There Went The Neighborhood - Studio Interview: Joetta Mial

Wed, 08/07/2024 - 2:04pm

When: July 18, 2022

Joetta Mial moved to Ann Arbor in the 1950s with her husband Harry Mial, who was the first Black teacher at Jones school from 1954 to 1957. Dr. Mial also pursued a career in teaching and became principal of Huron High School. She recalls conversations that were happening in the community about school desegregation.

This interview was filmed during the making of the documentary film There Went The Neighborhood: The Closing of Jones School, produced by the Ann Arbor District Library and 7 Cylinders Studio. More interviews are available in the There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive.

Transcript

• [00:00:06] TOKO SHIIKI: Rolling.
• [00:00:06] DONALD HARRISON: We're in 4K.
• [00:00:08] TOKO SHIIKI: Yeah, 4K and [INAUDIBLE] for this.
• [00:00:13] DONALD HARRISON: Great. This is Donald Harrison recording for the Ann Arbor District Library in the Jones documentary project on July 18th, 2022. We're here with Joetta. And, Joetta, I'm just going to start off with some basic questions and info as I know you all have done as well. I'm just going to have you say your full name and where you were born?
• [00:00:42] JOETTA MIAL: Joetta Mial, 5-5-31.
• [00:00:49] DONALD HARRISON: If you could say my name is Joetta.
• [00:00:52] JOETTA MIAL: My name is Joetta May Mial, is my middle name. [LAUGHTER] My birth date is 5-5-31, Cinco de Mayo.
• [00:01:05] DONALD HARRISON: Fun date. Where did you grow up?
• [00:01:10] JOETTA MIAL: In Jackson, Michigan.
• [00:01:13] DONALD HARRISON: And Joetta, if you can repeat my question in your answers.
• [00:01:15] JOETTA MIAL: Okay.
• [00:01:15] DONALD HARRISON: Just say, I grew up in--
• [00:01:17] JOETTA MIAL: Okay.
• [00:01:18] DONALD HARRISON: Where did you grow up?
• [00:01:21] JOETTA MIAL: I grew up in Jackson, Michigan. I didn't get very far from home living in Ann Arbor.
• [00:01:32] DONALD HARRISON: And when did you come--
• [00:01:32] TOKO SHIIKI: [OVERLAPPING] Sorry, sorry, sorry. Can I just bring that light higher a little bit? Because of the reflection. Sorry.
• [00:01:43] DONALD HARRISON: No problem.
• [00:01:56] JOETTA MIAL: You didn't take a picture of me smiling. I was just staring in the picture. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:02:01] DONALD HARRISON: Oh, in the pictures?
• [00:02:02] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah.
• [00:02:02] DONALD HARRISON: You want to do one with smiling?
• [00:02:04] JOETTA MIAL: Yes.
• [00:02:05] DONALD HARRISON: Let's do it.
• [00:02:12] HEIDI MORSE: You want me to take one with your whole setup?
• [00:02:12] DONALD HARRISON: Yeah. For the picture roll.
• [00:02:28] HEIDI MORSE: Let's do one more. Good.
• [00:02:31] TOKO SHIIKI: And then, could you look at Donald?
• [00:02:32] JOETTA MIAL: Say what?
• [00:02:32] TOKO SHIIKI: Could you look at Donald? Thank you. Good job.
• [00:02:42] DONALD HARRISON: [LAUGHTER] Us glasses people can create reflections in the light.
• [00:02:53] TOKO SHIIKI: Can you see it?
• [00:02:56] JOETTA MIAL: You get a shine or glare?
• [00:03:06] TOKO SHIIKI: Yes, yes.
• [00:03:06] DONALD HARRISON: Yeah.
• [00:03:06] TOKO SHIIKI: I think so. Yeah, better. Thank you.
• [00:03:13] DONALD HARRISON: Thank you for your patience. Joetta, if you can tell us what brought you to Ann Arbor? And when and why did you come to Ann Arbor?
• [00:03:29] JOETTA MIAL: I got married when I was pretty young, 21, when I eventually got to Ann Arbor. I got married in 1951 and we first moved to Ypsilanti. Then we had put in for housing at the University of Michigan. My husband was in school and we had to wait to get housing. It was called Terrace Apartments then, and now that's the children's hospital, that's all torn down. I've been in the Ypsilanti / Ann Arbor area for a long time.
