Exchange Place: How A Small Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation
Season 1, Episode 9: Hullabaloo

JULY 14, 2023 | THE 431 EXCHANGE; MYA CARTER (HOST); KEVIN GULLAGE (MUSIC)

TRANSCRIPT:

Episode 9: Hullabaloo

[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]

[00:00:00] Mya Carter: The need to hire competent teachers for the Adult Education Center was paramount, and Geoffray and Gibbons wanted as many as possible to be Black in order to provide both role models and a level of comfort for students. This was a task they discovered that was easier said than done.

The 431 Exchange presents Exchange Place: How A Small, Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation. [00:00:30] Exchange Place is the story of a school whose mission was to 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 [00:01:00] inspirational biographies of the school's graduates who 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 9: Part 1 - Work Begins

Geoffray had a limited knowledge of the pool of Black teachers in both the New Orleans public school system and in the segregated parochial school system. On top of that, [00:01:30] Geoffray experienced resistance on the part of the ones she interviewed to come aboard as part of the experimental program.

Black teachers working in an integrated environment risked being targeted in ways that a White teacher could never imagine and through clever means. After World War I, White supremacists had stoked fears that Jews, African Americans, Catholics, and others were taking over society. It was known as the second popular era of the KKK.

Laws [00:02:00] were passed that forced the KKK to make their membership lists public. In the 1950s and on, Segregationists used those same laws, ironically, to force the NAACP to release their own membership rolls and then targeted the many Black teachers who had been secretly contributing time and money to the organization.

Segregationists targeted them by trying and often succeeding in getting teachers fired or [00:02:30] reassigned to worse performing schools and by initiating boycotts of their spouses places of work or their businesses. Meanwhile, any prospective Black teachers for the Adult Education Center knew that Dominican College was itself a segregated institution.

No relationship had ever existed between the college and its Black counterparts. In fact, the entire system of churches, Catholic and Protestant, was highly segregated throughout New Orleans. [00:03:00] In addition, the pay of Black teachers was substantially less than their White counterparts. Therefore, these Black teachers had good jobs, but they did not have the kind of jobs where they would have easily saved enough money to take a risk on an experimental school scheduled for only two sessions.

Geoffray, who as a White teacher earned more than even the most senior African American teachers in the public school system, barely earned enough money to get [00:03:30] by. But perhaps there was an even more profound reason why Geoffray had such a difficult time recruiting Black teachers. The very teachers that Geoffray was trying to recruit based on the reputations she gathered from colleagues were reluctant to abandon their post at historically Black schools.

The best Black teachers throughout the public school system were being pressured and or enticed to leave their positions to go to White schools. While less experienced White teachers were being [00:04:00] transferred to schools in Black neighborhoods. Altogether, these factors made it difficult for Geoffray and her Dominican colleagues to convince Black teachers to be part of the project.

Even a project that had attracted enormous amounts of attention in the community and outside New Orleans. It made Angela Germany's decision to join the faculty that much more remarkable. Germany was a Black business education teacher Geoffray knew from her previous job who [00:04:30] joined the center as a student counselor.

It was thanks to this personal relationship that Germany decided to join the school's staff, albeit part time. Geoffray and Gibbons ended up convincing only a handful of Black teachers to come on board although they desired many more to be on staff. In hiring Germany and several other young women as counselors, Geoffray hoped the high ratio of counselors to students would establish strong relationships that could [00:05:00] help the students with personal or scholastic problems when they arose, or even before they flared up.

She would reflect later that one of their biggest mistakes in 1965 to '66 was underestimating how often the counselors would be needed. Geoffrey had no idea the deep personal relationships she and the faculty would form with the students. Even after graduation, the school and its counselors kept their doors open to former students [00:05:30] as they returned for guidance to navigate the new integrated business world they were creating practically by themselves.

Another Black teacher hired on full time was Shirley Lorenz, who had taught for several years as an English teacher in the public schools. At the center, she taught English and reading. Lorenz became one of Geoffray's dearest friends and colleagues after they both returned to the New Orleans public school system together.

As far as other staff, Gibbons had [00:06:00] several clergy in mind who wanted to work part time to help him reach his goals. These Dominican nuns were well educated, intelligent, and experienced. Two had doctorates, but they had also taught at the elementary, high school, and college levels as they had progressed from Novices to their present status.

