Hampton worked as an elementary school teacher at the Louis Champlain School in Chicago, Illinois, and as an academic administrator at Iona College and served as director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program in New Rochelle, New York. In 1985, she became the contributions manager of education and culture at the GTE Corporate Foundation in Stamford, Connecticut. She then worked as the assistant dean of student academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Family Resources and Consumer Sciences from 1987 to 1993, when she became the special assistant to the president at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. From 1996 to 2006, Hampton served as president of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation in Little Rock. She was the general manager of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra for the 2006-2007 season. In 2007, she founded her own business consulting firm, Sybil Jordan Hampton and Associates.
Podcast Links
EPISODE 171
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:08.8] GM: Welcome to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy, a production of flagandbanner.com. Through storytelling and conversational interviews, this weekly radio show and podcast offers listeners an insider’s view into the commonalities of successful people and the ups and downs of risk-taking. Connect with Kerry through her candid, funny, informative and always encouraging weekly blog.
[0:00:29.1] ANNOUNCER: This Monday is President’s Day, a federal holiday. All Americans are encouraged to proudly fly the US flag. Get a beautiful, new American flag at Flag and Banner in Downtown Little Rock, 800 West 9th Street. Also shop for American flag pennants and bunting, patriotic jewelry and apparel.
Invest now for President’s Day and you'll be ready for the whole summer ,including Memorial Day and Independence Day. Shop online at flagandbanner.com and look for the 20% off coupon code for online savings throughout the entire website. Flagandbanner.com, it's the President’s Day sale at Flag and Banner, Downtown on 9th Street and online at flagandbanner.com.
[0:01:11.5] GM: Now it's time for Kerry McCoy to get all up in your business.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:15.0] KM: Thank you, son Gray. For months, I've been trying to get my guest Dr. Sybil Hampton in the studio for an interview. Today, our schedules have finally aligned at the perfect time during Black History Month. You see, my guest’s first claim to fame and she has many, happened at the tender age of 15. Young teenager Sybil was among the second group of African-American students to integrate Central High School on the heels of the first, the Little Rock Nine. In 1962 when she graduated, she became the first black student to have attended all high school grades at Central High School.
You would think such a traumatic experience at such a young age would have soured her on any type of organized schooling, but no. Dr. Hampton has scores of higher learning degrees and has dedicated her life work to the field of education. Just to read a few of the items on her resume. Hampton was an elementary school teacher in Chicago, Illinois, an academic administrator and director of higher education opportunities at Iona College in New Rochelle New York. In 1985 she became a manager of education and culture at the GTE Corporation in Connecticut, later worked as the Assistant Dean of student academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
In 1993, she was a special assistant to the president at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Finally in 1996, she moved back to Little Rock as President of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. Needless to say, Dr. Hampton is a history maker and was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2005, of course.
It is a pleasure to welcome to the table the smart, worldly, fearless, self-involved, citizen extraordinaire, Dr. Sybil Hampton. She's making faces at me the whole time. Thank you so much for coming on. I asked you why. You seemed like you should be retired. Are you?
[0:03:24.1] SH: I am.
[0:03:25.2] KM: I asked you why you were so busy and you're just busy taking care of family and –
[0:03:33.0] SH: Volunteering in the community.
[0:03:34.5] KM: Volunteering in the community. I know you from the church speaking of community. Our two downtown churches, mine Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and yours, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal are sister churches and we often visit each other’s services. For some reason until I read about you, I thought you were maybe a preacher, or a history teacher. No?
[0:03:58.9] SH: None of the above.
[0:04:01.3] KM: I read what you said about your church influences, that I read where you credit your church, which I think has always been the same one. Amen.
[0:04:09.5] SH: Yes.
[0:04:11.1] KM: You credit your church for providing a nurturing, environment and social infrastructure that produced strong citizens dedicated to making life better for people of color in the community and throughout the world. That's where you’re volunteering now.
[0:04:25.8] SH: I'm on the board of Mount Holly Cemetery and I co-chaired the Little Rock Set Committee for the City of Little Rock, so that I do things at the church and certainly a lot with the Bethel Trinity, a covenant relationship. I'm out and about in the community.
[0:04:42.4] KM: Didn't you teach a class at church that I was going to go to and I missed out on?
[0:04:46.5] SH: I did. We did a study that Bishop Curry put together, looking at am I your brother – am I my brother's keeper?
[0:04:54.0] KM: What does that mean?
[0:04:55.6] SH: Well, I think Bishop Curry and a lot of others believe that the times are such that we need to examine whether or not we are all going to draw closer to ourselves and our families, are we going to take responsibility as Christians and citizens of being in and off the world and doing something about what's going on in the world.