• [00:04:31] DONALD HARRISON: Can you tell me your husband's name and where he was from and how you met?
• [00:04:37] JOETTA MIAL: My husband's name was Harry Mial. He was from Mount Clemens. He was a star football player and track star in high school and college. I graduated from Jackson High School a semester early and so my parents wanted me to do something, so I went to the junior college there. Then I went to Cleary what was then Cleary College in Ypsilanti and Harry was at Eastern. My girlfriend and I should go up on campus and that's when I first met him. He played football and track there also.
• [00:05:32] DONALD HARRISON: I was going to say Jackson and Mount Clemens are two hours apart so you met in Ypsilanti. Joetta, your parents, what were their names and what did they do?
• [00:05:43] JOETTA MIAL: My mom was Ettiphair Sims. She was at one time a housewife, stay at home mom, but then later on she worked cleaning houses, she also worked in a factory. My mom really married when she was young, she was about 17. And my grandmother went with my mom and dad when they got married [LAUGHTER]. My dad worked in a factory. I was born during The Depression, but we made it.
• [00:06:42] DONALD HARRISON: As far as your memories of Ann Arbor, when did you first move to Ann Arbor and where was that? Because you said Terrace, I think.
• [00:07:02] JOETTA MIAL: Let me go back to Ypsi first. We lived on Second Avenue in Ypsilanti and then we moved to the Terrace Apartments up on campus. Actually we lived in Willow Run for a short period of time too, but then when we moved to Ann Arbor, housing was very hard for Black folks to find in terms of getting housing. The most memory that I have is our house on North Fourth Avenue, which is directly across from Bethel AME Church. My husband and I had joined Brown Chapel in Ypsi, so we just transferred our membership there after we moved there. But we were directly across from there and up from what is now Wheeler Park. And the Dunbar Center was in the area.
• [00:08:16] DONALD HARRISON: Do you remember approximately when that was when you moved to the Fourth Street house? Would that have been the '50s?
• [00:08:28] JOETTA MIAL: Yes. Because I had two sons then and they were little. In fact I was looking at some pictures the other day of my sons and the Blake boys. Rosemarion and Richard Blake. The bus station--the transportation is named after Richard Blake. He was part-time in real estate and he was the one that got us up to rent this house at Fourth Avenue.
• [00:09:13] DONALD HARRISON: What was your impression of Ann Arbor at that time when you moved there? What do you remember of that? How would you describe it?
• [00:09:28] JOETTA MIAL: Well, it was a very pretty town. We got involved in the church. I taught Sunday School for a while, my husband was superintendent of the Sunday School for a while. We had friends. It was a very segregated. I'm trying to think who--there were just Black people on the part of Fourth Avenue where Harry and I were living. That was just before the Civil Rights Movement coming up, so there were problems, but not like in some other places at that time and my husband and got really involved in civic affairs and dragged me along with him.
• [00:10:47] DONALD HARRISON: In what way, what do you remember? What stands out when you think about what you were involved with?
• [00:10:53] JOETTA MIAL: Well, we got involved in housing. This I can vividly remember, Black folks couldn't move in Pittsfield Village and we marched out there, went to Detroit where the big corporate people were and marched there. And I gave a picture to the African American museum, where I am pushing Scott, the son you just met, in a stroller and my son Rick was there. I don't know where the oldest one was at the time, but we were there marching because Black folks couldn't rent. My husband was also on the housing--what did they call it? Fair housing--and was very active there in terms of eventually loosening up housing for African Americans. But it was a struggle.
• [00:12:13] DONALD HARRISON: When you moved to that neighborhood, we're trying to especially for younger people to understand what the neighborhood was like back then because I think there was a slaughterhouse, there was the junkyard right by where Wheeler Park is now. What do you remember, your impression of the neighborhood? What was your sense of how that neighborhood was when you moved there? Was it noisy? Was it busy? How do you remember that area?
• [00:12:47] JOETTA MIAL: We were quite close with our neighbors and the church, and Second Baptist was right around the corner, so even though we were segregated, it was a friendly atmosphere. But we were passionate about trying to make things better for Black folks in the area.
