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  • HL_HIST340-574_Padilla_Johnson_2022-04-01_transcript

Johnson 1 Interviewee: Kirk Johnson Interviewer: Jubilee Padilla Interview Date: April 1, 2022 Location: North Carolina & California -Via Zoom Call Length: 01:09:50 START OF INTERVIEW JP: It is April 1st, 2022. I am here with Kirk Johnson, and we are interviewing. Are you aware that you are being recorded and are you okay with being recorded? KJ: Yes, I am. That’s fine. JP: So, I understand that you moved to Asheville in the 60s? KJ: Yes. JP: Yeah, so what was that like? Was it different? Where did you move from? KJ: Yeah, it was quite different actually. I had always had contacts in Asheville because of my father. My grandparents were there before my father moved to Georgia. It was an older Southern city Augusta, Georgia. I had grown up there basically until I was fifteen. We moved to Asheville for my father’s job. So, we were there only about a few weeks when the tenth grade started for me. I was fifteen. That was 1969, August ‘69. It was within the first month of school I think that, well it was kind of a mess actually to be honest with you. There’s a lot of things I didn’t know at the time I can process and talk about them hindsight 20/20. The background with schools and integration situation at the time of course was in flux. Where I came from in Augusta, we had what was known as freedom of choice for residents who were deciding where to send their kid to school. That meant that there was sort of a natural integration if you will. I mean there were black kids at my school it wasn’t totally segregated. Which people usually assume. There were majorities. I mean coming from Georgia’s past there were, schools were largely black or white but they were not exclusively so. There were white kids at the black school and vice versa. I wasn’t expecting the stuff that happened in Asheville honestly. All of my family as far as I know is from the mountains from Appalachia, East Kentucky, South West Virginia, East Tennessee. Now western North Carolina. Having a, I guess even if I was an adult, I wouldn’t necessarily expect the things that happened. Because I think Asheville, Augusta had a population of about seventy, sixty-five or seventy percent black. It was kind of just the opposite in Asheville. I think the, I don’t know if I’m getting to far ahead myself now? No? I was the new guy, I didn’t know anybody really except for my family. I just had the blinders on trying to make the best grades I could. That was my only coping mechanism really. It was a little bit strained because, well that’s an understatement. It was very uncomfortable because I found that between the classes pretty much everyday people would ask for money as I went down the hallway. I wasn’t some rich guy. I don’t know why they, it was like spare change. I don’t know you probably don’t go back that far but that used to be a big deal. Not just with hippies but people in general they were just trying to bum change for this or that. Which was, it was uncomfortable because I, it’s like I didn’t get any break. I had to start learning to avoid eye contact and just Johnson 2 shaking my head and getting past people. What I didn’t know at the time was that Stephens-Lee had been closed by court order basically or by the city’s ordinances. To facilitate integration. JP: I’m sorry. I think my phone went off. I’m sorry. KJ: Oh okay. That mean that all the kids that went to Stephens-Lee were all of a sudden shorted their traditions. Whether that was sports or their motto, or their teachers, all that. They were put in with Lee-Edwards. Which became Asheville High when I got there. I didn’t know about all of these grievances. I just kind of was a fifteen-year-old kind of wondering what on Earth? Because they were—it was kind of chaotic like I was saying, in the hallways at times. Not what I was used to. There wasn’t a whole lot of real discipline or order. When the week came around of the riot what I recall is that there were sit-ins out on the front steps of the high school. Everybody was kind of, well not everybody, but I was kind of scratching my head kind of wondering what was going on. I knew there was protest. I knew there was protest about changing the name of the school and about the name of the mascot of the school. Those sort of things. The whole big picture background, I didn’t realize that it was court ordered desegregation that was driving the train with busing and all of that. There was a lot, it wasn’t uncommon in that decade for there to be a lot of protests. Of course, they were a lot more peaceful then what they call protests now. They weren’t burning. Nobody is burning businesses, at least in our part of the country in Appalachia. It was kind of, yeah it was a big switch. I hadn’t seen anything like that before. JP: So, you just sort of felt the tension when you moved to Asheville? In the high school you felt it? KJ: I felt it at the school. I didn’t feel it anywhere else. Dad worked downtown and I’d gotten a job downtown. Part time job so I was, I didn’t really experience any kind of uncomfortable situations really. Except for at the school. I