NIBS STROUPE

A Lifetime of Friendship; My First New York Experience

by David Billings

Nibs Stroupe has been a friend of mine since we were both in fourth grade and we've remained friends over the years. In 1962, he learned from his minister at First Presbyterian Church in Helena, Arkansas, about a summer program that was happening at a Presbyterian church in New York City. The minister thought Nibs should

look into it, and possibly apply for it. The dates kind of get away from me, the exact

dates now, because it could have been '63. But anyway, Nibs said, “I think we should look into it further and maybe we will be chosen.”

This church, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, is still in Brooklyn and still

very active, as I understand it. I haven't kept up with it's been 62 or 60 years ago now,

They were a very well-endowed church. It was the Underwood typewriter family church.

And Mary Ann Moore, the poet, was a member there, and other people who were quite

famous and that we would come to know about, if not know. They were endowed

enough financially to interview each of us; their intent was to hire two people from each

state in the United States. So there’d be a staff of about 100. Nibs and I did apply and

we both interviewed not together, but separately. We were even called back for a

second interview, and we were chosen.

New York City has always had this hold on me, because my Aunt Peggy who by

1962 was employed by the Women's Division of the United Methodist Church. She had been a missionary in Korea and had returned to the United States and gotten a job with the Women's Division in New York. So it was a big desire of mine to live in New York

City, at least to visit New York City. So when I was asked to become a part of the

summer staff, along with Nibs, we agreed to do so. It was another turning point in my

life.

I had never been to New York, and I felt that your experience, your first

experience in New York City, is kind of how you think about New York the rest of your

life. If your first visit is positive, if you had a good time there or had a good experience

there, then you seem to love it for life. And the opposite was often true: if your first

experience was not good, then you hated it or didn't like it. And of course, my first

experience was very positive.

Working at LAPC was the first integrated setting, racially speaking, that I had ever been a part of. I was inclined in that way, but I had no experience growing up in McComb and then in Helena, Arkansas. Very segregated environments in both cases: In Mississippi, segregation was strictly enforced by law as well as custom. And in

Helena, it was not as overt as Mississippi, but segregation still predominated in every facet of life. So going to Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, in the Fort Greene area – was the first integrated experience of my life.

In my application I had put down that I was an athlete, which was true, but when that is just stated so as I did on my interview, it possibly sounded like more than it actually was. Although I was a good athlete, and I went out for many sports, as was the custom among males in Helena., I played all the sports, but I was particularly drawn to baseball and I had a love for the game and its history.

So when I arrived to be a part of the summer program, my memory is that they

handed me a bat and ball and pointed me towards Fort Greene Park, which was just a

few blocks from the church. And I was told to go there. And I did. And for the first day or

two, I just sat on a table - one of those concrete tables that are a part of the park

systems in New York with places to sit around it. And I just sat there with the bat and

ball. Eventually, someone came up, a youngster, not much younger than me, but about

my age, and asked what I was going to do with the bat and ball. And I said, I don't know, let's see what happens. Something to that effect. And pretty soon, there were 30, 40 kids around there because back then, you know, baseball is an expensive sport. It's not like a basketball that you pretty well play as long as there's a hoop around. Baseball involves bats and balls and gloves and in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area where Fort Greene was kids didn't have all that equipment necessarily. Eventually, we had quite a group there, more than enough to occupy us playing games and that sort of thing. But it was always an educational process. Not only was racial integration new to me. But so was just the whole experience of being around kids who didn't have much, material things. They didn't have baseball bats and gloves and stuff. So I began to find at least enough to get games going.

I remember conversations with a couple of people there whose said, you know, it

wasn't long ago that you couldn't even be in this park because they were gang infested.

I knew enough to know something about what gangs were. So we'd talk about that for a while, and then I’d ask, well, why aren't they still here? And they said, "Oh, they're still

here, but they're no longer in gangs." And I said, "Why not?" And whoever was telling

me this story, said, and I remember it as being a teenage girl, said, "Oh, because of

continental clothes." And I said, "What do you mean continental clothes?" She said,

"Well, when members, those who might be a part of gangs, began to dress in certain

ways and wear certain types of clothes (which she called continental clothes), since you

didn't want to fight, you didn't want to get your clothes messed up. So you began to take

on another way of life.” I always remembered that, I don't know how much that's true.

That's just what she said. That was her interpretation.

I was organizing those young people into groups, and I was also naive enough to

have no sense of boundaries. So I would get 40 or 50 kids over the course of the

summer, and I’d say, well, let's go into New York. We'll get the subway and we'll go to this place and that. Some of the kids had never been into Manhattan. We'd pile into the subway and would go in there. and I'd never think about that it was problematic. When later I would tell this story, people would say, you went on the subway with 50 kids, just yourself, meaning, you know, how do you make sure that you all got back and you didn't lose anyone or get separated from each other. But I never really thought about it. And because of that, I guess we were sort of divinely protected, because nothing did happen.