• [00:13:25] DONALD HARRISON: Did you feel accepted by people when you moved there? Did you feel welcome and you got to know--or did you already know people by the time you lived there?
• [00:13:34] JOETTA MIAL: No. We got to know people and they were friendly.
• [00:13:42] DONALD HARRISON: Then at that time, Harry, was he a teacher already? Because I know that he ended up at Jones.
• [00:13:50] JOETTA MIAL: Let's see, he started teaching at Jones School in 1954. He actually had applied for the school psychologist job and they gave it to someone else. He was there three years. I just had my two older sons then and they were little and they went to Perry nursery school. I don't know if you recall across from used to be Jim's Hamburgers. But we knew Emmalyn Anderson was a nursery school teacher there, they went to Perry School. Those boys didn't go to Jones until after my husband had left there. So about three and a half years at Jones, he finally got the job as school psychologist, because he had gotten his masters in psychology from the University of Michigan. He was very active and people really respected him. I used to complain a lot about him going and being so involved, but it was a cohesive, friendly neighborhood. Yeah.
• [00:15:46] DONALD HARRISON: Can you remember when he--because I understand that he was the first Black teacher in Ann Arbor Public Schools--and do you remember what that was like for him or how you would describe how that went? Was it an easy thing or was it difficult? Was he well received? What you remember of--and was that at Jones, his first teaching job at Jones?
• [00:16:12] JOETTA MIAL: He had been involved with students, he was just very passionate in terms of working with students. He had been Teen Canteen director out Willow Run and he used to take kids from the church on field trips, some of my younger friends remember Harry taking them on trips. He put in an application and like I said, he had applied for the psychologist job and someone else got that, and they decided that they needed a Black teacher at Jones School and that's why he got the job. It wasn't because Jones School was all Black, I think it was integrated, but they had a number of Black students there. He was well received because he was so good with kids.
• [00:17:26] DONALD HARRISON: I think that was around 1954 is that what you--?
• [00:17:29] JOETTA MIAL: He started there in '54, started as psychologist in 1959.
• [00:17:40] DONALD HARRISON: Stayed there until, do you remember when he left Jones?
• [00:17:50] JOETTA MIAL: I think he was about three years there and then he put in an application for an administrator. The superintendent at that time was Jack Elzay, and he had said there were no qualified Black folks for administrative positions. Harry filed a civil rights suit, which he won. They hired another Black man, Bill Mays, to be a principal at Newport. Then a couple of years later when Scott Westerman came in at superintendent, he appointed Harry to Northside. He was at Northside for 15 years, and then he had two heart attacks and they had moved him to central administration and I forgot exactly what year he retired. But anyway, it was in the Ann Arbor News when he retired, yeah.
• [00:19:14] DONALD HARRISON: Do you remember any stories that Harry shared about teaching at Jones or what it was like at Jones for him?
• [00:19:23] JOETTA MIAL: He loved it. I gave you all the names of some folks that had him as teachers, but they all remember him and in several of the African American Museum interviews, folks have mentioned his name, that they have had him either at Jones or Northside or in church in Sunday school. Emerson Powrie was the principal, and he relied on Harry a lot, so there were still issues like when he moved from the teaching to the psychologist, one of the things that he noticed--he wasn't only one that noticed it--how many Black kids were referred to special education. And so when he moved to the psychologist position, he really zeroed in on that.
• [00:20:54] JOETTA MIAL: You need a certain talent and skill to bring out the potential of kids and so he was able to keep a number of our Black kids out of special ed. Because that's where they would quickly put them. But at Jones, he liked being there. He loved it, because he was so passionate about the kids. I can't remember how much attention I paid to administrative things that were happening. While he was teaching, he did become the teachers' union president, so he got involved in that.
• [00:21:55] DONALD HARRISON: Then you had two boys go to Jones. Can you talk about that as well?
• [00:22:02] JOETTA MIAL: You know, I don't remember a lot about that. My two older boys were there when he--we were still living on North Fourth Avenue so he could walk to school. I think the boys got along there okay. I can't remember time-wise. I know it wasn't when the boys were when they talked about desegregating Jones School and busing the kids out. Well my sons that was afterwards that that happened. Their experience was not that memorable. They had friends and like I said, the Blake boys lived a couple of doors down and they were really good friends. They were there at Jones too.