guess the tension there had to do with I think, I was a little intimidated honestly because Black guys would be lining the hallway. Where I’d be on my way to class. They’d want me to you know give them a quarter or something this or that. I’m not trying to, I don’t disparage them. Maybe there’s something wrong with me that I remember this as being a source of tension. But it just kind of, it was annoying is what I was thinking. Anyway, I was getting to know one or two people there and thought maybe it’s just because I’m new or I don’t know anybody that this seems so extreme. It’s not something that wouldn’t have happened downtown right there regardless of race. There was panhandlers there then just like they are now. My boss had good advice for me that I learned that year. He said, “If they ever ask me for money, I will take them to the store. I will take them to a restaurant, I’ll buy them a meal. But I’ll never give them money.” That became my approach to life. Although at the time I wasn’t thinking about all those things. I just knew I didn’t have much. I might have fifty cents in my pocket. Somebody asking me for money was kind of strange. JP: So you only sensed a bit of racial tension in the high school never..? KJ: In high school yeah. It wasn’t like in town. I’m very sympathetic in the sense that I’m aware of difficulties that there were. Segregation, the town was segregated pretty much according to where people lived. I don’t think it was necessarily by law or anything. It just kind of the way the economy had worked out and whoever was, it’s hard to know whether its people preferences Johnson 3 sometimes. There’s always accusations that it was a systemic thing. Usually I don’t know it’s a lot to inherit in the process to be born into that. You can’t ever know all of the origins of it. As a history student myself I’ve studied quite good on African American history and American history and really world history. I’ve traveled a lot. I was in the army for twenty-one years. I know the origins the slavery existed thousands of years before the Asheville riot. The Asheville high school riot. You know, there were old grievances and there were new grievances. They were all mixed together. I’ll go back to the week of the riot. We were noticing things were just getting a little tense when there was a sitting in. The administration was trying to get people to go back to their classrooms or to leave the grounds. I guess they thought there were people there that were not part of the school. Who were just kind of, I don’t know if they were organizers or if people were sympathetic, or what. I had no idea what would happen. I think it was on the fourth day maybe it was a Thursday, but I don’t know, I don’t remember exactly. They called for everyone. They had been making these statements like “You’ve got to go back to class.” Then I guess there was, I don’t know if it was an ultimatum if there was actually an ultimatum given or if they just triggered a police action where they had people come to clear the grounds of the school so that, I know that it was a distraction, but it was also a control thing. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I was actually at lunch down in the cafeteria when all the police showed up. It wasn’t just like they, I wasn’t outside, so I don’t know how the interactions were out there before this. The shocking thing was that all these police came running down the hill and chasing people it seemed like. Chasing the students and whoever else was there. There was just chaos. People were turning the tables up over in the cafeteria. Windows were broken. That was sort of, I mean everybody was in a panic. But the school, the loudspeakers were going on and they were still trying to keep control. They said, “Don’t leave school grounds without a pass from the dean” or whoever it was. I went to the dean’s office, which was a madhouse. It was like hundreds of kids trying to get into this one door. Then a guy came through from a stairwell or something. He had blood on his head. It looked like he had gotten hit by something. JP: Oh goodness. KJ: I think I saw that blood and just decided “I’m booking it! I’m getting the heck out of here!” I started running up the hill behind the high school. Low and behold there was someone I hadn’t actually seen in about ten years. She was a cheerleader there and she had grown up next to my grandparents. I knew her from childhood growing up. She was in her cheerleading outfit. Her name, Patty Anderson. We just recognized each other. Even though I think we had probably seen each other when we were eight and six. Then we were seventeen and fifteen. She said, “Patty Anderson” and she offered me a way out of there in a car. She knew somebody who had a car, and they were leaving. I thought well that sounds good to me. I took off to get away from there. I went down to see my dad, who was at his office downtown on Patton Avenue. Everybody was just kind of reeling with figuring out what had happened. The school was closed down after that. I didn’t know how long it was gonna be. To be honest I don’t know if it was, I wasn’t very good at moving. At age fifteen I left all my