[0:05:16.9] KM: Not just in America, but in the world?
[0:05:18.5] SH: In the world, but in America in particular. I mean, outside of our individual churches, do we need to form communities that are broader, that are inclusive, that are loving, respectful, trusting in order to build a world that is better connected, more coherent and less frightening?
[0:05:44.8] KM: A stronger nation.
[0:05:45.8] SH: A stronger nation.
[0:05:46.9] KM: You're always stronger together. There's a military tactic that's been around forever, to divide and conquer. It's the most simple basic military tactic that there is. You're talking about the opposite of that. Coming together.
[0:06:02.3] SH: That’s right.
[0:06:03.6] KM: Because dividing and conquering is would tear a country down, or anything.
[0:06:09.4] SH: It isn't in the process of tearing our country.
[0:06:11.1] KM: It'll tear any anything down actually.
[0:06:13.0] SH: A family. You're right, anything.
[0:06:16.1] KM: I read about you. As I read about you, the soft-spoken woman with grit, nerves of steel, I couldn't help but think about your parents. You were born in 1944 in Springfield, Missouri to Leslie and Lorraine Jordan. Your mother is a longtime educator. Your father was a World War 2 veteran who worked for the US Postal Service, but you grew up in Little Rock. How did all that come to be?
[0:06:41.7] SH: Daddy was in the military, getting ready to ship out to Okinawa and they were being trained at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Because mother was close enough, she was able to go and live there. I was born there and I had the opportunity of being born in the Greene County Hospital, only because the military intervened and insisted that any of the wives of the men who was stationed there. He was in an all-negro unit. Springfield was not a very open town at that time.
[0:07:15.8] KM: What does that mean you got to be born in – is that a white hospital?
[0:07:19.1] SH: It was a white hospital at the time. My mother said before she died in 2015, she said, “Your whole life has been being in these places that people don't expect you to be.”
[0:07:33.2] KM: Controversial places.
[0:07:34.3] SH: Yes. Yes.
[0:07:36.3] KM: That's nice. It’s like you had a destiny. Have you ever done your history of your family before your parents? Have you ever gone back and done genealogy on your family?
[0:07:44.5] SH: I've done some. I've done some, because my father came from the Wilma Monticello Warren area. I had a – his grandfather owned his own barber shop there. I'm particularly interested in researching that, because that probably means that he was a child, or a descendant of someone who was a child of a slave owner in order to at that age have the means to own his own business.
[0:08:15.0] KM: Oh, so you think he's part white.
[0:08:16.8] SH: Oh, he was. I know he was part white. He was part white. He was American Indian. He was extraordinarily fair. Extraordinarily.
[0:08:25.7] KM: He was a free man.
[0:08:28.0] SH: Well, he would have been a free man, because he was born after slavery, my great-grandfather.
[0:08:33.5] KM: Oh.
[0:08:34.6] SH: Yeah. He had a business, a thriving business. He was always an independent business person and also owned land. I'm looking to see who he's related to.
[0:08:46.3] KM: That would be interesting, wouldn't it?
[0:08:47.6] SH: Yeah.
[0:08:48.6] KM: You have a lot of degrees of master and a doctorate in education. Is that your parents’ influence? Your mother was an educator.
[0:08:55.8] SH: It is that I'm the third generation of my family to go to college. My mother's father hitchhiked from the Bayou Bartholomew down to Mississippi and he was not able to get a four-year degree, but he got a two-year degree. My father hitchhiked to Little Rock from Wilma, Arkansas, because there was not a Rosenwald School there. He wanted to go to college and he did not have the required credits, so he lived as a servant in the heights and went to Dunbar High School, where he met my mother.
I would say to you that one of the things that informs me just by living and breathing in that house is being with people who make great sacrifices to be educated. My grandfather lived with us, so that my brother and I had the opportunity to grow up and to hear adults talking about ways in which they had informed their lives and the things they had done. We knew that we were going to college, because everybody in the family had three of the people we live with, the adults we lived with had gone to college.
This is interesting though, Kerry. My mother after my father finished at Philander, because that's where he wanted to go, my mother wanted to go back Dunbar High School had a junior college. My mother had gone to Dunbar Junior College, but she wanted to go to Philander too. My father decided that as a woman, it wasn't really as important.
[0:10:19.6] KM: Of course.
[0:10:21.1] SH: That was so fascinating too as a child to understand that there were barriers for women. My mother succeeded in going back, but there was resistance from my father. Then she got a master's from Fayetteville. She was among that group of teachers of African-American teachers here in Little Rock who would go to Fayetteville in the summers, in those special programs and earn master's degrees.
[0:10:48.7] KM: Your family's fascinating. There's not very many people that have the legacy that you have of working hard, trying hard, doing good. Wasn't your father always active in civil rights?