• [00:23:12] DONALD HARRISON: Do you remember when the Jones Report came out and the conversation about closing it happened? Were you surprised or were you in favor? Do you remember when that happened?
• [00:23:23] JOETTA MIAL: When the desegregation came?
• [00:23:24] DONALD HARRISON: Yes.
• [00:23:26] JOETTA MIAL: I remember there was a lot of discussion in the Black community thinking that kids were leaving a nurturing situation where they were. And when they were bused out, all of them were not well received. And Debby Mitchell, who you're going to interview. She is one of the students that was. They put her on the bus when she shouldn't have been on the bus and she said the school there--I don't remember which school it was--was not receptive at all. There was name-calling, so there was a lot of discussion. I remember that Al Wheeler was really for desegregating it. I can't remember much about, it wasn't really angry people, but what was going to be best for the kids and a lot of people thought it was not good, that kids were not just going to do better because they were sitting next to white kids. So there was that. I don't quite remember when they resolved that particular thing at Jones.
• [00:25:08] DONALD HARRISON: Then you also got into education yourself. Can you tell me how you got into education and because you ended up, I believe, principal at Huron and you were also very involved in Ann Arbor Public Schools. When did you start to get involved?
• [00:25:25] JOETTA MIAL: You know, actually, my husband was my mentor and pushing me on because when I went to Cleary College and then I did secretarial work and there were some places I couldn't get into. I ended up doing some at the university. But anyway, he said he wanted me to go back to school and I first took some correspondence courses at the University of Michigan. Then when my youngest son was in first grade or kindergarten, I went to University of Michigan and took a full course load. That was incredible. I remember going through the registration line with all these young folks backwards. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, Harry pushed me on till when I got my Master's and my PhD. Oh, one thing I was going to say about, Harry had actually started his PhD and he was going to use data from the Jones School about whether or not the kids were doing better at Jones or having left, but he didn't complete it and at one time he said, "Okay, one PhD in the family is enough." So he decided to do that. But you might talk to Dr. Percy Bates. I don't know if he has some of that data. I was just looking at an old ditto report from Ronald Edmunds who was talking about the discrepancy of achievement in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, and he kept calling it the Jones Report. He was talking about whether or not having Black kids with compensatory help, that's what he called it, or moving them out to integrated help. His thing was that you really need to deal with the self-esteem of the kid in that particular report. But I don't know if there's some data about how the kids actually did there. Did they do any better when they went to integrated schools? Ron quoted something from the Coleman Report, which I have no memory of, that either side, compensatory or integration, shouldn't get on each other's case, but neither one of them seemed to be working that well. That they needed to do some other things to do that.
• [00:28:56] DONALD HARRISON: When you think back on that time and you started getting more involved and you're getting your own education, Master's and PhD, did you have a sense of it or opinions about how it was working and not working for Black students? There were, again, busing and desegregation efforts. Do you remember thinking that that was a good thing or it wasn't working or they were missing some pieces that needed to happen? Because I know there was a lot happening back then, a lot of change.
• [00:29:31] JOETTA MIAL: Not so much the busing, but I had a very keen sense of things were not right for Black kids. My dissertation is on the achievement of Black kids in the Ann Arbor Public Schools. I took from the years--I'd have to go get the copy to see, 1971 to something--but I was able to get a sabbatical leave. Way back there that they had money to give teachers sabbatical leave. Teachers and administrators. I was an assistant administrator at Huron then. Letitia Byrd and I, she was a counselor, we did a study and she looked at parents and I looked at the data in terms of looking, trying to find out, what is it that makes these kids achieve better? We looked at their high school records and because both of us knew so many people in the community, we interviewed parents of where their kids were, which was really exciting. People tried to tell me, "Go ahead and get any subject and do it." I said, "No, I can't do that. I have to do something I want to write. Anyway, to make a long story short, it depends on--the Black kids were more successful and probably the white kids too, if they were taking the higher level courses. So many of the Black kids were pushed into courses that weren't going to lead into anything. I was keenly aware of what was going on, I did what I could to try to change things up and I'm so proud that one of my--a Black male, who was both, my husband's student at Northside and mine, Che Carter, is now the principal at Huron High School.