friends in Georgia and my social life, the familiar things, Johnson 4 except for my family. And all of sudden been plopped down in the middle of this. I was kind of like “I wanna go back to Augusta. Send me back to my best friend and I’ll go to school with him.” [Laughs] It was a kid’s solution to a more serious problem. I think they wanted me to go to interview at the private schools there in Asheville. That’s how I ended up going back to school because they didn’t know how long schools would be closed. It was getting on day by day, and I think somebody. That was becoming a thing if people could afford it. They were starting to go to private schools. JP: You left Asheville High and went to a private school? KJ: I left. That was the last time I was there until fast forward, let’s see from ’69 up until, my daughter… We moved back to Asheville in 2012. My daughter, took her over there to go to high school. I felt, I still feel badly about doing that. I thought well they’ve gotta have fixed something. It’s been, how many years is that? Forty-three years. It was a strange feeling I still had walking up there on the sidewalk and going into the building. I couldn’t recognize much anything. Honestly it was totally, very different. That was it, I just didn’t go back. JP: Do you think that, kind of rewinding a little bit, do you think that the police amplified the matter or helped with the situation in any way? KJ: It would be hard for me to judge that. It kind of looked frightening to me because I just seen that on the news for the last several years in places like Watts or Montgomery. Whether there was a, the marches that were going on at the time. I guess in a way I wasn’t surprised to see them. But I didn’t see that many and the ones I saw were kind of running like they had nightsticks out or something. It was like infantry, if I can put it in military terms. I can’t say, I didn’t see anybody cracking heads or beating people. I don’t want to make it like one of those things where I’m insinuating things that I didn’t see. I don’t want to deny it either. If they were happening, they were happening. I was focused on my lunch in the cafeteria until I noticed all that stuff. It didn’t take too long. I was probably in the school another ten or fifteen minutes just trying to get my bearings on what to do. Like all the other kids. It was real chaotic. JP: Did this riot affect you in the future? I know you didn’t go back to the school, but did it affect the way you perceived Asheville or the schools there? KJ: Yeah. It made me wonder why it had to be so different. It’s a good question. Asheville was very different, period. It’s a mountain town. Augusta’s an old south town. Its old confederate. They had all this who-ha about the confederacy there. We were republicans. We were a small minority at that time, at least my dad and family. Most everything was Dixiecrats and democrats there. But you know, I liked it there. It was home. There were ugly things that happened there. I didn’t expect that in Ashville. I’d never experienced that in Asheville. Really besides that riot, I don’t think there were a lot of things that I experienced that were even in that vein. I used to joke about moving to Asheville when I found out we were moving. For two or three or four weeks in the summer and I’d stay with my grandparents. Who were in Asheville, and then Cullowhee, and then Sylva. I loved being in the mountains. Of course, I loved being with them too. I had a couple of playmate friends, Patty Anderson, and there was a guy down in Sylva who was a friend. It’s kind of like I got to go to another world from the hot humid stifling heat from Johnson 5 Augusta, Georgia. I was kind of asthmatic, so it was a big break for me just to be in a cooler climate. In spite of all those good things I used to make fun of it just because I guess I was a knot headed teenager. Talking about it being a “hicktown.” That was what people used to, that was a big deal with those kids in Augusta. You know “you’re a hick” or “you’re country.” I kind of played it up actually. [Laughs] JP: [Laughs] KJ: I thought it was all kind of silly. But we had a lot of fun doing different things. I don’t know. I got to thinking that, “Okay Asheville is kind of a tough nut.” The school I went to wasn’t even that much easier for me in a way. Because the private school I went to almost, I mean there really weren’t all that many people from Asheville. It was like they were from Northeast or wherever. It was a more affluent more protected situation. I wasn’t used to that. I was used to being around lots of people and it was very small. I started to realize that there was, it was like these different worlds that people grew up and lived in. I didn’t seem to have any control or power over it. I think after a year or so that I was there I wanted to go back to Augusta. But I eventually got over it. JP: The private school that you went to, was it integrated? And what was the name of the school? KJ: At that time, it was called Asheville Country Day School. Now it’s Carolina Day School. It was not integrated. I think that, it was really strong in some areas and it was quite weak in others, that’s my