being paid. Geoffray hadn't been able to either.

Geoffray was accustomed to poverty. She was the product of a broken family, an Irish mother who had only finished high school and an Italian father, a carpenter by trade, who was an [00:04:00] alcoholic and womanizer. She was able to attend college because the nuns who taught her at Dominican High School had provided a scholarship to her upon graduation to Dominican College. It was for studying music and the violin, but she ended up majoring in English and Business. Geoffray felt forever beholden to the nuns for lifting her out of poverty and providing a spiritual and intellectual education.[00:04:30]

Soon after graduating from college, Geoffray married Rudolph, a musician and music teacher twelve years her senior. Her marriage, unfortunately, was not good at all. By the time she interviewed for a position at the Adult Education Center, the two had not lived together for years. They were a couple in name only, and if Geoffray had not been Catholic, she would have been divorced by 1965. [00:05:00] He paid no child support and had never been a source of comfort, strength or emotional support. Geoffray blamed herself for the poor decisions that now had her struggling. Even with her college degree, and after nearly a decade in the school system, Geoffray's financial status was perilously close to the poverty line.

When Geoffray met Gibbons at the end of July 1965, she was the mother of [00:05:30] seven children and soon to be a grandmother. Though she had not aspired to be a teacher when she was growing up, or even in college, Geoffray became a passionate teacher with a deep respect for her colleagues and students. In becoming a spouse, a mother, and then a teacher, she had given up her dreams of being a Hollywood screenwriter.

In the months before interviewing for the part-time summer job, Geoffray had spoken with Gibbons [00:06:00] over the phone several times. When she finally met him in person she was struck by his charisma and sense of humor. He was cute -- even dashing -- with boyish good looks behind his horn-rimmed glasses and a contagious smile.

Gibbons had arrived in New Orleans from Chicago in 1959 when he was 28 years old. He had grown up on a farm in Illinois, one of seven [00:06:30] siblings in a religious household. In fact, three of his sisters had joined religious orders, too. Gibbons had never stepped foot in Louisiana before accepting his first assignment, but he was aware of the work of progressive priests there. For instance, Father Louis J. Twomey wrote a well-known monthly publication in the 1950s called "Christ's Blueprint for the South."

He and his collaborator, Archbishop Joseph [00:07:00] Rummel, established a theological basis for desegregation of schools and other institutions in the New Orleans archdiocese. In their publication, Twomey and Rummel boldly said racism and segregation were morally wrong even as almost all church institutions and Sunday services were segregated.

Like Gibbons, Twomey's work did not stop at the end of his pen, but manifested in helping people first-hand. For [00:07:30] instance, he worked on behalf of more humane working conditions and higher pay for sugarcane workers in southern Louisiana. Archbishop Rummel, meanwhile, was one of the few high profile public leaders who took a stance against segregationists, and even excommunicated the powerful White supremacist and politician Judge Leander Perez, a Catholic, for his defiance of Rummel's desegregation orders.

Soon after [00:08:00] he arrived in New Orleans, Gibbons was introduced to a circle of up-and-coming Black leaders active in the civil rights movement. One was a young man named Norman Francis who at the time was Dean of Men at Xavier College, a well-respected Black institution in New Orleans. Francis invited Gibbons over one evening for an informal gathering with others fighting for social justice.

Gibbons was conscious that it would be his first visit to a Black person's [00:08:30] home. He wondered if Francis's home might be different in some way. Once there, he realized it was no different from his own family's place in Rutland, Illinois, a little farm town with an all-white population of 509 people. The same boxes of cereal were in Francis's kitchen. The same image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung on the mantle. Gibbons was struck by the ridiculousness of his preconception.

Roughly eight years [00:09:00] after Gibbons visited the Francis home, Francis became the first Black male and secular President of Xavier. When it opened in 1925, it was one of the few college options for African Americans and Native Americans. When Dr. Francis announced his retirement as Xavier’s president in 2015 after forty-seven years he was the longest-serving college president in the country. During his tenure, [00:09:30] he dramatically increased the stature of Xavier and graduated thousands of Blacks who went on to become professionals in many fields. The advice Francis gave Gibbons in the early 1960s demonstrated the clear strategic thinking that served him well later on.