[0:11:00.8] SH: My father was a part of the Arkansas Human Relations Council. My parents were active with the NAACP, very active at Bethel. Of course, Bethel was the church that Ernie Green, Gloria Colmar, Melba Patillo attended, three of the Little Rock Nine.
[0:11:17.2]KM: Now where you are at church and some of the Little Rock Nine go to the same church you go to, it's not very long after the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education ruling that racial segregation in public education was not unconstitutional and the schools across America began to practice desegregation. Your courageous students as the Little Rock Nine that you knew some of them were the first in Arkansas, but it was in 1959 that you were recruited to be a member of the second group of pioneering black students to integrate Central High School.
How did that come about? Was it your idea? Whose decision was it? What did y'all talk about around the dinner table that night when he said, “Honey, I want you to be the sacrificial lamb and start going to Central High School”? Were you scared?
[0:12:05.2] SH: Well, my father and my mother were involved in conversations over the years from the 40s and 50s. They were engaged in thinking about what the community needed to do. I was already talking with my parents about whether or not my brother and I would go to Central when the Little Rock Nine began.
[0:12:32.7] KM: You wanted to.
[0:12:34.0] SH: Yes. Yes. First of all, I lived at Seventh and Park, so that literally my brother and I always thought that was our neighborhood school, since it was 14th and Park. That we really saw that as an opportunity to go to a school in our neighborhood, but also to go to a school at that point that was ranked in the top 40 schools in the nation.
[0:12:54.1] KM: You were already talked thinking, your parents had already engrained how important education was to you. Did you watch the Little Rock Nine? Did you started school that day and go down there and watched the Little Rock Nine go into Central?
[0:13:04.9] SH: I would never have gone down there with a mob. I watched the things on TV and read lots of things in the newspaper and followed it very closely over the year, so that we were not recruited. Those of us who went, we were a part of people in the community who were asked, would anybody volunteer. Lots of young people volunteered, because you had to be screened. There was intellectual testing, there was psychological testing.
[0:13:35.0] KM: Really?
[0:13:35.9] SH: The school board kept winnowing away the number of students that they would consider sending to the school. Little Rock used the pupil placement law in order to select between 1957 and 1971 the students who went to Central and Hall who were African-American were placed there by the Little Rock School Board.
[0:13:58.8] KM: For 20 years.
[0:13:59.4] SH: Mm-hmm.
[0:13:59.7] KM: It had to do with your grades.
[0:14:01.7] SH: It had to do with grades. It had to do with the perceived strength. The psychological testing was designed to choose young people who would have the strength and presence of mind to be in a stressing and distressing situation.
[0:14:17.8] KM: How many people applied when you were applying?
[0:14:20.0] SH: Oh, my goodness. I think that may have been 20 or 30 or more young people who were in the queue.
[0:14:24.9] KM: Describe a psychological testing.
[0:14:28.3] SH: We took the Rorschach and we worked with the school psychologist to look at pictures, look at images and then talk about what we thought we saw that's what the Rorschach is, in order to get some sense of whether or not we were – I think that frankly, they were looking for students who were talented, but also who were nice Negros; calm, very gracious. They were looking for model. People talk about model Asians, but I think they were really looking for model students among the group.
My brother and I really felt that along with our parents, somebody's children had to do it. My parents felt that our family was not going to be jeopardized like other families might be for losing jobs. My father worked for the post office. My parents had a grocery store on the corner of 7th and Park.
[0:15:26.8] KM: Oh, they did.
[0:15:28.7] SH: Yeah, they did. That was my parents’ grocery store, kids’ grocery store named after my mother who was called Kid by her father. She was raised by her single-parent father. Then on the adjacent corner was Grant's Grocery Store, which was the Anglo Grocery Store. That 7th and Park, actually that neighborhood was half of the block was African-American and the other half was white. People think of Little Rock as being a monolith in terms of how people live, but there were these neighborhoods within the city in which there were white and black people who lived in the same.
[0:16:02.8] KM: Just went to different grocery stores.
[0:16:04.5] SH: Mm-hmm. But we all knew each other.
[0:16:07.0] KM: Your brother applied also and how long did it take before you found out? When did you start applying? Like in July and then you knew about –
[0:16:14.3] SH: Not in July. That went on for maybe even a year. The queue started when they began recruiting for the Little Rock Nine, then they kept building the queue of students who would go for the other grades.
[0:16:30.7] SH: Because the Little Rock Nine was 1957 and there was no integration into Central in ’58. That's must have been when they were queuing you up like you're saying and testing. Then in ’59, you started.
