Diverse Suburbs Oral History Collection

Theme: Civil Rights

Clips from the Carol Clarke Oral History Interview conducted on June 23, 2010

Transcript Part I

RJ: Okay. Tell me more about your high school days.

CC: Okay, I went to Hempstead High School between 1967 and 1971. And I guess it was a typical. There were football games and basketball games. Just basically hanging out with friends. At that point you could walk downtown Hempstead. There was a record store that we used to hang out in after school. Parties on the weekends. House parties [unintelligible]. So high school was a good experience. I was-one thing that during the end of my junior and senior year-the early 70's. It was a pretty, I guess, turbulent time nationwide and things like that. And so there began to be racial unrest and things like that. And the one thing that-one memory that I have that's very-still stands out in my mind was something happened in my junior year in the spring. There had been fights in the cafeteria or something like that. School was closed for a couple of days and then the following week a lot of the white kids that I went to school with from Fulton School were
gone. They had been pulled out of school. I don't know where they went after that. It was just a rigorous and turbulent--where the heck do you go in April? You're a junior in high school. I wasn't used to schools like that.

RJ: So what-the fights were about race?

CC: I think and that's something that you have your own little memories. I think that--yeah, at that point. And they probably were nothing substantive. It's probably like today between the blacks and Hispanics. Just turf war.