• [00:32:18] DONALD HARRISON: You were principal, but can you tell me about when you got into the school system at Ann Arbor Public Schools, where you--?
• [00:32:25] JOETTA MIAL: I started at Pioneer High School and taught there for three years and [NOISE] I went to Huron, school year of '74 to '75. I was an assistant principal for 12 years and then a principal for eight.
• [00:33:01] DONALD HARRISON: Where were you, and where was that at?
• [00:33:03] JOETTA MIAL: Huron High School. Yeah, a River Rat.
• [00:33:08] DONALD HARRISON: So you might have started at Pioneer around 1971?
• [00:33:12] JOETTA MIAL: Yes.
• [00:33:13] DONALD HARRISON: So you started at '71.
• [00:33:15] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah, '71, something like that, yeah.
• [00:33:18] DONALD HARRISON: Joetta, do you have a recollection of what it was like as far as race, as far as tension, as far as Black students and white students? I think that was around a time there was more tension. I think there were stories of some fights breaking out at Pioneer.
• [00:33:38] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah, I was at Pioneer when one of the so-called uprisings came, and I remember they asked all the teachers to lock the doors and I could see the kids outside. My older two sons were part of that movement when it was there. Scott Westerman writes about that in his book. Some staff people had no clue how to--it's not that you treat Black kids, that you have to lower anything, you just need to be able to reach them and be able to, so that there's respect both ways and the learning is better. There's all kinds of data that shows that. One of the things that we did at Huron was start a group called US, Understanding and Sharing Diversity. It started out very negative. One of my white teachers used the N word in trying to discipline some Black students. I had already called in a consultant to work with the faculty on multiculturalism and trying to be more competent and so forth. When I talked with him, he said, after what had happened, "You're going to need more than one session." Anyway, the whole thing ended up really wonderful. He came in and trained teachers. We took kids off campus and trained them. We had a very good peer facilitating group and we trained those kids to work with their peers. It made a difference in the climate of the school, and it lasted about 10 years. It only lasted a couple of years, after our last--we actually had some courses in English and social studies that dealt with racism and multiculturalism, all that. When I look at now what is happening, and people are talking about the critical race theory and not wanting to know about history, it's just going backwards.
• [00:37:11] DONALD HARRISON: What do you think is important for people now to know about what was happening in the '60s?
• [00:37:20] JOETTA MIAL: In what?
• [00:37:20] DONALD HARRISON: In the 1960s. For better, for worse, things that worked or could have been better. Are there things that you wish people knew about what was happening then or should have happened or could have happened differently?
• [00:37:35] JOETTA MIAL: Well, the development of Black Studies, all kind of Black Studies courses. That's what the Black students, they called them the Black Demands. There were ten demands. They wanted Black studies, they wanted more Black staff and faculty, they wanted to be more involved. So those things begin to happen. I'm not currently up on what the achievement now is, but they've been working on it an awful long time.
• [00:38:26] DONALD HARRISON: Well, it seems like when they did the Jones Report in the early '60s, they saw that that school, students who were predominantly Black weren't performing as well as their white peers, and so then the movement happened to shut it down and bus. But then you can see throughout the years that the gap, the racial disparity, didn't improve for a long time. I'm wondering if you remember that or if you felt that there was enough being done or they weren't doing the right things, so your perspective on how they tried to fix this problem. Because they identified it in the early '60s, but even into the '80s and I think even into the '90s and beyond, they kept seeing that they didn't solve it.
• [00:39:15] JOETTA MIAL: Well, there was a resistance too. You can have all these workshops, and we had a lot of them. There needs to be more training, there needs to be, like at the high school level, I would tell my teachers, if you don't love it here, you really shouldn't be here. That you can have the content, know it backward and forward, but if you can't transfer that to the students, then you're not helpful. Like I said, I'm out of it, so I'm out of the loop in terms of knowing what exactly is happening. I know at one time we had a certain number of Black administrators and teachers and then we lost a lot of them and they weren't replaced. But I have no idea what is happening now.
