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Biography

A 1966 graduate of Clinton High, Ms. James-Walton returned to college at the age of fifty. She is now a prevention specialist working with children, youth, and families in Clinton. Her parents moved to Clinton from Arkansas to provide a better education for their children. She grew up in the black section of Clinton, experienced the racial tensions of the 60s, yet describes the fun times and special world in which she grew up. Among these are the dances and a special hangout for the black teens in Clinton that attracted students from the Quad Cities.

Transcript

Donielle: Welcome to our Oral Reports.

Danielle: The Clinton Youth Program is a prevention/dance group.

Donielle: My name is Donielle and I go to Clinton High School. I’m a freshman and one of my hobbies are dancing.

Danielle: I’m Danielle Johnson. I go to Clinton High School. I’m a junior. And I’m involved in track and also the CYP Dance Group. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Marty James-Walton: Yes, my name is Marty James-Walton. And I was born here. I went to school in Clinton. I graduated 1966 from Clinton High School. My family moved here in 1947 from Arkansas. And I’ve lived in Clinton and I grew up here. I was married here. We bought a home in Camanche, Iowa a few miles down the road. So I’ve been in the area all my life.

Danielle: OK. It is nice to meet you, Marty. And where were you employed at?

Marty James-Walton: Right now I’m employed at New Directions as a Prevention Specialist. But I would like to tell a story about that. I graduated and I went to Business College. I was one of the first African Americans to work at, at that time it was called Clinton Corn Processing. I started out in the mail room. And then, at that time when you had babies, they didn’t hold your job, so I lost my job after I started having my children. So then I got a job at the Clinton Public Library and I worked there for 18 years. At the age of 50, I decided I wanted to work with youth. So, I went back to school, got the credentials I needed and now I’m a Prevention Specialist with New Directions. I’ve been here for eleven years.

Danielle: So you work with youths now?

Marty James Wilson: I work as a Prevention Specialist work in the schools. We do prevention education. Helping children make good choices.

Donielle: And how many children do you have?

Marty James-Walton: I have three children. My daughter is having a birthday next month. Next week I think. She’ll be the big 4-0. I have an older son he’s 41. And my younger son, he’s passed away. He died at the age of 31. He died a few years ago.

Donielle: Oh, and what

Marty James-Walton: I have five grand children.

Donielle: Five….

Marty James-Walton: My granddaughter Marquette, I think you guys might know her.

Danielle: Yeah, we know her.

Marty James-Walton: She just turned 16. [Laughter] My eyes roll up in my head because she’s a “16 year old”. So she also has her permit to drive so that’s going to be kind of scary.

Danielle: Are you involved in any civic groups?

Marty James-Walton: Well right now I belong to, if civic groups you mean, if an organizations and coalitions around town?

Donielle: Yeah.

Marty James-Walton: I’m a member of the Martin Luther King planning committee. I’m a member of the Clinton Peace Coalition, which is a group that kind of evolved from Martin Luther King’s group. And I’m a member of the Vince Jetter Youth Center Committee. And I’m a member of the Clinton County Extension Service. So we, those are some social groups I’m involved with.

Danielle: Can you tell us some more about one of those
groups?

Marty James-Walton: Well it was very interesting being involved with the Clinton County Extension. They approached me about three years ago, the executive director, and said that they were looking for more diversity. And they wanted to know if I would participate and become a member of the group. So once a month, we meet in Dewitt. And I got introduced and involved with a lot of farmers, because Clinton County Extension started out as Farm and 4-H Clubs. So they started talking about time, when it’s time to do the fair. And how they go out and weigh the cattle and all this kind of stuff, you know, and so that was very, as I sit there my eyes kind of glassed over as I’m listening to them talk about farming and cattle and bugs and growing rabbits and stuff like that. But, it’s a whole different culture, but then we’re trying to. And I was also involved in getting our referendum to pass here in Clinton this time. So it’s been very different.

Danielle: So you are the only black in that group?

Marty James-Walton: Yes I am. Clinton County Extension, yes. I don’t think we have any African American farmers in Clinton County.

Donielle: Has it been difficult in those committees?

Marty James-Walton: Well it’s, everyone, it was very friendly and they’re very open. And they were looking, like I said, for diversity. So I was made to feel very welcome.

Danielle: So have you had any challenging cases like with you being black in?

