{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/319s17tp62/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Mark Levy Oral History"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/010/original/Aviary_QPLlogo_192x192.png?1578574261","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSummary of Full Interview:  \u003c/strong\u003e \u003cbr\u003eMark Levy is a civil rights activist, former Queens College SEEK faculty member, and union organizer. In the first interview (which took place on February 22, 2021) he discusses growing up in New York City, including his perceptions of class and racial divisions, and the general climate of McCarthyism. Levy then describes his experience attending both Antioch College in Ohio and Queens College in Flushing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At Queens College, he became student body president and advocated for students’ rights. In 1964 he volunteered for Mississippi Freedom Summer, where he coordinated and taught at a Freedom School in Meridian. Levy describes what he learned in Mississippi and how his experiences there influenced his experience teaching in the Queens College SEEK program in the late 1960s. Levy concludes by explaining how his desire to make a change influenced him to become a union organizer. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eIn the second interview (which took place on March 1, 2021), Levy describes the process of contributing his archives to the Queens College Library, challenges in publicizing the archives and integrating them into the Queens College curriculum, and how his papers impact and disrupt the established narrative of civil rights history at Queens College. He notes the importance of preserving the history of the Queens College SEEK program, and the program's role as a force for social justice on campus. He also discusses his experience teaching about civil rights and the Movement, and his impressions of the Queens College campus circa 2008-2014.  \u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English"]}},{"label":{"en":["Coverage"]},"value":{"en":["1939, 1960s, 2008-2010s (temporal)","Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, Manhattan; Riverdale, Bronx; Yellow Springs, Ohio; City College; Queens College, Queens NY; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mississippi; Prince Edward County, Virginia and Atlantic City, New Jersey. (spatial)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2021-02-22 (created)","2021-03-01 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Mark Levy (Interviewee)","Obden Mondesir (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eCC BY-NC-SA Contact digitalarchives@queenslibrary.org for research and reproduction requests.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Audio"]}},{"label":{"en":["Tags"]},"value":{"en":["Queens College Alumni"]}}],"summary":{"en":["\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSummary of Full Interview: \u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003cbr /\u003eMark Levy is a civil rights activist, former Queens College SEEK faculty member, and union organizer. In the first interview (which took place on February 22, 2021) he discusses growing up in New York City, including his perceptions of class and racial divisions, and the general climate of McCarthyism. Levy then describes his experience attending both Antioch College in Ohio and Queens College in Flushing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At Queens College, he became student body president and advocated for students\u0026rsquo; rights. In 1964 he volunteered for Mississippi Freedom Summer, where he coordinated and taught at a Freedom School in Meridian. Levy describes what he learned in Mississippi and how his experiences there influenced his experience teaching in the Queens College SEEK program in the late 1960s. Levy concludes by explaining how his desire to make a change influenced him to become a union organizer.\u0026nbsp;\u003cbr /\u003e \u0026nbsp;\u003cbr /\u003eIn the second interview (which took place on March 1, 2021), Levy describes the process of contributing his archives to the Queens College Library, challenges in publicizing the archives and integrating them into the Queens College curriculum, and how his papers impact and disrupt the established narrative of civil rights history at Queens College. He notes the importance of preserving the history of the Queens College SEEK program, and the program's role as a force for social justice on campus. He also discusses his experience teaching about civil rights and the Movement, and his impressions of the Queens College campus circa 2008-2014. \u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eCC BY-NC-SA Contact digitalarchives@queenslibrary.org for research and reproduction requests.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Queens Public Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Queens Public Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/010/original/Aviary_QPLlogo_192x192.png?1578574261","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/170/728/small/Levy_Mark-aviary.jpg?1668437951","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 2 - Levy_Mark_02_22_2021.m4a"]},"duration":10240.48,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/170/728/small/Levy_Mark-aviary.jpg?1668437951","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-queenslibrary.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/170/728/original/Levy_Mark_02_22_2021.m4a?1668436504","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mp3","duration":10240.48,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Full Transcript - February 22, 2021 [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: So now I am recording.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1.0,2.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Okay. I see it here too.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2.0,5.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And—so let's get the date out of the way. Today's date is February 22nd. My name is Obden Mondesir. I am collecting this oral history for the Queens College Special Collections and Archives, and specifically for the SEEK History Project. And I am with Mark Levy. And Mark, could you start by telling me when you were born, where you were born, and about your family?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5.0,35.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Okay. Name's Mark Levy. I have a middle name, which I never use, which is Lawrence. And it's Mark with a K, and Levy with a Y. I was born May 30th, 1939. Marched in Memorial Day parades as a young person regularly. Born and raised in New York City. I was born and raised on 96th Street, near Central Park in Manhattan. I currently live on 94th Street near West—on West End Avenue. So I'm a native Upper West Sider. I've lived all my 81 years on the Upper West Side, but I've traveled around and lived in other parts of the country.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=35.0,85.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: My father's name was Harry Levy. He's deceased. My mother's name was Leona Stein Levy. She's deceased also. And I had two younger brothers. I was the oldest of, of the three guys. My father worked in the textile and garment industry. And, he was the oldest son of a family of immigrants from Eastern Europe from Vilna. And my mother—she has a interesting and complicated background. She went to law school in Chicago in the 1920s, and not many women went to law school ever. Particularly, a high level law school, like University of Chicago. But she never—she didn't finish. It was before she was married. I never found out why she didn't finish. And I think all her life, the sense that she could have gone on to a fairly high-powered and unique position, but didn't, for whatever reason it was, was always an issue with her. I didn't find out until after she died, in fact that, she had been adopted. I knew her grandparents, wasn't—she was adopted as just a new kid being adopted. Her mother— so my grandmother on that side, had been married before and, when she remarried, my grandfather adopted the kids, but I never knew that story until after she died. So it's a grand lesson about how the \"traditional family.\" You never see the traditional family, but people like to pretend that there is a traditional family. So I learned that it was different afterwards.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=85.0,230.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: It was a middle class upbringing until I was a junior in high school, when my father lost his job and went bankrupt. And I had gone to elementary school in the neighborhood on the West Side. When it was time to go to junior high and high school, my parents—particularly my mother who was very upwardly mobile—they sent me and my younger brother to a prep school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale (NYC). The trajectory there was to be an upper middle class doctor, lawyer or something like that. And, I always had a sense—I remember class issues there. There were a few students at Horace Mann who were on scholarship. I wasn't one of those, but there were an awful lot of the other students who were driven there in limousines by chauffeurs. And I was not one of those. I took the number one train up from the Upper West Side up to, to 242nd Street, then would walk up the hill to Horace Mann. So, I, I was in this middle structure, so my father went bankrupt, I did not have the, the scholarship to stay in my senior year. So my senior year I went to my local high school, which was New York High School of Commerce, which is where Lincoln Center is now. And physically that building is where Juilliard is now. Alright, so that's the basic stuff about my family.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=230.0,361.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And I guess your mother—at this time, what was her profession?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=361.0,369.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: She was a mother and housewife until my father went bankrupt. When that happened, she got an office job as a secretary and sort of maybe office manager for a high powered university professor at Columbia University, a sociologist named Lazarsfeld. That lasted for a couple years. And then she also worked as a legal secretary for some lawyer, 'cause my father, after he went bankrupt, really couldn't find anything that was stable. He had a couple of different jobs.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=369.0,419.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: There's one other thing I forgot to mention about the family. The other thing that was very significant about the family is that my family's Jewish. I was bar mitzvahed at an Upper West Side congregation that went from being just sort of a neutral to a very politically conservative one to a, a ultra-liberal one recently. But being Jewish was a significant part of the family. We weren't Orthodox, and we didn't keep a kosher house, but we would observe the holidays. My parents would—my father would go to synagogue on anniversaries of family members' deaths. And at various other times, we would invite international students from Columbia University over to the house for many Jewish holidays. But the sense of Jewish values, the understanding of the Holocaust, the sense of discrimination that existed in the world was part of my upbringing. So just for example, I remember—I guess when I was in maybe elementary school or early junior high school—somehow we were talking about where would I like to go to college? And I said, \"Oh, I'd love to go to college near here.\" And the nearest college to where I live is Columbia University. And I remember being told, \"Oh, you can't go there,\" because Columbia University, at that time, discriminated. They didn't let Jews in. Or they had a very small limit for how many Jews they would let in. So that sense of discrimination in the world, the sense of the international issues related to the Holocaust and that level of discrimination—that, that was always part of my upbringing.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=419.0,559.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And I guess one thing—I guess it was it—I'm, I'm assuming, but could you describe the apartment that you grew up in, in the Upper, Upper West Side?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=559.0,572.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Oh, that's a good question.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=572.0,573.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=573.0,574.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: It was a two—large, two bedrooms, separate dining room, separate foyer, separate living room, kitchen, and then what was called a small \"maid's room\" behind the kitchen. So that there were three brothers and when there were two of us, we shared one of the big bedrooms. At some point when there were three of us I as the oldest son got the maid's room. So I had my own room with a little bathroom that went with it. But I have one little story about growing up in my house that also adds color to the world that it was. My parents weren't political. So growing up as a kid and then as a teenager—this was the McCarthy period in the United States, one of political repression. And, I remember I was told to stay away from a couple of cousins who actually turned out to be my favorite cousins, and it was because [my mother said] their parents were \"Communists\" and—so we shouldn't hang out with them. And the other thing that I remember very clearly—and, and you're asking about the apartment—even though we were sort of an upwardly mobile middle class family, and my mother was educated and schooled all the way through part of law school. My father just—I think he finished high school—he never went to college—we had no books in the house. No books at all. My father would read the newspaper. I don't know whether my mother read stuff.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=574.0,689.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And at some point my middle brother, Paul, who's deceased also now, and he and I must have been elementary school. So we were 10 or 11 and I was born in '39, so that's '49, '50 that period of time. We asked our mother to get us an encyclopedia. A set of like 12 books. And, and she really resisted. But in our classes, we—in the elementary school, we'd always be asked stupid things like go research, \"stupid\" in quotation marks, the simple things like what's the major product of the Dominican Republic? So back in those days before computers, you'd go to the encyclopedia and you'd look it up and then you'd come back and say whatever it was—bananas, or whatever. So we wanted an encyclopedia, so we pressured my mother to buy it. So she buys an encyclopedia, and she takes the 12 volumes of a inexpensive one called Compton's, Compton's Encyclopedia. And she puts it in the top shelf of the front closet where my brother and I couldn't reach it, right? So we couldn't thumb through the books. We couldn't do any of the research, and I remember very specifically asking her, \"Why do you put our encyclopedia way up where we can't reach it?\" She says, \"You don't wanna leave books showing, 'cause the FBI investigates everybody—when the FBI comes to our house, if they see books around, they'll think we're intellectuals. And if they think we're intellectuals, they'll assume we're Communists also.\" So we would get in trouble for having books around the house.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=689.0,809.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: That, that's really fascinating. And it, it—yes. And—'cause like the other—the one question that was in my head was, during this time in regards to expectations of going to college, was that part of the cultural norm for you growing?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=809.0,838.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yes. By, by our having been sent to Horace Mann, the absolute expectation was not only going to college, but going to an Ivy. Horace Mann, that's the—that was the track. If you got into any place that wasn't even an Ivy League, you were a failure. And I remember I was an oddball my junior year, even before I found out my father was bankrupt and we were not gonna be able to finish there. I was fascinated by this odd school in Ohio that had a work study program called Antioch where you'd go to school three months, then you'd go out and have a job for three months and then you'd come back after three months. I thought that was a terrific way to learn. But the guidance counselors at Horace Mann really leaned on me to not go there. It wasn't prestigious enough. Well, if I couldn't get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, maybe I could go to Lehigh. Lehigh was a party school. So, maybe I'd be happy there, but don't go to Antioch. That doesn't count for anything. So yes. Those were the expectations at that time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=838.0,919.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And then, so—I mean, there there's Horace Mann in Riverdale and then you finish at—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=919.0,929.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Commerce. New York High School of—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=929.0,930.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: —the New York High School of Commerce. And, could you describe your decision—well, you've described your decision to go to Antioch. Could you, could you tell me, yeah—what happens after New York High School of Commerce?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=930.0,943.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well, there's some stories about New York High School Commerce that I'm happy to put in the record because part of real changes for me. So here I show up, this white middle class Jewish guy who was taught how to do all sorts. It's good schooling at Horace Mann, so we could deconstruct a sentence and follow grammar. I had taken Latin. So, I come in as a senior and I'm a real outsider. 'Cause Horace Mann is all working class—not Horace Mann—New York High School of Commerce is all working class. First and second generation. Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, from mainly like Hell's Kitchen area on the West Side, down to the Village and a couple things started happening in that school that were odd. And I, I sort of got accepted—again, so this is '56 and '57—because I played soccer. I had started playing soccer at, at Horace Mann. Then I could be a soccer player at Commerce and I was the only guy without an accent, American-born who played at soccer. I was never very good 'cause I wasn't born kicking a ball. But, but I got to make friends on the soccer team. But two things stand out. One is I got very friendly—and again, these are the times '56, '57—I got very friendly with one girl, a young woman who grew up in the Village and she would not stand and say the pledge [of allegiance]. It was required every morning that we all stand and say the pledge and she wouldn't do it. And it really threw the teacher into a tizzy about what to do. And I supported her just 'cause I liked her, the idea of not saying the pledge I'm—'cause I was not a lefty or an activist or political I could see why she wouldn't, and I could sort of support the idea that she shouldn't be forced to say it. And I didn't push it as much as she did, so I didn't get in trouble. She sort of got in trouble, but that was—the idea to standing up to authority, beginning to question or challenge the world. The pledge of allegiance actually I think changed while I was there. You know, \"one nation under God\"? The phrase \"under God\" was not in the original pledge. That was added during the McCarthy era. No—nobody knows that, but it was the conservative Congress or something - he [President Eisenhower] made the motion and it was adopted to change the pledge.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=943.0,1136.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And the other significant thing that I was learning pretty much all along was that here I was in one of the higher, however they ranked classes, and all these kids were really smart in the class and they were really nice. But two things: and one is, they all had accents. That wasn't like Horace Mann. And there were girls in the class and Horace Mann was all boys. So it was really my first discovery that you could have smart girls, right? Which at that time was like a big deal thing. And actually a couple of my best buddies were girls, was the Barbara Benmosché, who was the troublemaker from Greenwich Village.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1136.0,1189.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And then I got friendly with the girl who was the senior class president. Her name was Melba Torres, and Melba Torres somewhere—oh, probably around this time of year, February—we started planning—the, the class student association started planning the prom. And she asked me to go around with her to interview the managers of the hotels that would, I don't—host such facilit—banquet managers, I think they were called. So we went around, and the first day we went—must have gone to, I don't know, 3, 4, 5, 6 hotels. And we asked them, what does it cost? Could we bring our own band or do they have musicians? Food? All the questions you would ask about a banquet. And then we get back to school afterwards and Melba says, \"Mark, I gotta talk to you.\" And she pulls me aside and she said, \"Mark, did you notice that at all the hotels we went to, the banquet managers talked to you?\" And when we got there, she said, \"I introduced myself as the class president to them. And then they went ahead and talked to you and you answered them. And I was just standing off the side. Everybody was ignoring me.\" I said, \"Oh no, I never noticed that. I'm, I'm really sorry.\" She said, \"that happens to girls—women when they get ignored, when there's a guy and you're a white, English speaking guy and I'm Puerto Rican and I have brown skin.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1189.0,1308.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So it was one of my first introductions to gender and racial and language discrimination. And also to the fact that she was willing to explain to me, I, I don't know where in my life, I was able to hear these things and listen. But fortunately I did. And so, I can point to very specific times when key learnings came, not from authority figures, but from other normal figures. So I learned how smart girls were, I learned intercultural communications, I learned a whole bunch of stuff. When I went to the High School of Commerce and then I said I want to go to Antioch. And the guidance counselors there were ecstatic that I wanted to go to college, right? And they thought it was very smart. They thought that I could go to Antioch, work and study, and pay for part of my tuition, which turned out not to be the case, because that only works if you live at home and then save your money. But if you take jobs in Ohio, or here or there, you don't save the money, you have to just support yourself. So, I had guidance counselors who were very supportive of Antioch as opposed to Horace Mann where they thought it was embarrassing to the institution if I went to Antioch instead of an Ivy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1308.0,1408.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. And, just to clarify, were they also—were they excited at the idea that you had an interest in college?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1408.0,1415.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yes, absolutely. I don't know, in 1957, what percentage of the New York High School of Commerce graduated, but schools were very tracked and very racial in their tracking. I hadn't thought about this until you asked the question—I was in what was called an \"academic\" track. I was in the highest, first level of an academic track. Whereas other—most—the vast majority of people at the High School of Commerce were in \"commercial\" tracks. Taking courses in bookkeeping or secretarial duties or sales or that, that kind of stuff. So I was being, at Commerce, tracked. But to go to college in those days, if you were going outside of New York, cost money. Though, again, to bring the story back to one of our main parts of our conversation, in 1957, the guidance department counselor said besides Antioch, that I should look at one of the City University—probably wasn't City University then, but one of the city colleges, and—'cause they were free. They were free. No tuition—zero tuition. So I went up and looked at City College and I went out to Queens and fell in love with Queens. Queens was a rural campus with trees and with a agricultural—big agricultural farm, just, to—towards the city. It had very few buildings. If, if you look at the number of buildings that existed at 1957, you'd see it was a small rural campus. It was almost like going to an out of town campus. So that was my introduction to Queens College. But then I chose to go to Antioch, so when I dropped out of Antioch, I'd already had surveyed some of the City University-type schools. And that's how I wound up back at Queens, 'cause I had applied—thought about it and gone to look at it in—back in 1957 when I was at the High School of Commerce.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1415.0,1564.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And what do you remember about City College when you went to visit?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1564.0,1571.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: It was all cement and concrete and big buildings. It was also characterized to me as being a very competitive school. Very high class. Queens was softer, or a more welcoming kind of school, but back in '57, City College was very competitive to get into and it, it really catered to super smart European, pretty intellectual academic kids from New York City.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1571.0,1623.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. I mean—I had the opportunity to interview Edward Matt, who was an educator at, at City College. And he was born in, in 1929 and he like, really talked up City College, when I interviewed him. But yeah, that's really like—so I, I've heard this, this, this difference between the two spaces. And then, so, we're at the point where you've decided to attend Antioch and could you talk about that transition?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1623.0,1663.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well what I didn't know at the time, was in some senses how well I might fit in because of other cultural things. In high school, my best friend from the neighborhood—not at Horace Mann, but from the Upper West Side—was a teenager who was a banjo player. So '55, '56, there were not many folk musicians and folk music was just beginning. So he was a banjo player. And for me to hang out with him, he would go play banjo, but I didn't play an instrument and I can't sing a lick. So we bumped into a group that he hung out with where there was a guy who played a wash-tub bass. One stringed instrument around a great big wash-tub upside down. And I could learn how to go [imitates sound] thump, thump, thump to his banjo playing. So, I learned how to play the wash-tub bass. And between his banjo playing and my wash-tub bass, we hung out as high school seniors, a little bit in Greenwich Village, which was a big beatnik scene at that time, poetry and folk music. Not really lefty politics or anything but much more cultural stuff. So beat poetry, and, and folk music and wearing black. You always wore black turtleneck shirts. It was almost like a regular uniform. And it turns out when I went out to Antioch, Antioch was very much of a beatnik school. It wasn't just a work study school and, and it turned out that Antioch, and I didn't know this, was almost 50% from New York City. And it had a higher than usual Jewish population. And—so in, in some of those cultural ways, Antioch was just really, really comfortable.