Gibbons and Francis discussed many issues related to segregation, including the barriers to equal education, free commerce, and voting. [00:10:00] In conversation after conversation, the issue of the availability of decent jobs came up. Francis encouraged Gibbons to research the kind of jobs that might be in demand for men and women who had a limited educational background. He emphasized the importance of lifting up adult men and women who did not have access to four-year college programs, either because they could not afford it or because they were prohibited from attending because of [00:10:30] race.

Francis was unenthusiastic about Gibbons' initial plan: education for entry-level jobs in the restaurant and or hotel businesses. Such jobs could not prepare Black women, or men, for better professional or financial opportunities, Francis said. No matter how good an employee they were, he thought, they would end up pushing a mop or holding a broom or serving as dishwashers or in other lower-paying jobs. Francis [00:11:00] urged Gibbons to take a survey of the business community to find out if there were other categories of jobs that would be a better path to full employment for ambitious students, albeit ones with fewer opportunities.

Gibbons did as wide a survey as possible to determine the kind of jobs the city's businesses needed most and the training required. He also consulted with other Louisiana colleges that were part of the Alliance of Private Colleges. Gibbons [00:11:30] found-- through the unemployment office, middle managers, and other sources--that clerical jobs were in high demand. At the same time, practically no Black women worked in large institutions in this field. The sentiment was that Black women "weren't ready" to integrate those businesses or the clerical field in general. Gibbons and Dr. Francis disagreed. They were confident Black women were ready and eager to pursue these careers. However, [00:12:00] Gibbons and Francis also discovered they didn't have the skills to qualify or a way to obtain them. No affordable schools existed for them that focused on providing such training. And even if they could afford the schools, they weren’t allowed in because they were Black.

Businessmen and business teachers in the same survey indicated that the New Orleans dialect spoken by a large segment of low-income New Orleans residents—Black and [00:12:30] White—posed an almost impenetrable barrier to competing with White secretaries who spoke standard English. Those survey results confirmed Francis's concerns and observations regarding the challenges of the dialect, one that made a handful of words difficult to understand. For example, the word "oil" was pronounced "earl."

Any student who wanted to work at Texaco or Shell or [00:13:00] another petroleum company based in New Orleans would no doubt run into trouble answering phones and interacting with co-workers and clients. Francis insisted any job-training program Gibbons started had to focus on addressing the students' speech. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even pass the interview stage.

Around this same time, Congress was debating what would become the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962 [00:13:30] [MDTA]. The act was meant to address a rising unemployment rate and fears of an outdated workforce due to automation. In a special message to Congress in 1961, President John F. Kennedy told legislators that “large scale unemployment during a recession was bad enough, but large-scale unemployment during a period of prosperity would be intolerable.” Like many others, he also believed [00:14:00] that America's workforce was dangerously out-of-date. Four days later, he sent a bill to Congress that addressed these problems. The MDTA endeavored to train and retrain thousands of workers who had become unemployed because of automation and technological change. Hailed by the country as the first major piece of manpower legislation since the Employment Act of 1946, the problems that the MDTA intended to [00:14:30] solve were

not original to Kennedy. Nor, were these concerns ones that would be unrecognizable to our own era.

The dawn of the Atomic Age had witnessed the implementation of new technologies that threatened to replace men with machines in factories and on the farms. Furthermore, the Cold War and international competition had revealed America's weakness in training skilled technicians in sufficient numbers. The MDTA [00:15:00] was designed to help workers keep up with a new era.

Gibbons hoped to take advantage of the new legislation by applying for a grant for an experimental program to teach clerical skills to underemployed women of all races. Before applying, he decided to initiate a short pilot program to provide the data to justify the need for such a school—and its effectiveness. The pilot would also help develop and define the curriculum needed to [00:15:30] teach clerical skills that would put its graduates on the road to full and meaningful employment. Gibbons’s goal was for the pilot’s results to provide unshakeable evidence to the MDTA that awarding a grant was not only logical but essential.

