Roberson, Valeria Steele

              
ORAL HISTORY OF VALERIA STEELE ROBERSON
Interviewed by Chris Albrecht
Filmed by Rick Greene
Significant Productions
July 1, 2005
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
 
MR. GREENE: And we’re rolling.
MR. ALBRECHT: Okay. And you got good audio?
MR. GREENE: Yeah.
MR. ALBRECHT: Okay Valeria, I know you have doubt ably a number of things you would like to share with us that you have already thought of, but before we get into that I want you to share with us what stories have you heard from both your parents and your grandparents about the time of the Manhattan Project. What kind of stories have you heard and I’m interested because of your perspective from your generation. 
MRS. ROBERSON: When I was a little girl, my grandmother would often talk about her time in Oak Ridge during the 1940’s, and she’d talk about the rats and the mud and she would talk about giving a day toward the bomb. I always thought that was so interesting that she would give of her time and her money in effort to promote this great cause of providing this bomb for our country. So I would listen very carefully to her and she inspired me to want to find out more and I asked more and more questions about that. I also remember that my mom, as a little girl, I would empathize with her being away from her parents and I wondered how it would feel to be away from, you know, your parents and being so far away from them for such a long period of time. So those were the kinds of stories that interested me and encouraged me to want to find out more about that particular time in our history. When I attended Berea College, I had an opportunity to do a project and I decided to come home for a month and interview people here to find out about their experiences and from that I wrote a paper there. Through the years I would gather more materials and do more research and then I had an article produced in a book called “These Are Our Voices”, which was produced by the Children’s Museum. The article is entitled “A New Hope”. That is what I think Oak Ridge was about. It’s about an opportunity for Blacks to come here and make more money and to be able to help those back at home, but also just to better themselves. They were a part of the process even though they had menial jobs, they didn’t do anything technical, as my mom said before, but what they did was so important because if they didn’t have people to clean up or to build the buildings, and to do all the things that they did, then Oak Ridge wouldn’t have become the facility that they needed to have at that particular time. 
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s good stuff. And you mentioned doing menial work. There were not Blacks in technical positions; do we know that for a fact? I’ve read a couple of things that almost hinted that there may have been a few Blacks in other than menial jobs. Do you know of any situations like that?
MRS. ROBERSON: It seems to me that at some point, and I’m not sure when, that there was someone that had another type of job at the plant. I’ve heard a couple of people say something to that effect, but we do know that a majority of them were brought of Oak Ridge because they couldn’t read very well and they didn’t want anyone to leak anything to anybody. So if they were cleaning something up in an office, they wouldn’t know what it meant; they couldn’t pass on anything. Many of the Blacks had little or no education that were brought here. They were brought here to do those jobs that were needed to, that they needed to have done and they did them well and they were happy with that pay. My grandmother always said that they weren’t making any money back home, but when they got here they were making lots of money and that made a great difference in their lives. They were very excited about being able to make some real money for a change. 
MR. ALBRECHT: Tell me since you have done quite a bit of research, what do you know about how Blacks were recruited to come here? 
MRS. ROBERSON: For instance my grandfather, Willie Strickland, he heard about it through I believe his brother-in-law. There were recruiters that went throughout the South, Alabama, Georgia, and other places hoping to find Blacks willing to leave their homes and come to Oak Ridge to work, because they needed lots and lots of people to come and do those menial jobs at that particular time. So my grandfather heard about it. He thought that this would be a great opportunity to better himself, to better the lives of his family. So he came to Oak Ridge with the hopes of making the world a better place for his family. 
MR. ALBRECHT: From the stories that you heard and so forth, he came up here and your grandmother followed about a year later. What was the thinking of her coming up and leaving the children behind then?
MRS. ROBERSON: I am sure that was very hard for her to do so, but my grandmother has always been a hard worker. She would tell stories about picking more cotton than any man could in one day. She is always very proud of all the things that she could do for her family. So when she saw that opportunity to come to Oak Ridge, I’m sure that it really hurt her to leave the children, but she realized that it was an opportunity to make life better for them. So she could sacrifice for a little while and be apart from them so that they could have a better life in the end.
MRS. PATTERSON: She’d pick 400 pounds of cotton a day.
MR. ALBRECHT: Is that right? Well, as spry as she is now at her age; I can only imagine what she was like when she was 20 years old. Rick?