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1663.0,1801.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: The other connection that comes and continues in different ways in my life from having gone to Antioch was, as a freshman, in our dorm, we were assigned a senior advisor. And the senior advisor to my hallway, I can't remember where that hallway was called, was a guy named Steve Schwerner, and Steve Schwerner turns out to be the brother of Mickey Schwerner and also Steve Schwerner, wound up working at Queens College for many years. Steve Schwerner was not only our hall advisor. He was the head of, I think it was the DuBois Club. We're talking about '56, '57, whoever heard of DuBois? The DuBois, I don't know, chapter civil rights group or something like that. And they were boycotting the white barber in Yellow Springs, Ohio where he would not cut Black folks' hair, but there was also a Black barber in town who would cut white folks' hair at as well as Black folks hair. So that there was a boycott that Steve Schwerner and people in his Dubois club. If I remember the name correctly, recruited us too. So way back in the, the fifties, here I am coming to this college. And I—one of the first things I'm told is that I have to participate in this boycott of a barber and what did I know? Right. So Schwerner explained it in the logic, the civil rights activities, and this was pretty radical for the, the fifties to be, be doing that. I mean, there was no confrontation or anything like that, but it was just to make a choice to boycott it publicly boycott the white barber was a, was a big deal back then. So Antioch was great. I had—I really loved—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1801.0,1934.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Just one question. I was like, do you remember how long the boycott lasted?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1934.0,1938.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: No, because we'd be there three months and go on three months. So time was odd in that kind of way.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1938.0,1952.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Okay. But, you were continuing on a, on a, on a, on another thought.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1952.0,1956.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well, I had a bunch of different kinds of jobs. I worked in a survey research center. I worked in wire mill. I worked as a camp counselor. I had one other job. I can't remember what it was now, but working in the wire mill, I worked in a town outside of Cincinnati. Did I say wire mill? I didn't mean to say—I've worked in a wire mill later. This was a steel fabricating plant. So big beams would come to the fabricating plant from a steel mill. And then what this plant would do would be to cut the beams, to drill holes in the beams, to paint the beams and to follow engineering design so that they could be used in building. So I had to operate or learn to operate some pretty dangerous and heavy equipment. I nearly lost a finger in doing that, but all the guys who did that were from Kentucky, which was right across just a few miles away, 'cause Cincinnati really borders, Kentucky. And they really patronized me in a funny kind of way. I, I was a good worker. I worked hard, but then they would tell me don't work too hard. They also wanted me to who take 'em to Antioch 'cause they heard that all the females that Antioch believed in free love and they, they wanted to come up and meet some of these Antioch girls, which I never did bring anybody up. And they offered to take me hunting in Kentucky to go hunt for squirrels. And they would joke with me 'cause I was so much of a city boy, they would say, oh, we really don't shoot the squirrels. We shoot the branch that the squirrel is on. Then it falls down. They would pull pranks on me all the time, ask me to carry things I couldn't move. But I survived, I did it and all that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=1956.0,2087.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And then at Antioch—so you would do three months of a work job and then you'd come back and you'd be taking regular courses and their courses would just really interesting. But then you would have a separate set of experiences where you would sit down and write about what did you do on your job? Describe it, evaluated it. What did you learn? What was the—so I was dealing with my, it was my first experience really with rednecks. I mean these guys from Kentucky were all white and all typical hill people from, from Kentucky, they were mining families. They were really sort of whatever, I guess, more rural farming, small form families in Kentucky. So I was really disappointed to have to leave Antioch cause I couldn't pay for it. I wasn't taking my studies very seriously. As a freshman, first two years I played a lot of pool. I, I, I was adopted by three women and taught how to play bridge. So I played bridge late into of the night. I remember signing up for a chemistry class that met at eight o'clock in the morning on Saturdays and doing chemistry labs at eight o'clock in the morning on Saturdays was just not my thing. Yeah, anyhow. So I was not a serious student and, and, and money was hard and there was a song at Antioch that was a joke, but it was serious. And the chorus of that song was \"save your money honey, CCNY is free.\" So it'd be a verse about something about Antioch, and the fun and how we were a bunch of beatniks back then or what it was like being on the job. And then it would be \"save your money, honey, CCNY is free.\" You could always be someplace else. So in fact that's where I wound up. Right.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2087.0,2213.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. And I feel like is, is, was that song because like you mentioned earlier that like nearly half of the people that went to Antioch were from New York. So there was that connection?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2213.0,2223.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right. And, and because if you came from a wealthy family that was destined to go to the Ivys or some fancy party school, you would not have wound up at Antioch. So \"save your money, honey\" meant that everybody who was at Antioch really didn't come from upper class or really wealthy families. They, they were from middle class, lower middle class working class families had money, but also people who were willing to work at all sorts of jobs. Right. We were not gonna be kids just living off of our parents. We were all people who knew we had to have jobs; we respected work; we respected what you learn at work. So it was a different kind of expectation.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2223.0,2273.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. What I'm finding really fascinating in some of the things you're narrating is it seems like a lot of your early life really sat within this nexus of, middle class in regards to aspirations and like, what you had access to, especially in relation to like your experience of like what you saw with students at Horace Mann, like people being driven in limousines, and then like Antioch, where like people had to work to earn, earn their education.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2273.0,2309.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right. And, High School of Commerce. The kids in that class at Commerce were really smart, really good. I didn't stay friends with them cause I went out to Ohio. So it was a big break with a lot of the people that I—both at Commerce and who I knew in the neighborhood. But yes, it really changed my expectation and worldview 180 degrees. It's sort of interesting now when give n current politics, one of the quick answers about the Trump supporters and the white nationalists—so there are people who feel their expectations and hopes themselves and their kids are being lost. And so they get angry at immigrants or people of color who they think are making out. And in a certain sense, I went through the same experience, but came out 180 degrees the opposite, right? 'Cause here I am with a downwardly mobile, middle class family, and, and meeting nice people who I liked and respected, then know how to sense that the way to, for myself and for others around to survive and do okay was to change the world for everybody and make the world better for everybody's rather than being either angry or, like some of the white supremacists are, or to be selfish, like the really rich kids at Horace Mann were, and like a lot of people are these days.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2309.0,2430.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. Yeah, there seems to be like a lot of what happened at January 6th was like this call of a return to like fixed positions of class where like, race equals caste and like caste means like I get to maintain what I have.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2430.0,2445.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2445.0,2446.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. And so, what you were last discussing was that, because of your experiences of, of, of bridge and having class at 8:00 AM on a Saturday, obviously those were the main reasons, but, how did you find yourself back at Queens College, I think is my question. Not back, but—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2446.0,2468.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well, the—right the first year out of Antioch, I didn't go to school. A combination of being, I guess, a little depressed, having to drop out of Antioch and also a sense of needing money. My parents basically said, if you're coming home and living at home, you gotta earn some money and you gotta give us—this was never true before. Right? You gotta contribute a little to the house, not rent but to food. And you can't expect us to give you money, so you gotta—so I had a couple jobs there, during that year. I drove a truck for a while for a TV rental, company. I, I forget what else I did, but I, I had a bunch of jobs. And I've stayed pretty close to home. And then, went back to Queens. I guess it was the fall of '60, '57 to '59 [at Antioch]. And I didn't go [to college during] '59—'60. So it must have been the fall of '60. So I went to Queens, and I got to Queens and I liked the feeling, but very quickly I got into trouble. Antioch was this sort of beatnik free school. So I remember the first trouble I got in was I had to go from one side of the campus to a building on the other side of the campus. Then the shape of the quad was the same as it is now. The main quad between the sandstone buildings. And I just walked across the grass, but there were chains around that, that you had to step over. And, I just—there weren't even, I think the walkways, I think there were maybe no walkways back then.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2468.0,2590.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So I just took the shortest route and I got busted by campus police, who yelled at me for walking on the grass. And I said, \"What's wrong with walking on the grass?\" So they took me to the Dean's office. His name was Kreuzer, Dean of Student Activities at the time. And Kreuzer yelled at me for not only walking on the grass, but I must have shown some attitude about [laughs] some sense of correctness and for work—walking on the grass. I believe I probably explained to him that at Antioch, when they built a new building, they didn't put in the walkways. They let people walk on the bare ground, and then the walkways were put in where the paths went, right? It wasn't an architect or a landscape designer who figured out where they wanted to put paths. It was the people's footsteps that they put. So I must have explained that to him. And I don't think he liked any young people explaining things to him. So he, so he yells at me. And then when I leave his office, he had a secretary. Secretary's name was Helen Hendricks, and Helen Hendricks was pretty young as a secretary. Turns out—I've just recently found out how old she is. She's about five years older than I am. So I was what? Maybe 22. So she—that would've made her about 27 or so, and she was Black and she basically said, \"Don't worry about it. He yells a lot, but you know, just be a good guy. We're—it's a good school, so chill,\" right? Or whatever the appropriate way. So she and I got to be buddies after that and became one of my most important teachers at Queens ever.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2590.0,2703.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And the other thing that I got trouble for was, again, something—expectations from Antioch. The teachers at Queens at that time and courses that I was taking were cool and distant. They read their lecture notes? There could have been nobody in the room or 200 people in the room, or 20 people who were eager and interested, or there could be somebody who didn't understand his accent. They weren't teaching people, they were teaching content and they were teaching it in, in some ways that they didn't teach it at Antioch. And at Antioch, we were encouraged to think on our own and to be critical and to challenge teachers. I mean, that, that was what Antioch was like. Like it's Queens, that's just not the case. And, the teachers were smart. They knew their subject, but they were very authoritarian and they were very traditional in the way they taught. And they really didn't care about who their students were from what I could tell from where I sat. So I puzzled over that. I talked to some people and I wound up somehow bumping into somebody from student government who said—oh, and I was also saying, I—'cause I—he probably asked me, \"What do you wanna do about it?\" Which is a very radical question for anybody to ask. And I came up with this idea that we should do a survey. We should ask students what they thought of their teachers and their classes and Jesus, back, back in those days, students were not supposed to evaluate their teachers. But student government picked up the idea and empowered me to be head of the curriculum evaluation committee or whatever it was called back then. So I started doing that stuff, and that was pretty good.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2703.0,2833.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So life for, for me, my first year on campus was I joined the soccer team at Queens. They had a very good team. They were all Turkish. Very aggressive, very powerful players. And I was the only guy who didn't speak their language. There may be a couple or a couple of Italians, but really they were dominated by people from Turkey at that time. So I played soccer. I was getting involved in student government. I had my washtub base that I played. I was still into folk music. And on campus at that time, the cafeteria was one of the sandstone buildings that's now where they have some of the, IT classes on the ground floor. And I think it's now been taken over maintenance department, but there was a downstairs cafeteria that most students would go to and upstairs right above it was the, what they called the \"Small Caf.\" And if you're in the archive at Queens College and you look out the window, you—that's the building you're looking at. If you're looking towards where the gym is now, the cafeteria as it is now is off to the right. And then there's some building. Anyhow, so I started hanging out upstairs in what they called the \"Small Caf\" and that's where the beatniks went. And that's where also the more progressive students, people whose families were left wingers, where people would criticize being educated in school and hiding under desks, because there—we were told that there was gonna be a nuclear war. So it was poetry, folk music against nuclear attack. And then there were a bunch of other activities. So that's where I hung out. And I got adopted into that progressive culture. So I was having a lot of fun and was connected.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2833.0,2961.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: A lot of the rest of the campus was fairly alienated because Queens is a commuter school, right? People come and go. But because it was no tuition, the necessity to leave really quickly and have a job was less evident at that time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2961.0,2986.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And so one set of culture that I got into was the small caf culture. There were two other cultures. One was the social cultures, fraternities, sororities, and house plans, the Greeks and, and the non-Greek house plans. And they pretty much discriminated by—well, there were no Black students there, but there were the Jewish fraternities and house plans, and then there were the Christian ones. And so it broke up pretty much like that. And I had hardly any contacts in those. And then there were the—every department had a club, like the psychology department and history department. So that's where the brainy kids hung out, right? They would—were in the departmental clubs. I met a woman who—girl who was student government in the psychology club and was hanging out in the small cafeteria because her family was a very progressive political family. And she became my first wife. And one of the things that transpired in the—that year was—I guess this was '60—my second year '61, '62 is that, so I was just beginning to get involved in student government stuff. Different campus groups invited speakers to come talk to their club, right? So there was NAACP club and some other club who invited Malcolm X. So the administration banned Malcolm X. Malcolm X came to speak at Queens some other time. But at that point in time, he was banned. Then some other club invited Benjamin Davis. Benjamin Davis was the head of the Communist Party USA at that time. And he was Black and he was banned. And so there started to be an uproar about the bannings, and then the conservative club invited William Buckley, and he was banned [laughs] to be equal, equal side ban. And the, the argument from the college president was the college president had a responsibility to treat the students in loco parentis, in the place of parents. And parents would not want their students to be too controversial, or to have surround themselves, or be seen with such controversial folks.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=2986.0,3168.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And these groups of students who were stuck in the situation of having their speakers banned got together with student government and said, \"We should do something about it.\" And there was some discussions to try and convince the college president to reverse the ban. And he was absolutely reluctant to make any changes. So 1961, brand new big idea, let's have a student strike. And there hadn't been the Berkeley Strike or the Columbia Strike or any other strike. So Queens was one of the first campuses to have a strike. And, and I, I never realized until later how smart it was in a certain sense. It wasn't an ongoing perpetual strike, forever. It was like a one day strike. And so there was a lot of participation. But it was, it was pretty radical. And in fact, the college president backed down. There was some compromise that was worked out. There wasn't like they said, everybody could come. There was a process set up for bringing in speakers. And—but we felt very powerful. So, the lessons I was learning and I was doing my student evaluation committee. And here we, we had been through this student strike, and that was pretty successful. And student government was, was being pretty successful. So I was learning and having this sense that student activity could really make a difference. That even college kids, if they got together and worked together and used group action, they could make a difference.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3168.0,3280.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And there were other issues about student dress. Girls had to wear skirts. They couldn't go to class or cafeteria in slacks. So there was a bunch of stuff around student rights issues. And I was very supportive of student rights, right? I, I was not, being against the war and nuclear, being against nuclear stuff. That's pretty radical being too much involved in civil rights stuff. That was a little too radical, but student rights issues were comfortable for me at that time. And the fraternity that used to control student government was AE PI. It was the high ranking, elite Jewish fraternity. And they had provided the presidents of student government for a bunch of years. They ran out of people who wanted to be student president. And the existing student president came to me and said, \"Mark, do you wanna run? 'Cause you, you did this with the evaluation committee, et cetera, et cetera.\" And I, I really didn't want to do it, but he persuaded me and he said, \"Here's the deal: The deal is we have somebody in our fraternity who wants to be—who's willing to, doesn't want to, but is willing to be the vice president. So if you're willing to run together as a team, his name was Brian Schwartz. If you're willing to run together as a team, we'd support you as president because you have a constituency, not only with some of the student activities, 'cause you're on the soccer playing on the varsity soccer team, you're friendly with the jocks and because you play the wash-tub bass, you're friendly with the beatniks up in the [small caf] so you have your own constituency and Brian has the fraternity constituency, so we could back you up.\" So, I got to be student body president.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3280.0,3405.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And one story I'll love to tell was never recorded any place. So this is an opportunity to tell you that story. One of the campaign issues that I ran on to be so supportive of my beatnik folk music community, was that we would start an annual folk music festival at Queens College. And as president of student government, student government had access to money. So we were gonna do that. So got it budgeted. We started having discussions about who were the musicians we wanted to have there. There are some traditional musicians then there's some more union oriented like Pete Seager and some of the others. So Brian Schwartz comes to me and he says, \"There's a guy in my fraternity who plays the guitar. And I'd like you to hire him and let him sing in this folk music festival that we're working on.\" So I said, \"Okay, good. Let me—happy to audition him.\" And so Brian brought me this guy and this guy came with his guitar and he played some songs and I said, \"No, we're not gonna hire him.\" Now, I wasn't political enough to know that the answer was \"yes.\" Whoever it was I should of, should have said \"yes,\" 'cause he was my vice president. So who is this guy who I refused to hire? Paul Simon! Do you know Paul Simon?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3405.0,3506.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yes. I do know who Paul Simon is.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3506.0,3508.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/53","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3508.0,3508.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/54","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: [laughs]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3508.0,3508.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/55","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: —I'm probably the only guy in the world who wouldn't hire Paul Simon to sing because he was a singer- songwriter. He sang his own songs. He didn't sing traditional folk music. So anyhow, less, lesson learned on multiple levels. So I was student body president for a, a year and one other big lesson and experience on campus at that time was the cafeteria, as it exists now, was then built somewhere between when I first arrived and then. And it has—one wing is one great big room, and the other wing is a slightly smaller room. And then attached further to the side or a bunch of smaller rooms, which where now is the pool hall and the [college] president's room. And so all the stuff like that now, that was the faculty cafeteria off to that side. So those of us who were in the small caf, in the old cafeteria gravitated to the smaller of the two cafeterias and that's where I would hang out. And I don't remember when I could track it down. It's probably in a Phoenix [student newspaper]. One day, one of the hangers on around student government came up to me and said, \"Mark, I gotta talk to you.\" And I was really engaged with friends at the table and I didn't know, 'em hardly. And he says it's really important. I said I'm busy. And he asked two or three times. So I got up and said, \"What do you want to talk about?\" And he said there's gonna be violence on campus. He heard rumors and he's got—he's gonna tell me a secret that I have to swear that I'll keep to myself. And I said, \"Okay, okay.\" So he says, I work for the FBI. And the FBI asked me to investigate this threat of violence. So I said, \"Oh my God.\" So I said, let's step through the doors, which then led to the to the hallway in the faculty calf. And was standing there. And he's telling me a little about his background, about his father and how his father was some sort of terrorist. And—but his mother wanted to turn his—he's giving me this long story, before he starts getting into where he heard rumors about campus violence, which I had not heard anything about.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3508.0,3673.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/56","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And I was just shocked that there were FBI informants infiltrated on campus. And so we're talking there and this big, tall muscular guy comes walking outta the faculty cafeteria into the hallway. And he says, \"What are you guys doing here?\" And I said, \"We're just talking.\" He says, \"You're students, you don't belong here.\" So given the other things I've already told you about me and my actions to stuff. So the hackles go up on my back and I say, \"Who are you, sir?\" He says, \"I don't have to tell you because, I'm an adult and you're a student.\" [laughs] So I say something like, \"Do you want my card? I'm happy to tell you my name, but I'm not gonna turn over my student ID card for you.\" He says, \"No, give me a card. Because I tell you to.\" I said, \"I'm not gonna do it.\" And this guy, this FBI contact—he wasn't an agent. He was just some sort of informer, it turns out. He just sort of melted onto the floor. He's saying nothing. And so, this guy walks over to the phone. There's still a phone on the wall, in the same spot, near the door. And he picks up the phone, he calls and he calls somebody and he explains to them that he's got some student who's being disrespectful and would they come over? So we just then stand in silence, waiting till whoever calls comes over. And these two guys come marching over and the door opens and I say, \"Oh, Dean Kreuzer, Dean Spitzer. I know who you are.