A few held significant positions within the Dominican College faculty, two were destined to become future presidents of the college. During the first [00:06:30] program, beginning in 1965, Sister Mary Giles and Sister Mary Albert, two of the center's staunchest and enthusiastic members, left the convent. Their unrest marked the beginning of the unprecedented exodus of religious men and women from the traditional orders in order to take up civil rights and other humanitarian causes.

These two women desired to find positions in life that they considered more meaningful and purposeful. [00:07:00] Each had spent approximately twenty years as a Dominican nun. Each had proclaimed her final But the call to be part of a movement on the ground changing the country was too strong to resist. There were other teaching positions that required special expertise that could only be found with lay teachers.

Gibbons selected two speech therapists, Carol Steiner, a recent master's graduate of the speech department at Newcomb College, the all [00:07:30] women's college associated with Tulane University, and Morris Needham, an experienced speech therapist. In addition to bringing the students' speech to a desired level of employability, these two full time therapists prepared the original material to be used in the speech classes.

No textbook existed that could help them achieve the ambitious goals of the school. Meaning a textbook that would teach English as a second language without diminishing the value of the student's [00:08:00] own dialect. This was a new approach to English and not widely studied. In fact, the textbooks that were available emphasized correcting dialectical differences as if those differences were defects.

Geoffray did not hold with the notion of correcting students English. So the school began preparing a first of its kind business speech textbook. It became the first published on the subject and was sent out by the Labor Department to speech teachers [00:08:30] throughout the country. Meanwhile, Geoffray needed an assistant.

Sharon Rodi was a determined young woman from an Irish Catholic family that lived in the Lakeview District of New Orleans. Her father was a professional baseball player. And because of that, Rodi was more worldly than most of her peers having lived in places like Boston and Seattle. Rodi met Gibbons when she took his theology class as a student at Dominican, and she took [00:09:00] to heart his call for her and her classmates to consider participating in the civil rights movement that was happening all around them.

In class, Gibbons immediately spotted Rodi's potential to be a change agent and her capability. When he asked her to come aboard the Adult Education Center, Rodi didn't even need time to think it over. She was all in.

As far as the nuts and bolts of the school's funding, the money came from two sources, the Labor Department and the [00:09:30] Health Education and Welfare Department (HEW). The Labor Department's funds would be responsible for the administrative portion of the contract, including equipment. It was a line item budget, meaning funds could be spent only on the approved items that were submitted in the proposal's budget. But with HEW, Gibbons had negotiated for a tuition based budget, twelve hundred dollars per student for ninety students. The money could be spent at the discretion of [00:10:00] the administration. Only the Dominican College administrators had to approve those expenditures. Washington did not. When a bill was presented for payment from HEW, the school had to indicate how many students were on the rolls during the time period. They also had to attach the beginning and terminating dates of attendance for any student who had left the program and the reason for departure. Only four students dropped out in the first program. No other MDTA [00:10:30] program nationally could boast of such a record. It was the first time a tuition based arrangement had been agreed upon for an MDTA contract.

Up until then, they had all been line item cost reimbursement budgets. Later, other MDTA contracts would be negotiated in a similar manner. Unfortunately, this policy provided an opening for abuse later by for-profit institutions to obtain money from the government to [00:11:00] teach students without being accountable for the quality of the instruction. Not all those funds went to teaching. But in the hands of the earnest educators of the non-profit Adult Education Center, Gibbon's strategy was efficacious, allowing for a great deal of much needed flexibility. It was important, because there was no map for the road to success. What the Adult Education Center's educators were doing was so new, so [00:11:30] groundbreaking, they needed flexibility as to how and where funds were spent, and why.

Geoffray thought the MDTA agreed to the unprecedented arrangement because of their respect for Gibbons's priesthood and his unquestionable sincerity, honesty, and commitment. He was also an extremely persuasive man who would use those skills in private business as a stockbroker after he left the priesthood.