[0:16:44.2] SH: What happened in ’59 that's fascinating is that initially when the school opened, only Carlotta Walls and Jefferson Thomas of the Little Rock Nine were admitted. The school board was trying to keep the group of the Little Rock Nine attending and not adding any more. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund got involved and went back to court. Frank Henderson and Sondra Johnson were admitted in the 11th grade and I was admitted in the 10th grade and we came into the school after school started.
[0:17:15.5] KM: Out of the Little Rock Nine, there were only two that went back in ’58?
[0:17:18.6] SH: In ’59.
[0:17:21.6] KM: I mean, in ’57, the nine in ’57, there were only two that were back in ’58?
[0:17:26.4] SH: Yes.
[0:17:26.8] KM: Sorry, I said that backwards. I just cannot imagine being a teenager and going to school in such a hostile environment. I could hardly go to high school in a nice environment.
[0:17:39.9] SH: Well, but you have to remember Kerry, that we grew up in the segregated south. There were many things about life outside of thinking about desegregating a high school that were not pleasant. You had to go to the back of the bus, you had to remember that you could only go to a colored race room, you had to remember that you couldn't drink at a water fountain, you had to remember that you could never go to the lunch counter in Walgreens. There were an awful lot of things about the way you lived in the segregated south as a Negro child, that imposed upon you and certainly sent you negative messages.
[0:18:17.1] KM: So you were tough.
[0:18:17.9] SH: Yeah. I would say that we were – that children, not me, but just children of parents living in the segregated south were taught from the time that we could stand up, what to do so that you could be safe. That's how we could have been prepared to go to Central when we didn't know there would be the school desegregation, is that all of the things that our parents taught us and the things that we learned at church and Girl Scouts about how do you live safely in an environment that has all these barriers and restrictions, but also how do you live with hope and joy in expectation that the future is going to be a future in which the promises that your foremothers and forefathers and slavery never realized. As Democratic citizens, you might be able to be the first generation to realize that we were.
[0:19:12.0] KM: Tell us about the first day. You got up that morning.
[0:19:15.0] SH: Yeah. I got up that morning. Daddy stayed home from work and we prayed and then Reverend Henderson came, because he drove us to school; Frank Anderson's father, and so Sondra, Frank and I were all together. They picked me up, because I lived closest to the school and we went. On the steps, there were national guardsmen, because it was not clear what was going to happen when people learned that three more Negro students were going to enter.
[0:19:44.5] KM: Was there only going to be three of you that year?
[0:19:46.1] SH: No. There were three more. Carlotta and Jeff had already entered.
[0:19:49.7] KM: Yes, so there was just three more coming there. Okay.
[0:19:52.7] SH: We walked up the steps very quietly and I walked into the school and everybody was in class, so it's really quiet and we met with Miss Huckabee and we met – the principal greeted us and told us that Mrs. Huckabee would be our key contact. She talked with us to let us know where our office was, that she was available in case we had any distress or needs and she took us each to her home rooms. I went to my homeroom and –
[0:20:25.4] KM: What they do when you walked in?
[0:20:27.7] SH: People just looked at me.
[0:20:29.3] KM: Nobody did anything?
[0:20:31.9] SH: Nope, nope, nope, nope. My homeroom teacher showed me where my seat was. What I learned that first day was that we were going to be shunned. Over the three years, nobody in my homeroom ever spoke to me in the three years. My homeroom teacher spoke to me to let me know, or the class president spoke to me to let me know it was my turn to read the Bible. Nothing could be more fascinating than to be in a setting where I would be a part of reading the Bible and we would say the pledge allegiance to the flag. I was being told very directly that I didn't matter, and so people didn't look at me, people didn't talk to me.
[0:21:19.3] KM: It's hard to even talk about it.
[0:21:21.1] SH: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. What I think people can't begin to understand is that what you saw was what happened to the Little Rock Nine. That was a very active – it was in the news, people were doing all kinds of things to harass the Little Rock Nine. That's why the troops came. That's why they had escorts in the hallway. We didn't need that. The five of us didn't need that, because the resistance turned to shunning.
[0:21:56.1] KM: So no spitting in the face?
[0:21:58.0] SH: Oh, I did have that. Oh, I did. I did. I had the absolutely incredible experience of if you've ever been in Central, the staircases take you all the way up. I was going up to the top floor and there was this kid, every day when I went past this classroom door, he would lean out and glare at me. Finally one day when he leaned out, he had been collecting saliva in his mouth the entire period, and so that he spat in my face and I want to tell you that when I went to see Master Harrell and the voice when we lived in Madison, Wisconsin there's a spitting incident and I had never thought of how that impacted me. I burst into tears in the theater. The people around me were quite startled. I realized that I had such an emotional response, because it's such a humiliating and degrading thing to have someone spit on you.