\" And they say, \"Oh no, Mark, it's you.\" [laughs] So I said, this, guy's asking for my ID badge. I don't know who he is. And they say, \"Well, that's Dean Howard,\" who was the Dean of Administration. And the—I don't know the organization chart back then, but I think the Dean of Administration was the number two dean. Probab—I don't know whether there was a provost, but I think he ranked even above an academic provost. So he was the number two guy in the college that I wouldn't turn my ID badge over to. So I didn't know who he was. He didn't know that I was a \"big shot\" 'cause I was student body president. Right? So we were being disrespectful to each of us and, and neither of us yielding.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3673.0,3845.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/57","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So, Dean Spitzer said, \"Give me badge.\" He was Dean of Students and Kreuzer was Dean of Student Activities. Actually there's a long work that Dean Spitzer wrote that's in the archives [editor note: The correct name is Dean George Pierson]. He wrote during the rebellion of the SEEK time and SDS time. He was a decent, thoughtful guy. Not a pushover, but a decent human being. And so he took my badge and I go home and tell you, he says, \"You're temporarily suspended. So go home.\" So I went home, my parents got a phone call the next day saying I was suspended indefinitely. And I shouldn't come back to school. Scared the shit outta me. You know, this is my second college. If I get suspended here, my life's over my career's over, I'm done for. And I started getting—and Queens College issued that I had been suspended. The student body president had been suspended. They [college administration] sent out a press release and they included my address and my parents' names. It was really nasty. It's sort of like, in the sixties, if you were Black in the south and tried to register, they published your name and address and phone number. So, my, my parents started getting hate mail and hate phone calls right after that. But some students started, some students and some faculty I knew started organizing on campus and ultimately they—I was let back in. There was a lot of student pressure. I was student body president, it did not look very good to them to be suspending me. And the reason was that I was standing in, in the faculty cafeteria, that's not really a grounds for ruining somebody's academic career. And they asked me to write a letter of apology. And I did, and I got some advice on it, and I handed that in and they wouldn't accept it. They said I was not being apologetic enough. And I thought I was being really apologetic. And they said, \"go back home and be more apologetic and write something.\" I couldn't. But I got people who did write something for me. And it, it's really almost an obscene letter.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=3845.0,4005.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/58","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: But the terms where I would be allow back in I'd be able to graduate if I came in. And, so actually—and they insisted that my apology letter be, be printed in the front page of the student newspaper. So if you go to the Phoenix now you'll see this horrible letter that I had to write to get back in. So I get back in and, the—I was supposed to graduate that year, but I had a lot of incompletes. [laughs] The way I played pool and bridge at Antioch, I played student government, at the—and, and starting to play a little bit of stuff around civil rights issues at Queens. So I had a lot of incompletes, and unbeknownst to me, the college—the, the Dean, Dean Howard, I believe—but I don't know who was in charge—they tried to turn all my incompletes to failures. And if they did that—I had like 15 credits of incompletes—if they did that, I would never have ever graduated from college. But I don't remember the details, somehow I, or some other people negotiated an extension. And if, if each of the teachers for those courses would give me an extension, they would give me an extension. So I think this stretched out into the semester, the next semester, where I didn't take any classes on campus. This was the '63, '64 year. I worked, I got, had a job at United Parcel Service, and I worked finishing my incompletes and the faculty who gave me permission were pretty generous. So I was able to graduate. My GPA was terrible, absolutely terrible. 'Cause—my school was my—what I did—rather than the books I learned from, or tests I would take. But I didn't get everybody to give me extensions, but I got enough that I could just sort of skim through. So I did that, and in '63—'64, I was not on campus. I was working and finishing my incompletes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4005.0,4163.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/59","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And I think I had gotten married around that time to the woman I met at Queens. Her name was Betty Ballinger. She was active in the student government. We got married the weekend that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and she went on to graduate school up at Harvard Graduate School of Education. And so my year when I was working on the incompletes, I was traveling back and forth between living at home, and part of the year I was living in the village and going up to Cambridge where she had an apartment and was going to graduate school. All of which I explained merely to—mentioned that the recruitment for going to Mississippi in Freedom Summer, that started in the spring of 64. There was a Freedom Week on Queens College campus. I didn't know about it. I wasn't involved in it. I didn't get recruited that way. 'Cause I was spending most of my time up in Cambridge or working for UPS. I actually got informed and invited to go to Mississippi by this woman I met either on a bus or a train in one of my connections going back and forth. And I forget whether it was a bus or a train, but somehow I'm sitting next to this woman, and turns out she had gone to Queens College and she knew my wife. She knew my wife from activist kinds of things. And this woman's name was Dotty Miller who then she became Dotty Zellner. And so Dotty—I guess she was Dotty Zellner at that point—her husband was at Brandeis taking some time off from the south. He—Bob Zellner. They just made a movie about Bob Zellner. I heard it's fairly terrible. It may go down a little bit like Mississippi Burning, but it was done by Spike—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4163.0,4295.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/60","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: [laughs]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4295.0,4296.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/61","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: —it was done by Spike Lee. Bob Zellner was a white Alabama guy whose father was in—or grandfather was in the Klan, but he then joined SNCC. That was Bob Zellner's—Dotty's ex-husband","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4296.0,4311.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/62","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Son of the South.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4311.0,4313.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/63","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Son of the South. Yeah. I haven't seen it yet, but it just came out.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4313.0,4319.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/64","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah, it, it, it, it came out in 2020.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4319.0,4324.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/65","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I haven't seen anybody write anything good about it, but I'm anxious to, [laughs] I'm anxious to see it. 'Cause it's [distorted] like Mississippi Burning. A bunch of people have already asked me, have I seen it? What did I think of it? Bob Zellner is a guy with a tremendous big ego. Good civil rights worker, hardworking, very brave guy, but a giant giant ego.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4324.0,4347.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/66","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Anyhow, Dotty was the one who told me about Mississippi Summer. Got me involved in going to some planning sessions up in Cambridge with a guy named Noel Day who was from Boston. He was doing some organizing. He was doing sessions. He was a Boston organizer. Black guy who had a freedom school experience created an early Freedom School, '61 or '62 during a boycott of Boston schools. And so he was doing sessions in the Boston area that ultimately joined sessions that were happening in the New York and Washington areas that became the Freedom Schools in Mississippi. So Dorothy invited me and Betty to participate in those meetings. And she was the one who told us and interviewed us about going to Mississippi, not as \"martyrs\" or not as—what's—I'm losing the word. Not as \"missionaries.\" Neither martyrs nor missionaries were being recruited to Mississippi. The local people in Mississippi were in struggle and they needed people to help. So, that's what—that's how Dotty described it. But Dotty also said it was dangerous, but these were serious people. SNCC was a serious organization. We had to be prepared that it was dangerous, but we had to be careful. They didn't want anybody who had caused trouble.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4347.0,4457.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/67","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: So when, when you and your wife agreed to go down, have I guess two questions. Like one, emotionally, what were you thinking and feeling before you made this—before you went down?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4457.0,4472.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/68","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: [coughs] Pardon me. Let me just get some water here.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4472.0,4481.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/69","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. I mean, we can pause for about five minutes if that, if that'll help at all.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4481.0,4484.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/70","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Oh, I'm just fine.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4484.0,4485.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/71","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Okay, cool.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4485.0,4486.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/72","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: If I start coughing on my voice disappears, otherwise I'm just fine.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4486.0,4490.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/73","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4490.0,4499.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/74","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well that whole range of things that influenced me to make that decision—the way I first learned about it from Dotty on traveling up to Boston one day and I did not say yes or no to Dotty. I'm not stupid guy. I said, \"Let me talk to my wife first.\" So I checked with Betty, and Betty's family was a very progressive left-wing family. So she was much more experienced in progressive politics than I was. And so she said quickly, \"Yes, that'd be a great idea.\" First, one thing that I remember being very much in my mind at that time, was that I was just ending my time, if I got this correct, in terms of the time, I was still student body president or the new president at Queens hadn't taken over when the 1963 March on Washington came up. I remember I was on campus. Maybe I was finishing incompletes then, but anyhow, I was still on campus in August of '63. And some people from the civil rights side of campus came to student government and to me and said, \"We should send a bus down to the March on Washington.\" So I said, \"That's cool. Yeah. And then, how do we go out and organize that?\" And, and we went around and spoke to the fraternities and the academic clubs and the sports clubs and said let's go south. And there were some people on campus who had participated in some of the Freedom Rides, and the March—the picketing outside of Woolworth's. There was that. A lot of that was going on in the north because the Woolworth's were not serving Blacks in the stores in the south. So there was a boycott and picketing of Woolworth's in New York. A lot of that stuff was just going on.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4499.0,4650.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/75","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And so some of those groups came to student government and said, \"Let's send a bus to Washington.\" I remember being nervous and scared, because what was going on in the South was people were being and beaten and fire hoses and dogs and all that other stuff. And so I was really nervous about that. But it just seemed like the right thing to do. It was just—and the people approached me and said, let's do it, and offered to help out in doing it. That made a lot of sense. So we did it and we went down to—got on the bus in the morning. I made a huge mistake: We rented a cheap bus. So instead of being one with a bathroom and like interstate travel, we got like a yellow school bus that bounced us all the way down there. I, I thought I was gonna be killed on the bus by the other people who were there. It's funny. The pictures of us in Mississippi were next to somebody—not in Mississippi, in, in Washington. We were—the whole group was standing next to one of those big Trailways or big interstate kind of bus, not our yellow bus. Anyway, so we got down there and participated in the March. I could talk more about that at, at some point in time. And it was very exciting being there. And there was no violence, right? There was no—there were a zillion people, Black and white together, and it was mainly Black, but there were a lot of whites. But everybody was dressed like it was Sunday. People wore ties and ladies wore big hats and church clothes. And, everything was pretty well organized. And there were a quarter million people there. We got there early and we had no idea how many people were gonna come and they just kept coming and coming and coming and coming from all over. And, and we would talk to the people around us and we saw unions come, and it was just a sense of strength and solidarity. And, we were near people from the South who were talking to us and church folks and, not just Black church folks, but I remember a group of very white, Episcopalian, Connecticut old ladies, gray hair who were near us also. I actually don't remember most of the speeches. We were busy relating to the people near us.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4650.0,4815.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/76","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And so when Dotty said, \"Do we want to go to Mississippi and work with SNCC? Some of the things that were scary, I had gotten a little past them by having been to Washington. I did not—the—you may hear in some of the interviews that Queens is doing with the people who are in Prince Edward County. I knew those folks, but I wasn't there. I chose not to go to Prince Edward County. And they came to the March on Washington, but not as part of a Queens College group. I didn't even know they were there. So I didn't learn that stuff until that they were there until way afterwards.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4815.0,4874.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/77","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: But the, the, the sense of strength and solidarity and discipline and righteousness, from that march made me feel comfortable to say, yes. The other thing that went through my mind at that time, and remember, your question was how did I see it as a person of that time? Not so much how do I think about lessons that I learned or some other stuff, that, that existed. The other thing was, this was coming out of the McCarthy period and both—and, and Kennedy was trying to get legislation passed through Congress after he was elected, the Peace Corps and some civil rights stuff. And a bunch of other legislation that Kennedy was introducing. And it was all getting blocked because in Congress, at that time, the Dixiecrats got a—Senate was controlled.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4874.0,4957.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/78","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Chairmanships of committees in the Senate were based totally on seniority. And seniority was determined by who was a Senator the longest. Obviously the senators who got elected time over and again, and again, and again was the white Southern senators. So Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, those senators controlled all the committees. So Kennedy couldn't get any decent legislation through. So I remember being angry about that—and then understanding that the discrimination and racism that existed in Mississippi, goodness gracious, it impacted on me too. If Blacks could not vote in Mississippi and if Eastland and those other racists were the chairmen of the committees, then what we needed in the north, we couldn't get. And so that it was an Alliance not just idealistic, but there would be practical benefits, right? And I say that in more of a politically aware sense than back then. That was just like a gut sense. I wasn't a political science major or anything, but I just knew that both those issues were connected. And being Jewish, and the Holocaust, and knowing about discrimination, having my experiences in high school with Melba Torres, having my experience boycotting the barbershop, having friends at Queens who picketed outside Woolworths, all made this seem doable.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=4957.0,5080.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/79","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And I guess the last element was I respected and trusted Dotty, the person who was inviting me to go. And the way she explained it, I started to mention, but the two elements, looking back that were absolutely essential: One was we were going there to \"help.\" We were not gonna be in charge. In fact, we were gonna have to learn how to always step back. If a reporter showed up, we shouldn't talk to the reporter. Local people should talk to the reporter. That made obvious sense to me. And the other thing was, she was really honest about it being dangerous and that the people down there were taking risks, but they were not being stupid. Whether it was the the guerilla forces of the SNCC activists or whether it was local people, local ministers, local house cleaners, local cotton pickers, they didn't want to get shot or die. They just did what they had to do. And they did it as careful as they could, so that our going there, we should respect that people are willing to take a degree of risk, but then don't wanna do anything stupid. So by being upfront and honest and not trying to trick us into going, not hiding anything from us, and by explaining that we were gonna need to be careful ourselves. And that's like, oh, okay. This is serious stuff in a certain kind of way. So, I felt comfortable with that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5080.0,5186.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/80","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So it was that whole bunch of things along with Betty saying, okay. We had to speak to our parents. Betty's parents were supportive, though nervous, they were scared for their daughter. And my parents—my father was supportive. My mother really didn't want me to do it. She was both more conservative and also more maternal. She was conservative in a number of ways—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5186.0,5219.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/81","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: What about your brothers?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5219.0,5222.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/82","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: They were younger. They [were] totally out of it. They weren't involved. I was. After I came back alive and well and all that kind of stuff, that they were proud of my being there. We don't have a close family, that sort of fell out with the rest of them. And, and neither of them were activists. My youngest brother—who I never particularly was close to—has become active, recently was for Obama. And he has cancer. Very unique form of cancer. Leukemia or something like that. And he survived, he's got some sort of medical drugs, so he's very aware about healthcare, healthcare system, healthcare costs. So he's liberal and active around healthcare issues, but they were never political. So I asked—so that's how we wound up deciding to go to Mississippi. That was your question, which—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5222.0,5306.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/83","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. [laughs] No, I [crosstalk]—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5306.0,5308.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/84","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: [crosstalk] in a number directions.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5308.0,5310.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/85","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. But I appreciate the robustness, because I feel like there's, there's so much in that particular decision. Like a migration in whatever form is always like—the thinking about it. I think about my parents deciding to come to the US, you mentioned the Peace Corps. I joined the Peace Corps. There were a lot of decisions, in that aspect. So I felt like this very important moment, like there was going to be a lot behind it, so thanks. And, I guess we should discuss the actual experience of—I mean, I've read that there—you have multiple accounts of your experience in Mississippi, but, would you like to discuss, once you get down there, what the work was like? And, I know there was a particular account of you attending a synagogue and your experience with that as well.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5310.0,5375.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/86","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Okay. We originally volunteered to do voter registration. When we got to orientation in Ohio, we got to meet Rita Schwerner, who actually was a Queens College student and her husband, Mickey Schwerner, who was Steve Schwerner's younger brother. We were invited to join the group going to Meridian.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5375.0,5409.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/87","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: As Mickey and Rita got to know us and our interests, and the fact that Betty had gone to Harvard Graduate School of Education and wanted to be a teacher, we were invited to switch from the voter education, voter organizing registration track to the Freedom School track. So we were then invited to stay the second week of orientation, which was more focused on recruiting and training volunteers who were gonna go to the Freedom Schools and pull together a group who would go to Meridian and want to be Freedom School teachers. So, that became our, our major assignment and our major focus. And Betty and I were asked to be co-directors of the Meridian Freedom School. We said yes. We had no idea what that meant or, or anything, but [laughs] they asked, we said, yes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5409.0,5472.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/88","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: One piece, just to note, without going into detail, between the first and second weeks of Ohio orientation, three of our Meridian group—at the end of first week—went back to Meridian from Ohio to get stuff ready for when the second group would come down. And the three who went back along with others who were gonna do the voter registration, those three were Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. And, within 24 hours after they got back, the first thing that they did when they got back was to go up to Neshoba County, to get—find out what to do about a church that had been burned down that was gonna be used both as a base for voter registration in Neshoba County, and as a Freedom School. Meridian was part of Lauderdale County. Neshoba was the adjoining county. And so, they went up there. And then the, the rest of that story is, is the Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner story. But, we knew them and they had come down. And so between the first and second week, we all knew that they were probably captured and killed.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5472.0,5556.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/89","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And so the big decision of the people up there second week was, are we gonna go down to Mississippi or we gonna turn around and go back? Hey, how do we get that? We [coughs]—pardon me. We get to Mississippi. And Betty and I get assigned to work—to live in the home of Mr. and Ms. Turner. I don't remember his name, but her name was Dessie Turner. For people in Meridian, she was more working, middle class. He worked in a factory that made plywood. Dirty, dangerous jobs were assigned for the Blacks in the factory, but at least it was a job there and it was a Northern-owned and run plywood factory. So that was considered a prestigious job. And Ms. Turner taught me both—did cleaning in white folks homes. And she worked in the kitchen of the—I guess the Negro high school, I believe. Could have been one of the other schools, but I, I don't, I don't remember. But—so, so she had two sets of jobs, so that, that put them in a fairly stable position compared to the rest of the community. So the house was actually a brick house in, in the street that was mainly a Black street, but in the south, how white and Black areas can be right next to each other, or mixed in funny kinds of ways. So it's almost—it's different than like Northern ghettos where there's a clear line and there'd be lines like a railroad track line, but sometimes it would be different areas. She lived in a brick house rather than, oh, a couple blocks away where the houses were more shanty, like more wood. And so, so we were in a nice situation with, with the Turners, 'cause the Turners had asked for a married couple. And so we fit the bill and we were welcome, welcome there. And they were very nice. I mean, I could go on talking about them, but—so we lived with the Turners.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5556.0,5712.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/90","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: At some point early on, two quick things that are worth mentioning. One of them was Betty and I were walking down the street with Mr. Turner, and I forget where we were going. We may have been going to get something to eat or food in a store. And Mrs. Turner said, \"Cross the street.