One of [00:12:00] the key items the school needed was books. Gibbons knew it would be the first time the African American students of the Adult Education Center would attend a school with new textbooks. Throughout their entire education up until that point, most of the textbooks Black students received were used, tattered, and decades, some even a half century out of date. Future Center students like Gwen Shepard, who enrolled in the newly integrated [00:12:30] Louisiana State University of New Orleans in 1959, were issued battered out-of-date textbooks at the university. LSUNO, which would later become the University of New Orleans, was touted for being one of the first universities in the south to open to African Americans and students of all color.

Yet the integrated university had a segregated cafeteria where the food was noticeably [00:13:00] worse according to Shepherd. The people in charge who assigned the classes would not give Shepherd permission to attend the courses she was interested in at the time for no other reason than her color. She did not see the public all Black colleges like Southern University and Baton Rouge as an option either, for they were woefully underfunded.

In a segregated world, higher education followed the same pattern as the segregated elementary, middle, and high schools [00:13:30] of Louisiana. It was no wonder students like Shepard sought out the Adult Education Center.

As for the textbooks the Adult Education Center would use, it was not difficult for Geoffray to compile a list of business education texts based on her prior experience. She followed up with general texts for English, math, spelling, and other courses. Gibbons had received permission from Sister Mary Judine, Treasurer [00:14:00] of Dominican, to proceed with the purchase. The college would advance the money required. The center would reimburse the college as soon as money was received from Washington.

This was a huge leap of faith for Dominican and underscored their confidence in Gibbons. However, as the number of textbooks increased, the price tag soared. Gibbons got very uncomfortable about the debt he was accumulating. Suppose something happened? [00:14:30] Suppose the program fell through? Based on Gibbons' current income, fifteen dollars a month, he figured it would take him approximately ten years just to pay the shipping costs to return the books.

Within a couple of weeks, the brand new books began arriving. They were stacked in the meeting room where Gibbons and Geoffray had met originally. It wasn't long before they spread into the entrance foyer and then into the office area. It was a visual reminder day in and [00:15:00] day out for Geoffray and Gibbons that the pressure was on for them to make the school succeed.

But they had no idea the pressure was about to increase to a level they could never have anticipated and from multiple directions. Starting in June, 1965, a total of fifty-nine landlords refused to rent space to the founders of the school, thus threatening the very existence of the program and dashing Gibbons's well thought out goal [00:15:30] to have a first class facility in the midst of the Central Business District.

Finally, one brave landlord agreed to rent them a space. But, the location was the former site of a bar and illegal gambling joint called, "The Squirrel Cage... Where the Nuts Meet." The Squirrel Cage was on the fringe of the French Quarter, on one of its most notorious blocks, and underneath the former apartment of Lee [00:16:00] Harvey Oswald, who less than two years before had allegedly assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

The bar had been gutted and needed a total renovation. Thus, when one of the biggest natural disasters in the history of the United States up to that time, Hurricane Betsy, rolled through New Orleans, it wreaked all kinds of havoc on the school's plans, including making it nearly impossible to find the [00:16:30] construction crews necessary to convert the dilapidated location into the home of a business school.

If that wasn't enough, funding for the school became a high stakes game of political football tossed around by Democratic officials at the highest levels of state government fighting amongst themselves for possession of every dollar coming in from the war on poverty programs. Their explicit aim was to use such funds to help them court the vote [00:17:00] of eligible Black citizens who they could no longer afford to ignore. Finally, there was the unrest of a country and city on the precipice of dramatic social change whether it was ready or not.

Part 2: Hullabaloo

Father Gibbons had landed in New Orleans determined to translate theology into action. For him, Christ's teachings were hollow [00:17:30] without change on the ground, and in Gibbons' case, that meant challenging the racism that permeated the South with a concrete plan for transformation. But the young priest's ambitions crashed head on into the South's escalating resistance to change. By August of 1965, tensions between Gibbons and his superiors reached a boiling point. He was abruptly removed from his post in New Orleans.

His superiors reassigned [00:18:00] him to a small college in Albuquerque, New Mexico, hundreds of miles away from local politics and the people he had come to love dearly since moving to New Orleans from the Midwest. It was hard for Gibbons not to feel like David and other misunderstood visionaries in the Bible.

Banished. The news was shocking. It was also likely intended to be a potential death blow to the Adult Education Center. Gibbons had created [00:18:30] enthusiasm and confidence among the teachers and supporters of the school, instilling in them the idea that the job ahead would be a great adventure. Now, the future was in doubt.