Marty James-Walton: In different, not in the city groups no. But sometimes we’ll bring up some different topics. A lot of, I’ve found out that a lot of white people in our community are curious about African American culture. So sometimes we’ll do some discussions and we’ll talk about different things, the way we do things, the way we cook. But they’re just interested in what, so when they have an African American that they feel comfortable with, they’ve tried to delve a little bit into our culture to see what’s really going on in there, besides what they see on TV, because what they see on TV sometimes is a lot different than what, who we really are.

Donielle: Yeah. What was it like growing up in the ’60s in Iowa?

Marty James-Walton: Growing up in the ’60s in Clinton? Well we, first of all, in my family I was the first one in my family to graduate from high school.

Girls: OOO!

Marty James-Walton: So, when we moved, and that was one of the reasons my family moved us to Iowa so that we could have a better chance at an education. So I didn’t have anyone to help or guide or mentor me. When we get, so, as we go through the schools and we go through the system and the learning process, our parents were able to support us when we were name called and when we were treated unfairly, but they weren’t able to help us with the work. So, none of the teachers really stepped up to the plate to help us out either. No, and so we were kind of stuck there, but you know we, I’ve made it because they expected us to make it. Our parents expected us to make it and to become educated and so we did. So we didn’t have room for failure I guess in our home. So that made us work even harder at school on things that we didn’t understand. We just had to kind of muddle through on our own because there wasn’t a lot of support from the teachers.

Donielle: What church do you belong to?

Marty James-Walton: I was brought up and raised in the Second Baptist Church, in the Baptist Faith, Second Baptist Church. But at the time that I went to, was growing up we interchanged our faiths because there were two African American churches in the city. It was Bethel AME and Second Baptist. And we were singing in each other’s choirs every Sunday. We were giving a lot of fellowship and back and forth and I don’t think that’s going on right now. But we were very close in the ’60s because although there wasn’t any overt racism, if you were African American, and you wanted to buy property or live in the city, you were kind of guided to one certain part of town. So that made us have a very nice, close, African American community. We weren’t spread all over town, the way you are today. So we had a close knit community. And we had a Clinton Fellowship Club, where all the mothers and grandmas in the, both churches got together. You would have picnics and you would do activities that they would sponsor throughout the year. So the African American community had a, we had a community and we had a togetherness that’s not, that’s missing today.

End of Video One Begin Video Two

Danielle: Going back to growing up in the 1960s, were there a lot of black families during then?

Marty James-Walton: In our community, I’m saying, we had
three blocks of families that were all children of our age. And I remember going to school and we would just go up and down the street picking up each other. Waiting for each other, then we’d walk down the street in this big blob as we would walk together going to school. Then we’d do whatever we had to do in the school and then we’d meet up and walk together coming back home. And then on the weekends we used to have house parties because, we were involved in school, in school activities, but there wasn’t a lot of sports at that time for us to be involved in. So we had a lot of, but they had like sock hops and we all got together as a group and went to the sock hops, or we went to, the next door from this building used to be the National Guard Armory and they used to have school dances there and we would get together as one group and walk to the Armory. Things like that. We would go to the movie theaters which used to be across the street. So we had a lot of activities that we did as a group of African American kids that we just hung out together.

Donielle: Did you encounter any segregation or discrimination?

Marty James-Walton: Yes that’s always, that’s always been around, that’s always been a part of us. As a, the part of town that we were allowed to live in, was also, poor white people lived there. In fact we lived next door to a, in the Second Avenue North there was three white people that still owned property there. And so my parents lived next door to Mrs. Hanson. And she was like a thorn in our side the whole time that we were growing up. So, she would call us names and my parents would be back and forth fighting and fighting for us. We would, she’d call us names and we would go tell our parents and our parents would come out, and they would, so that was going on. And then across the street there was white people and those kids would call us names. So we had lots of fights among the kids. When we went to school, it was during the ’60s and that was during the Civil Rights Movement had really started getting going. So we would watch Martin Luther King and the riots on TV. So there was a lot of racial tension. But the African American, I think my class, in our graduating class we had like fifteen African Americans. We started kindergarten together and we graduated from high school together. There was no school dropout.

Donielle: Was there fifteen?

Marty James-Walton: No. It was, everyone that was, our parents, we just all knew that we had to graduate from high school. So we all started to school together and we all graduated together, in spite of discrimination of the ’60s. Dropping out of school was not an option for us, so.

Donielle: How did you feel when you first, like, heard discriminating words, what did you?