The pilot, a typing school open to, but not exclusively for, Black women, was planned for the spring of 1964 and sponsored by Dominican College, where [00:16:00] Gibbons was assigned as a teacher and chaplain. All-white Dominican was located in Uptown New Orleans on the corner of Broadway and St. Charles Avenue, one of the most affluent parts of the city, in close proximity to the Garden District, Audubon Park, and Tulane University. Dominican provided the classrooms in a building they owned in the neighborhood of oak-lined streets surrounding the college.

Instructors included public school teachers, [00:16:30] vocational instructors, and Dominican college teachers, most of whom were nuns. All were volunteers and personally recruited by Gibbons. Gibbons recruited the students from various churches in the city. Students had to be willing to pay a small fee for supplies and books. In addition to typing, they were schooled in English and math. On Francis's advice, the faculty also began working with the [00:17:00] Dominican College Speech Department to develop a curriculum for speech training that would increase their employability. Gibbons planned to offer the speech program to both Black and White women.

The program was designed to allow Gibbons to test several hypotheses: first, that unemployed and underemployed women, both Black and White, could obtain the skills needed to qualify for clerical work; second, [00:17:30] that those women could actually get jobs as secretaries, and; third, that those jobs would increase their earning power compared to their previous history of employment. If those goals sound straightforward today, they were not straightforward at all in the time and place in which they were tested. The mere presence of the students a couple nights a week in the seldom-used residential building adjacent to Dominican proved to be a [00:18:00] lightning rod for the neighborhood. Numerous residents did not want Blacks anywhere in their vicinity, no matter what the reason.

In the spring of 1964, Gibbons's pilot program began. Classes were small, quiet and unobtrusive, and yet the opposition was ferocious. Residents threatened, among other actions, to sue the college. At first, Gibbons was [00:18:30] able to overcome the opposition and was supported by the administration in doing so.

Foes of the pilot program pulled a maneuver that Gibbons had not anticipated. They called on a city inspector to repeatedly visit the building. He eventually ordered that if the facility was not brought up to code, it would be condemned. As Gibbons put it, the ploy was "baloney." Eventually, the pressures proved [00:19:00] too great for the college to withstand.

The classes, the test, was shut down before its scheduled completion. The opponents had won, as those like them were winning similar battles in practically every city and county across the country.

But the pilot had given Gibbons, Francis, and others more evidence that their efforts were valid. They now knew there were many women ready for such opportunities. [00:19:30] At the same time, the experience prepared them for the fact that such a school would only happen with extraordinary effort and by people who were committed to doing so regardless of the forces opposing them.

Soon, Gibbons submitted a proposal to the MDTA. Dominican College would again be a sponsor. They wouldn't provide money but would provide support and expertise in the [00:20:00] form of Gibbons and other staff prior to grant funding. As part of the proposal, the college would retain the state-of-the-art IBM Selectric typewriters and other equipment from the pilot program.

Gibbons knew any potential staff needed to be excellent. He put the word out, looking for “the best business education teacher” in the New Orleans Public Schools. The name that came back from a trusted contact: Alice Geoffray. She was [00:20:30] working in the Business Education Department at Rabouin Public High School. Geoffray would later say that she may have been the only business education teacher Gibbons’ contact knew.

Geoffray was conducting programs with goals comparable to what Gibbons had in mind for the Adult Education Center, but classes were exclusively for White participants. Such programs were referred to then as Cooperative Office Education, or "COE."

Geoffray's [00:21:00] approach was not only to prepare her students with technical skills, but also with interpersonal skills -- skills that strengthen what we might call “emotional intelligence” today -- skills that in her experience students needed to land jobs and excel at them. The ability to interview well and to communicate so as to fit in and move up were paramount. Geoffray’s work included liaising closely with [00:21:30] the business community to gauge their needs and translate those needs to the dreams and aspirations of students. It also meant exposing students to the workplace experience as early as possible and giving students feedback well before they committed to a career path.