• [00:40:36] DONALD HARRISON: I think we're really interested in that era, really the '60s when so much changed. There was so much turmoil. In many ways, what had been the old neighborhood, pretty much where most of the Black citizens and residents lived, that started to break apart. So our focus is really your recollections, what you think was happening back then and why, and your opinions of it, your memories of that, because I think that's something people nowadays don't necessarily know that redlining created these neighborhoods and then why it started to break apart. Do you have a sense of when that started to change? When did you move from Fourth?
• [00:41:29] JOETTA MIAL: We moved to Brown Street down from Michigan Stadium. It's just, when you say "Look at the '60s," it's a continual struggle. It is not something that you're going to solve in one year or something. You have to keep working at it. You have to have people who want to do it. There can be a lot of resistance in some ways that hampers the growth. I've seen some things, read some things like Saline was having some problems. Pioneer had a teacher that had done something. You just have to keep working on it, and I don't know how you bring up all the stuff that we did in the '60s. But you probably need some new strategies if they didn't get it done in the '60s. But it's something you have to keep working at. It's not going away, you're going to have to keep working at it.
• [00:43:16] DONALD HARRISON: You had how many children? You mentioned two boys. How many are they?
• [00:43:22] JOETTA MIAL: I had three sons, one of my older sons died three years ago, yeah.
• [00:43:27] DONALD HARRISON: Sorry to hear that. For your children growing up in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, what was your sense of how it served them? How was their experience?
• [00:43:40] JOETTA MIAL: They had problems even when Harry and I were both in the school system. But we were there to challenge people about things.
• [00:43:58] DONALD HARRISON: Is there anything you can say about that or what the problems were? Any examples of what they encountered?
• [00:44:15] JOETTA MIAL: More looking at them as not being able to do a certain level of work.
• [00:44:30] DONALD HARRISON: You saw teachers tracking them away from the--?
• [00:44:35] JOETTA MIAL: Mhm. On the whole, I have to say though, they had a pretty good experience. They're not bitter about their experience. My older boys were involved in the upheavals at Pioneer. Scott was a-- [NOISE]. Sorry about that.
• [00:45:24] DONALD HARRISON: No problem.
• [00:45:29] JOETTA MIAL: My middle son, the one that passed, had tried out for quarterback at Pioneer and at the time, Bump Elliott's son was there, and we had Black parent meetings because we thought the coach was not, you know, it was just things like that. Scott had an easier time than the older sons. But on the whole, they were not--because the older boys were in there doing some of the work with the Black Student Union. Scott was in the Black Student Union and some other stuff, working, but it wasn't as intense as in the '60s.
• [00:46:43] DONALD HARRISON: Do you remember when things started to shift in terms of the old neighborhood and the Black community starting to change and I guess you would say maybe split up more, lose that closeness that you described when you moved there? Do you remember that happening or when that started to happen?
• [00:47:05] JOETTA MIAL: I don't remember the year. I just remember that housing opened up and Black people are spread all over now. But I don't know what exact year that was. Actually we moved here 50 years ago and there was a covenant that it shouldn't be Black people here.
• [00:47:39] DONALD HARRISON: On the deed for this house?
• [00:47:40] JOETTA MIAL: For this house.
• [00:47:42] DONALD HARRISON: I know there's a lot of deeds that have that, so your house was one of those?
• [00:47:45] JOETTA MIAL: One of them, yeah. But we got the house.
• [00:47:53] DONALD HARRISON: Were you aware of that before you bought the house? Was that something that you were familiar with? What do you remember of that?
• [00:48:04] JOETTA MIAL: I think we looked at it, but the person who was selling us the house wanted to sell it to us, so there wasn't a problem. In fact, I just looked at it not too long ago. I had really forgotten about it until I was reading something about it in the Ann Arbor News where they're having these meetings and they had the covenant and I said, "Oh wow, we had one."
• [00:48:38] DONALD HARRISON: I think they've been trying to get those changed.
• [00:48:40] JOETTA MIAL: Right.
• [00:48:45] DONALD HARRISON: And, Joetta, do you remember a sense of that happening when you moved to Ann Arbor, of red lining or the fact that there was really not a lot of ability to live anywhere else, or that those neighborhoods were pretty much the only options?
