There Went The Neighborhood - Audio Interview: Nadia Shalaby
When: February 2, 2022
Nadia Shalaby attended Jones School from third grade through sixth grade, and then in 1964 her family moved to Birmingham, Alabama. As an Egyptian American student who lived in the North and the South during the era of school desegregation, she shares a unique perspective.
More interviews are available in the There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive.
Transcript
- [00:00:01] HEIDI MORSE: Today is February 2nd, 2022. I'm Heidi Morse an Archivist at the Ann Arbor District Library. We're speaking about Jones School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Could you please say and spell your name?
- [00:00:13] NADIA SHALABY: My name is Nadia, N-A-D-I-A. Last name is Shalaby, S-H-A-L-A-B-Y.
- [00:00:26] HEIDI MORSE: When and where did you grow up?
- [00:00:29] NADIA SHALABY: Well, I grew up between Kentucky and Ann Arbor until I was 13, and then we moved to Alabama. I had gone to Perry Elementary, and then in third grade, I switched over to Jones School. It was a shock really because my father was from Egypt and my mother is a hillbilly from Kentucky. It's hard for me to fit in. Nowadays, there's a lot of ethnic mixed people, but then I think I was the only little Egyptian girl named Nadia in the whole city. My dad was one of the first Egyptians to come to the University of Michigan, and then he went to Lansing for his PhD. All the Egyptians were young with no children except my father. It was a shock to go to third grade in Jones School because it was I'd say 98 or 97 percent Black. First week or second week I was there I got beat up by the baddest little Black girl in Jones School history. That was shocking, but I survived, and we became friends. That's my first little taste of it. Then went to fourth grade and that was okay. We didn't like our teacher, she was a very poor teacher. I was a history teacher for my career and then a safety educator. She was a very poor, poor teacher who had no classroom management skills. I can look back and see that now. Then in fifth grade, we had, I think, the best teacher I've had in my life, including college professors. Her name was Elizabeth Fox for fifth grade. She really helped me because part of the problem was my fellow students, except for Jenny, were mostly uneducated parents. I would always finish my work way ahead of time, it was way too easy for me. Of course, I acted up and got in trouble. But later I figured out when I studied education that that was the reason, I was just too bored. I'm not bragging, but I was smarter than everybody else. You can contact them, they'll tell you.
- [00:03:25] HEIDI MORSE: Go ahead.
- [00:03:27] NADIA SHALABY: Sixth grade, we had a very strict teacher, but she was very good. I learned a lot in there, she kept a type classroom, whereas Ms. Fox was more relaxed, but she was so interesting, nobody made any problem because you wanted to hear what she had to say. The sixth grade teacher used to read to us. I remember the book, she read The Pearl, and the whole class really intently listened in. I was at the time spent most my time in the library reading or checking out books, or picking the grapes, the muscadines behind the library, you probably don't remember. No, you wouldn't remember if you're from Trenton? But they had a whole back fence that was full of muscadine vines. Jenny and I would go pick muscadines, and I'd check out books and stuff like that. Then seventh grade and went to that junior high called Slauson, and that's when I started being boy crazy. The next year we moved to Birmingham. Culture shock in a big way from Ann Arbor, highly educated, sophisticated people down here to Birmingham, although we lived in one of the best areas of Birmingham. But still, I mean, they were doing things here that we'd never done in Ann Arbor. They did something called diagramming sentences. Did y'all do that in New Jersey?
- [00:04:59] HEIDI MORSE: Not that I recall.
- [00:05:01] NADIA SHALABY: Yeah, it's crazy stuff. I mean, I don't know how we knew which was the proper verb or adjective or whatever's used. But somehow, you just know it. Could have been because I read a lot. But anyhow, that was the craziest thing that I never got the hang of. But the kids--I went to an all-white school from being at Jones and then Slauson. I was the darkest thing they had at that school, they'd never seen ethnic people before. It says white on my birth certificate, but I'm tan. I'm tan, but I have really straight long hair. But still, it was very different for them. The first day everybody stood up and there'd be a prayer on the loudspeaker. It shocked me so much because we didn't do that in Ann Arbor, so I said I didn't even know what they were doing. It's called a devotional, I know now. I said, "What are you guys doing?" They said, "You guys?" I said, "You know, you people." They said, "Where do you go to church?" I didn't know what they were doing. I said, "Well, we don't go to church." [LAUGHS] Right there, that's a strike against you down south.