Geoffray’s high school and college had been segregated. She had not been a part of the Civil Rights movement in any way prior to getting the call from Gibbons. [00:22:00] The New Orleans Public Schools were barely integrated at the time; as a result, Geoffray had no experience teaching Black students. She probably had never even been in a classroom with them. Neither were the schools integrated in terms of its teachers and administration so Geoffray barely had any experience with Black teachers or Black administrators. This was unfortunate because dating back to the early [00:22:30] 19th Century - before the Civil War - New Orleans' Creole and Black communities had a long history of outstanding educators and educational institutions despite a gross disparity in the distribution of resources between the White and Black communities.

Gibbons valued that Geoffray had a good reputation among the business community for developing talent as well one for job placement. Gibbons [00:23:00] interviewed Geoffray over the phone and then subsequently called her several more times as he was doing further research and before they met in person.

But after finishing the first MDTA proposal, Gibbons promptly forgot Geoffray's name and lost her number. When he received preliminary approval of the grant several months later, all he could remember was that the business teacher lived on Broadway Avenue [00:23:30] near Dominican's uptown campus. So, he got a copy of the city's Red Book, the only way to look up an address in those days, and pored over the pages looking for a name on Broadway that sounded familiar. Nothing did. Serendipity intervened. He finally found Geoffray through a newspaper article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. She was featured for having just won the 1965 Classroom [00:24:00] Teachers Award from the Freedoms Foundation. Gibbons contacted Geoffray immediately to ask her to come in for a face-to-face interview.

Geoffray had no idea that Gibbons had made such an effort to find her. She remembered months before they had talked about the project on the telephone as he worked on a grant proposal. But she hadn't thought about it since.

The two met in person for the first time in a grand old conference room next [00:24:30] to Gibbons’s chaplain's quarters, which would later become her temporary office. It was only a block or so away from the site where the pilot program had been shut down.

Geoffray thought she was coming in for an interview; but the way Gibbons greeted and talked with her, she soon gathered he had already made up his mind that he was going to hire her as his secretary to prepare the school for opening. He had not selected teachers or the administration of the school, so those jobs were not on [00:25:00] the table, yet. Nor would it have ever occurred to Geoffray that the position of director of the school would be for her. After all, she had no administrative experience. She didn't consider herself a leader. Her image of a leader was the 5'11" priest before her who she said had an undeniable charisma and "a great smile one that made people instantly drawn to him." A man in black wearing a white collar who she said was [00:25:30] "attentive and curious and seemed to be genuinely interested in the world and the people in it." Meanwhile, she was self-conscious about her own looks. Rail-thin all her life, after giving birth to her eighth child, and then nearly dying from a gall bladder operation gone wrong, she had started to gain weight on her otherwise diminutive frame. She had always felt like an ugly duckling; now she was a plump one.

Geoffray was [00:26:00] intrigued that the program would be the first in New Orleans signed under the MDTA and that it was being sponsored by her alma mater. Gibbons told her he was eager to get the Dominican students involved in social action programs. Dominican was a small, liberal arts college for women. Though many of the women did not live luxuriously, they lived in a world of their own where they were not seriously touched by the problems of the poor.

Even Geoffray, [00:26:30] whose family was just about as poor as poor could be, had practically no interaction with underemployed poor women of color as a child growing up, and every environment after that had been all-white: high school, college, and the classrooms in which she taught.