\" And there are no sidewalks in, in basically the Black neighborhood. So if, if there was—and I think we were just walking in the street, there may have been a path on, on the red clay dirt, but—so he said \"Cross the street.\" And given both as a northerner and as traditional Mark Levy, the—[laughs] what popped into my head was I was about to say, \"Why?\" \"Why do you want us across the street?\" And I bit my tongue. And it was like, this guy lives here. He survived. He's lived through all the terrors and discrimination and he lives there. And if he says cross the street, jerk, just cross the street and don't ask why. And it was like an awareness of myself that popped up, both around my own attitudes that I had to be careful about and also a respect for him as being a survivor and a brave guy. Then as I understood, that—I forget. Yeah, this was very early on. I had some discussion with Ms. Turner, and maybe it was about where to leave my car. 'Cause I had driven both to Ohio and then to Mississippi in my little green Volkswagen bug with New York plates, I didn't realize how stupid that was [laughs]. No, not only in New York plates, nobody in Mississippi had Volkswagens, gimme a break. If I was gonna hang a neon sign in front of the Turner's house, that there were white folks from New York there, the green Volkswagen Beatle by itself would've been enough. So at some point I realized that if I was afraid, I could hop in my car and just drive home, drive back up north. I could leave at any time. And by parking that little green Volkswagen outside the Turner's house, that was like a neon sign to the police, to the white citizens council, to the KKK, to the people who employed Ms. Turner and Mr. Turner, that she had white civil rights workers staying in her house. So she forever, and he forever were gonna get tagged as housing us troublemakers. And I could just get in my car and go home at any time. And, and between those two things, I had a different sense of the risks that they were taking and the, not just the courage, but the skills it takes to survive. So I learned a lot.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5712.0,5936.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/91","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: If I can put in a parentheses, there's something that I never understood and never learned back then that, oh, maybe five years ago I heard Bob Moses who was the leader of the Freedom Summer Project for SNCC. I heard him give a talk. And he said something that I never understood, but as soon as he said, I got to appreciate it. The other dynamic that was going on was that I was the—I, I—Betty and I were the first white folks who were ever nice to the Turners, right? Every white figure in Mississippi—whether it was a white cop or a white teacher or a white clerk in a store or a white person just walking down the street or the white ticket tape, the white ticket seller in a movie theater or a white doctor who made 'em walk through the back door,—every white person in their lives had been threatening and hostile And that's how they saw us. And they had to somehow make this huge leap to invite us to their house. And I never understood that every minute of the day, that we were sort of on trial, right? Were we gonna turn out just like all the other folks, all the other white folks, right? I, I never understood or appreciated that. I understood that I had to learn to enjoy collard greens or grits, both of which I've never gotten to like, but I got to eat a lot of. And that there were a lot of Black culture Southern things that I had to learn about and get used to, and the speed in which we walked around as New Yorkers and the speed the southerners tend to walk around. I was aware that I had to adapt to certain things. I, I never understood that other thing about Bob Moses saying that Black folks in Mississippi and how they looked at us as volunteers. So that, that was something I learned later on.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=5936.0,6101.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/92","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So, Betty and I ran a big Freedom School. We must have had about 20 teachers in our freedom school. We have names for about 250 students, who attended at various times, not every day. So our school was the largest single Freedom School in the state of Mississippi. We got to use a Baptist seminary. Some local person approached their minister who approached the group who were in charge of the Baptist seminary. So we got to, to use that. Other Freedom Schools around the state would meet in a church basement or on somebody's porch. We were the only one that had a big regular school with regular desks and auditorium and all that kind of stuff. I could talk about the curriculum there, but that, that, wasn't your question. So we did Freedom School stuff. At night, we would attend meetings. Sundays, we would generally go to church with our families. We had due preparations like any teacher, we would help out a little bit with voter registration campaigns, but mainly there was a whole other crew doing that. We, we were more like, extra bodies when there was a, a meeting, helping setting up chairs or giving out leaflets or something like that. So we, we were always busy the whole time we were there.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6101.0,6198.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/93","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: The other experience that really shook me up in a different direction—certain things you're partly prepared for, but you're not fully prepared for—was, at orientation, they said there really wouldn't be white folks who would be sympathetic to us in Mississippi. We really shouldn't count on that. There were a few, but they were beaten up, thrown out, or chased out of Mississippi. But they were super, super rare. So we shouldn't expect that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6198.0,6235.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/94","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: But, if we ever had an occasion as human beings, a human being to find white folks, but they were not our target community. Right? We were not there to talk to white folks, but if we could let them see us as human beings, that was fine. So it turned out that Meridian, as the second largest city in Mississippi at that time, it's not anymore, had one, possibly two synagogues. There was a small Jewish population in Meridian. So there was one big synagogue. And at some point they had a little one that was a really different branch that existed for a few years in the sphere. But so I thought one way to meet people who would likely be open to conversation or seeing us as human beings and might even be sympathetic because my presumption at that time, naive young man that I was, was that they were Jewish. So therefore they had to be sort of liberal, right? 'Cause all Jews—yeah, right, right—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6235.0,6306.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/95","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: [laughs]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6306.0,6306.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/96","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So all—[unclear] this is what I came with, right?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6306.0,6310.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/97","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6310.0,6311.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/98","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I was brought up in New York City, 'cause liberal New York Jew was one word, right? So I, I thought that if I got to Mississippi, I would get to meet the liberal Mississippi Jew. So Betty and I go—I don't remember whether—I remember it being bright and sunny, but in, in July in Mississippi, it was bright and sunny on, on Friday evening as well as Saturday. But we went for services. I didn't have a beard at that time. I went to Mississippi mainly with white dress shirts. So we walked to the synagogue that had a bunch steps. We didn't have buttons, we didn't have signs. We were all clean cut. And it was just me and her. And we started walking up the steps and somebody stepped out of the synagogue. A woman stepped out of the synagogue, out of the front doors and, and, and sort of shouted us and said, \"Go away. You are not wanted here. We are southerners first.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6311.0,6381.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/99","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I'll never forget that. [Phone rings.] (Wait a second, let me turn this—I don't have to take that, but I have to—I'll turn it and mute it.) So I'll never forget that. I've struggled with that concept for a long time. Was it because they were all racist? Was it because they were afraid? How'd they know we were coming? Was there somebody spying on us? Or did they just know we were outsiders? Everybody knows who's everybody in towns like Meridian, or the small towns. So clearly we were not the regular people. So, when I got back to the Freedom School over a period of time, I talked to some of the students. There was one particular guy named Roscoe Jones who was a senior in high school. And Roscoe was head of the Black Student Union or whatever it was called, student association at the Freedom School. And I guess he had some similar position at his high school there. And I mentioned it to him and I remember his telling me not to get upset by it He said, look, all Black churches—oh pardon me—all churches, all Christian churches discriminate. Sunday is the most segregated day of the week. So if you're a Christian, you go to a white Christian church. If you're a Black Christian, you go to a Black Christian Church, but whatever the Bible says that doesn't make any difference to where you go to church. So it wasn't just the Jewish synagogue that discriminated against. It was everybody. All the Christian institutions discriminated.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6381.0,6511.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/100","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And he also pointed out very lightly then, but then explained more when I met him later times that even within the Black church, there were 30 to 40 Black churches in Meridian, right? Some really small. Some of them, major institutions, but all of those 30 odd churches in, in Meridian just by itself, only a handful of them would allow any civil rights activities. The others didn't—they stayed away from the movement, right? They didn't necessarily support Dr. King. They didn't necessarily want any of us white folks anywhere near there.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6511.0,6559.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/101","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: It's taken me a long time to think about that and talk to other people about it. But in the same way, as it turns out, when you really start looking at the, the Jews and the synagogue, why we were thrown away, there's a range of reasons, right? In the synagogue, there were some white Jews who were racists. There were some who were afraid, and there were some who just wanted to keep their heads down. And with the Black churches, the same thing. Some were absolutely terrified. Didn't want their church bombed. And there was some who had a lot of self-interest. I remember meeting a minister who said he did not support integration because he'd be out of a job. If his church joined with a white church and there was only gonna be one minister guess, guess who was gonna be that minister, right? And it was like teachers, teachers, [many] Black teachers really didn't support the Movement. They, none of 'em—one came one day to the Freedom School. He claimed to—he was interested. All the students said he was just sent as a spy, but all the teachers were hired by a white school board. So they were terrified of their jobs.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6559.0,6640.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/102","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: When I was younger and a wise guy, I would say, well, at some point, how do you pick up stopping, stop being afraid and do certain things? But in fact, in real life, in 1964, and even in 1965, in Mississippi, all the schools were still segregated, right? 10 years after the Brown decision, Mississippi had not complied. They were finally improving conditions in the schools, you know? Separate but equal. They could accept the fact that their schools were unequal. So they thought they could slide by a few more years that by maybe upgrading the, their, their, Negro schools. But they were still totally segregated.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6640.0,6693.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/103","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Finally, after Freedom Summer, it took two years with some lawsuits and Black community people pushing, they finally desegregated. They didn't \"integrate,\" they \"desegregated\" the schools. And what they did was exactly what we've learned and some, Black teachers anticipated, but a lot of other people did not anticipate. They closed the Negro school, sent all the Black kids to the white school and kept all the white teachers on. They would keep one or two Black teachers, but basically the Black principals, assistant principals, guidance, counselors, and teachers, they were just unemployed. So those kinds of things make contradictions even within churches and religious institutions. So the, the great shock that I had that not all Jews were liberal, some were racist and some were terrified, was a lesson I had to learn. And as I got older and more wise it also made me look at the different ways that Jews responded, even to the Holocaust. There were Jews who became guerilla fighters and went into the resistance. There were Jews who escaped and ran away to other countries, both within Europe and, and, England and tried to get into the United States, but got turned away from the United States. There were other people, just other Jews who stuck their head in the sand and said, \"Oh, it won't happen to us.\" And there were even other Jews who were complicit and did the work of the Nazis, either pointed at, pointing out where Jews lived or, joined and helped out with, with different aspects. Even some rabbis did that. So it took me a long time to learn about these complicated relations, even within our religions, that where our religions should act differently. Roscoe pointed out that the guy who was the KKK head referred to the same book to justify racism as Martin Luther King, would refer to the same book to justify the golden rule or anything else like that. So life's a little complicated.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6693.0,6860.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/104","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. I mean which—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6860.0,6861.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/105","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So that was my first lesson, when I tried to go to the Jewish synagogue got expelled or didn't even get in, didn't even get up the steps. Oh, and then [many years later], I went back [to Mississippi] for a number of reunions and other events. In Jackson, the civil rights community has historically not made some contact with the Jewish community there. And in fact, we, we got invited to speak during one of the anniversary years in a couple of synagogues. I went back to Meridian and by then there were some decent white folks, a lawyer, a guy who was the community college ex-president, white guy, were very sympathetic and, and very much involved in civil rights, pro-civil rights stuff. And I said, \"Can you set up something where I can go have coffee, tea, or a glass of wine privately with some of the people who were Jews or young people or old people back then to talk about that?\" And he couldn't even make it happen. None of them would sit down secretly, privately and be willing to talk","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6861.0,6945.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/106","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Even after all the—I mean, after all this time too.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6945.0,6948.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/107","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: This we're talking about 2011, 12, 13, 14, getting close to the 50th anniversary.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6948.0,6954.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/108","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6954.0,6955.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/109","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: 40 years later, 50 years later, would not sit down and talk. In, in Meridian. In Jackson, they did.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6955.0,6963.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/110","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6963.0,6964.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/111","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: There are a bunch of reasons for those differences, but that didn't involve me personally.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6964.0,6970.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/112","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And, I guess at, at what point, with this experience, with the, with the synagogue, did it happen with your time, with the Freedom School?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6970.0,6987.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/113","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well, it really had nothing to do with the Freedom School. This was either a Friday night or a Saturday, I went there. I think that was the last time I ever attempted to talk to a white person in Meridian. [laughter] That's the only way, you know? If I couldn't talk to a Jewish person who I hoped would be liberal, who else was I gonna talk to? So they're all enemies, or they're all at least not friends, if not active enemies. I subsequently found out that there were some Jews in Meridian who secretly did some things. May have been a nicer employer to the Black person who worked in their home. Or I heard about one white Jewish businessman who would cash the paychecks from the Schwerners. Those Schwerners got money from CORE, just so they could eat and pay rent. And there's this one guy who would cash their checks. So I was at one of these reunions in the last five, 10 years. And I said, \"Wow, at least there was one guy who would do this.\" And what somebody told me, they said, \"What you didn't know, and what they didn't know, is that this guy would then not deposit the checks. He gave him the money, but he wouldn't cash the checks because if he went to the bank, the bank would see that the checks came from CORE to the Schwerners and they would then know that he was involved. So he figured it was safer for him to give them the money out of his own pocket than for him to have actually cashed the checks.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=6987.0,7113.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/114","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Wow.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7113.0,7114.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/115","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah. Right. Wow.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7114.0,7116.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/116","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7116.0,7116.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/117","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: You just don't think of the things. It's like—I mean, the other example for me that was more personal was, I mean, you've seen some of my pictures that I took in Meridian. I took 20 rolls of film. I—somebody recommended I go to a New York radical newspaper called The Guardian. They gave me 20 rolls of Tri-X film, told me to shoot it at ASA 1200, which is pushing it. It rated ASA 400 and you push it to ASA 1200. They said: \"the only bad picture is the picture you don't take.\" And they said, don't ever use flash, don't be disruptive. Just shoot lots of pictures. And they said, you can't have the film developed down there. Somebody's either gonna steal the film, or destroy it, or they will make copies. And then they will, then, you will have then informed on all the people who have come to the meetings. So you can't do that. So it's like hey, New York silly guy. I would not even have thought of not having—going to a drug store or photo shop to have my film at all. So every one of those pictures in 20 rolls of film, 20 times 36 on a, on a roll, every one of those pictures, I didn't know whether my camera was working. I didn't see any pictures till I got back to New York and I gave 'em to the newspaper and had them printed. But little things about where do you cash your check in that kind of situation? Or where do you have film developed? This was the kind of stuff if you were Black, you had to know, and even more so if you were a SNCC activist. To survive, you had to learn all those tricks of survival, 'cause you were marked as a troublemaker. So that was part of the reality that I just started learning bits and pieces on.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7116.0,7245.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/118","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: I'm gonna ask to pause 'cause I, I have to—I'm gonna pause for—back to recording. So where we left off, you were kind of discussing the inherent dangers of being in the south and understanding like what it meant to know where to get film processed and also like very small things like cashing a check, but like the huge dangers that came with it. And, I guess, I guess how I would like to move forward is, I would love to hear like of, of your eventual return to New York. And, yeah, like let's just take it there.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7245.0,7293.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/119","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Okay. Neither Betty or I had jobs lined up, for when we would return to New York. We just knew we wanted to teach. I had more of a concern than she did, partly 'cause she had her second degree. And also, I guess she just saw the world in, in more political terms. I didn't know whether when I came back and went looking for a job as a teacher, and I say, \"Oh, hi, I just came back from Mississippi.\" And just last week I was sitting outside the Atlantic City Auditorium where there were the demonstrations around seating the Freedom Democratic Party and their famous—Ms. Hamer, Fannie Lou Hamer gave her famous speech there, and their demonstrations outside. I had no idea when I would go to a, a school when I was looking in junior high schools to teach social studies, whether people would say, \"Hey, you're a troublemaker, you're a lefty. Go away.\" or what. So the first school I went to, I picked geographically just 'cause it was on the West Side, but it was in West Harlem. It—Broadway and 129th Street, that's just north of the 125th Street line. And open arms. It's like, it's not like we're gonna discriminate against you. We want you for that reason. Right? You come with a certain experience, and it turned out to be really a wonderful school.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7293.0,7414.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/120","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I enjoyed teaching there. It was a sort of a mixed community because City College is up the hill in the other direction and Columbia's up the hill in the other direction and it's not Central Harlem and there are a couple of housing projects, big housing projects nearby. So it's mixed in, in all sorts of ways and it has some stability. And the teachers there were just terrific, the principal, the vice principal, et cetera, et cetera. So it was a, a good experience, teaching there. So I taught there for four years. I tried setting up a pen pal program between students who were in the Freedom School of Mississippi and the kids in that class there. But we just couldn't pull it off. I had two students in Mississippi who really wanted to make it happen, but they just couldn't find people who wanted to do it. My class was—I couldn't find people who wanted to do it here.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7414.0,7486.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/121","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: The first year is a bit of a blur teaching. Any first year teacher [laughs]—that was like survival. And I had never had student teaching or any experience, I had just gone straight from ed [Education] courses into running a school in Mississippi. Right? 'Cause I had a little teaching experience. I did more administrative stuff and my wife did more teaching and a little administrative stuff. So this was my first experience teaching junior high school. The first year is a bit of blur. The second year, I think it is, I did some interesting stuff. And so I was there for four years when I decided that I would—I wanted a Master's, and I had taught student teachers from the City University. So I had credits that I could use towards some of my own courses, but I don't know how much you want me to talk about the experience there before I went off to Queens.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7486.0,7499.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/122","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: I think, I think because there—like I did read through the oral history of your experience, like with the interview from 2013, that it would—I guess—Hmm. I—we can maybe work backwards where we can talk about like how you started working at Queens and the exp—how that experience related teaching and your decision—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7499.0,7586.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/123","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7586.0,7586.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/124","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: —to work at SEEK.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7586.0,7586.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/125","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah, I mean, some of my experiences there were shaping how I taught and how I would teach in SEEK So I went to Queens and I was thinking about this today. That was a long time ago [laughs] and—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7586.0,7604.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/126","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: [laughs]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7604.0,7606.