But that summer in New York, I would go to Greenwich Village. Dylan wasn't still playing in the park, but if he wasn't, he’d just left because this was 62 and you were

hearing about folk singers and you were experiencing things. That’s also the first protest

that I was involved in. What struck me about the protest was that there was someone on

a soapbox railing against some injustice, usually involving the police or something that

had happened. I wasn't used to people talking in such incendiary tones. But these guys were. And I was worried because I thought something was going to happen because it sounded to me like that's what he was calling for. But in the midst of the protests, there would be someone working the crowd, so to speak. selling Cho Cho bars, those little ice cream on a stick things that had vanilla ice cream with chocolate coating, right in the midst of it. I always remembered that the rhetoric, the rhetorical excess, as I learned to call it, wasn't always going to lead to something. Sometimes it did over the years, but when I first heard it, I thought it was going to be immediate and that the police were going to come. But it had a lot lighter side to it, almost comical side to it. I was fascinated by that.

Ole Miss Experiences

Ole Miss football was something that I had grown up with; I was deeply

connected to the story of Ole Miss Football and the era that I grew up in corresponded

to the zenith of the Ole Miss football tradition. My dad was a real loyal fan of Ole Miss,

and I went to school there later after graduating high school. Never really considered

going anywhere else. It was like Ole Miss was the only university, even though Ken

Hatfield, as I said, lived across the street from me, and he was a big star at the

University of Arkansas. There still was never any doubt that I was going to go to Ole

Miss, and I did. It just seemed like the thing to do. It was a combination of Ole Miss only

80 miles from Helena, and I had a girlfriend in high school so I was driving back and

forth on the weekends, just about every weekend. I didn't make a lot of friends those first couple of years in school, because you've got to kind of be at the school, live at the school, particularly on weekends, to get immersed in the totality of the college experience.

At Ole Miss they still hazed incoming freshman boys, and you had to have your

hair cut off, and it wasn't smoothly cut. It was just kind of yanked out with barber

scissors and an electric razor. So I was very conscious around my looks, and had a sort of inferiority complex. So looking at myself in the mirror, with my hair yanked out in splotches. I was just too embarrassed to go outside the dorm until it grew out some. The good part of it was that I just stayed in and studied, did my lessons. Someone had said to me in an early class at Ole Miss that the way to make good grades is to take good notes and then translate your notes into prose and then memorize, in effect, what the professor said to you and feed it back to the professor on the test. It was always an easy A. He would think you were brilliant. It wasn't so much that as that in my case, I memorized well, and I had these notes that were superior, and so on the test, I would repeat back to the professor the answers to the questions he raised, and I'd get good grades. I remember the first time, because I was a good student in high school, but I wasn't a great student. I wasn't Nibs Stroupe or someone at the very top, but I was in the top third of the high school class, which was small. When the first test came and the grades were posted on a certain place and at the school, you'd go check your grades. And I got A's all across, and it was just a tremendous feeling, seeing all of those A's attached to my name. So I was driven then to make As to make good grades. I was also an athlete and so I was socialized in that circle that was thought to be the leading students.

I had a professor at Ole Miss, who was a professor of political science, and his

name was Gobertan Begat. He was Indian. He had been on the United Nations

delegation from India from whatever part of India he was from, and he was a part of the

Indian delegation of the United States. But, of course, when I met him, he was teaching

political science at Ole Miss.

One of my aims beyond living in New York was to go to an Ivy League college for

graduate school. I felt that my education at Ole Miss, although I got a lot out of it,

learned a lot, I had some good teachers, or who I thought were good teachers was

really not as good as Northern schools. I felt like the only way I could prove myself was

if I got accepted to an Ivy League school for graduate school. And so Dr. Begat said,

"Well, you can't make any more B’s here if you're going to go to graduate school in the

Ivy League." My image was always Yale. I wanted to go to Yale. I felt like Harvard was

probably out of the question; I had no basis for thinking like that. It's just somehow I'd

picked up. But I felt like Yale was just as good and maybe I could get to Yale. And so I

just dove into the academics, which, you know, later would prove to be very beneficial to

me, but it certainly limited my college experience.

On the campus at Ole Miss, there was a small group of what were thought of as

activists or liberals now. It was a small group of us, and eventually you would find each

other. And I started hanging out with them and we became what passed for activists.

The whole country was in a stage of upheaval, of social change, of just disorientation.

Ole Miss had its own version of that, although it was nothing compared to many

schools. Ole Miss was still trying to live out its image of being not just a conservative

university - violently conservative because of the riots that had gone on after James

Meredith had been admitted to Ole Miss in 1964, and the National Guard had to be

called up to allow his entrance into the school. The governor of the state had vowed to

resist and keep James Meredith from entering although he knew that eventually he had

to give in to Federal authority. Much later you would hear tapes of his saying to the

attorney general, who was Bobby Kennedy, that he had to be forced by the authorities

to finally succumb and allow James Meredith to enter Ole Miss. They mapped out a way

in which he would stand in the schoolhouse door, so to speak, and model George

Wallace, the governor of Alabama, in refusing to allow James Meredith to enter school.

But at the point of bayonets and rifles.

Ole Miss campus, although Meredith had just left, had the atmosphere that I

grew up in. There was just a heightened form from what I grew up in.