Densho Digital Archive - James T. Johnston - William R. Johnston - Dorothy J. Whitlock Interview (denshovh-jjames

<Begin Segment 20>

KL: So they moved, you moved as a family to Memphis?

DW: No, when we moved back to Dyess. Oh, this is later, yeah. But we moved to Dyess, Memphis was our closest shopping center.

WJ: When my mother and Jim move to Memphis, of course, my dad passed away, Dot was either in Texas or California, I'm not sure where.

DW: Oklahoma maybe. I'd married then, yeah.

WJ: And I was... what, I was in service then?

DW: You were in the service, yeah.

WJ: I was in Germany, or possibly still in Massachusetts. Anyway, everybody was gone but him.

DW: And that's when Zuma, Mom's mother, came back and lived with you guys there in Memphis. Well, no, she'd been living with us in Dyess before that. Yeah, Dad added that room on the house, yeah.

WJ: Dad renovated the house for her.

KL: So you finished high school in Memphis?

JJ: I finished school in Memphis, yeah. Went to Messick High. Went there in the tenth grade, and went from my old class was like thirty, and my homeroom in Messick was like fifty, and five hundred people in my grade.

DW: Talk about the exchange the Dyess to...

JJ: It was a little bit intimidating for me.

KL: Yeah.

JJ: But it ended up being a good thing for me.

DW: Well then you went to dental school and everything there in Memphis, didn't you?

JJ: Yeah, I went to Southwestern, it's now Rhodes, for my pre-dental, and then at the University of Tennessee dental school, it was all there in Memphis. So I was able to get my college education done minimally, extra expenses other than tuition.

DW: Because you lived at home.

JJ: I lived at home, yeah.

KL: We started off talking a little bit about your... I am curious about this because I think it is kind of one of the legacies of the camps and of this period, how it affected people's thinking about race and different ethnicities, and interactive with people and stuff. So you adjusted okay to being in Memphis and being in a big city...

JJ: Oh, yeah.

DW: Lots of black people.

KL: Do you think your experiences -- I know you were a young kid -- but do you think your family's experiences in Rohwer affected your thinking about Memphis in the '50s and '60s racial...

WJ: Tell you when you hired Barbara and how long.

JJ: Well, to answer your question, I think everything shapes our being as we progress through life, and particularly if it's very important, that time in your life. So, yeah, I think these things really shaped me. But I felt like... well, I don't know the proper word. I was never a racist or had any animosity towards other races of people. I just hadn't grown up with that.

DW: I started saying it wasn't part of our family.

JJ: But I don't know if that helped me adjust better in Memphis or not. Back then the schools were still even segregated in Memphis, we had black schools and white schools, and it was still a big issue. And I remember not liking it, I remember thinking that, kind of like Dad's analysis of what it would have been like to be put in that camp. If they tried to make me ride in the back of the bus, or make me have a special water fountain, I would have been, I would have been in jail, you know? So I guess I sympathized to some extent with the black situation. But even then, like I was telling everybody, I was so naive, I had no idea how truly bad it was, what was going on in that world. Moving to Memphis and getting into a bigger culture and wider horizon, that helped me a lot. I think I would have been harder put to go from Dyess graduating into college. Y'all did it. [Laughs]

DW: Well, Mother had panic attacks because we're living in Dyess, and so I'm getting ready to go college. And so she insisted I had to go to Hendrix, which is a Methodist university there.