- [00:06:11] HEIDI MORSE: Do you remember what year you moved there to Birmingham?
- [00:06:17] NADIA SHALABY: Yes. I think it was '66 or '65. I think it was right after they bombed the church here. I think that was when. There were no Black children at all in the school until the next year they had a Black boy who played football, and that was it. It was very culture shock to me. Coming from where everybody, everybody's okay, nobody's better than the other. Being in a rich area, Birmingham, Alabama. It is not fun.
- [00:07:03] HEIDI MORSE: Just to backtrack a little bit too. You were talking about your parents, what were your parents' names?
- [00:07:09] NADIA SHALABY: My father was Dr. Salah, S-A-L-A-H, Eldareer, E-L-D-A-R-E-E-R. My mom, her maiden name was Campbell. Her name was Beulah, B-E-U-L-A-H.
- [00:07:25] HEIDI MORSE: Thank you. You said your father came to Ann Arbor because of being affiliated with U-M.
- [00:07:41] NADIA SHALABY: Yes, he came to, I don't know if he went to Lansing first or University of Michigan. He was in Lansing and he did his thesis at U of M. I think he got his PhD there.
- [00:07:55] HEIDI MORSE: What about your mother?
- [00:07:57] NADIA SHALABY: Pardon.
- [00:07:59] HEIDI MORSE: What about your mother? Did they meet here or?
- [00:08:01] NADIA SHALABY: Yeah, my mother has just a high school diploma from the little podunk town she's from. They met in a bar in Lansing actually. She left home when she was 18. I think my dad was like 23 or something when he came over here. They hooked up and that's it. Then we moved here and I was 18 and my mother had two more children to cope with. She'd had a low thyroid and then she took thyroid medicine. And boom boom, she had two, as a 40-year-old and 50-year-old, teenagers.
- [00:08:43] HEIDI MORSE: Wow. Where did your family live when you attended Jones School?
- [00:08:48] NADIA SHALABY: 214 North First Avenue.
- [00:08:55] HEIDI MORSE: Okay.
- [00:08:58] NADIA SHALABY: Yeah. It was great because there's an apartment building next door now, but West Park, are you familiar with West Park?
- [00:09:06] HEIDI MORSE: Yes.
- [00:09:07] NADIA SHALABY: We were about two blocks from West Park. Jenny lived next door and she and I on icy days, just skate down to the park to skate, it was great. Sled down the hill. It's fun when you're a kid in the snow. But now, so cold up there, I don't know how you all take it.
- [00:09:31] HEIDI MORSE: It is cold. Do you remember any discussions about segregation in your neighborhood or at Jones School? I know you were a child at the time, but--.
- [00:09:44] NADIA SHALABY: No, there was no talk of it, but I do remember we'd hang out on campus and march with the students for civil rights. I remember that. I've always been a proponent of civil rights and I'm very upset these days about trying to take away our civil rights. No, I don't remember anything except marching, but I remember coming down here and all my friends who were Black said, Nadia, they're going to kill you, you can't talk to any of us down there. They were right, there weren't anybody to talk to.
- [00:10:23] HEIDI MORSE: That gives you a pretty unique perspective, I think on the school desegregation era.
- [00:10:33] NADIA SHALABY: Yeah, it was very strange and I didn't like where the kids--I was at the Homewood Schools, which is a wealthy suburb of Birmingham. I had a friend who moved, our whole department from Ann Arbor moved down here, and one of the kids was my age exactly. She was Catholic, so I switched to a Catholic high school and I fit in much better because it was a lot of Italians and Lebanese and we wore uniforms and nobody knew who had money, everybody looked more alike and I was much more accepted there. They thought I was really weird in Homewood.
- [00:11:19] HEIDI MORSE: In terms of fitting in at Jones School, how did that feel for you? I know you described--
- [00:11:26] NADIA SHALABY: Oh yeah, I fit in. In third grade, you don't really recognize differences in races and that. It didn't affect me, it didn't matter so much.