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/127","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: —and, I remember more of the Mississippi stuff, partly 'cause it was a little more traumatic, but mainly 'cause I have a zillion pictures and documents. So when the brain gets fuzzy, I look at stuff and it's like, oh this happened and oh this is that person's name. I don't have some of that stuff for SEEK. So this stuff's a little bit fuzzy. If I remember correctly, I went to Queens not to teach in SEEK, at first. I went to get my Master's in Education, and I got a job teaching in the Upward Bound program. I don't think that exists anymore there, but basically it was working with Black and Latin, then Black and Puerto Rican, high school students to help them aspire to go to college and give 'em some of the skills to apply—Upward Bound. Right? That was—so it was, it was high school students. I was doing that and taking some courses—maybe that was over the summer. I can't remember. And the other dramatic thing that happened really right at the beginning is, there was the—a [UFT teachers] strike at it's—before your time, but it's remembered historically 'cause the city teachers union and system in some ways has never gotten over it. It was called the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7606.0,7706.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/128","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7706.0,7707.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/129","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And because I had both had a history of civil rights and because I had taught in a very community sympathetic Harlem school, I supported the community to have rights about how they wanted their schools and the fact that there should be more Black teachers and Black teachers could be asked for in Black schools. And though I was—this was before I was working in a union. I was a good union supporter. So I didn't oppose union taking positions. But when it became a clear conflict between very traditional union positions and civil rights and community positions, it was a tough choice. There was some tough choices, so that things escalated over time. And then there was this citywide Ocean Hill Brownsnville strike. And I was at Queens at that time. And I remember volunteering to go across Kissena Boulevard. There's a public school right across from Queens College, out that way, that's right in the middle of the projects there, Pomonok—what are the Pomonok houses?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7707.0,7796.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/130","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah, yeah. The Pomonok houses.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7796.0,7798.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/131","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right. So there's a elementary school there, and the teacher's union shut that school. I mean, the first day it was shut and the community—so we were talking about—when was Ocean Hill-Brownsville? '68, '69 '70, something like that?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7798.0,7818.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/132","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Late sixties.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7818.0,7820.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/133","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah. It's like '60—wait a second I taught '64 to '68 at [JHS] 43[M]. So it was probably '68, '69. Somewhere in there. So, the community, the Black community in the Pomonok houses said, \"We're gonna send our kids to school.\" I mean, this wasn't Ocean Hill, it wasn't Brownsville. But there was this strong community there and they said—and I don't remember how I got the word—they said they need some teachers to volunteer to keep the school, school, schools open. So, Betty and I volunteered to do this, and I think I was just starting either in graduate school or started teaching at Queens. So we were out there. So I remember walking through a picket line. Teachers, white teachers, screaming, spitting, throwing things. I was more afraid walking into the Pomonok school than I had been with anything in Mississippi. And we had brought some supplies with us. I think we'd brought a pet turtle or something silly like that. Here we were being thrown in as substitute teachers. There weren't gonna be many kids there. The only kids who were gonna be there were the Black kids. So we walked through this line of screaming, racial epithets and, and inside, we didn't know what we were gonna expect cause we weren't—this was not where we taught. We didn't know about community. And inside were these really serious-looking guys all dressed up in their dashikis, the kente cloth and all that was just gorgeous. And these were like serious dudes inside who had sort of helped escort us through the last part of the line. We had to walk down through most of the line ourselves, getting grief. But opening the doors, there were guys who were doing security and let us in. And so that was one of my first experiences coming back to Queens College, was to walk through the Ocean Hill-Brownsville line and see the huge division between the campus, elite Queens College campus and the [Black] community right across the street. Right? So that was, that was one of my very first experiences.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7820.0,7990.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/134","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7990.0,7994.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/135","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Hasn't gotten better since.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7994.0,7996.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/136","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: [laughs] And so you have this experience with, with the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike and it's effect with the, the houses in Pomonok, and, what happens after that in, in your, in your work?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=7996.0,8014.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/137","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So I, I don't—I just can't remember whether who recruited me to teach in the SEEK program, how I heard about it, whether I started out part-time full-time, —that's just totally blurred. Like I know I wound up taking the courses and getting a Master's, but I also was teaching at SEEK. And I remember my first year teaching in SEEK the director was this sort of stocky guy named Mulholland.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8014.0,8050.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/138","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Joseph Mulholland. Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8050.0,8052.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/139","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Joseph Mulholland. Was a pretty decent guy. I remember that his background—what do you call him? He worked—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8052.0,8069.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/140","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Like, not a parole.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8069.0,8073.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/141","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah. He was like a parole officer or something like that. That, that was his general background. And a lot of the students in the classes were people would come outta prisons and they were sophisticated strong guys. And they had a range of skills. And I remember what really clearly what we were teaching. We were given these books called contemporary civilization. They—it was two semesters. I think Queens College at that time had that as a requirement. It was Contemporary Civilization I and Contemporary Civilization II. And these were books of the great white male thinkers of Europe. Philosophers and Spinoza and this one and that one and Descartes, all that kind of stuff. And I really didn't like any of that stuff, but it was a required course and the SEEK students were gonna have to do that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8073.0,8142.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/142","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: SEEK at that time had set up the courses that they were six hours. A three credit course instead of being three hours was a six hour course. So our mandate as SEEK teachers, whether it was in English or in the social sciences, was to teach a traditional course or a required course, but then be teaching how to take that course, right? So, assume our students didn't know how to take notes, take an outline, use the library, write a paper, any of that kind of stuff. And there were, I presume there still are lots of books, workbooks and stuff about how to do college level skills. So that's what we would do. We would give assignments out of the readings and then figure out which particular skills were appropriate to, to tie to that assignment. And I, I enjoyed that very much because you were dealing with folks who were smart, but that they may had been missing 'cause they had been in jail or, or gone to some shitty high school. They didn't have some of the skills. So you'd have to get to know the students in your class and who knew what and who didn't know what and how to balance some of that. So it was, it was a challenge and, and none of us had ever done that combination of teaching before, but the atmosphere was—our goal was to be supportive.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8142.0,8264.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/143","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And I think I have the timing of this, right. What had come before that, was because of pressure in New York State and in New York City to, oppose de facto segregation in the City University that came up with this program called \"Open Admissions,\" right? So it was pretty competitive to get into any of the City Colleges, and the effect of that surprise, surprise, even, even if those tests and the interviews were neutral, surprise, surprise, there were very few people of color in any of the university. So the change that came about was—and I, I forget the technical rules—if you had a certain in between high school test scores or averages, you could come into the City University. They lowered their admission standards. And what that got to be was just a revolving door. Oh, come on in, you, you got shitty grades from high school. We don't expect you can learn anything, but can take the courses and oh, you flunk the courses? Bye-bye. Right? And that was what Open Admissions were. Not—and, and if you had some super talented kid who somehow had not come through, there was some folks from Open Admissions who were making it, but the flunk out rate under Open Admissions was dramatically high. And then pressure came from a number of sources on people in state legislature, Black state legislators, to say that Open Admissions was a failure-based program. If you could create a different kind of program, you could have a different kind of success rate.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8264.0,8401.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/144","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So they got funding and created SEEK, which handled a much smaller number of people than Open Admissions. Open admissions and SEEK were running concurrently. But if you could get into SEEK, you would have an economic stipend. So you wouldn't quit because you didn't have any money to buy books or you had to work. You would have counselors who could recruit and support you and you would have teachers who would be teaching the study skills. And then that would make a difference, right? So that was the major thoughts behind SEEK when I first started teaching there. So there were counselors, there were English teachers, there were social studies teachers, and I think there were math teachers. Almost all of us were white when I first started working there. Again, I, I don't have the years in front of me, so not my first year. There may be my second year or third year, there was the rebellion. The, the students and faculty in SEEK decided that the program did not have a support of culture, that the courses were discriminatory and racist. And the, the, that the SEEK program should be more like a Black Studies program. Black Studies was new language—demands on campuses. That, that movement was just happening at that time, so that SEEK should turn into more like a Black Studies program. And their big demand is that the administration and most of the teachers should be Black teachers, or teachers of color. And, and not only just teachers of color, more international. Puerto Rican and African and South American. And so I was there during that rebellion—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8401.0,8540.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/145","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And, and the rebellion that happened in around '69.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8540.0,8545.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/146","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right. Whatever the number [date] is. [laughter] I don't have those papers in front of me. Yes. So my role in that was really minimal and secondary, 'cause this was a movement by people of color, right? They did not go out and recruit or involve the white teachers. A few jumped in and volunteered and were found ways to be supportive. There were some white teachers who were antagonistic. Thought what they, what the students and faculty were demanding and their methods, they thought that they were disruptive and nonacademic and what of the bad words that they would want to use were disruptive. And then there was a group—and I was friendlier with this group—that was basically supportive, not basically, but really supportive of all the demands. Didn't see a role for white folks to step out at that time and was kept—I don't know, there were half a dozen of us who would meet and talk every so often and say, what's, what can we, as white teachers do to be supportive? What's the right time? When is there a message that any of the people who are leading the rebellion could send us and ask us to do something? So, there were little things we tried to do which I forget, but we were trying to say \"We're here. Just tell us what to do. We support you, but you don't want us to be upfront.\" And, and we really stopped talking to a lot of the other white teachers also, who were opposed to this.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8545.0,8673.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/147","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And, like, who do you remember there were—I know that you were from the outside, but like who do you remember, like leading a lot of these rebellions with the, the student faculty association? Like I've had a chance to—I know that Bill Sales was one of those figures, and that also Sam Anderson was a part of it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8673.0,8694.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/148","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8694.0,8694.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/149","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And, was there anyone else that you, you knew that—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8694.0,8700.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/150","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: No. At, at that time, those were were the guys. I, I didn't know the student leaders, and if I saw a list of the faculty, I might remember other names, but really it was Sales and Anderson. I keep getting Anderson mixed up with somebody else. And I kept calling him MacIntosh when I was talking to somebody before, but it's Sam Anderson. And I think his wife taught then. Carolyn Anderson—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8700.0,8742.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/151","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yes—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8742.0,8742.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/152","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: —his former wife.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8742.0,8744.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/153","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8744.0,8745.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/154","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I remember her.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8745.0,8746.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/155","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And there was—and I, I think I mentioned in our prior interview, there was also—like other people I've been able to interview is, Waldo Jeff, and, and Bill Modest.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8746.0,8766.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/156","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah. They were counselors. And those of us who taught the English and social studies components really didn't have much contact with, with counselors. I don't think I got to know Modest until the following year when everything was restructured and they hired a whole new faculty, et cetera.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8766.0,8787.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/157","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And—yeah. And, and before that, there, there—with the, the, the rebellions, there was like this, this, this demand to have Mulholland removed. And, when, we were discussing Mulholland, we talked about like, his—one of his initial replacements, which was, which was Ralph Lee.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8787.0,8806.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/158","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right. Yeah. I remember Ralph Lee showing up, clean cut, close cropped hair, white shirt, bow tie, and jacket. He was just sort of classic faculty, HBCU guy, I don't remember which school he came from, but he was just, he, he was so different and out of the water, that it was hard to really—to figure him. And I think it was as much a North-South thing, as well as coming to a white school or mainly white school in a Black, Black program within a white school is different than a Black program within a Black school.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8806.0,8866.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/159","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: But it also is New York. I mean, I, I don't know what the other guys told you about the famous story of how he showed up the first day or, or first week with his station wagon full of all those worldly goods. And he just parked it on the street. [laughs] He came down and he was just shocked that his car had been packed—picked, clean, wherever he, wherever he was living. And, and he was just shocked, he was surprised. He just didn't know—oh, were you ever able to find or make contact with [Assistant QC SEEK Director] Juan Silén?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8866.0,8907.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/160","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: No, not yet. I've been working on looking him up, but like, I haven't, I haven't gotten any strong hits yet. I have kind of, this Felipe Luciano who, who you've mentioned, and I haven't gotten in contact with him, but I've gotten in contact with someone that is working with him. So we'll see how that works, but no, not Juan Celint.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8907.0,8931.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/161","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right. So I think I—oh, so, so not only was faculty changed, but the curriculum was changed. Totally. It became like a Third World Studies course. And so we were using—instead of Columbia University, Contemporary Civilization, we were using books like Fanon and a book called Montu. And I, I forget some of the other stuff, none of which I had ever read before. Absolutely not had read. And I, I—most of the teach—many of the teachers had not read. And—'cause the faculty was a third world faculty. So it wasn't just a Black faculty. There were people coming—Alem was from Ethiopia, Yemi—I forget where Yemi is from. Nigeria? I forget where Yemi's from. So people came and then—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=8931.0,9001.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/162","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: But the, the name you're mentioning, when you say Alem, you say—you mean Alem Habtu?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9001.0,9006.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/163","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yes. Okay. Right. So people came with all sorts of different books that they liked and that they recommended. And they sat down with Bill Sales and Sam Anderson and they had some of their books. So they came up with a curriculum. Really fascinating stuff. But not everybody was familiar with all the stuff. So we were teaching stuff and learning as we were teaching along. I don't even think that Bill Sales had read everything that he was then having to teach. So—but it, it was, it was exciting stuff. And I think the, the students really got into it. I don't know—'cause I think people were passionate about the difference between [laughs] what, what they could have been teaching and, and this kind of stuff. I started to tell you that my last year there I proposed and was allowed to teach an elective. And I in fact found the readings that I assigned for the elective and what the course was. I, I think the—I didn't find the title of the course, but it was something like, Deconstructing Schooling. And the title that I have for the book of readings is What Have They Done to, to Your Mind? And my thought in structuring that course—because this was an introduction to the social sciences, right? So that you can bring political science, you can bring history, you can bring sociology, you can bring all those social science courses to examine what schools are like in our society. And you can use those different academic skills to critique the schools.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9006.0,9131.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/164","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So my thought was A) you could use those skills and B) if you, and this, you know, this followed the same attitude that I had in my high school, where I had students looking at the community, something they had in common, what was good about your community? What's bad about your community? How do you want to change it? What I was doing with schools using really all those other social science disciplines was to say, take a look at your own schooling. What of your schooling made you feel self-assured, which made you feel insecure? Where did you feel you were being tracked? What were your aspirations and where were your aspirations being shaped? Who is your favorite teacher, who is your most hated teacher? What was the difference? And, and so I, I, that was an elective that I, I got to teach and that was really exciting. And I thought that that was something that I could do. And in terms of sort of racial politics that, I, as a white guy can be teaching something like that in a more comfortable way than teaching [unclear], for example. So it, so it was great. And, and then, the other are teachers at the time and administrators within SEEK were, were supportive of that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9131.0,9232.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/165","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And, and you taught, and you taught that class in that elective in, in your last year, you said?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9232.0,9244.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/166","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah, I think so. For, for a bunch of reasons, I loved teaching at SEEK. The push was to have more third world teachers. So they were not encouraging, but as a white teacher, you were taking the place of somebody else that they would like to hire. And also there was—it wasn't described as pushback at that time, but I saw, I think I told you there, I saw it as pushback—after the rebellion and after hiring of all these teachers—either Queens College or the university, I don't know who initiated it—said that SEEK can't have those people on their own faculty lines, that all the people teaching English and social sciences had to be on a departmental line and sit within a department, and then SEEK could borrow them to teach courses that students were taking. And so, they were about to assign all the teachers to different departments. At the same time as that was going on, I was becoming frustrated with classroom teaching in the sense that A, you meet some wonderful students, you got 'em for one semester and they're gone. And B you're dealing with words and you're dealing with ideas and maybe some school skills, but you're not really making a change in the world. And a lot of my friends and the politics of the times was to do more working class organizing, whether it's within economic struggle within a community or doing union organizing or community organizing. And that was much more of interest to me, to learn and, and to get involved in that kind of organizing than it was you could sit around and read books [unclear] to all day long. And so what does that mean? Right. You come out and you think or act or dress differently, but it doesn't necessarily change the world or, or whatever. I don't mean to put it down, but it's, it's like, what's my role in those situations? And how do you do the kind of other change that I thought was more important?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9244.0,9423.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/167","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So, there was a notice that a new program was being started at Queens College, called the Action Program, University Year for Action, where both undergraduate and graduate levels, students would get coursework and it could get a degree doing community organizing. And they were recruiting faculty to, to do that. And I—and they had directors, two women who were the directors of the Action Program came out of the Welfare Rights Movement. They were very good, very smart, really tough and experienced community organizers. And they needed somebody who had an academic title to do some of the course work and the readings and stuff like that. So I, I volunteered to do that. So that's—I left SEEK to go into that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9423.0,9484.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/168","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And then I left Action to then actually get a job in the labor movement and sort of switch careers at that time, because I was leaning much more to the actual organizing and found that union organizing was a thing that could bring people together, Black, Brown, white, et cetera, to fight a common enemy, to fight the boss. And I thought that that was really important and useful. And what was going on at that period of time was that nationalism became much more of a thrust within the Black community so that the— there was Stokley Carmichael's \"Go work in your own community.