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TI: But before we go to college, I want to go back to Skyline and, and you were talking about the story of taking the bus from the flatlands up, up to Skyline. Did you have a sense that the people at Skyline, or how did they look at the people who were bussed from the flatlands? I mean, what, did you have a sense about that?

RH: It became obvious, especially the first years because we were one of the first class to be, start integrating, so definitely we were coming, basically people of color coming onto their campus, which was, again, before, predominantly white or those people of color were fairly, of people, families of wealth, basically, because the Skyline District is the upper east Oakland area, which is where all the rich folks lived. And so it was not only just a color difference but a whole class difference that was going on that we had to learn and understand what that meant, and so, and a whole different value system, which was also kind of difficult for us, for me to kind of understand what was happening at Skyline. Like the kind of cars that kids, my classmates drove, it wasn't like, weren't the kind of cars friends in my neighborhood drove, and just that whole kind of, the kind of clothes they were to buy and vacations they talked about going on and those, all that kind of stuff was just different from what it meant -- I mean, an example for what I felt was always kind of funny about our high school is that Skyline didn't have a swimming pool on the campus, yet we had the best swim team in the city, so how does that happen? [Laughs] Basically, the families, they had access to stuff that we, other schools did not have. We had, naturally had a horrible basketball and football team. We got our butts beat on that all the time by the other schools in Oakland, but it was, but the other, some of the other sports, we had a great tennis team, we had a great golf team, great swimming team, had a great gymnastics team, all those kind of high end sports were very, very strong. So it was just kind of, that was the kind of school, everything, and so what I enjoyed about Skyline, though, was that the music department was very strong, though, because there, the kids up there were very serious about music and that's one thing that I appreciated about, and that's why I really got into music even more at the high school level.

TI: But was there resistance to this integration process, I mean, the fact that buses were coming from the flatlands, from the city up there? Did you see any resistance to that?

RH: A little bit. And not, I mean, we could sense it. We understood it. We didn't really talk about it a lot and outwardly, but we kind of knew what it was. We knew how, what we had to do in order to deal with it, basically, and so -- we meaning the kids I knew coming up, especially from my neighborhood -- this is what it is and this is how we have to kind of deal with it. There were, on occasion, a few kind of outbreaks that maybe could relate to racial tension in a way, but in general it was, we were all trying to do our best to kind of, kind of make it work at our own different ways.

TI: And how about your former junior high school classmates who didn't go to Skyline, did you ever get flack from them for going to Skyline?

RH: Yeah, sometimes we would in the neighborhood because they would hear, I wouldn't talk about, "I go to Skyline," they would just assume I was going to Castlemont or something else, but they, if they knew I was going to Skyline they would say, "Oh, okay," they, you already get pigeonholed, basically, who you were and what that meant, basically. And our neighborhood became very, a center for a very hot social political scene, basically, because from where we lived, about four blocks away was where the Black Panthers started their, their work, basically. So during high school, during the, when the beginning of the Panthers, it was not unusual, it was common that we would see them driving through the neighborhood and you would see the guns sitting there and so it was very obvious, and knew, we knew what it was all about. And so, and we knew also that, basically, they were there for their own reasons, what they felt was neighborhood protection, so if we didn't mess with them they're not gonna mess with us, so it was a common respect in that way.

TI: Did any of the, the kids who were being bused up to Skyline, bring some of that, that thinking to Skyline in terms of, of confronting the social order at Skyline?

RH: I think it was starting to grow. When I first started at Skyline it was the early part of integration and by the time I was starting to leave and probably afterwards it was becoming more obvious because, again, after leaving high school, going into college, that to me was kind of the peak of when ethnic studies -- this is like 1969, when a lot of the anti-war stuff was really picking up or starting up and then development of ethnic studies and all those kind of things, so I feel, probably my experience at Skyline was at the very beginning, where people were just trying to make a system work and try to be, do whatever it was to take, get it to happen, and then things got much more political afterwards from, from the kids coming up there.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.