- [00:11:45] HEIDI MORSE: It sounds like you moved away right around the time that Jones School closed as well. Do you remember anything about the closure of Jones or conversations about that?
- [00:11:56] NADIA SHALABY: No. I was shocked to learn--Jenny just told me they closed because they started busing kids. I had no idea until I read about Community High School that they had even done that. That had happened, so I was totally unaware. We were aware down here of all the problems and crazy people behavior. But not so much there, no, I didn't feel any segregation and Slauson was about half and half I'd say, or maybe one-third, two-thirds.
- [00:12:30] HEIDI MORSE: Was there anything else you'd like to share about Jones School or your memories of Ann Arbor growing up. [OVERLAPPING]
- [00:12:41] NADIA SHALABY: We had a great playground. We had the best swings and the best swing and rings, like monkey rings. It was a great playground, we enjoyed it. We could walk to school. And I walked to school in the snow. My grand kids don't believe that, but I tell them, yeah we did. You could walk anywhere in Ann Arbor. You come to Birmingham, you have to have a car. I really hated that.
- [00:13:15] HEIDI MORSE: You said, for your career primarily, you were a history teacher?
- [00:13:20] NADIA SHALABY: Yes. I was a history teacher. Then when I got my masters in counseling, I worked at the university doing intervention work and then I worked with my best friend and moved here from Michigan and safety for the state of Alabama and the Birmingham highway safety department and my job was to go around to high schools, make appointments, and go speak to different classes concerning the, I called my program "the dangers of drinking, drugging, driving, texting, sexting, and anything else you need to know to stay alive till you're 25." [LAUGHTER]. I got their attention right away. I really enjoyed that. That's the best, better than teaching history. I wouldn't teach history nowadays with all these, what is it? Critical race theory crap going on, it's insanity.
- [00:14:19] HEIDI MORSE: There's a lot happening around those controversies.
- [00:14:25] NADIA SHALABY: So ridiculous and so ignorant, they just want to keep the populace of America as ignorant, the Republicans, as ignorant as they can to keep us under control as much as they can because we're too stupid to know better especially in Alabama. So irritating.
- [00:14:45] HEIDI MORSE: Do you or family members come back to Michigan at all?
- [00:14:49] NADIA SHALABY: I go back. I've gone back several times to see friends. My father came, went back for a reunion of his Egyptian friends who had formed a bond, bonded together during that time. A lot of them came from Egypt. They had a nice little reunion out there. Yeah, I love Ann Arbor. [OVERLAPPING]
- [00:15:15] HEIDI MORSE: Is there a group or organization that he was a part of that you remember the name of?
- [00:15:21] NADIA SHALABY: No, I don't remember the name but it was the Egyptian students and some other Arab country students. My dad being the oldest and the only one who had his PhD yet, was the ring leader. He had all the people gathered around him at the Union. My dad had parties every weekend. Yeah, it was a lively time. We had these programs at the university, international programs where different countries put on their dances and their food. Do you guys still have that?
- [00:15:54] HEIDI MORSE: I'm not sure. I think so.
- [00:15:57] NADIA SHALABY: Oh good. And my mom worked for the university in population studies.
- [00:16:09] HEIDI MORSE: Good. Well, I think that covers most of my questions for today.
- [00:16:14] NADIA SHALABY: Okay.
- [00:16:16] HEIDI MORSE: Thank you very much.
- [00:16:18] NADIA SHALABY: Thank you. I mean, I don't have that much to offer, but those are just my little memories from my perspective.

Media
February 2, 2022
Length: 00:16:25
Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library
Downloads
Subjects
Jones School
Jones Elementary School
Ann Arbor Public Schools - Desegregation
Egyptian Americans
Perry Elementary School [Ann Arbor]
Slauson Junior High School
West Park
Civil Rights Movement
Desegregation
LOH Education
LOH Education - Jones School
Education
Local History
Oral Histories
Race & Ethnicity
There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive
Nadia Shalaby
Jennifer Mitchell Hampton
Elizabeth Fox
Salah Eldareer
Beulah Campbell Eldareer
401 N Division St
214 N First Ave
Birmingham AL