MR. GREENE: I guess, you hinted at some of the more philosophical, emotional things when you were asking questions. Do you, have you run across in your research or from hearing stories from either your mom or your grandmother, how she really felt, how your grandmother felt. Has she talked about, you know, the pride that she felt? I can sense it, but she didn’t say much about it, not just from your family, but from those that you talked to, you know, when everyone realizes, “Gosh, look what we were a part of.” Did you have a sense for that? Could you talk about that at all?
MRS. ROBERSON: I don’t remember her talking about that with her specifically, but I would just imagine that they were happy about the fact that they were involved with a project that helped bring the war to a close, much earlier than anticipated, but sometimes when you’re on the periphery of a situation, you don’t have as much of an appreciation for, for the outcomes of situations. They were doing their jobs and trying to have as much fun and trying to enjoy life as much as possible, but as far as what was going on, I think, in the big picture, since they weren’t aware of it, they were just doing what they were asked to do, I think that they don’t, it’s almost like looking at a situation that you are sort of involved in it, but not totally involved with it, and when it comes to a fruition and you know what it’s all about, it’s like, “Okay. That’s what it was all about”, but my life is still going on, I’m still struggling trying to make it in this world, and I’m glad that the war is over, but I still have all these challenges to meet in this world, still have to deal with segregation, and providing for my family and all those kinds of things.
MR. GREENE: Hey Chris, I need to change the battery.
MR. ALBRECHT: Okay.
[Break in Video]
MR. GREENE: Rolling.
MR. ALBRECHT: Valeria, based on research that you have done and stories that you have heard over the years, versus what we heard this morning that your grandmother has told us, or your mother has told us, what could you add to the Black experience during the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge that we haven’t already discussed today. 
MRS. ROBERSON: There is a citizen named Paul White and he is still alive and a very interesting person, but I will always remember him talking about the way they were treated. He said that they would go to the bus station and try to buy a sandwich; they’d go around to the back and stick that sandwich at them through a pigeon hole. So, just the way that Blacks were treated, and the fact that they just kept on trying to do what was right, I can’t imagine being treated as they were as second class citizens. You were like an afterthought, you don’t really matter. “Yeah, we want you to clean up and what have you, but you really don’t matter in our society.” To be looked down on like that, I just can’t imagine that. I was born in 1959, and I assume that I, and I know that I did experience a little segregation, but I was so happy I really didn’t notice it. When we integrated schools in ’68, that’s when they integrated our elementary schools. Let me backtrack, I think it was ’67 because I was in the third grade. I didn’t realize that I was missing anything. I was a happy child. As far as I knew I was getting everything that was necessary at Scarboro, but when we integrated schools, it was a good thing because I think that it provided more opportunities for us. But I think that a lot of times children don’t understand how important these things are because you’re happy. You’re accepting of what you have and you do realize how poor you might be or how other people might be better than you, or have better opportunities than you do, you just live. I think that for a lot of Blacks it was just about surviving, going through the struggle, hoping that a better day is coming. So I have heard a lot of stories about how people are treated and I just can’t imagine going through the things that they went through. For instance, white people having a fountain and we have a fountain. What’s the difference? People are people. 
MR. GREENE: Anything else? Any other stories any other things you want to say, just in general about Oak Ridge and the, I’m seeing this expanding and talking more about life in general since that time also, like your mother’s speech fits in perfectly with that. Do you have any thoughts anything you want to say? 