\" So what was the role of white folks? So both it was something that I enjoyed, something that I was good at and something that continued the struggle, but I was outside the Black nationalist movement, so I could do that with another movement, but they were supportive. So going into the trade union movement fit within all those other traditions that were happening at the time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9484.0,9578.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/169","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: I guess in regards to the transition of these movements, because there is this belief in coalition building, right? And basically, I guess my question is, how do you feel about the difference between your experience with this Freedom Schools and then also like a few years later with your experience at SEEK, and then this transition to like the seventies, with the labor movement? Like, like how do you feel they, they interplay with each other?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9578.0,9621.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/170","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well, I think there's a continuity. What's the word, \"intersectionality,\" right? [laughs] That was never a term back in my days. But the intersection between racial and economic and struggles, I think I always understood as key. When long time ago people would ask me about what did I learn when I was in Mississippi and did I do anything there that I would've done differently, or that the movement would've done differently? My quick gut answer, I mean I haven't read books or research thought, but say we didn't really fight around economic issues. Right? Civil rights was about discrimination, segregation. It wasn't about economic exploitation. And ater on, King and Malcolm would make jokes or things about why fight to get on—to desegregate a bus if you don't have the money to buy a bus ticket, or, why fight to get coffee in a coffee shop if you don't have money to buy coffee? But, so there were elements in earlier in the Movement who at least, on a speech level, would tie economics and race, discrimination together. And the group that did that the most, in fact, got oppressed the most. That's the Black Panther party. I thought the Black Panther party was brilliant in what they did. I understood as a white guy that it was the Black Panther party for armed self-defense. They weren't going around looking for cops and shooting at cops.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9621.0,9771.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/171","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: When I was in Mississippi, everybody had a gun. The Turners had shotguns sitting at the door. If somebody came to attack their house, they were gonna fight back. I understood about armed self-defense. And I understood that armed self-defense is not necessarily contradictory with nonviolent direct action, right? You can be nonviolent with all these cops around you, [laughs] right? But by doing direct action, you're not gonna get into a gun fight with the cops. So you call that nonviolent, but that if anybody came to get you, you were gonna fight back. So I understood that about the Panthers and the Panthers added this critique of capitalism and economic exploitation. And so did the Young Lords, and so did a number of other groups. And I thought that that was correct, that, by joining the critiques of racism and capitalism was the proper understanding. So within that framework of understanding—not that—not organizationally. I didn't go join the Black Panthers or whatever.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9771.0,9853.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/172","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: But, within that understanding, to struggle within the labor movement, that there were racial tensions, even within the labor movement. So you had to work that out within your own union and what the union was aiming for. There were skilled trades unions that were very racist. So I didn't do anything with any of them. I tend to go to the industrial unions where there could be hundreds of people or thousands of people in a workplace, whether it's a factory or a hospital and the whole idea is to how can you organize together, to fight against the boss? And I thought that that—and then deal with the tensions of how to, how to bring everybody together. And then—so, so that's, that's—those are the things that led me to go to the trade union movement.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9853.0,9914.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/173","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. And I guess, when you mentioned the, the, the Black Panthers—when we spoke, the other weeks—you said—you mentioned that there was a story about like a Black Panther, but that person may have been a cop.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9914.0,9931.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/174","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yup. Yeah, it was after the struggle. It was in—we had our new curriculum, our new teachers and our new books, and there was this one well dressed, good looking guy with a really trim Afro. And he came and he was—any, any time he could get, he would talk about, \"We need a revolution.\" He was always talking about revolution, and he was talking about Black Panthers. And the rest of the people in the room would, sort of look at him like, \"You old man, if you wanna talk about revolution, why are you doing it here?\" This is a white guy up there, and this is a classroom, it's like, hey, this is not appropriate. Then he kept doing it and doing it. And then all of a sudden he disappeared. Totally disappeared. He left my class, whatever English class he was in, he, he wasn't there. And then one of the students came up to me afterwards and said, \"You know that guy who was talking about a revolution? He was a cop.\" They all knew it. They all figured it out. So I wasn't surprised by that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9931.0,9997.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/175","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. And I, I feel like with telling of this story, I think the realization that there was like heavy infiltration by, by police departments, forces like the FBI, especially with the story, the story that you mentioned earlier when you were suspended by the Dean, that is—that was a very apparent danger that like, I guess, constantly existed, like—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=9997.0,10025.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/176","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah. And I think the SEEK program was under heavy surveillance. I, I should look for my FBI records. I asked for them once, and I don't think I gave them to the archives. I, I don't remember what was in them. I know what—I know there were things that weren't in them. There was nothing there about my confrontation with the Dean where, where there was a FBI representative there. There's some stuff about Mississippi. Two FBI agents came to my house after the summer of '64 and interviewed me nominally about Andy Goodman. That wasn't in there. But I think there was stuff around SEEK and blacked out were names. They said, \"We—and we\"— there was a sentence that would read something like, \"And we checked with our usual sources at Queens College blank, blank, blank, and blank. And they'd have like six names that they would cross off and—that, that were all blanked out. So the, the FBI had regular people who were open to talk to, to them. And I think they were deans and faculty. Oh, hold on one second. Sorry. I have an appointment in 15 minutes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10025.0,10126.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/177","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10126.0,10126.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/178","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10126.0,10129.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/179","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: We can, we can, we can pause for now. And then, if—do you have—would you have the same time next week?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10129.0,10139.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/180","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I will tell you in a second. Next week is—what's today? Today's Monday.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10139.0,10147.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/181","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. Today's Monday. So it'll be—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10147.0,10149.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/182","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10149.0,10150.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/183","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: —the first.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10150.0,10150.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/184","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I do. Mar—March 1st is good.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10150.0,10151.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/185","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Oh, perfect. So I'll send you a calendar invite for the same time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10151.0,10157.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/186","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10157.0,10158.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/187","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. And then—yeah. We'll—'cause we were kind of leading to your donations to the archives. And I wanted to talk about the creation of the civil rights collection. And also follow up on some other things once I get to listen to this interview.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10158.0,10178.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/188","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Good. 'Cause there there's things about the archive stuff that are great anecdotes that are not as necessarily flattering, but I'm—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10178.0,10189.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/189","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: [laughs]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10189.0,10190.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/190","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: —happy to get 'em on record.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10190.0,10192.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/191","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah, no, me too. So—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10192.0,10195.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/192","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah, yeah. They're not—they, they won't be news to Annie. She's heard those stories. Anything I say about Annie will always be flattering, but to get the thing off the ground, there are a couple of good anecdotes. So we're on for next Monday.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10195.0,10211.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/193","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yes we are.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10211.0,10212.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/194","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Okay. Very good. Thank you.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10212.0,10214.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/195","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: All right. Thank you so much for taking out the time and, and sharing your experiences.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10214.0,10218.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/196","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Good. I, I hope it's not too meandering. I—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10218.0,10221.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/197","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: No, no, no, no. They were—well that's kind of the point of oral history. Like, you were able to like expand on a lot of experiences and it provides a lot more nuance to what one could read. So I think it was great.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10221.0,10235.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/198","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Okay. Good. And your questions are good. Okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10235.0,10237.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/199","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Thank you.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10237.0,10237.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/200","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Very good. We'll be in touch.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10237.0,10238.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728/transcript/40645/annotation/201","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Alright, cool. Bye.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170728#t=10238.0,10240.48"}]}]},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 2 of 2 - Levy_Mark_03_01_21_audio.m4a"]},"duration":5730.4,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/170/727/small/Levy_Mark-aviary.jpg?1668437981","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/content/2/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-queenslibrary.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/170/727/original/Levy_Mark_03_01_21_audio.m4a?1668436497","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mp3","duration":5730.4,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Full Transcript - March 1, 2021 [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: To this computer. So today's day is March 1st, 2021. My name is Obden Mondesir. I'm collecting this oral history for the SEEK History Project. I am with Mark Levy, and we're continuing the second part of our interview from last Monday. And, as we were discussing previous, we thought it would make more sense to continue the conversation in regards to the Queens College archive and like your donation to, to said archive.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=0.0,43.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I'm a little vague on specific years on, on a couple of events and would not be sure how easily to find out exactly when. So, some of the things that I'll mention, I don't have those exact dates, but they could be found if it was necessary. I was working for a healthcare union of interns residents for a fair number of years. After I've left SEEK, I went to the University Year of Action doing community organizing. And from there, I went to doing union organizing for an industrial union called the UE, United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers. It was a pretty progressive union—left oriented union. I worked in a wire mill doing organizing. Then I went on staff as an organizer, and then I worked in New Jersey, New York and North Carolina, a little bit of South Carolina, doing that kind of organizing. Back when gas was 25 cents a gallon. I left that union because industry in New York was pulling out. And that union offered me a number of places to go. Minneapolis, course, South Dakota. And I remember the conversation that I had with the director of organizing of that union, where I said, \"But I've lived in a rent controlled apartment in Manhattan. You want me to go to Minneapolis?\" And he said, \"Well, yes. But you could change your life and come back.\" And I said, \"That won't happen.\" So, I went to work for 1199, a healthcare union, for a number of years. Because of internal politics, a big turnover with staff because of internal politics within that union, I wound up going to a very \"odd\" union of interns and residents. In New York City, it was mainly in the public city hospitals and smaller community hospitals. It was a New York and New Jersey union, but over the years, it, it grew nationally, both by organizing and affiliation. So I worked with medical interns and residents, doing traditional union work as well as healthcare, organizing. And, at some point the—one of the key guys in the union left and there was a new Executive Director. Then at some point, he was promoted to work with the international union and he invited me to be the Executive Director. So I was the—at that union, for I don't know, 25, 30 years.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=43.0,249.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: At some point I was doing some cleaning around the house. I think I was still employed with that union called the Committee of Interns and Residents or CIR, for short. And I discovered a whole bunch of materials that I had in Mississippi. Photographs and just a lot of paper materials. I contacted Queens College 'cause I still had, even though I hadn't had connections for a long time, I still had warm feelings, both from my student days and also my SEEK days.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=249.0,288.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I forget who I contacted in the library and I said, \"I have all this stuff from Mississippi, from the civil rights movement. And there were a bunch of us in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer. So would you like that as a donation?\" And whoever I was speaking to was fairly high ranking library official said to me, something like, \"Does that stuff have anything to do with Andy Goodman?\" And I said, \"Well, Andy and I worked in the same area, but this is about my experiences. Andy got killed when he was there 24 hours. So this is not an homage to Andy and all his stuff. There were a bunch of us from Queens who were there, but this is about our experiences.\" And he said, \"Well, if it's not directly about Andy Goodman. We don't want it here.\" So, [laughs] okay, cool. I'll check with other libraries. Somebody else may want it. So this was not a major focus, and—so I, I just dropped it. I, I went to the Schomburg, I went to a couple of places. Schomburg would've taken it, but they were not aggressive. The supportive—actually Andy Goodman's materials were up at the, the Schomburg. So I dropped it for a while. In 2007, I retired as the Executive Director of Committee Interns and Residents. And I made myself a list of things that I would like to do during the time that I was retired. And one of the things was, to maybe possibly find a home for all my stuff. So, I went out to Queens College.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=288.0,408.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I walked into the—what for me was the new library. I didn't know it too well. But I asked to talk to somebody in the archives, and they said they didn't really have the archives, but there was a part-time archivist somewhere subterranean. And basically he had space just a little bit bigger than two of my living rooms. And it was all cordoned off by chicken wire, if I remember correctly. The only security—there were these wood stands, floor to ceiling and chicken wire at, at a door. I—and it was odd. I mean, there must have been some organization and the guy who was the archivist was really a \"Collyer.\" People will tell you what his house looked like. And I think he died when things fell on him or something like that, but he was a really an odd fellow and he had a part-time person, and he was sort of interested I was not crazy about giving my stuff and having it appear inside this chicken wire place. Plus, they had no program for how to use the materials. Now parallel thought, why did I wanna bring my stuff to Queens College in the library? Why was the library there? Why was that my first choice? My first choice was that Queens College had adopted not the Andy Goodman \"story,\" but the Andy Goodman \"myth\" and a narrative: \"He was this young white Jewish guy, went to Mississippi and he got killed. Isn't that terrible? Right? And that's the end of story.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=408.0,532.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: What about the 10 people who went there and lived and did stuff, all at large? What about all the local people who had invited us down there to help them do what they wanted to do, which was the real goal of going to the city? Rather than talk about how a young person got killed and the little that Queens College ever talked about Andy was that he was \"martyred,\" rather than \"murdered.\" And the difference between the two, when we went to Mississippi, we didn't go to Mississippi to die. None of us were volunteers to be martyred. SNCC and CORE worked very aggressively for us not to get killed and not to get ourselves in trouble. So to structure the Queens College memorial to Andy Goodman in those kinds of ways, I thought was, was bad and not telling the correct narrative historically, and denied the grassroots activism of the local people in the grassroots leadership. It was another white Jewish guy doing something for somebody else rather than having their own self-determination.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=532.0,610.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: The other thing that I was concerned about the incorrectness of such a narrative, is that as a community organizer and as a union organizer, one of the things that I learned was that if you approach somebody else, as an organizer, do you want to get involved? Do you want join a union? Do you wanna do things? Generally they don't do it around somebody else's problem. So, with certain exceptions, like some of the demonstrations now around the police murders, that touched a spark in a very different kind of way. But generally if I went to a factory and said something like \"I got a phone call from Mary Smith, she just got fired. Can we organize to get her back?\" People would sorta look at me and say, \"Why would I want to do that? I'm gonna get fired if I do that.\" Whereas if I went to them and say, \"Gee, I just read a report that all your rooms are insulated with asbestos, and that's gonna kill you. And unless we can get this place to clean it off—\" that has self-interest in it. The other is more distant. I can go on for lots of examples like that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=610.0,721.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: If you go to somebody and say, \"Oh, isn't it a shame that Andy Goodman got killed?\" which CORE did a lot of right after that, Andy Goodman's mother did a lot of right after he was killed, is to do fundraising. So whether it's outta guilt or altruism or whatever, CORE used the Andy Goodman image to do fundraising. I think even Queens College uses that narrative. \"We are the home of Andy Goodman,\" they use it for the most part for fundraising. But my interest was not as a fundraiser. My interest is as an organizer. How do I get somebody else to invest their time, their energy, their sense of risk, or their sense of what's important to use their time, what their values are? It doesn't come from that other kind of stuff. So to the extent that donating my pictures or any of my other records to add onto—I don't want to take away anything from Andy Goodman. I wanna open up that story so that other people can use a much broader and, and more significant and hopefully a more engaging narrative.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=721.0,802.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So that's why I came to Queens. The first time I was turned away. The second time I was shown this cage. I spoke to some of my friends. Actually the people I spoke to were Mike Wenger and Stan Shaw, the people who did the Virginia project. And, and Mike Wenger has a long history working with all sorts of government and, and nonprofit institutions about how to handle something like that. And what he suggested was, don't try and do this yourself. Pull together a committee. He was—he started to say that I should even pull together a fund or a steering committee. But I got a bunch of faculty who I had known back from my SEEK days or a few of those recommendations. So I pulled together, totally as outsider, a bunch of faculty. And I probably had, I don't know, six or eight, 10 people who I met with in a room two or three times and said, \"I got this bunch of stuff. Do you think Queens College could use it in any kind of way? Do you think you personally or your department—history, poli sci, sociology—could use some of those archives?\" And I got some sympathy, but nobody was really saying, \"Let's go get 'em,\" with two exceptions. One was a guy from the History Department, who—civil rights was not his field and I found him terribly politically conservative. And he and I just didn't hit it off. And then there was a guy from the libraries, from the—actually not from the library at that time. He was just from the CUNY library school—which was independent of Queens College [editor's note: this is incorrect; the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies is a separate department from the Queens College Library, but both are part of Queens College]—right there. They were housed downstairs, but they had no really tight set connections.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=802.0,948.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Ben Alexander was an interesting guy. He was very affable. Very interested. He was commuting between Los Angeles and Queens. His family and wife lived in Los Angeles, and he was teaching courses and doing stuff and flying back and forth to New York every week. And, he said \"Oh, I like this idea. And you got all this stuff. And it's really great.\" His students loved him for a while. It did not end well, but what he said to me was, and I'm paraphrasing, but basically what he said is I think I can really do a thing with what you're saying. This could be my track to tenure, creating an archive and a civil rights archive. Civil rights would be like the tip of the spear to get a bigger archive. And civil rights was not his specialty, but he was sympathetic to it and, and he would be happy to do it. And I said, sounds like a deal, right? No—you want to get tenure, you need a project that's attractive to the College. (PS off the record, he didn't get tenure. It was ended sort of ugly.) But, if you wanna do that, and that's the way for me to get my materials, not only into Queens College, but institutionalized, I said, \"We got a deal.\" And, he was very creative and very aggressive. He got himself a grant. I think he went on a Queens College line. So he was doing special collections, as well as the archives, a part of his pay down at the, whatever the official name is of the CUNY library school [Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies]. Some of that came from Queens College, so he was doing that stuff. He some money, and, and probably harder to get in any university than money is space. The space—first he got where the archive offices are now. And then he negotiated for space downstairs where a lot of the stuff is kept. So he really was a move and a shaker that kind of way.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=948.0,1115.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: What do you remember—what was in the space—the, the GSIS office space. Do you remember what was there before?