academic reflection. I’d gone to Christ School and Asheville School to interview. Those were both completely male schools with uniforms. Asheville Country Day seemed like, maybe a little bit more realistic with the not having to wear uniforms and co-ed. JP: Yeah. KJ: I wasn’t quite ready to go to the monastery. [Laughs] JP: Yeah. [Laughs] It seems like inadvertently those events, the riot, really kind of effect your life and push you towards private school. KJ: Yeah, they did. There was a big changed because all of a sudden, the kids I was around, they had cars. The first night I had an outing I went over to these guy’s house in North Asheville. They had an engine disassembled. They were all drinking beer and working on overhauling an engine. I thought…[Laughs] We laughed about this, my friends in Augusta. Nobody would do that, none of our crowd anyway. I don’t know. You know drugs were starting to become part of the scene in Asheville too. That influenced things at my school and among my friends. The adjustments were kind of just ongoing, as far as, changes that were happening. I got to Chapel Hill. I went to Carolina when I graduated in ’72. I don’t know it just, I did get into some history courses, Southern history, Southern Folk Lore, urban history, Black American history before 1865. I started to read and study and move around a lot. I don’t know if it was really until, when I was twenty, I decided I was leaving. I always had this complex that I was being put through everything. I wanted to work to support myself. A friend of mine was at school at Stanford in California. I went out and worked down in Colorado that summer. I drove out with him, and I had some encounters there with people that were very helpful actually in getting a perspective on Johnson 6 what had happened. You know, the race relations, while they weren’t the greatest, they were good race relations. As well as the ones were more negative or caustic. I think, there’s one thing that I was trying to remember there. I might be giving you too much information because that’s what people tell me. I talk in paragraphs. JP: You’re fine. [Laughs] KJ: So what was it that I….Oh yeah! You have no idea how different this was. I had gotten into the car culture thing. I wanted to get a car when I was 16. By the time 16 was rolling around I was lusting over this Fiat Spider. A little baby blue convertible a lady was selling for $1,000. Which was a lot of money. And Dad knew that I was interested in that. But my friends wanted to… I give you too many words. Let me make a long story short here. JP: [Laughs] KJ: I went on a trip with a small group through Europe. This is right in the summer of ’71. That was about 7 weeks’ worth of really eye opening exposure to other things that were happening. One of the first things I encountered that was really enlightening for me, actually I look back and I think of it as a light bulb moment, was being in the hotel we were at this hotel in London, and we had only been there a couple days. There were some workmen trying to negotiate this big furniture down narrow stairs. They were kind of laughing and joking. Of course, I was tripping on the British accents thinking, “This place, I could just sit around and leave my ears open, and I’m entertained.” One of the guys was Black. I think I had never heard a Black person with a British accent. They were getting along just seamlessly. I thought, “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be.” I guess I kind of feel a little emotional about it. It’s not like, for once I had a really bad impression on what race relations could be, and that was because of the riot. But over time I had these other experiences. I don’t know if they were healing, but they were helpful in making me see where either my own conditioning or the environment that I’d been in was not adding up. JP: It was like for you the riot was the worst of the worst with race relations? KJ: Up until that time. Up until that time I’d say so. Without me being personally injured it was like an accident where you break bones. Yeah, it was just a big question mark. There were a lot of things that were a question marks then. Overtime, visiting the concentration camp in Germany, Dachau, this and East Berlin, it was a whole slew of things that just kind of. It took me years to process these things. I came back and I didn’t know how to tell anybody about what had happened. It was like everything was like that riot. There were demonstrations in Berlin when I was there of Kurdish communists. I had never seen anything like that. It was just, “What is that? What is that all about?” There were so many things that I didn’t know. Sort of like discovering the bottomless pit of things you don’t know. So, I didn’t know that. I kind of didn’t know much about the riots to be honest, except for what I’ve experienced. Until later I was reading more detail about what led up to it. Of course, in my hometown, in Augusta, Georgia, they had a large-scale riot about a year later where a big portion of the city was burned. It wasn’t just a high school riot it was more like a massive… The way it was explained was that people were torching Johnson 