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AI: Excuse me, you were saying how you, part of your work was keeping track of all this, the publications, the articles and so forth, being written on race relations, and what was then called intergroup relations. What was the tone of, and the content of some of these articles and publications?

EH: Oh, well, all I could do was keep clipping and categorizing. But they were just exciting, well, to us exciting. Let's see... they were issues like, lot of the big colleges had quotas and race restrictions. I remember that the big five women's colleges, I don't, well, Evelyn Apperson went to Smith, but I don't know that black students could very well get into the big five women's colleges. I remember Jewish students having problems, they couldn't file for applications like everybody else, they had to appear in person, and, and then got scrutinized. That kind of issue. I think schools like Fisk also got notoriety. There was all, there were all kinds of breakthroughs coming on, you know. Black soldiers were, were very aggravated, because they couldn't get in. In fact, in Ralph's situation, the reason we had to leave (Chicago) was he was a senior at Northwestern, he was going to the downtown campus, and Northwestern had the rule that one of the four years, you had to be a resident student, meaning you had to be on the Evanston main campus one of those four years. So in compliance, Ralph went to sign up for the senior year, and they discovered that he was black and said, "The quota for Negro students is filled." And, but that was very common. Big colleges had quotas for black students. And, and yet, he had the senior status, so why couldn't he stay? The professors, on the, on the downtown (...) Chicago campus, very close to Michigan, on the north end of the loop, that was of no concern. They didn't notice or care what color he was.

And but anyway, that was the status, and his boss, Joe Lowman, and one of the professors was, I think the vice presidency candidate under Henry Wallace. Wallace was running as a third-party candidate. And this guy's name was Taylor, I think. He was a journalism professor, and happened to be one of Ralph's professors. And there were a lot of people who wanted Ralph to challenge it legally, but you know, returning vets in those days didn't have patience for postponing education. Ralph, I forgot, Ralph must have been in late twenties, he's born in '22, and that was '40, so maybe it was mid-twenties, past mid-twenties. And he didn't, he wanted to go where he could get his degree. And it, the only colleges that were offering journalism degrees was, were, Columbia was a graduate school, UCLA and USC were filled, he wasn't going south to Missouri, and UW was the only school that was open, and they accepted him. But when he got here, the professor, the head of the department, had never heard of some of these classes that were on his Northwestern transcript, and he didn't, he didn't want to accept it. And Ralph wouldn't give up. He knew, Ralph knew that Northwestern was one of the top journalism schools, so finally the department head said, "All right, go get signatures of all the professors, and let's see how many of them approve of this transcript." And they couldn't believe that anybody was (going to) question a Northwestern transcript, so he got in. But midway through the year, he came home one day and said, "If I get another "redbaiting" assignment I, I quit, I'm (going to) take a leave of absence." And I said, "You know, you've been complaining about that all year. Tomorrow's not (going to) be any different." But by golly, he came home and had a, had taken a leave. And fortunately, he landed a job -- I think he landed a job at, I don't know... at some point he landed a job at Boeing, but maybe that was, maybe he got a post office job. I don't know.

But anyway, oh, I guess it was Boeing. He got, he landed the job and he was at Boeing for two or three months and he came home and said, "No, I'm not (going to) be doing that the rest of my life." And came back to the U and switched his major to political science. And that was, that was all right. I think he hated to give up writing, but he, he got his B.A. in political science, and then he went to get his master's degree, and because he served in India for three years, he wanted to do his master's degree on the new Indian government. He, he had... well, for real scholars or government-interested people, Nehru and Gandhi were exciting figures. Especially, I think, if you were in India. Nehru was a big hope for Indians, India. They'd been under British thumb for so long, that they were eager to get their independence. And Ralph wanted to watch that and write about it. Nobody was interested in India on the UW campus. And he wasn't, he wasn't (going to) give up, and he kept going around and around, and finally somebody in the British department, I guess, in political science, said, "Okay, I'll pick him up." A female advisor.

So he wrote his thesis on, on the Indian government, but when he, when he was about to graduate, or maybe it was his orals, they made him take five areas of concentration, where normally it's three for master's degree. So he took a string of 300, 400 classes that... when, when the, when the oral kind of interview was going on, the department head came in, and sat in on it, and looked at the transcript and said, "Who told you to take all this?" And he said, "They did." So, you know, they probably got raked over the coals, but twenty, twenty years after he started teaching, they called him back, and they called him and wanted him to come in for an appointment and they, they wanted, they said, "You've taken enough, you don't have to take any more classes, just write your thesis, and you could get your Ph.D." See, they knew that they had overloaded him. Because, and, in that period also, blacks were, in graduate school, were facing that all over the place, and they were leaving. And they would say to Ralph, "What the hell are you staying around here for? I'm not (going to) take this." And Ralph's philosophy was, "Let 'em dish it out, I'll dish 'em back, I'll dish it back." And you know, plus the fact that we had, we had at least two kids, by the time he got his teaching certificate, we had three kids. But he didn't want to be moving all the time. And as long as teaching was available, I guess he took it. But that was interesting. He, when they talked about the Ph.D., Ralph said, "Are you (going to) offer me a job?" And, "What's, what's the first year salary like?" They said, "$11,000," and Ralph said, "I can't take that. I've got two kids in college. I've got two more coming." And he was getting, it wasn't a great deal, but I think he was getting $24-, $25,000 from the school system by then. And that just, that seems ridiculous now to look back and get $24,000 with a master's degree. But anyway, he stuck (to) it, he stuck (to) it. And I think he, I think that was probably a good field -- I'm sure glad we didn't have to move, and I would be, I would, it would be deadly to have to raise kids in Chicago, I think. Climate-wise, even. You know, you can't beat this place to be -- and I, I think I must say, Seattle is a fairly well-integrated, fairly open-minded. UW is not the most liberal place in many respects, but as far as the community goes, it's probably easier than most places.

<End Segment 54> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.