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1115.0,1121.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: No, I don't.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1121.0,1123.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1123.0,1127.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: In addition to my materials that I brought from Mississippi, I had just retired. I had a whole bunch of framed civil rights pictures and art that were in my CIR office, in my union office. And they're all over that office space. Now, if you walked around and looked at what's up on the walls, I would say that 75% of that frame stuff is all from my office, my union office. Ben Alexander was doing some terrific stuff, moving all that along. Then he would do weird things— I'm well aware that the tree that falls in the forest, that nobody hears, that whole concept, that the tree didn't fall the forest. So here I am giving my stuff, here he is working with those materials. How do we get the whole college to know? How do we get some PR for the archives out to the community? So, I pushed some contacts. He pushed some contacts. We had a—we used the College a little bit. So we get the Daily News to come and we make an official announcement of the civil rights exhibit at the library. And the Daily News guys come with a photographer and all this stuff. And Ben doesn't show up. He goes off to California, so it was me and it was this wonderful, senior who was a SEEK student and psychology major, major named Donaldson Conserve, who's just [unclear]. And so we did the interview, and we were photographed for the Daily News. I have a copy of the article. I can send that to you.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1127.0,1250.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: There was something else. Oh! The, the other deal that I made with Ben, when I said I would give him my stuff. I also said I'm willing to do the work, but just having my stuff there and that—and, and not have a sense that the Queens College civil rights archive could grow, then my stuff would just be put in boxes and never be used— if I do organizing and get other Queens College students to donate civil rights materials, and sixties activist materials, are you willing to extend that archive to others? And more out of self-interest than actual interest, he said, \"yes, of course, I would help us make the whole archive grow.\" So then I started recruiting and I started calling all my friends or emailing them, \"what have you got in your closet? Can you come down? Can you bring this?\" I convinced a lot of people to make the donations. Almost everything that's in the civil rights archive comes from people I knew and called and leaned on to give those materials.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1250.0,1341.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: The other deal that I had with Ben, he never fulfilled. And I don't necessarily hold it against him because people have limited time and energy. But this was a period of time coming into 2014, 2013 and 2014. There was gonna be the 50th anniversary of a lot of the civil rights events, right? The 50th anniversary, the March on Washington is 2013. 2014 was the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. So I had asked him if he would make a commitment to link up with other libraries that were well known for their civil rights collections, so that Madison, Wisconsin, or Duke, or I forget— who else? Somebody in Atlanta—there were some really good civil rights collections around the country. And I have this fantasy in truth and justice that I still have that if you get a bunch of people from those libraries to sit down and talk to each other and share materials, you learn and you contribute. And then it's—all of it is more accessible to other people. So he said he would try and make those connections. He did just teeniest bit. And then he dropped the whole thing. I'm not sure why, I have my guess. Some people will do stuff that they're in charge of making the things happening, but to be a, a little player in a bigger deal, it takes more time and energy and influence. And sometimes that's not the role you get. So he just dropped that. So that Queens never really got to do linkages where there were other big civil rights collections around the country. Even Columbia University has a really big collection. A bunch of the people who I wanted to give stuff to the Queens College library, Lucy Komisar and, Dotty Zellner, had already given their stuff like—and, and, oral histories had given that to Columbia University. So, I thought there was a—and, and Andy Goodman stuff was up at the Schomburg. So there was a—I thought there was a real utility to act, but that, that never happened.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1341.0,1515.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: But one of the nice things that happened, because 1963 was also the 50th anniversary of the Prince Edward project—where the Queens College students had gone down there and spent the summer there—they were doing a reunion and an event just between Queens College. Because there had been a lot of activities and other people down in Prince Edward County, over the—well, all the years from '54 on up, before I think they finally desegregated must have been '65, '66. There were a dozen years approximately when the schools were closed and, and there other, outside of Virginia groups that contributed, but they were gonna run a special event. They have a museum, the Moton Museum, and they were gonna run a special event just for this big group of Queens College students that come down there, lived in people's homes and done summer project. And the person who happened to be the graduate student from the CUNY Graduate School [Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies], who was assigned to a internship at Queens College [Library] was Annie Tummino [now Head of Special Collections and Archives]. And—so here was this reunion where people—this whole crew from Queens College was going back down to Virginia for that reunion. We did a little bit of conniving and getting support and permission for the archive interns to go down. So Annie went down and was down there both with the Queens College students who'd been the volunteers 50 years before, and a lot of the actual students who were now 50 years older. So she went down there—well—and this was while she would visit Queens. She also then became a key player, one of the other in another project, one of the projects that purely accidentally that Ben Alexander pulled off was he was at an event where he was sitting next to somebody who was connected to James Forman, the SNCC leader. And Forman had given most of his materials to I think the Library of Congress, but he had some other stuff, mainly a lot of books he had collected—he had line markings and those books and a bunch of supplemental materials for Jim Forman. And Ben Alexander asked him to give those supplemental materials to Queens. And Ben actually drove down and got those materials, and brought 'em back.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1515.0,1714.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And then Ben and Annie had the idea of inviting James Forman's son and his close friend, Julian Bond, come and speak at Queens College. And Annie became the graduate student who did almost all the work to pull together this wonderful event. We had probably several hundred people from Queens College in the auditorium downstairs in the library, where both James Forman spoke and Julian Bond's son speak. No, not Julian Bond. James Forman's son spoke and, and Julian Bond spoke. It was a very nice event. We have—I have a bunch of pictures [unclear]. So Annie has a history herself of being—going to Virginia and meeting those folks and being involved at the time of the Forman collection coming to Queens College and meeting Forman's son and Julian Bond. So her coming back last year or the year before was just terrific. It's a continuity of that. I respect her commitment and skills that she's brought to continuing the civil rights project which is now part of special collections and many more kinds of archives.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1714.0,1814.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. Thanks for—thank you for sharing a lot of that. I, I find a lot of it fascinating as a like—as an archivist and a oral historian myself, in regards to this journey of you like donating your collections to the archives and like how it's like developed so much since. And it fills, it fills a lot of, of, of gaps. And then—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1814.0,1848.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Excuse me, one, one thing just that I should probably say is I gave a lot of thought, but it's a multistep process. A lot of my best photographs I've kept and put into my will that they'll be given at some point of Queens College. And I've also put into an agreement that at some point they'll be put into Queens College, all the negatives and contact sheets, and a lot of five-by-sevens that were not the best of the five-by-sevens, those were donated to Queens College. The rest I have in my possession, currently, a lot of them were mounted on big three-by five, foam core boards. But I digitized the best of that series and have used those and separated those given copies of those to the library, as well as used them myself to develop. So there will be more new special versions of some of that stuff coming to the Queens College library sometime soon. And I just found some new stuff in the closet, that I found some new pictures of not just the Mississippi, but the groups that went to the bus that went down to the March on Washington. I've found originals of those pictures. So I'll have more stuff that I'll be soon giving to Queens College. I'm sorry, I interrupted.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1848.0,1946.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Oh, no, that's fine. I guess what I'm thinking about is with this concept of, of history in the past, I guess it's like, what do you think—I, I—what are you thinking about, like, your contribution and the work and like, how do you think it'll be affect—how do you hope it'll affect the telling of the Civil Rights Movement in relation to Queens College in the future?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1946.0,1985.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well, I can give one nice—a broad example, and then go back to the other thing. PBS decided to make a video to go along with Stanley Nelson's wonderful long documentary called Freedom Summer. The way PBS sometimes does these educational supplementary videos that you find at PBS, they went and found people. Some of whom had been the ones included in the Freedom Summer documentary, and they found some of us who hadn't made it past the cutting room floor, where we, we were interviewed for the documentary, but they never included it. So some guy called me up and interviewed me, and then PBS has a documentary called The Teacher. And they have probably about 10 extra categories. And the way he framed his whole thing was not just to have me in the big Freedom Summer documentary, but he came to the archives and he interviewed me in the Queens Library. And he looked at pictures and he has me talk about being a teacher, also the materials at the library. And he did it in this very comfortable, easygoing, normal kind of way that makes it seem that people who are activists don't have to be heroes. They can be ordinary people, right? So he was saying, here's this guy who turned out to be a teacher. And he continues to talk about this stuff and as a teacher or story teller. So that's one good way this stuff is, is set out.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=1985.0,2107.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And I think the, the other thing—which is the focus of, of all my talks, that I give in high schools and colleges—by looking at the materials in my archive, and by my using them in my talks, my main themes are the civil rights movement is not just the movement of charismatic leaders. It's not just the movement of marches and other events and big public spaces. That it's a movement of community organizing. It's a movement—if you look at the pictures that involved a lot of women, and it was a movement in many ways that was really kicked off by young people, and involved young people. Too often the newspapers and the history books, they have a handful of male Black ministers leading a march, and that's the civil rights movement. But who are all the people behind? Who are all the people who talk to other people to say, \"We should go on march?\" So it's not just King and the other people around SCLC that make up a movement or make up the power of a movement, and the, and, and, and stay around and stay in a community. King would come someplace, give a speech, lead a march, and then he'd leave, right? So is that a movement? What happens in that community? What happens to the people in that community? So I think a lot of my materials talk about the contributions of local people, the continuity of their struggle, the involvement particularly of young people. Hopefully, this material list all the names of the students who were in our Freedom School and a lot of the other leaders.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=2107.0,2251.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: In many senses, some of that material coulda, shoulda, woulda been best done in Meridian to be encouragements for local people, but they had had no archive. And the institutional structure of Mississippi in the 21st century in many ways was no better than the institutional structure in the 20th century. The signs were gone, but discrimination and all that other stuff still existed. So my materials would just disappear down there. And in fact, I, I gave copies and left some of the copies and people used it in wonderful ways, but I think the stuff that they made—distributed, I was just trying to find it. Get it to a Freedom School that still exists in a—different kind of Freedom School, but one that exists in Meridian that all the stuff that was used in the 2014 events that we had in Meridian that were supposed to be preserved either by the community college or by the mayor's office, I think all that stuff just disappeared. So I thought it would be safer in, in an institution like Queens College—the originals, if I could get the copies down to, to Meridian. And, and I did a lot of that myself, but Ben Alexander and some of the people at Queens were helpful with that. Both out of self-interest and support for the movement, in the 2014 commemoration of Freedom Summer in Jackson, Mississippi, I convinced Queens College to take out a full page ad supporting the summer, supporting the recent history, but also advertising the fact that they had a bunch of materials there. So, I thought my materials there would be safe. I thought they could be used. I thought if we had an aggressive structure—outreach process that they can be shared with other people. And in fact, to a degree they have been shared. I—it's been sort of serendipitous. Not through any of those formal contacts. It was more—I guess, some of the contacts came from my being places and speaking to people. So for example, did you ever meet Miyuki? Miyuki—I forget her last name, is a scholar from Japan, right?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=2251.0,2433.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yes. I, I did. I, I, I met—I was—this was before the pandemic, so she was in the reading room while I was work—Yes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=2433.0,2442.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah. And so she's a bit of a trip. And I met her at one of the events that I was at, and she just grabbed on and boy, she kept asking for more materials and more information. I would send her stuff, and send her stuff, and send her stuff. Then all of a sudden, she got this grant to actually live with Queens College in the dorms and to do this, all this other research. She was actually on one of the videos yesterday. The one with Norka [Blackman-Richards]? I think she was on. And I asked her whether all that research has ever been written up, that is in a way that I could read it. And she said no. So I was shocked. I was surprised because she's so compulsive and such a hard worker. And then there was a guy in the Education Department. Nigerian guy in secondary social studies with Education Department. I'm saying that cause I'm trying to pull up his name [Prof. Magnus Bassey]. And he had invited me quite often—at least once a semester for five years—to give a presentation to his social studies teachers. So about both my experiences, but also how to teach about civil rights movement as teachers. And I did that for a whole bunch of years and he's written a book. He then, sort of like Miyuki descended into the Queens College archives and pretty seriously researched all of us who were doing any civil rights work. And he's written this book. I can't think of his name. He took a whole semester where he did nothing else. And he's circulating a book. I've read some of the early drafts of it, he's got it going around. So that from an academic perspective, there are people who have picked up the, the story, and hopefully are telling this story in ways that are supportive.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=2442.0,2603.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I know Miyuki's pitch is one that I struggled with her on. She originally came to the states the year before the 50th anniversary or maybe two years and went to Brandeis [University], and her thesis was that Jewish students, male and female, disproportionately were involved in the civil rights movement. And I think that that's true. It doesn't necessarily work the way around. She was also saying all Jews are in favor of civil rights. No, no, no, that's not true. I told her about how I was kicked outta the Mississippi synagogue. But when she would say there were a lot of Jewish students who went to Mississippi, the answer was \"yes.\" Jews make up 2% of the US population. Just 2%! But even though there were no specific questions on the application blank, estimates of the number of Jewish volunteers in Mississippi during Freedom Summer runs 25%. Some have told me it could be as high as 30% of, of the summer volunteers. How or why that happened, that's the subject of many books and there are one or two books that I think are absolutely wonderful about the connection of Jewish culture and Jewish ideology and the civil rights movement. The best one to do that, and comes, and it comes from an oral history background—Oh, goodness gracious. Oh! It's called Going South. I can give you the title, it's about three women going south. The Jewish women in the civil rights movement. And, it's done by a, a woman who lives in Brooklyn, a researcher, and is at, one of the CUNY schools in Brooklyn. And I think it's just a brilliant book. She follows mainly three women with oral histories who have different observances or connections to being Jewish. One was Orthodox. One is just totally secular, and more influenced by politics. And, I think she does a real interesting job with that, where she goes back and forth between some of the more theoretical connections and historic connections, and does a real nice job with their personal oral histories. So, I've met students at Queens College who told me they've been moved by that kind of story.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=2603.0,2806.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I think what really moves people is not that kind of story. I think what moves people, like I said before is, putting your one foot forward and getting involved and then being successful and then taking another set of steps. So during the years between say 2009 and 2015, when I was coming to Queens College, I would keep going over to the Student Union and trying to make contacts in student government, so that I could both make connections for me as a faculty person, and as a former undergraduate teacher in SEEK and probably most important as a former Student Association President to say, \"it's terrific what you folks are doing student government's really important. And I'd love to sit down and talk with you about how my experiences in student government connected me to being more involved in civil rights and other social justice movements.\" And I must admit, in all those years, I've had zero follow-up. I mean, that's fine. But I would've guessed that somebody would've said, \"come sit down and have lunch with 10 of us, or, give a little talk at one of our meetings.\" Not once. So I, I've always been surprised by that. However, I've gotten a much more sympathetic one-on-one conversation with a couple of the last presidents of the Student Association who actually are SEEK students. When I was an undergraduate, the Student Association was totally dominated by fraternities. They controlled all the money. They won all the elections. The social clubs controlled that. When I came back, after I retired, the student government was totally controlled by Hillel. Not exclusively, but they really had all the top leadership positions, and I don't know the internal dynamics—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=2806.0,2958.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: And could you, could you describe Hillel for, for those that don't know that term?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=2958.0,2962.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Hillel is a Jewish religious social organization. They celebrate Jewish holidays together. They celebrate Jewish history together. Hillel pushed for the creation of a Jewish Studies department of Queens College, but it's, it's like safe space, for Jewish students at Queens College campus. But Hillel has a national structure in Washington that actually is very conservative. It's really a social structure for holding Jewish students together. So the way the Student Association works is that they get a lot of money from student fees and then disperse that money among student groups. And so they're very powerful among student organizations cause they have the money to disperse and how—what set of dynamics changed it from fraternities and sororities with something happening in the middle to Hillel deciding they wanted to take, take it over to now the last three presidents who've been from SEEK, Black or Latin, or I guess I think one of the presidents I think may been south Asian or I dunno where he's—but basically not, not the traditional SEEK students. But I was hopeful that some contacts could be made there, but it really wasn't made there. Another set of things that worked beautifully for a while, right near the beginning, I met this really interesting, lovely, nice art teacher. He was actually in—within the art framework. One of the sub pieces of the art department is a design department and he was just a structure in the design department. He subsequently was hired on a tenure track line. And I just got an email from him yesterday saying he got tenure and he was actually functioning as the chairman or the deputy chairman of the design department for several years. His name's Ryan Smith. And he was just here as a, I guess, maybe even a part-time instructor. And for a couple of his courses, he would send his students to the archives to do art based on materials make—based on materials, they would find in the archive. So they would use the pictures and some of the papers and some of the documents, some of the posters, and, and make them into collages. So I don't know whether you've seen laying around the offices different postcards about the archive.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=2962.0,3188.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: All the good ones are gone, but some of the others were up there. So they made like four of them, but students came back with the designs and then the archives—I'm not sure who funded it or who actually did the printing. They made a whole bunch of—hundreds, hundreds, maybe thousands of the postcards during the 2014 area talking about, come to the archives, come to this memborable exhibit. The guy Ryan Smith did a little video of like a school bus going down to the March on Washington. And he did some very creative stuff. He also—I don't remember whether Annie was around at that time, but I think Ryan Smith played a key role working with the art department and the archives to have some special exhibit on the civil rights movement and sixties activism. So a lot of that stuff has been used at the College. It wasn't used institutionally. It was up to an individual teacher to grab on and push something. Institutionally, I've had a whole bunch of struggles. One of the activities when the archive was just getting started was to have, say the history club and some other clubs, co-sponsor something. And one of the student groups that wanted to co-sponsor with the club was a new version of SDS. There was some group of Queens College students who starting an SDS, and the faculty member in charge put a kibosh on that. \"We're not gonna sponsor—\" I'm talking like 2013 and 2014 at Queens College, \"We don't wanna co-sponsor anything with SDS, they're a bunch of radicals.\" It's like, oh, hello?\" And I know during the 2013, 2014 time, there was people in fundraising and public relations who had the traditional narrative of Andy Goodman. So they wanted Queens College—If you're gonna talk about civil rights, talk about the poor martyred guy who died to give us money. That that proves we're a liberal school 'cause this white Jewish guy was killed. And anything that went against that narrative, they wouldn't publicize, right? Some of that still exists today.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=3188.0,3370.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I had some back and forth with some people who weren't particularly helpful and it took somebody above them to tell, to be a little bit helpful. So the same issues on an institutional basis that the Black and Latinx student—faculty staff association were running into, institutional kinds of reluctance to do certain things. I ran into—going back to 2012 and 13—the one department that really was friendly and, and picked up stuff, was the Education Department. And there's a real continuity. The Education Department at Queens College is the one that was first desegregated back in the late fifties. Had the Black—first Black faculty. One of the chairs in one of the divisions for bunch of years is Black. A fair number of faculty in the Education Department are third world Black, Latin. And because of their support, the first activity commemorating Freedom Summer, back in 2014 was an idea that I had come up with with some of those faculty. Instead of having a big rah-rah rally, what the thing was was we brought in a number of nonprofit educational groups that used and developed materials for how to teach about civil rights. So that was one of the very first kickoff events. And that was supported by, by the Education Department. I and some other people involved in civil rights have been invited over the years to speak quite often in the Education Department. There are probably a half a dozen teachers there that I've had good relationships and have used the materials and, and be in positive kinds of ways and where they've been open for me to make recommendations, how to use them, what other organizations provide materials. So they, they've been the best. Some other departments—do you want me to go through some of the departments that have been good and not so good?