• [00:49:01] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah, when we moved to North Fourth Avenue, we did not have a lot of options. My friend Letitia Byrd whose husband was an architect, she ended up living on Brookside. They had put in for a house, and when the people found out they were Black, they turned them down, and so they had a white friend go and buy this land and David Byrd built the house on Brookside.
• [00:49:51] DONALD HARRISON: That's how they got around it?
• [00:49:54] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah.
• [00:49:55] DONALD HARRISON: When you came to Ann Arbor, do you remember you talked about the church that you were in, that you switched to, do you remember anything about the Dunbar Center? Were you involved there ever?
• [00:50:07] JOETTA MIAL: I don't remember a lot about it. I know it was there. I'm trying to think, did my sons go there at all? But I know people who were there and it was a vital place for people to go.
• [00:50:30] DONALD HARRISON: Was there anything else that when you think back on that neighborhood at that time that stands out for you, as far as anything that was very memorable of that time in that neighborhood?
• [00:50:49] JOETTA MIAL: I think it was memorable in the sense of cohesive, village-like, and support and friends. I remember--I have good feelings about that, about where we were, and the people that we knew.
• [00:51:20] DONALD HARRISON: Then looking back on it now and how it is, how it's changed, what's your sense of how Ann Arbor has changed in terms of that neighborhood?
• [00:51:37] JOETTA MIAL: Things are definitely better in terms of ability to find housing. You find Black people everywhere. We still have some issues to work through. I'm not sure. My husband was on the, they called it, Human Relations Committee. Then he was it years later, and they call it now Human Resources Committee. He always was working not only with housing, but complaints that people had about different kinds of things, particularly Black people and things. He ended up being on there twice. Like I said, we just have to keep working. There's no pinnacle that we're going to reach in a while. I guess for a while, I thought when all this past administration and all that stuff came up, I have three grandchildren, and I thought, "Have they got to go through this?" [LAUGHTER] And so I talked to my granddaughter, who is a speech language pathologist at Romulus, and who's very opinionated about things that are going on. But I find it disheartening because I feel like we're going backwards. I said, "You know, instead of building on what we had, keep going." So that's disappointing. But you can't let that stop me from keeping working. I'm just very old now and I can't do everything that I used to do.
• [00:54:24] DONALD HARRISON: Well, we won't expect you to fix everything. [LAUGHTER] And, Heidi, if there's any questions, you can jump in. But, Joetta, you did your dissertation on the experience of Black students in Ann Arbor, right?
• [00:54:37] JOETTA MIAL: Mhm.
• [00:54:37] DONALD HARRISON: You just have such a valuable, unique perspective on how Ann Arbor was serving or wasn't serving those students, and your impression of that, what was working what wasn't working and why. I'm just curious, in your career in Ann Arbor Public Schools, you said earlier that self-esteem and somebody believing in you was part of it. But having a teacher who looks like you-- [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:55:09] JOETTA MIAL: It's a whole bunch, it's not just one thing.
• [00:55:14] DONALD HARRISON: Can you please tell me about those things?
• [00:55:23] JOETTA MIAL: They need role models that look like them. They need curriculum that they're in, that they can relate to. And the white kids need that too. They need--I read someplace where it said, education is 90 percent encouragement. My advice is that we keep working on the problem. We can't just get comfortable with what's happened. We've been shaken to our senses this past administration. There are places where they show best practices of how Black kids learn.
• [00:56:55] DONALD HARRISON: When you look back at what your sons were involved, like what was happening in the '60s, did you see things getting better or getting worse or both?
• [00:57:05] JOETTA MIAL: Since that time?
• [00:57:06] DONALD HARRISON: Like when the protesting was happening in the late '60s. Again, there's a lot of turmoil, but did you see things improving and not? Like was there more tension? Did things get worse, get better?
• [00:57:21] JOETTA MIAL: When they were involved in it?
• [00:57:22] DONALD HARRISON: Yeah. Like you watching your sons trying to make things better and speak out.
• [00:57:28] JOETTA MIAL: There was a lot of tension. My husband was so involved. At one point we had a bunch of nasty phone calls when we were picketing Pittsfield Village, and having people deliver pizza to our house and stuff like that. Eventually things did get better, over time. But there's still a lot of work to do.