[0:22:55.3] KM: You can't do anything about it.
[0:22:56.8] SH: No.
[0:22:57.8] KM: You've passed the test that you would – don't do anything about it.
[0:23:00.8] SH: Well and actually, that wasn't the most horrifying thing, Kerry. The most horrifying thing was that and when a football player kicked me on my knee that was bandaged one day. To be in a place where not one person will come to your aid, that's the most jarring thing that one can learn is that you are truly alone in the situation and that other people don't sense your humanity. That disgusting thing, dangerous thing, I was at the top of a staircase and had to go down five flights of steps, that nobody would reach out if I stumbled or fell. I mean, that was the thing that I learned in that setting is that whatever the students had learned that their mother's breast, it wasn't about hating me. I've never felt that I was hated. I felt that people have been taught that I didn't matter, which is different.
[0:23:59.3] KM: Like you're not human.
[0:24:01.3] SH: That's right. You're not the same.
[0:24:02.9] KM: You're not the same.
[0:24:03.4] SH: You’re not the same.
[0:24:04.2] KM: You don't have the same feelings I have.
[0:24:05.2] SH: That's right. That's right. That's right. You're not the same.
[0:24:07.7] KM: Did you cry at night when you went home?
[0:24:09.0] SH: No. Not at all. My parents were absolutely clear. They said, “This is not something that you need to cry about. This is something that you need to gear down and understand that you have no idea what's going to happen. You have made a decision. We have made a decision as a family to support you and that you have no idea what's going to happen. But as things happen, you have to bear up.”
That was very good, because when I went, we talked before I went about what my goals were. My goal was to have an excellent educational experience, that would then catapult me to fantastic higher ed experience and a fantastic life.
[0:24:57.9] KM: And it did.
[0:24:58.8] SH: And it did.
[0:24:59.1] KM: You got scholarships. Did you ever asked to quit? Did you ever say, “Mom and dad, can I just quit?”
[0:25:02.7] SH: Absolutely not. Not a day. There was never a day in which I felt that quitting was what I wanted to do.
[0:25:08.4] KM: You walked home every day?
[0:25:09.9] SH: Never. I never walked any place again. It was dangerous. I was taken to school every day. I was picked up. I never learned to drive, because my parents would not –
[0:25:19.8] KM: You don't drive right now?
[0:25:20.7] SH: I did learn. I didn't learn to drive until I was 30.
[0:25:22.2] KM: Oh, I was about to say, “How’d you get here?”
[0:25:25.7] SH: I didn’t learn to drive until I was 30, because my parents would not – they were not interested in me driving, because so many people would see me around the town; kids. They didn't ever want me to be out alone. I never did anything alone. I never went on the bus again alone. Everything that I did, I was always with my parents, or my brother because that was the danger that being clearly identifiable from the school setting, somebody might just do something.
[0:25:52.9] KM: You're like a star.
[0:25:53.8] SH: No. There's nothing glorious about it. What you are is you're like a marked person. You're a target. Oh, it was very negative to have to not have the freedom as a teenager to hang out, hang out, hang out. My parents would take me. I went to dances. I was in Girl Scouts. I was in Y teens. I did things to church. I had a very vibrant life outside, but it wasn't the thing of walking along the streets of my friends that I did prior to go and to set it up.
[0:26:29.8] KM: Where did you go to dances?
[0:26:31.5] SH: Horace Mann. I hung with my friends. In fact, most people that I know from Horace Mann don't even remember that I didn't go to Horace Mann.
[0:26:40.3] KM: Because you were there all the time.
[0:26:41.1] SH: I was there with the basketball games.
[0:26:44.2] KM: I was wondering, how was your social life? That was completely your education life and then there was a completely different social life.
[0:26:49.9] SH: Because by law, we could not attend any activities at Central and we could not participate in any student organizations by law.
[0:27:02.0] KM: It wasn't quite desegregated.
[0:27:04.6] SH: It was desegregated, it wasn't integrated.
[0:27:06.3] KM: There you go. Your brother went there.
[0:27:09.4] SH: Yup.
[0:27:10.3] KM: Was he also a marked child? Did you feel like it?
[0:27:13.5] SH: No. He had more independence and he was out more. He learned to drive.
[0:27:19.1] KM: What year was he in there?
[0:27:20.3] SH: ’63. I went in ’62. He's one year younger than me.
[0:27:24.0] KM: He in the next year and things were already getting better for him.
[0:27:27.0] SH: Well, no. That's not true, because on the 50th anniversary of his graduation, one of his classmates wrote a letter to him and she wrote about he’s presenting a paper and she said, it was probably the best paper that anybody in the class wrote, but at the end nobody responded and that all of her life, she'd been haunted by the silence that he experienced. Then she knew that it was larger than just that one class.