Gibbons was ostensibly leaving because outside forces had forced the hand of his superiors. But the truth was that the Dominican Order did not entirely approve of the project from the start. Some believed Gibbons was a rebel. Others [00:19:00] called him an outside agitator, a term also given to civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner who had been murdered in nearby Mississippi the prior summer in what became known as the Mississippi Burning Murders, not to mention the organizers of the Freedom Rides.

Dominican thought if Gibbons was transferred, the Adult Education Center might die, or fail, or fade away. [00:19:30] Geoffray opined that the nuns in charge, particularly Mother Mary Imelda, one of the leading administrators was afraid that the Dominican sisters involvement with the program might bring problems to the college that would be irreparable in the future.

The antipathy towards Gibbons had begun during the pilot program. The negative feelings became more personal when he started looking for a new home for the second program under the MDTA grant. He made his outreach [00:20:00] to the highest profile landlords of the city a clarion call for the moral imperative of such a school.

But that wasn't what got Gibbons into real trouble with Dominican. It was what happened in between the two programs. According to Gibbons, his removal was spurred almost certainly by his choice of a keynote speaker for the Dominican College graduation ceremony in May of 1965. That spring, Gibbons was given the honor and responsibility of [00:20:30] choosing the keynote speaker for the graduation because he had become the favorite son on the Dominican campus, especially to Sister Mary Louise, the college's president.

Gibbons wanted students to be exposed to issues of social justice. To that end, he reached out to Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers Union, UAW, to give the speech. Reuther was not just any union leader. [00:21:00] To this day many consider him the most important labor leader of the Twentieth Century. He commanded the attention of U.S. Presidents and the media at the drop of a dime. No one yet has filled the vacuum he left when he died in 1970. Under Reuther's leadership the UAW made groundbreaking progress for workers in equal rights and wages. He is also considered the last [00:21:30] of a breed of progressive labor leaders with broad support and power the likes of which are non-existent today. In 1999, Time Magazine recognized Reuther as one of the 100 most influential people of the Twentieth Century, along with businessmen Bill Gates of Microsoft and Sam Walton of Walmart. Inviting Reuther to New Orleans was a major provocation to White supremacists and anti-labor forces.

It [00:22:00] was astounding Gibbons had the guts to make such a bold choice, and just as astounding that Reuther accepted. Perhaps he did because he rarely received invitations to speak in the South. He was being invited to a city hostile to both civil rights and organized labor. It was also an environment rife with recent violence.

Only a few months earlier, in March of 1965, Bloody Sunday, the Selma to [00:22:30] Montgomery marches had generated international attention. In and around New Orleans, there was similar unrest and White terrorism, although they did not receive the same media attention. Reuther's influence was far reaching. In the run up to World War II, he had proposed converting America's auto industry into airplane manufacturing with a campaign he called 500 Planes a Day.

After the Japanese [00:23:00] invaded Pearl Harbor, he was instrumental in making the United States the arsenal of democracy by refining the plan, but it is in civil rights where Reuther may have made his most lasting mark. In the 1963 March on Washington, where Reverend Martin Luther King gave his famous, "I Have a Dream" speech, Reuther was the only prominent White speaker to appear alongside King.[00:23:30]

Reuther had leveraged his five million member UAW union to help organize the march. Many believe that show of support helped make the event a success, or at least helped prevent it from disintegrating into violence and disaster. Union organizers across the country used their experience and infrastructure for transportation, accommodations, and other practical assistance before and during the march.[00:24:00]

For example, under Reuther the UAW arranged for the massive professional sound system that allowed the voice of King and others to be heard by the 250,000 people who had gathered for the event at the National Mall in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. On March 26, 1965, less than two months before he spoke at the Dominican college graduation, Reuther appeared on the cover of Life [00:24:30] Magazine alongside Martin Luther King for an article entitled, Historic Turning Point for the Negro Cause." In the New Republic, Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee for president, called Reuther "the most dangerous man in America. More dangerous to our country than Sputnik or Soviet Russia."