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=3370.0,3546.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah, no, I think this is really great info in regards to—my personal interest is like how these collections have been used. So like, please go ahead.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=3546.0,3564.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So, the Education Department, absolutely the best. So I went to Urban Studies and the chair of Urban Studies was a decent guy, progressive guy, patted me on the back and said, \"Go speak to any of my faculty.\" And there was one Black woman in the department who picked it up and was interested in community organizing and that stuff. But she didn't have anybody else who supported stock. When you have one person in a department, it, it's hard to get something going. She was wonderful. She passed away. I forget her—she was young. She died surprisingly. So I didn't get the support that I expected from Urban Studies. I went to the Anthropology Department. The Anthropology Department had a significant role that they could play 'cause—famous anthropologist who taught at Queens College. Really famous. One of the most important people early in the field whose name I'm blocking on. The building is—well, the social science building—what's the name of social science building?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=3564.0,3650.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Been on the campus for a while, it's gonna—I'm gonna struggle to remember, sorry. [pause] The name of the—not Powdermaker Hall?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=3650.0,3673.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yes. Powdermaker Hall. Right. So Hortense Powdermaker, in fact, in the 1930s, did some of her earliest work in the south, in Mississippi. She was a, young white woman who would sneak onto the plantations. Risking her life in all this stuff in the 1930s and, and talk to the sharecroppers and say, \"What's your life like?\" And her anthropology was the anthropology of Mississippi share, sharecroppers. And, she continued throughout her life that progressive reliance. And in fact, her notes in her original research on Mississippi are somewhere in the library. So, I thought the connections between life and conditions of sharecroppers in the 1930s, Powdermaker's work in support of the civil rights movement—she used to have fundraisers over her house and things like that in the sixties.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=3673.0,3746.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I thought all of that would be interesting for somebody in the Anthropology Department to pick it up and run with it. And people would pat me on the back and we would sit and chat for a while. But then—and, and my approach was, look, I can't run around and do this stuff all over the College. I know how it works. I can't run the anthropology event. Who's gonna get the students there. Right? The Anthropology Department has to run it itself and it will then get its anthropology students. And then you do outreach from that point. So they didn't pick that up. History department, one or two, but it was very weak. It wasn't as enthusiastic—except for one or two teachers. And, and part of what hurt stuff, I think there was that there were competition between two teachers or three teachers about who was gonna be the spokesperson around the civil rights issue, and they never seemed to cooperate. So they then never in turn used any stuff or connected really, as far as I know, to the archives. It was really weird why these two or three people never cooperated. The one Black faculty at that time has left Queens College. But—and I know why in some ways why she didn't want to use the archive, was she didn't want to use the archive to get the view of white people talking about Black people, and that's the Queens College archive. And I went to a bunch of other departments where there was lip service. The film department showed some films. Theater department did a play.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=3746.0,3874.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So there was some stuff being picked up, bouncing off of what was in the archive, but the only places that were real homes for me and for developing the archive was SEEK. SEEK, [laughs] SEEK gave me two important things. It gave me a desk and a phone number in a teeny little office that I could sit, do some work at. They gave me a key to the men's room, which was really critical. So SEEK did that. The library and archives gave me a space and the Education Department gave me a lot of space. And then the President of the College, Muyskens, really took up the idea. I wrote a proposal to him about how to celebrate 2013 and 2014. And he said \"yes.\" And I went back to him and said, \"Look, I don't want to make money off of this. I, I have a decent pension and social security, but people just sort of brush me off if I don't say I have a college ID and have some role.\" And he said, \"Cool.\" So he did three things that were important to me, sort of the way that bathroom key was important to me. He gave me a title: Special Assistant to the President for this event or a series of events. They gave me a small stipend and they gave me parking, free parking. Parking was as probably, maybe as important as the bathroom key. So he was very—Muyskens was very supportive of that. And Muyskens was also supportive because he went way out of his way to invite John Lewis to one of the commencement addresses, and John Lewis was the guest speaker. There was a special event afterwards in the—upstairs in the library for people from the archives mainly. I mean, a few other people who had been supportive of the civil rights archive were there, but it was mainly library people and maybe six to 10 other faculty.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=3874.0,4018.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And what Muyskens had done with this John Lewis address, he had asked me and the people in the library to do outreach to all the civil rights activists Queens College that we could think of. And we were given gowns and participated in the commencement march. So I had a whole bunch of old folks, male and female who had been to Virginia, who had been to Mississippi, and all that kinda stuff. So, we were a visible piece that correlated to the John Lewis talk. Then after Lewis was talking at Commencement and it was over, we had this event upstairs in the library and that was just marvelous. That was really nice. I have a lot of pictures of that too.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4018.0,4070.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So there were places, people that were helpful, and individual faculty. I think there was one other group that picked up on stuff. Oh yeah. It was the Women's Studies Department or pro—I don't know if it was a department or program [Women and Gender Studies Program]. They initiated a program about Queens College women who were active in the movement, and they invited a group of really powerful, interesting women. So Rita Schwerner, who was Mickey Schwerner's wife, is a Queens College graduate. She had never been back to Queens College. So they got her to come and speak. Dotty Zellner—who was one of the ranking people within SNCC—they got her to speak. Lucy Komisar—who started all sorts of activist stuff—they got her to speak. And a woman who I mentioned who was the historian, the Black woman, who was the historian [Rosalyn Terborg-Penn] who had participated in the Student Help Project and lived in St. Albans, she came and spoke. So that was a very big deal thing where they picked up that and they were very helpful. Very supportive.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4070.0,4168.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So it was really, it was really mixed, and they did that again, really without connecting to the archive. All that stuff is to try and make the Queens College culture feel more comfortable, more activist. Whether that's changing or not, I have no idea. Why did I start doing this? One last story: today, I guess, when I came to the Queens College campus, the year can be determined by just looking up a couple things. What was the year in the Democratic primary, where Hillary was running against Obama? In the very—in the primary. So it was before the year or two years before Obama was first elected.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4168.0,4230.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: If it's the primaries, wouldn't that be 2006, 2007? Hold on.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4230.0,4236.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Yeah, it could be 2006 or seven.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4236.0,4248.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: According to Wikipedia, the Democratic presidential primaries were in 2008.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4248.0,4255.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: So was that started—it started before that, then.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4255.0,4261.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: It, it was from—I mean, the primaries are usually the same year as the election. So like, it was like from January 3rd to June 3rd, in—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4261.0,4268.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: That—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4268.0,4268.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: —2008.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4268.0,4269.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: —it was somewhere in there, which fits with what was happening in my life. I was just retiring. I had announced my retirement. I don't know whether it was after I announced my retirement or actually when I took the leave—was using vacation time before retirement was official. But, I came to Queens College to make these donations, or to, you know, one of the points of early, early, early discussions with the archive. So I walk around the Queens campus and I go drop into the SEEK office to see if there's anybody's there still that I recognize. I go the Education Department to see if I got any old friends there. I went to the library 'cause that's where I was headed. So I'm all over the campus. I'm there for a bunch of hours. And I had driven there. So I'm in the far parking lot, the big parking lot and the, the campaign is pretty rigorous at this point to me. So it may have been the spring of 2008. I don't see one bumper sticker. Not anywhere on campus, not anywhere in the parking lots for either Hillary or Obama. And as I walking around, I know what the campus looks like. I know how people put some tacks of flyers all around on every door in the cafeteria and here and there. They're up for a couple days and then they take them down. Sometimes they're in covered boxes. Sometimes they just take the walk in my whole multiple hours on campus. You would not have known that there was a Democratic primary going on. Not one! No indication!","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4269.0,4395.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: And that just blew my mind. Had the campus gotten so apolitical and I—and the other thing is I didn't see one person wearing a button. When I was an undergraduate, you were—there were the young Democrats and the young Republicans. They would talk to each other. Debated. Have bumper stickers and— Nothing, zero, zero. I mean, I could have been there on an off day. But I went back a number of times after, and I still didn't see it. It was like the whole college campus was ignoring this historic option that the Democratic Party was about to face. Are they gonna have a Black person to run for president? Or are they gonna have a woman run for president? Whichever way it went, it was gonna be historic, and you wouldn't have known it. Right? And I think—no—more than I think. I know that as significant to me as changing the narrative of the Andy Goodman myth narrative, the fact that Queens College students just wouldn't be out, or even if they had feelings, were not saying them publicly. Was this like the McCarthy period where you could be for somebody, but you wouldn't dare let it be known publicly? The fact that that stuff wasn't public just blew my mind. And I said to myself, \"Maybe, maybe I gotta make this happen. Maybe that could make a difference if there's an archive in the archive, brings forward the discussion about the civil rights movement. Maybe that will get people to talk more openly about the options that the Democratic Party was making the start.\" So that was a big thing to walk around that campus on that day and on a couple of days, right after that, not see any political symbols.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4395.0,4541.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Wow. Oh, I'm not on mute. Great. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, I have a follow up question to that. I also had a follow up question to—which I feel like we might have to save it for a third interview because like, they can be very long responses but like immediately—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4541.0,4560.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: [laughs]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4560.0,4560.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/53","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: —responding to—'cause like the first thing I'm thinking about is, in regards to Queens College and the usage of its own past there seem to be the, the political reasons why they use certain parts of the collection and like political reasons, or just attitudes towards a particular apathy. And then the other thing I'm thinking about is the change over time on campus with students. And maybe how that population change affects their political involvement into the rest of, society, right? Like with the Queens College students, it's still heavily a commuter campus, but it's just, it's just very different. So I mean, with your experience, I'm wondering, why do you—what reasons do you think it is the way it is?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4560.0,4628.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/54","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Good question. I have several hypotheses or guesses as to why, but I have no data. I'm not a historian.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4628.0,4645.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/55","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Well, yeah. So with oral history, it's from your personal experience. Go ahead.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4645.0,4649.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/56","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right. First of all, City College, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College are all commuter campuses. Right? So is Queens. So the explanation that it's a commuter campus, doesn't tell a full story. I mean, City College for years has a history of being an out there, upfront, politically active campus. I gave a talk down at Hunter College. During the period I was doing these talks and boy, every club, every activity group had flyers around and people were wearing buttons. The students were more politically active in public kinds of ways, from an outsider who's just there for —didn't have a big wide open campus. It's campus in Midtown is more a vertical campus. So that there's a collectivity to riding up and down those elevators or the stairs or something about that. The City College campus—Brooklyn campus, I'm not sure, but—so, so they're all commuter colleges and I don't know whether that fully explains it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4649.0,4745.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/57","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I think, earlier times at Queens College, when I went there, most of the students were not immigrants, but were second generation, right? So all my friends, their parents had been immigrants, but they were they were going to college doing school's things, and they were the ones who were about to enter the middle class. And there's a whole thing that's in lots of the literature about second generation. Have they disowned some of the backgrounds or culture of immigrants? And I think that was true at Queens at that time. Plus what I said when we spoke last time about the influence of the McCarthy period. That was was paramount at Queens. I think the right wing attacks at Queens College students was just awesome and had many years effect.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4745.0,4825.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/58","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I think—again, this is my opinion—the factor that existed back then at Queens College, is that Queens College has two large groups that contribute to its diversity, but then cause a problem. Many of the Jews who are on campus are Orthodox Jews. They may not be the old fashioned hat-wearing Orthodox Jews, but they're very Orthodox that come from Orthodox communities. And there's a large Orthodox Muslim population on the Queens College campus. So when I came back and I was looking to bring my materials to the archive—and again, I used this symbolically—I would see women with their heads covered, and I would see men with yarmulkes. I would see women wearing wigs and, and dressed conservatively. And I would see Muslim women with head coverings, including the ones with just a very narrow opening. And it was politically as, as equally possible for them to be really hostile, go to war with each other around the issues of Palestine and relations between Jews and Muslims. And I think—and an organization was started called CERRU [Center for Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Understanding] which in many ways is a wonderful organization, that basically said, \"Look, guys, you gotta find ways to get together. Let's find ways to be nice to each other.\" But it kept politics out of, out of the way. It's sort of like when you go home for Thanksgiving, you didn't talk about Trump. Well, it's like when you come to Queens College, you didn't talk about Obama or Hillary. (And I think that that was—can you hold on one second? I have a call coming in.) The fact that you could have people from 40 language groups coming to one college and being there and it being diverse, rather than make it more exciting and more sharing, it could almost have the opposite effect. You'd have to have a culture to bring people together.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=4825.0,5002.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/59","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: As a union organizer, I walk into one hospital and I, I walked into the room where all the interns and residents were having lunch in that lounge, and people were at separate tables. And there was one table that was full of Pakistanis. One table were Sikhs wearing the big hats. And there was another table with not religious Indians. And, and here were three groups of people from the subcontinent and they didn't talk to each other. Right? And, and to do union organizing meant they were all gonna have to get together to fight the boss. And it was a huge job to say \"Leave your shit at home.\" Right? We, we, ain't gonna fight the Pakistani Indian border issues here. 'Cause you know, the one who gets away with something is the boss. And I don't know—so, so that at a place like the Queens College campus, what people look for very often is not points of commonality, but points of safety, right? Were all the Queens College students willing to—and, and faculty and administration, were they willing to jump up in the air and fight and defend the undocumented? Well, they made some compromises that helps the undocumented people get through. And they've done some nice things for the College, but there are people who don't want to do anything, and they won't do anything. That administration hasn't done anything politically that would jeopardize—it's—there's not a one-on-one conclusion that comes out of having a place as diversified as Queens College. It could create just the opposite. Anyway, moving forward.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=5002.0,5135.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/60","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: So yeah, that was in regards to the political engagements of the students. And I think the last question I'll ask for this part—'cause it seems like once I review the interview, I probably will have more questions—is the initial question that I kinda stumbled or like mire through is in regards to the College's historical usage of the past. Like you've kind of ran through a litany of how like the history has been used as this point. And I guess what I wanna ask is when we were talking offline, we were talking about Queens College and it's position within Queens. So I guess how do you hope that that changes moving forward?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=5135.0,5211.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/61","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Well, I think SEEK is the best model for quality education, anywhere in the College. Some people are copying and stealing without crediting SEEK for having developed them. SEEK has always found its own narrative and history as important to its students. I think the SEEK students see that history as important to them and valuable to them. Very many of the SEEK students are going to Queens College as the first in their family to go to college. Many of the students are experiencing more Black and third world faculty because of the history of the struggle in Queens College. And they're being told that and the way the courses are structured and the way Norka [Blackman-Richards] particularly set up all these activities and, and almost forces or encourages or assigns students to get involved in SEEK activities. Almost everybody has to be in some club or student government or something or something, or do—volunteer to do service. Whereas that's built into the part of the SEEK community. That leads people being educated in that kind of way to a sense of empowerment and commitment. And, I jumped into ask—answer a question at the panel yesterday that Norka asked. The motto of the SEEK program is, I may get it backwards, but it's \"Learn to struggle. Struggle to learn\" or \"Struggle to learn. Learn to struggle.\" Whereas Queens College's motto in, in Latin is \"We learn in order to serve.\" Okay. The idea of service is a better idea than we learn to have big ideas or we learn to get rich ourselves. So the Queens College tradition of community service, go out to be a mayor, or this or that, those are good, good ideas. But they, they really leave out the idea of \"struggle.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=5211.0,5406.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/62","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Hey, you're student at the City University because somebody a hundred years ago kicked ass to start a free university. Your tuition has all sorts of grants to it because students fought for many years and certain elements of the community fought for many years for there to be no tuition. There was zero tuition until I think 1975. And then there were Pell grants and other kind of grants that kept it minimal for people eligible to those grants. So that the fact that you're even here or that the university here is not just \"service,\" but it grows out of \"struggle.\" Right? And, and the SEEK program, by doing their archive—actually their archive—I don't want to—I'm not talking about me, but I made their archive happen. Right? I brought my stuff in and says, \"This is what happened in the South. In 1964, this other struggle that I've seen that changed my life and influenced me and did good things was the SEEK program. You gotta interview SEEK, you gotta interview SEEK. It's gotta be part of archives.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=5406.0,5487.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/63","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: I identified [William] Modest and Norka [Blackman-Richards] and all these other people, and I knew which file cabinets and where upstairs stuff was hidden away. I kept pushing and pushing, which doesn't mean I made it happen. Right? And somebody else made it happen. Right? And Norka finally said \"yes.\" And Annie said \"yes.\" They found you so that you could actually make it happen. You guys made it happen. But bringing my archive in about civil rights in the sixties, about student activism into the seventies, then became the point where we could kick down the door and say, let's continue to preserve the history of people of color at Queens College, of the quality education, and the SEEK program at Queens College. So I think the two events are connected. And in fact, the spirit of the archive has been adopted by SEEK in a little bit, in a few corners of the Education Department. But I don't think it's touched a lot of the rest of the College, but it really has touched SEEK.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=5487.0,5576.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/64","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. And, those are really excellent points in like how SEEK like shares this history of the students, and like, as you mentioned, there have been multiple—SEEK, SEEK students have become like, presidents of, of the student body. And like we have Khalil Anderson who is now an assemblyman. And he credits some of his influences as like people that were part of SEEK that—I mean, he seemed like he was very ambitious to get into politics to begin with, but like, it was encouraged.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=5576.0,5613.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/65","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Mark Levy: Right. And, and I think Annie would have the data, but I would guess that SEEK students use the civil rights archive and the archive in general, probably more systematically than any other group of students on the campus, both individually in terms of their own research. I know SEEK has regular classes that come to the archive and those are new innovations and not so much that the fact that, this white guy's materials and pictures are the reason they should come, but it makes the library appeal a little more purposeful and friendly, so that Annie and other people in the SEEK program are able to say, \"Go to learn how to use research tools in the library, because A) you can look up SEEK's history, B) you could look up about the Virginia project, C) you could look up about Freedom Summer,\" et cetera, et cetera. So I think even academically, the archives have really been useful to bring students into the library and into the archives to do that kinda research.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=5613.0,5706.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727/transcript/40646/annotation/66","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Obden Mondesir: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, a really good form of, of outreach and, and, and usage of the collection, which, is like, I think a wonderful continuation. But okay. Thank you. I mean, I think we should at this moment we pause for now, let me.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/82505/file/170727#t=5706.0,5730.4"}]}]}]}