[0:27:54.8] KM: Haunted by the silence. I bet that made him feel wonderful. I know it made her feel better to confess.
[0:28:01.3] SH: She said no, that it didn't make her feel better. She said because what she recognized is that it was too late. She said that it was – but that she had learned a very important lesson and that was never be afraid to stand up, even if it's – if you're just one.
[0:28:19.3] KM: Well, I think a lot of people need to learn that lesson. There's a lot of bullies out there today and it's hard to stand up to bullies. This is a great place to take a break. When we come back, we're going to continue our conversation with Dr. Sybil Hampton, an outstanding citizen as you just heard. She's an educator, we're going to learn about that; administrator, consultant and as you've been hearing, a 1962 graduate of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas.
It's Black History Month and in this next segment, we'll talk candidly about racism. It's a two-way street. We'll have dr. Hampton give us her take on how far we've come, the work that lays ahead and her predictions for our future. We’ll be back.
[BREAK]
[0:28:59.4] Announcer: The Dreamland Ballroom inside Taborian Hall, the home of Flag and Banner, has recently been featured on television and constantly has public programs scheduled. Follow the Dreamland Ballroom Facebook and Instagram accounts for regular updates on what's happening, including the just scheduled Unburied Truth Program, The Mamba Mentality of Kobe Bryant. It's the other side of NBA legend, Kobe Bryant; a free event at the Dreamland Ballroom on March 10th. Information on this event is available at the website. Please go to dreamlandballroom.org.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:29:36.7] KM: You’re listening to Up In your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. I'm speaking today with Dr. Sybil Hampton, educator, consultant and among the second group of African-American students to integrate Central High School on the heels of the first, the Little Rock Nine.
We talked about your parents in the beginning of the show and how educated they are. Three generations of college graduates in higher education. Amazing. Then on the second section, we talked about your first days at Central High School. At the break I was saying, I – in learning about you, I thought it's all going to be about being afraid and fearing for your life, but you said it was about being invisible, I think is the way you said it. That's just something you don't really think about. You're 75-years-old and this happened to you when you were 15 and you still get upset by it.
If you're just tuning in and you did not get to hear Miss Sybil Hampton talk about her life at Central High School, you need to go back and listen to the podcast. It's enlightening. It's just stuff you never hear. It's from the heart. In 1996, you went off to become an educator. Boy, did you go off to be an educator. I said earlier that you were an elementary – started as an elementary school teacher in Chicago, Illinois, academic college administrator in New Rochelle, New York, Manager of Education and Culture in Connecticut at the GTE Corporation, Assistant Dean at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Special Assistant to the President of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas and President to the Rockefeller Foundation focusing on education and cultural programs.
This last one that I just mentioned is when in 1996, she returned to Little Rock to serve as the President of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. You were focusing on racial and social justice as always, as you and your whole family has done forever. You did it for 10 years as the head of the foundation and you helped to fund a variety of educational and cultural programs throughout the state. Was it hard to make the decision to come back to Little Rock after living all over the place, working for these higher education places and then you think, “Well, I'm going to go back to Little Rock where I've had some deep-seated memories.” Was it hard to make that decision?
[0:31:57.6] SH: It was 30 years later. That gave me perspective. The most important thing is that to become president of an incredible independent foundation is like going through the eye of a needle. What was quite startling is that the most stunning career opportunity I had was in the town without pity.
[0:32:28.0] KM: What does that mean?
[0:32:29.4] SH: Turning back to Little Rock, so that it was ironic and it was totally startling. I would never have told you that I would have come back to Little Rock to do anything more than to take care of my parents. I would never have believed that the best job that I could ever have would be in Arkansas. It was fate. It was quite ironic and it helped me to know that yeah, you can go home again.
[0:33:00.1] KM: It was healing.
[0:33:01.0] SH: It was healing. It was healing. It was very challenging, because I'd literally –people didn't know who I was, because I had not been here for 30 years. I had no career experience here. In the beginning, I would go places and I show up for a meeting or something and people would be directing me someplace else.
[0:33:23.7] KM: What do you mean?
[0:33:24.9] SH: Well, I mean, because I would be going places where I might be the only woman who was there.
[0:33:29.1] KM: In the room. The only black woman probably too.
[0:33:31.1] SH: Well, the only woman, period. People would not know that the present, because I just become the President Foundation, they didn't know who I was. That was once again, one of those experiences of having to make my way and having to build relationships and trust and having to just become a part of the flow.
[0:33:54.4] KM: You graduated with all kinds of accolades from Central High School, went off to college on all kinds of scholarships.
[0:34:04.3] SH: I had no accolades from Central High School, because –
[0:34:05.8] KM: I thought you did. I thought over that you did.