When she had attended Dominican from 1940 to 1944 during the Depression and the early years of World War II, many of 'her kind' - poor Irish and Italian Catholic girls -- were [00:27:00] on hard-earned scholarships. She had won one of two scholarships given each year, based on academic standing, which provided tuition for four years. However, her family found it difficult to even come up with the forty dollars a year they needed for fees. Dominican had advanced in stature and status since then. Roughly three years before Geoffray met Gibbons, Sister Helen Prejean graduated from the college. She would go [00:27:30] on to become one of the country's fiercest anti-death penalty advocates and be immortalized in the movie "Dead Man Walking," a movie based on her nonfiction book. She remains a tireless advocate of rights for the poor and especially those caught up on the criminal justice system. Her third book, "River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey," is the prequel to "Dead Man Walking" and tells how a young woman, who grew up in a White, middle-class family in the Jim Crow [00:28:00] south, found her way to the housing projects of New Orleans, and from there to accompany a man on death row to his execution.

During the interview, Gibbons told Geoffray that he wanted her to take a leave from the public schools to join him in staffing the school. In addition to the temporary secretarial position, he offered her a position teaching either shorthand or typing. He also wanted her to suggest other people who might be interested in working with them. [00:28:30] Geoffray wasn't sure that was what she wanted to do or should do. Although she was interested, she had worked hard in the public schools, built up a pension, and was reluctant to give up the possibility of advancing further. It had been a good year. She had won a prestigious teaching award and other accolades. She loved her students and felt she brought out the best in them. Some of her most innovative [00:29:00] initiatives captured the imagination of newspaper and television audiences. For instance, in response to President John F. Kennedy's 1963 inaugural address wherein he famously urged citizens to "ask what you can do for your country," Geoffray urged her students to write to their leaders to ask them “What can I do for my country?' The response from U.S. Senators, Congressman and even the Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, was [00:29:30] overwhelming.

The press enthusiastically covered the story, and her students won multiple awards for the project.

Geoffray was not a participant in the civil rights movement. Up until the interview, her focus was on survival, her own and her children’s. Yet as much as she didn't want to leave her safe job at the public schools, she couldn't say "no" either. Something in the way [00:30:00] Gibbons described the program coupled with his deep sense of purpose was too compelling. In any case, he pointed out the actual program would last only twenty-four weeks. Even if Geoffray would not take the full-time instructor position in Fall, he suggested, they could work together in July and August to prep the school for opening. In Geoffray, Gibbons saw not only a first-class educator, [00:30:30] but someone who had the potential to be a change agent, one with compassion and quiet determination. Gibbons was prepared to use his salary for a temporary secretary during that period if Geoffray would agree to work with him, and told her so.

Gibbons had just received his Master's degree from Tulane University in psychology in May 1965. Before that, [00:31:00] he had taught philosophy. He admitted he didn't know anything about business education. He emphasized to Geoffray how important her relationships with the business community could be to the school. Furthermore, he challenged Geoffray directly. He asked her, “What have you done to deserve your reputation?”

Geoffray was taken aback. She didn’t know what to say. She found she wasn’t angry with [00:31:30] Gibbons for his bluntness; she was inspired. He had opened her eyes not only to the seriousness of civil rights, but to the possibility she could make a difference in the lives of Black students. She thought it would be selfish or short-sighted not to try.

Geoffray accepted the temp job. In addition to be being swayed by Gibbons' argument -- and his charisma -- she needed the money after one of her [00:32:00] usual part-time summer jobs was canceled. She thought she would have two months to decide whether to quit her job in the public schools. She had no inkling political undercurrents swirling beneath Gibbons that would quickly envelop her and force a decision that would change her life, forever.

That concludes Episode 5 of Exchange Place: Two Paths Cross.

Please join us for Episode 6.

[00:32:28] Jeff Geoffray: This has been a [00:32:30] presentation of the 431 Exchange. We're a nonprofit organization dedicated to adults seeking to transform their lives through continuing education. We invite you to learn more about us by going to our website at www.431exchange.org.

To hear more inspiring stories please sign up for our newsletter. Thanks. Copyright 431 Exchange LLC, 2022.

[00:32:55] Simpler Times: [00:33:00] [00:33:30] “Simpler Times” by Kevin Gullage, Performed by Shelby Griffith

Simpler thoughts

And simple feelings

Simple smiles

Full of joy

And full of love

Simple ways

Simple truths

And simply longing

Simply for

Something real

And something more [00:34:00]