MRS. ROBERSON: Oak Ridge has come a long ways and I am proud of all the accomplishments that we had made. I never would have thought that we would see the day that there would be a Black principal at Oak Ridge High School. So now we have had one and were getting ready to have a second one. A lot of things that have occurred have really shocked me and I’m so pleased to see how Oak Ridge has evolved through the years. Now, when it comes to thinking about our history, and my mother has mentioned this too about having to fight for every little opportunity here, that’s very disturbing. I know that the government, as far as my research is concerned, when they first started thinking about Oak Ridge and building the communities here, they had envisioned a nice Black community where people could live in nice homes and what have you, but with the influx of 75,000 people here at one particular point, they had to get rid of those plans and allow whites who were scientist to live in those nicer homes and they put the Blacks of course in the hutments and the men couldn’t live with their wives and those kinds of things and the families couldn’t be here and the education system was deplorable. It really was when it first started, but I look at my mom and I can see how she grew and learned in spite of it all. She’s a remarkable lady, my grandmother’s a remarkable lady, so I always think about Blacks and how we have taken a little, but God has helped us to expand that to much. And I also think that the church was a very important part of the Black experience here. When we couldn’t feel like we were somebody in the world, or on a job, you could go to the church and find strength and encouragement. You could be a deacon or a teacher, or you could have all kinds of responsibilities so that you would be encouraged to feel like a human being to feel that you are one of God’s children, that you are special, that you should be treated equally as other people. The church helped to build up our people so that they could go out in the world and face segregation or any kinds of obstacles in their lives. So having God in their lives made a great difference. My grandmother, she didn’t go into that much, but the church was a backbone of the people then and it is still the backbone of the people now. And for those that don’t have the Lord, I don’t know how they make it in this world, because we still have a lot of issues to deal with. There are still a lot of bigoted people in America. I teach up in Lafollette, and I had some students there from Hawaii and they were telling me that they were being discriminated against there. So it’s not just Blacks being discriminated against, we have Hispanics, we have all kinds of people who are misunderstood, who are being discriminated in our country. We need to be excepting, more excepting of everybody. We are all Americans and we are going to be here whether we like it or not.
MR. GREENE: That is beautiful. 
MR. ALBRECHT: It was. 
MR. GREENE: And I think you hit on something that hadn’t come out and I think we tried before and that is, and maybe you could address it a little more and that is the housing situation. You explained it beautifully. It wasn’t planned to be that way, but in the hutments and stuff the fact that men and women couldn’t live together. I still don’t have a good handle on that. Was that because there were just so many people that there wasn’t time to build homes so that you know, your grandmother and her husband, you know your grandmother and grandfather, was it intentional that they separated them or was it out of necessity?
MRS. ROBERSON: It was probably more out of necessity because…
MR. GREENE: Yeah, and if you tell us what you’re talking about, explain the housing situation.
MRS. ROBERSON: The housing situation in Oak Ridge for Blacks was not good. The men and the women couldn’t live together. The women were put in a pen. That just sounds horrible already because when I think of a pen, I think of a pig pen. So they were in hutments and there were four ladies to a room, but they were surrounded by barbed wire and I think it was for their protection that they put them there, but the guys, their husbands, or the men were in hutments, put somewhere else. We also know that white men lived in hutments. White women never lived in hutments, but it was a very deplorable situation. They had a pot belly stove in the middle of the room and not much privacy, but as far as my grandmother and grandfather being separated, they knew that going to Oak Ridge that they would probably have to deal with situations like that because it has been said that their jobs were related to whatever your work was. So if you were a scientist you got better housing and what have you, but in the pen, they had guards, as my mother said before, I think it was more for the protection of the women that they had the barbed wire and what have you. And I’m sure that it was difficult for my grandparents to be apart, but they always took whatever situation they were given and made the best out of it. That is why I think they are such tremendous individuals. It wasn’t easy, but they just dealt with it. They just went with the flow. 
MR. GREENE: One other question, unless you have got another one. It’s been said and I don’t remember it coming, what your grandfather did here.
MRS. ROBERSON: I know it was some kind of a labor job, I think, Mom, I can’t really recall.
MRS. PATTERSON: At one point, he was doing one of things, what’s it called?
MR. GREENE: A jackhammer.
MRS. PATTERSON: Yeah, he did that. In the final years, he worked for the City of Oak Ridge.
MR. GREENE: Okay.
MRS. PATTERSON: There he is on a picture where he is working on the City of Oak Ridge. 
MR. GREENE: Okay. 
MR. ALBRECHT: That’s the same one as this.
MR. GREENE: We got seven minutes, Chris. 
MR. ALBRECHT: Okay, is there anything else that you feel that you would like to say. And let me say this, stop the tape for just a minute, to conserve what we…
[Break in Video]
MRS. ROBERSON: Can you think of anything Mother? 
MR. GREENE: And we’re rolling.
MR. ALBRECHT: I think we have pretty well covered all the bases for now.
MRS. ROBERSON: I think so. 
MR. ALBRECHT: I want to thank you so much. All three of you. 
MRS. ROBERSON: Thank you.
MR. ALBRECHT: This is, Rick and I are very excited about this project. We have, we have been hesitant to share what we are doing with too many people because ideas get stolen. The few people that we have talked to think we’re really on a good subject here and share our enthusiasm. So keep your fingers crossed.
MR. GREENE: I believe…

[End of Interview]