Marty James-Walton: Like it’s going on today. The first time we heard any discrimination was when we entered the school system. Until then, like I said, we had this lady who lived next to us, so we were kind of exposed to it from her. But our parents were like a shield for us. So when you’re coming from a loving home and you have support from your family, you just, I mean, you just belong. So when we started feeling that we didn’t belong was when we entered the school system as the first times we started encountering that people really don’t like us because of our color.

Danielle: So, were there any whites that you interacted with, like with at school?

Marty James-Walton: Oh yeah. But as I said once, we weren’t involved in a lot of activities in school. At least I wasn’t because there wasn’t sports for girls. And there was no way that we were going to belong to the Swim Team. I think there was only pollywogs, I think. And at that time there was no permanents like they have now. We only had, we straightened our hair every week. And we had to go swimming at school. And when we get out of this pool our hair would be this (shows with finger measurement). And so it would start off long and then we’d come back so all of our white classmates wanted to know, “What happened to your hair?” Because there wasn’t anywhere to keep it permanently straight. So, we were kind of embarrassed about that. And so, there’s no way we were going to be on a swim team. That was the only I think sport, sporting activity that was for girls at that time that we could, that we could join up with. There wasn’t any track, or volleyball, or softball or anything like that.

Donielle: So did the teachers at the school, did they treat you all equal? Or did they like?

Marty James-Walton: No they didn’t. But we didn’t have to interact with them. If they, our parents were very involved with our education. If we had a, at the time, this is what I think is different today, than when we were coming up. When we were coming up, if we had trouble with the teachers, as children and juveniles we did not try to interact with that teacher, that adult. We told our parents; our parents went to the school and took care of it. So we were taught to respect adults. And it didn’t matter what the adult did, that was, we had enough parent that we would go and then our parent as an adult would deal with that. So we would just we, we would, what we would experience if we thought it was unfair we would go and would tell our parents. Then my mother would, Oh she went to the school for everything. She was involved with PTA and she was an advocate for us.

Danielle: So is there any black history in Clinton that we should know?

Marty James-Walton: Well I think that, this is something I was going to try to look up, but I didn’t. But my mom and dad they started a little, a little, think it was called M & L Café. And it was for my mom and dad’s first name. My mother’s name was Litha and my dad’s name was Maud. So it was the M & L Café. And they owed some property in Clinton. And they had one little house that they set aside as a little café for the African American kids to hang out.

Girls: OO, awesome.

Marty James-Walton: And they had a juke box in there and they would go south and get records, or order records from Nashville for African American records because we couldn’t find any up here. And so it was open after school and on the weekends. And that’s where all the teenagers hung out at. And then it got to be so popular that we had boys coming up from the Quad Cities. We would have dances there. It was just a real nice place. Hamburgers and pop and stuff like that. It was just a place to hang out that’s missing with the African American youth today. You don’t have your own place that you can hang out at. So our parents provided that and that was really, really unique. And about, that was opened up in 1957. And she, and that, and it closed, I think it was all the way up to 1980. And then we had one reunion that everyone came back to town and had a thank you night for my parents because as we’re older we realized that that was really something that was very, very important in our lives. That little café in that little place helped us to, you know, we would dance and have parties. It was just a place to hang out that I think is missing with the youth today. That we, our parents provided for us. We had, I didn’t like it because we always had to clean up after everyone ’cause we had to do, you know after everybody left, and we’d have to go and sweep and clean and empty bottles, clean up around and sweep around the building and if anyone needed French fries or hamburgers we'd have to be the ones to help cook it. So to us it was a place. We had to work there. But, as we look back now, I think wow, there were a lot of, I think a lot of happy hours were spent there with the teenagers in our community.

Danielle: So did you have other siblings growing up with you?

Marty James-Walton: I’m the oldest of ten. So I’m really bossy and I like to get my way. And I think I know everything. But our family was, we lived in a small home, and we had, and my grandparents lived with us also. So we always would eat in shifts. And I was the oldest so I’d have to get off school and help cook supper. My grandmother canned everything. So we always had plenty of food that she prepared. It was, and then after we would finish eating, and then we would clean up the kitchen. And then our kitchen became a study hall. So we all had to go around the table, the homework came out. The little ones were kept out of the kitchen while we got homework done. So, as I look back now it was very organized and our parents, that was our connection between the school and home. ’Cause we had homework and our parents knew we had to do it, so they just, our kitchen table became our study hall.

Donielle: Well, it was nice talking to you.

Marty James-Walton: Well, thank you very much; it was nice talking with you.