7 their houses in the worst part of town, because the landlords were slum lords and just took their money and didn’t help keep the place up. They felt exploited. It was primarily Black. [Break] KJ: Okay Jubilee. I just thought of something. I would like to correct what I said. I did notice the Black people that I worked with or had interaction with, there were some that were very much on a healthy friendly basis. Not that much because I guess it was pretty segregated in Augusta. There’s a couple of guys in my class who were excellent students. They were always in the front, sitting in the front of the class. They worked harder than anyone to make their grades. Very neat, well disciplined, and all that. There were a couple of guys that I knew that would just hang out. You know the guys circle when you’re in recess talking. And we had, you know James Brown is from Augusta. It’s not like you could just ignore. We were dancing, having parties, and stuff. It was a good scene in a lot of ways. Actually, I think after some years when I went out West with my friend from Stanford I was in situations where I realized I wasn’t comfortable in a social situation with blacks. It was people I didn’t know. A girlfriend asked me to go to this party and it wasn’t even a big deal. It was like a dozen people. I was just really uncomfortable. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just me. JP: Do you think it was trauma maybe from the riot? KJ: Well, I didn’t know if it was how, maybe they were looking at me funny. When you go out to other parts of the country or even the world and you’re speaking with a Southern accent and you’re white, there’s just a lot of triggers. People got a big vocabulary that describes a generalization you may or may not fit in to. I didn’t think myself as a racist or anything. One of the older guys, nice guy. He was an older Black guy. He asked me to go sit with him and talk one on one somewhere. Looking back in a way it seemed like a, being sure I was set straight about some things. Actually, I’m glad we had that conversation. I’m really glad we did. I’m not sure I would’ve even stopped to think, “Why am I uncomfortable here?” You got to get beneath the surface. It was one of those things that made me, I don’t know, things in life sometimes you look back and it gives you a little different perspective. I don’t know if I was uncomfortable because of the riot. I really can’t say that. I was starting to enjoy things that were more typically multi-cultural. Where I’d kind of got off into the white kid rock’n’roll thing. I started to get interested in blues. I’m putting this in terms of music because that was important to me. Jazz and going to hear a lot of different musicians. Kind of getting more culture. JP: Yeah. KJ: I don’t know, I found myself enjoying life. Life it’s too good to enjoy to waste and worry about stuff. I don’t know that’s probably a really messy answer to your question. [Laughs] JP: It’s okay. [Laughs] Did you know what was going to happen that day? It really seems like it was a turning point for you. KJ: No, I didn’t know. If somebody had said, “Okay there’s an ultimatum and people are going to have to leave.” I wasn’t in the, I didn’t get the memo. I was more interested in joking around with the one friend I had there. You know, Asheville is so different. I’m just remembering now. Johnson 8 You’re making me remember. They had a smoking area at the high school. [Laughs] You go out there in between breaks and kids would be out there smoking. I was like, “God man, this is wild!” They would’ve suspended us or expelled us in Augusta for smoking cigarettes. [Laughs] Asheville was different. Asheville’s always been different, I guess. How did I get off on that tangent? JP: [Laughs] Was it scary? How did it feel that day of the riot? KJ: That’s a good question, I guess. I don’t know. If I say scared that sounds like that’s not quite true. Panicky. It was a combination of feelings. Bewilderment probably is maybe the best thing to say. I didn’t know whether I should be afraid, or I should be obedient under the authorities, or just rely on my instincts. Which is what I ended up doing. You don’t have any precedent or template for processing or coping with something like that. You just have to find out. You don’t have any choice but to find out. You’re in the middle of it. I realized it could’ve been a lot worse. I think in time I started to see it could’ve been, there was some problems that day at the South French Broad School, I think. Then there were issues later. My sister went to Asheville High. They were younger. There were some issues but, it was more people trying to preserve their integrity of their communities. The Black community had been separated for generations in general in Asheville. It was within their right to want to keep that sort of integrity of their relationships. While mingling more and interacting more with non-blacks. Same with whites. I know that to this day my sisters kind of roll their eyes when they say they’re having a reunion, because they actually have two reunions. JP: Really? That’s interesting. KJ: There’s usually a reunion for the Blacks. Then there’s