Reuther was the survivor of two assassination attempts including one where [00:25:00] someone blasted a hole through his kitchen window with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Another attempt left his right hand crippled. While leading strikes in the 1930s and 1940s, he was hospitalized after being badly beaten by strike breakers.

While many people don't think of labor leaders as being green activists as well, Reuther was an instrumental organizer in the first Earth Day in 1970. Later that [00:25:30] year, tragedy occurred. He and his wife died when their chartered Learjet crashed. Those who thought Reuther's death was not an accident had a long list of enemies they suspected based on Reuther's activism, from the Mob, to the U.S. Government, to the Communist Party, to anti communists. Meanwhile, when word got out in May 1965 that Reuther had readily accepted Gibbons' [00:26:00] invitation to speak at graduation, it caused "a hullabaloo," in Gibbons words. Reuther was just the kind of liberal, progressive, troublemaking intellectual the segregationists of New Orleans had every reason to despise, not only for his views on race.

But for being simultaneously a representative of unions and a symbol of the elite as an East Coast intellectual who advised presidents and civil rights leaders. Neighbors of the college who had [00:26:30] already been instrumental in shutting down Gibbons's pilot program stormed the college to object. Even though many were big supporters of Dominican and staunch Catholics, they pleaded with Sister Mary Louise to come to her senses.

The threat posed by Reuther's visit was so serious that the New Orleans Police Chief, Joe Giarrusso, had to get involved in protecting both the peace and Reuther. Gibbons was appointed the college's main [00:27:00] contact with the police and he and Giarrusso spoke constantly. Giarrusso told him the visit was the biggest security challenge that the city had faced since the visit of Charles de Gaulle, the president of France in 1947 after World War II.

In that visit, riflemen were posted on the roof of New Orleans famous Cabildo, one of the city's most historic buildings. For de Gaulle's speech in Jackson Square, while nearby [00:27:30] sewers were inspected and blocked to prevent bombings and terrorists. Reuther's visit looked like another no win conflict for Geruso and the New Orleans Police Department.

Geruso found himself plagued by others and by his own internal dialogue with the question, how could he keep the peace without exhorting to violence against or on behalf of one side or another? Just two years earlier, Giarrusso had been deemed a [00:28:00] spectacular failure in keeping the peace in another civil rights event.

In 1963, a lunch counter sit in had been organized by Reverend Avery Alexander, a prominent civil rights leader who would go on to become a state representative. The setting was the segregated cafeteria in the basement of the New Orleans City Hall, where Alexander and his peers goal was to not leave the segregated cafeteria until they had been served a meal or arrested.[00:28:30]

For five hours, Alexander and his peers sat refusing to leave. It wasn't until police arrived that Alexander was televised being dragged by his heels up the basement steps with his head banging on the staircase. The spectacle of Reverend Alexander being dragged out of City Hall by Giarrusso and the dramatic news coverage it spawned galvanized the support of previously less engaged citizens and [00:29:00] encouraged Alexander and his supporters to go even further.

The incident was a personal and professional blow to Giarrusso, who up until then had prided himself on being tough. He once carried a shotgun into City Hall to dramatize the call for a better armed police force. Another time, he knocked out a former state senator at the original Roots Chris Steakhouse.

His confidence was shaken by the Alexander incident, [00:29:30] and his response to it. For many people, Black and White, He became a symbol of Jim Crow. Moon Landrieu, who served as mayor of New Orleans from 1970 to 78, said in Giarrusso's 2005 Associated Press obituary that he believed his friend and ally likely regretted having to enforce segregation laws in the 1960s.

Giarrusso later shed his Jim Crow image. by becoming a [00:30:00] city council member from 1976 to 1994 with a reputation for fighting for the rights of the working class. In advance of Reuther's visit, Giarrusso worked double time with Gibbons and others to prevent violence. There was too much at stake for him and for the city.

The police force was increased by a third for the event. Surveys were carried out in the homes and neighborhoods around the college before the speech. [00:30:30] Homeowners were told to close second floor windows within sight of the college to prevent an assassin from using any opening. On the day of the speech, police posed as protesters and counter demonstrators, filtering through the crowds.