[0:34:07.4] SH: Because remember, I could not belong to the honor society. I mean, I had nothing –
[0:34:11.1] KM: You had some accolades. Maybe they were national ones.
[0:34:14.1] SH: Yes. I got a really great scholarship and actually, it was startling to my parents that my picture was in the newspaper as being one of the people in the class who got one of the best scholarships, so that was an accolade. You’re right. You’re right.
[0:34:29.5] KM: You decided to go into education. I think that's really interesting.
[0:34:33.0] SH: I didn't. I was a major in English Lit. I thought, I want to do something of them being a teacher, because women had been so limited.
[0:34:45.6] KM: Nurses, teachers, or secretaries.
[0:34:47.3] SH: Yup. I thought, “I want to do something different.” I thought I might like to work for the Public Health Service, because I'd had an externship with the Public Health Service and I thought, I'd like to go and get a masters in public health. I got married after college and my first husband went to work on his PhD at the University of Chicago. I thought, “Hmm.” I went to work and I thought, “I don't think I'm going to graduate school. Not at the University of Chicago.” I ended up going to the University of Chicago to my surprise, but also and I'd studied to be a teacher and I thought, “Well, well, well, you should never say never.”
[0:35:22.4] KM: Yeah, full circle. Your mother was probably very happy since she was a teacher.
[0:35:25.6] SH: Well and after coming out of Central, I had promised myself that I would never do anything that would put me in direct connection with any young people again in life.
[0:35:36.2] KM: Scarred. Your first opening was got a PhD. Man, you’re a bunch of educated people. I should be intimidated being around y'all. What was his degree in?
[0:35:47.5] SH: Philosophy.
[0:35:50.0] KM: I could guess y'all had a lot to talk about, I'm sure. When you worked for the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, describe a day there. You worked on social justice.
[0:35:59.9] SH: Well, economic development, education and economic racial and social justice. One of the things that was really quite wonderful is that in the first days there with the my program managers we went around the state and just went around and visited all the communities. Because remember, I left Little Rock at a time when I had never been to Fayetteville. You wouldn't go to Harrison or Fayetteville.
University of Arkansas at Fayetteville probably had its first undergraduates with people who would have graduating class of ’62 with me. I had not been a lot of places, particularly in the north and part of the state. I've not been to Lake Village. One of the things that I really wanted to do was go around the state. We went around the state staying in state parks and just going into communities to see what work people were doing in the non-profit sector, in the schools. It had been clear to me when I came home that probably the most endangered young people in Arkansas are really talented young people who live in small rural community and don't see people like themselves and don't see what they can do and don't see a way out. I wanted to get a real feel for Newton County.
[0:37:19.2] KM: I don't even know where that is.
[0:37:20.7] SH: Jasper, Mount Judi. I really wanted to get the sense of delta communities versus the places in the Northeast –
[0:37:29.2] KM: The hill country.
[0:37:30.2] SH: Yeah. What were the things that were in common for young people, because the work that we did at the foundation, the work that the foundation does just doesn't focus on African-Americans that focuses on improving the quality of life for all Arkansans.
[0:37:46.4] KM: Yes, economics.
[0:37:48.5] SH: Also, making sure that there's more justice and equity. That our project –
[0:37:54.7] KM: How did you do that? How do you get everybody connected?
[0:37:57.8] SH: Well, you don't get everybody connected. One of the things that a good foundation funds things that can be replicated and a good foundation also makes grants to build capacity in communities where that capacity needs to be built. For instance, when we realized that this whole thing about broadband was an issue in small communities, we wanted small communities of 10,000 or less to think about how are you going to get ready for the technology age.
We asked people across the Facebook community to sit down and to think about what would you need to do to get ready? What do you need to do assessments? What will you young people do? Well, the young people set up senior nets in some communities. It was that thing. Stimulating communities to think about the future, but also having the projects involve young people, because one of the things that that we understood is that young people might want to leave Arkansas. If you engage them before they leave in loving and supporting their communities, then they wouldn't escape as much as they would always have connections.
[0:39:14.8] KM: You went there in ’96. That's right at the dot-com boom. You're really on a cutting-edge of technology and putting like you said, wireless broadband out there in the community. What do you think are the positive things about today? We were talking about this before we went on the radio, about some people think today we're in this terrible situation and I said – You and I were like, we're not perfect, but we've come a long way.
[0:39:40.8] SH: I mean, I didn't even know anything about private foundations when I grew up in Little Rock and I became the president of one.
[0:39:48.2] KM: There you go.