one that’s supposed to be for everyone. Who attends them? I don’t know. I just kind of wave it off. My school is so small I don’t think we’ll have any reunion. They later became integrated. They had more students of color. They expanded. At the time the only distinctions there were class. I wasn’t in the affluent class. My dad could afford to pay for my tuition. You have a kid going to school with the Cecil’s kids. You know who I’m talking about right? JP: Yeah. KJ: And all these people from Biltmore Forest and I was like, “Man what am I doing here?” JP: There weren’t those class differences at Asheville High? Or not as much? KJ: Maybe there were. But when there are so many kids and there’s so much going on you don’t really care so much. You kind of go with who you get along with. Actually, the friend I got along with had been at Country Day before. He was from Biltmore Forest, one of the families. Do you know the Seely Castle in Asheville, the Overlook Castle that’s up on Beaucatcher Mountain? JP: I don’t think so. KJ: Anyway, their family had been Seely’s in Asheville history, I didn’t know that until later. We connected because of our sense of humor. Things like that kind of illuminate class or race. Johnson 9 JP: What year did your sisters go to school? KJ: They would’ve been, high school I graduated in ’72. One of them graduated in ’76 and the other one graduated in ’77. They were four and five years behind me. That means they would’ve gone in maybe ’74-’76, ’75-’77. JP: I just thought it was so interesting that they have two reunions even into the mid ‘70s. KJ: That’s what I hear. I kind of see that every once in a while. I don’t know if it’s still like that with the current classes. Of course, what goes on today is kind of beyond description as far as, I don’t know I’ll get into other things that aren’t on topic. It’s anti-traditional I think there now. That’s what I saw with my daughter. On a personal note, she decided she’s one of these kids that got involved with the groups that are LGBTQ etcetera. Mostly because she’s a very empathetic person. I think she’d had some friends that felt that they were victimized because they were different. The more she got in there the more she started to think that she was a boy. This is where I need to be on a couch with a psychologist. I won’t go to deep here, but my experience again with Asheville High was “This ain’t right.” There’s just… I don’t know about the leadership over there. I really don’t. Just too many things happened. I went over there to work as a test proctor as a volunteer. I just did have a good, I wished I’d put her in private school to be honest with you. Not because of race but because of academics. They were too scattered over there. JP: Yeah, I get it. Do you think that the riot had a big change in Asheville at all or nothing changed, and it stayed the same? KJ: I’d say it kind of broke some ice maybe. In some ways? JP: How so? KJ: Do you know what was going on then that was kind of related to race? That wasn’t the end of people being uprooted, like the Blacks were from Stephen’s Lee. In those days they had a program called urban renewal. Going to Country Day I used to drive from out North near Beaverdam to out South. Hendersonville Road, where the school was. Our route usually was to drive down Charlotte Street and what’s now South Charlotte Street. It used to be Valley Street. Valley Street was lined with, I don’t want to call them tenements, but just houses like I remember seeing in Augusta there were very poor Blacks. That had not gotten a paint in probably 40 or 50 years. You know a coat of paint on the house. Very close together. This urban renewal program was all about building these tenement buildings or apartment buildings. Eradicating and getting people to move into those. Destroying what was there. What had been there. I guess they bought it up from whoever owned it and just leveled it. Now it’s like a public, you’d never that it was there, driving down the street. Totally disappeared. Most of the people I think that lived there moved over to the Hill Street complex. So, I don’t know. Again, I forgot why I brought that up or what I was answering. JP: Do you think that urban renewal might’ve caused some tension? Johnson 10 KJ: Well, yes and no. Parents and providers were glad to have a better place to live, I’m sure. I don’t know that… It’s sort of like an island over there. Do you know where Hill Street is? JP: Yeah. KJ: It’s just like it’s… There’re expressways all around it. When you get there, you’ve got to go over a bridge. It’s kind of isolated and off to itself. I guess people don’t have to live there but they need a place to live. They might be living there because there isn’t much other choice. I wouldn’t say there’s something wrong with it. Compared to what they have on Valley Street it probably seemed like a good thing to a lot of people. Then on the other hand it might’ve seen like another way for the “man” to keep everybody where they wanted them. JP: Yeah. Like you said earlier another loss in tradition or community, sense of community maybe? KJ: Yeah. That could be a positive and a negative. There could be some positives