Undercover cops were embedded in the audience. No doubt the FBI were present as well. On the Saturday night before the speech incoming calls were routed to Gibbons from the [00:31:00] college. In one, a man said, "the gun we'll use to kill Reuther is the same gun we used on Kennedy." Gibbons believed the caller was referring not to a type of gun, but the actual gun allegedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President John Kennedy in Dallas twenty months prior. Gibbons believed the caller was insinuating that the police themselves would be involved in the murder of Reuther because the rifle [00:31:30] Oswald used to kill the president was presumably in their possession.

During this time, the actions of priests like Gibbons, who were dedicated to civil rights, and of the progressive segment of the Catholic Church, caused many non-Catholics across the country to vilify the church and its followers.

In New Orleans itself, where Catholicism was dominant, people were more forgiving. Hostility was not as big a factor, but outside of New Orleans, it was a [00:32:00] different story. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups were suspicious of the church and they associated the Pope with recent immigrants, Germans, Italians, Irish and so forth. For example, there were reports by teachers in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana that children cheered when they heard the news that Kennedy, the first Catholic president, had been assassinated in Dallas.

[00:32:30] Giarrusso and others feared Reuther's visit would draw outsiders bent on creating violence and mayhem. The night before the speech, Gibbons picked up Reuther at the airport. Accompanying him was Victor Busey, the head of the Louisiana AFL CIO. Busey, who had held his role for decades, was another powerful labor leader, who was as influential as many governors, and certainly one of the most powerful political leaders in the state.[00:33:00]

Traveling with Reuther, Busey and Gibbons were two bodyguards. Even though Reuther was registered under an alias at three hotels, when they arrived at the French Quarter Hotel that was to be his lodging, the doorman and all the staff seemed to already know who Reuther was and had made preparations to receive him. Someone had tipped them off.

Dawn came. There were so many picketers, graduates [00:33:30] had to alter their route. Traditionally, they proceeded from the campus gate at Broadway and then re-entered the campus at St. Charles Avenue for the ceremony. Instead, for the first time they stayed entirely on campus. The angry picketers opposing Reuther were countered by another group supporting him, called Students for Integration.

The police presence was thick, the atmosphere, tense. [00:34:00] Giarrusso had told Gibbons his plan was to plant spies within both camps of protesters in order to do everything possible to prevent violence. Reuther walked up to the podium and looked out at the crowd. Of those picketing against him, he said, "our friends out there don't understand that when hatred fills a man's heart there is no room for reason in his head."

He added that they also didn't understand [00:34:30] that the genius of a free society is in its ability to harmonize its differences. Reuther went on. He said, "the crisis confronting the world is not essentially economic, political, or social, it is a moral crisis. We must learn to further our abilities in the art of working with man."

The protests disbanded when the graduation ceremonies ended. After all the [00:35:00] hullabaloo leading up to his appearance, Reuther's visit ended peacefully. His detractors and enemies in the South had been quelled by the carefully executed security strategy. What had not been quelled, however, was the antipathy Gibbons had aroused among his detractors.

The speech launched his removal from his post. By summer's end, Gibbons needed to find a suitable replacement for himself as director of the Adult Education Center [00:35:30] so the school could open as planned, or it would not open at all. The clock was ticking.

That concludes Episode 9 of Exchange Place. Please join us for Episode 10.

[00:35:43] Jeff Geoffray: This has been a presentation of the 431 Exchange. We're a non-profit 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. [00:36:00] 431exchange.org

To hear more inspiring stories, please sign up for our newsletter.

Thanks. Copyright 431 Exchange LLC 2022.

[00:36:10] Steppin' Out by Kevin Gullage: I've been up all night.

I've been up all night.

I've been dancing and moving.

I've been dancing and moving.

I feel all right.

I feel all right.

I'm lookin' real good. I'm lookin' real good.

Don't be shy now. Don't be shy.

Don't be so rude.

Don't be so rude.

[00:36:30] Let's tear the house down.

Tear it down.

Let's break all the rules.

Let's break all the rules.

Let's get to steppin' out.

Steppin' out.

Steppin' in the street. In the street.

Let's get to steppin' out. Steppin out!

Let's dance 'till the morning. Dance 'till the morning.

Tonight is the night to do it all right let's get to steppin out.

Steppin' out.

Steppin' out. Steppin' out.