[0:39:49.9] SH: When young people say to me, “Oh, my goodness things have not changed.” I go, “That's not true. We didn't get all the way. It's a million year journey, so that it is going to be a slog and it's going to be difficult, but we are not in slavery.” I mean, I really –
[0:40:10.8] KM: It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
[0:40:12.5] SH: It's a journey. I mean, we're not –
[0:40:14.1] KM: It’s a journey.
[0:40:15.0] SH: You're not going to a destination, it is a journey of a million miles. I was in Northern Ireland last winter this time and I would tell you that it's so important for me to come back and say to young African-American students, young people in Northern Ireland don't have the hope that you have, because the tension between the Catholics and the Protestants, the fact that only 14% of the schools are integrated, which means that they're either Catholic or Protestant. There are very few schools in which Catholics and Protestants go to school together. That's a way of having this perspective on how the differences, the way in which people with power keep down the people who don't have power. It's racially, it's religion. There are all kinds of bases of what makes people hateful to other people.
[0:41:15.8] KM: Gender.
[0:41:16.4] SH: Gender. Mm-hmm. Sexual orientation. The largest project we had at WRF had to do with the Japanese-American internment camps. We did that because we thought, you can't just say it's a black-white thing. You really need to be able to understand that 18,000 Japanese-Americans were interned in two places in the Delta of Arkansas.
[0:41:42.4] KM: That was all propaganda, started this hate about poor Japanese people. Before you know it, we're putting them on trains and busting them to the Delta of Arkansas. If anybody doesn't know that story, they need to –
[0:41:54.6] SH: People didn't know the story.
[0:41:56.5] KM: I did not know that story till 10 years ago, probably.
[0:41:59.2] SH: Yes. Then the thing that's really important is that Arkansas now has all this historic tourism that allows us to tell the various stories and to connect the dots.
[0:42:10.1] KM: Is that because of y'all? Is that because of the work you did?
[0:42:12.7] SH: I think that certainly, the work that we did with the Japanese-American internment camps led to Senator Inouye's going to the National Park Service and getting the large grants that have come here to restore those two sites.
[0:42:28.0] KM: What do we need to do next?
[0:42:31.2] SH: What we're doing between Trinity and Bethel AME Church is really very important example of what we need to do next. People from two different denominations, people who are from two different groups, racial groups coming together over a long period of time to build trust, worshiping together, singing together, doing Bible studies, doing studies together and just doing the thing that it takes to get people to get comfortable.
Our world is a world in which we still live separate and apart. The comfort zones for most of us, if we were to sit down and to write who are our closest friends and all the characteristics of our closest friends, we would discover that and for many people, that's not very diverse.
[0:43:25.4] KM: No, it's not.
[0:43:26.4] SH: Not inclusive.
[0:43:27.1] KM: Birds of a feather, they flock together. That's really okay, as long as you're not judging all the other people. I mean, it's okay if you want to be flock together with your people, but you can't judge other groups of people. That's where I'll get really –
[0:43:39.5] SH: Well, the problem with flocking together and not getting to know different people is that when you need to make important policy decisions and things, that things resonate with different people in different ways. There are nuances that you've got to be attentive to, particularly if you're going to be a leader.
[0:43:58.6] KM: Yes. Your EQ, your emotional quota to be a leader is so important. You can't really know that, unless you have empathy and understanding of the other person.
[0:44:10.6] SH: If you don't have relationships with people who can help you to learn.
[0:44:15.3] KM: That's right. You have to make the effort. You absolutely have to. Gosh, Sybil, time has run out. I'm just sick about it. Thank you so much. I mean, you're quite calm, strength, voice of reason, all of America, maybe more than, maybe they don't know it, but they need to know it, is indebted to people and families like yours who've shown outstanding fearless citizenship. I mean, thank you so much for coming on. I have a book for you, The Dreamland Ballroom. I'll sign it for you after it's over with.
[0:44:42.5] SH: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Kerry.
[0:44:44.2] KM: Oh, I have enjoyed it. I’ll see you at church.
[0:44:46.2] SH: All right.
[0:44:48.4] KM: All right, that does it for us. Thank you for spending time with us. We hope today you've heard or learned something that's been inspiring or enlightening and that it whatever it is, we'll help you up your business, your independence or your life. If you haven't heard something today, you hadn't been listening.
I'm Kerry McCoy and I'll see you next time on Up In your Business. Until then, be brave and keep it up.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:45:07.8] G: You’ve been listening to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy. For links to resources you heard discussed on today’s show, go to flagandbanner.com, select radio and choose today’s guest.
If you’d like to sponsor the show or any show, contact me gray@flagandbanner.com. All interviews are recorded and posted the following week. Stay informed of exciting upcoming guests by subscribing to our YouTube channel, or podcasts wherever you like to listen.
Kerry’s goal is simple, to help you live the American dream.
[END]