there I would guess. I mean I’m not Black, so I can’t speak for them. They may have had the chance to keep their friends and maybe some of their family close by on Valley Street. Over in that area by Stephens-Lee. Then there are other people who would think, “This is B.S. I’m gonna get out of this.” People do move on. People change and places change. How much? I guess that’s an ongoing story. JP: Does what happened in 1969 effect you today and continue to affect your life? KJ: I guess in some ways. I was really actually glad that you were gonna have this interview. I have brought it up before to people wanting to talk about it in Asheville. My contemporaries. They weren’t there. They were at private schools. They kind of look at me funny. Like, “Now what are you talking about.” I experienced something they didn’t. Today it’s more of a, it’s like a political litmus test, everything you say. Or whatever word you use. I’m thinking of a particular instance where I saw a couple people I knew from childhood. I didn’t really know them well. We’re sitting having a beer downtown. Something got me to bring that up. Their eyes got real big and smiled. I think they were a little bothered about where I went with it. It wasn’t just some kind of happy political talk. It was more like people are still unpacking it you know? JP: Yeah. Are there any stories about Asheville, that day, or anything that you’d like to share? KJ: Oh, Asheville. Things I’d like to share. That’s a very generous offer. JP: [Laughs] KJ: I was wondering what I might talk about today when we were doing this. I have so many memories. I’d be like a “pig in the poke” as they say. JP: Do you have one that stands out? KJ: Hmm. I don’t want to put it in terms of race. That’s what I’m struggling with here. I keep thinking I gotta come around back to some theme. Asheville was a fun place for me when I was a kid. It really was. It became fun. Like I was saying I worked downtown at a part time job. I was used to dealing with the public. My dad was in retailing. We had these stores that were Johnson 11 associated with the old army store that used to be downtown on Patton Avenue, Sky City. Are you from the area? Where are you from? I don’t know if you’d be familiar with Sky City that’s why I say it. JP: I’m currently up in Cullowhee, but I’m in Asheville all the time. KJ: Before Walmart took over everything, it was one of these discount chains. I don’t know I was used to seeing and being around a lot of different folks and attitudes. Downtown was really great then. There was not Asheville mall. Everything was downtown. I was a big fan of Little Joe Brown, who was a popular disk jockey. He was just about a block away from the army store. I’d go down on Saturday mornings. He’s let me come in and sit in the studio while he was doing his show. Pop Music. He’d be playing records. It was actually in Asheville I got to hear James Brown for the first time, live. That was exciting. That was just about a month after the riots too. It was that same time frame. It was exciting. I’ve got a lot of memories. Going back to grandparents. My first marriage, which didn’t work out. My first job. Working in the retail management program with Woolworth. JP: How did your grandparents and your dad feel about the riot? KJ: They didn’t talk about it a whole lot with me. I knew they were concerned. They’re fairly reserved. They weren’t swearing or punching the wall, or out of control about it. For an adult at that time, it wasn’t like they couldn’t have expected some kind of trouble. So many things were changing in a wholesale way. They were just making these decisions that… I’ve been on both sides of something hard. I always assumed they were basically part of the establishment. I didn’t think about them as individuals that might have their nuanced ideas about what was going on. I try to give them more credit as time goes by. I realize that things are not always black and white. They didn’t like it that everybody was having this upheaval. It was like education was being left in the dust because that’s why I was supposed to be at school. Not to solve the problems of the world. I don’t know, they grew up so different. My grandparents and my father, their environment was way different than mine growing up. Dad grew up in the ‘30s. My grandparents were in the teens, background World War I. Circumstances economically, socially, and demographically was very different from mine. JP: Speaking of wars, do you think the Vietnam War had any effect on Asheville? KJ: Sure. When you’re growing up and you’re a teenager and every evening seems to be like numbers of bodies being reported, either dead or killed, it’s a downer. Sort of like looking at all the trash. People litter freely didn’t care. It’s like a careless time. I didn’t know what the war was about, honestly. I knew that I was supposed to be going into the service because there was a draft. At some point I was going to be of draft age. So yeah. After I was working downtown, I worked in a hosiery mill, a textile mill out in West Asheville in the summers. I was working with some vets who would come back who were negatively affected by what had happened. I started to realize how wrong some things must be that are going on over there. One guy showed me these tattoos on his hand between his thumb and his forefinger. Just little marks. He said that each one of those was for a capital crime that you had committed while you were there. Johnson 12 JP: Wow. KJ: It was like a mark of pride. Whether it was killing someone, murder, rape, or I don’t know. It’s kind of hard. It made him permanently seem damaged in my mind. I went through the whole draft period on auto pilot. I was in the lottery. The year that I became eligible they started a lottery and that’s how they drafted people. If you had a high enough lottery number, you’d be inducted. My first year I was 65. Then the second year I was 45. Then the third year I was 45? 45, 65, 45 that’s how it went. My chances of being inducted were going up with each year. Then they decided to pull out of Vietnam. So, the thing passed. Things were affected in Asheville because the counterculture kind of got into the woodwork. Started coming out of the woodwork. It was a time, fashions changed. A lot of Blacks wearing afros. A lot of white people we getting long hair. There’s a real generation gap-issue. Somehow, I tried to live in the middle of that, not rally to extreme one way or the other. Some kids at my school were real conservative and eschewed all of that. Then there were other one who were just the opposite who were gung-ho about every thrill that came down the sidewalk. I think some of that at least was in being contemporary with the Vietnam War you couldn’t say they were unrelated. JP: Yeah. KJ: Some things that were accepted by the G.I.s that came back, certainly not all of them. Some of them that came back, if they hadn’t had drugs or these other ways of getting through their situation, they didn’t know how to cope. Then they came back, and they had problems. People who hadn’t been over there had no reference point. I understand that now from having served in the military. That you can be deployed somewhere and not know when you’re coming back to the world you know, people you love. You don’t know when it’s gonna happen. You keep telling yourself “That’s the plan to come back in one piece and get back to what I knew.” It’s kind of like it doesn’t even have a language. Then I learned. You see people, everybody was affected in some way probably by a family member, a death, or injury. Really in a way it wasn’t as ugly as what’s happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. What I saw with the G.I.’s who’d been through that, I just didn’t see those massive debilitating injuries that we have. It’s like it was much more savage in Central Asia, than in Southeast Asia. JP: It just kind of sounds like there was tension in general during the late ‘60s early ‘70s. KJ: There was yeah. Wouldn’t deny that. When I’m together with my peers from that time we’re generally remembering the things, we enjoyed. [Laughs] You’re just thinking about, “Oh wasn’t it great? You could do this and that.” [Laughs] Sort of the glory days syndrome. Everybody’s got their, had no idea what was ahead of you. Enjoying every minute of it or at least tried to. That’s the funny thing about recalling bad moments. You don’t find yourself dwelling on them a lot. You do contemplate them, and you want them to be in perspective. If there’s something to learn from them its best to go ahead and try to pull that out of it. It’s good to dwell on the things that make you happy. That you can be sure were healthy. JP: Is there anything else you would like to share with me? Johnson 13 KJ: No, I wish you well in writing your thesis. I did some graduate work in business. I was in geography as an undergrad. I always enjoyed travel and meeting people. Having conversations kind of like—I’m doing most of the talking here, but you know, getting under the surface. It’s nice of you that you could include me in this. If there’s anything else that you’d want to ask me down the road let me know. JP: I appreciate you interviewing with me. Thank you. END OF INTERVIEW

Kirk Johnson examines moving from Augusta, Georgia to Asheville, North Carolina in the late 1960s. He describes his high school experience and explains the impact the Asheville High School Riot of 1969 had on his life. He describes race relations at the high school and compares it to the downtown Asheville community, his hometown of Augusta, and Europe.

• Creator
  • Johnson, Kirk
• Contributor
  • Padilla, Jubilee
• Format
  • Sound recordings
  • Transcripts
  • Interviews
• Type
  • Sound
  • Text
• Date
  • Date: 2022-04-01
• Extent
  • Duration: 1:09:50
  • Pages: 13
• Subject - Topic
  • Asheville (N.C.)
  • Asheville (N.C.) -- Race relations
  • Demonstrations
  • High schools
  • Johnson, Kirk
  • School integration -- North Carolina -- Asheville
  • Segregation -- North Carolina -- Buncombe County
• Location
  • Buncombe County (N.C.)
  • Asheville (N.C.)
• Source institution
  • Western Carolina University
• Source Collection
  • WCU Oral History Collection - Introduction to Oral History
• Identifier
  • HL_HIST340-574_Padilla_Johnson_2022-04-01
• Repository
  • Western Carolina University Hunter Library