• [00:58:09] DONALD HARRISON: Heidi do you have any questions that you want me to ask? Thank you, Joetta, for already taking so much time.
• [00:58:19] HEIDI MORSE: One follow-up about desegregation of Jones and that conversation. You mentioned Al Wheeler was one of the key people talking about that issue. Do you remember who else was involved in pro or cons of closure of the school?
• [00:58:39] JOETTA MIAL: No, I don't. But you all have been in touch with Alma Wheeler? [OVERLAPPING] She said she was going to call you.
• [00:58:47] DONALD HARRISON: Oh good. Because I talked to her at the Juneteenth events.
• [00:58:51] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah.
• [00:58:52] DONALD HARRISON: She spoke and I talked to her and she was very interested. We need to follow up with her because we would love to have her also do this.
• [00:59:00] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah. She would have more information. I know that our local NAACP was very involved and Al was president then at that time. I don't know how divided people were about it. I just would hear them talk. I think my husband was disappointed that they broke up Jones School. I'm not too sure about that. But he was looking at the nurturing impact. I'm thinking that it wasn't like some places in the South where they didn't have the same resources at school.
• [01:00:26] DONALD HARRISON: Was there anything yet, Joetta, that you haven't talked about? Because again, I think [LAUGHTER] for people who are younger, they don't really know what was before Kerrytown, what was there before Community High, and Zingerman's, what's now called Water Hill. Are there any things you'd want younger people to know about that neighborhood, about the Black community, about how things have changed or what's different now? Or the impact on busing and the good or the bad of busing and how the attempts to solve the problem played out in the '60s.
• [01:01:21] JOETTA MIAL: Now, tell me again what you want. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:01:28] DONALD HARRISON: If there's anything you haven't said yet that you think's important for younger people to [OVERLAPPING] know about Ann Arbor.
• [01:01:35] JOETTA MIAL: That area, Kerrytown, was all Black businesses and was really thriving, and now they're not there. There are some Black business people. There's some there. I'm not aware of all of them. But that was too bad that that got broken up in that area. Young people need to know that, whether it's protest or whatever, when you see something wrong, you know in your gut what's wrong, what's right. You can't be silent because then you're a part of the problem. You need to help Black and white kids. Back then when the kids were in protests, some of them ended up getting suspended and stuff like that, but they made it through. They made a dent in what was going on.
• [01:03:25] DONALD HARRISON: Sounds good. Is there any last question?
• [01:03:28] JOETTA MIAL: I will try and find out if there's anybody else. Oh I know, Percy Bates. Do you know him?
• [01:03:38] DONALD HARRISON: Not yet.
• [01:03:39] JOETTA MIAL: I think he's retired. Have you heard of Percy Bates?
• [01:03:43] HEIDI MORSE: I have not.
• [01:03:43] JOETTA MIAL: He'd been a longtime professor of education. He used to work with the program for educational opportunity at the U. I don't happen to have his number anymore, but I'm sure you can get it. He might have something because he and Harry used to talk about that. He might even have some data. In fact, I tried to reach him before I was going to have this interview and the number that is in the Google said it was no longer in existence. I haven't seen him. He was at my 90th drive-by birthday celebration. That's the last time I saw him.
• [01:04:56] DONALD HARRISON: Joetta, you taught and were a principal, right?
• [01:04:59] JOETTA MIAL: Yes, I taught at Pioneer for three years. I taught English, radio and television. I was the supervisor for the school paper. And then I came to Huron and I was an assistant for 12 years and then a lead principal for eight.
• [01:05:33] DONALD HARRISON: What was that like?
• [01:05:37] JOETTA MIAL: I loved what I was doing. It was very challenging, but it was also very rewarding. I see kids now, "Oh, Dr. Mial! " and it makes it all worth it.
• [01:05:54] DONALD HARRISON: You feel like a proud River Rat? Wasn't that around the time, Huron hadn't been around that long?
• [01:06:01] JOETTA MIAL: What?
• [01:06:01] DONALD HARRISON: Wasn't Huron still a pretty new school when you got there, maybe 4-5 years?
• [01:06:07] JOETTA MIAL: No, it was older than that.
• [01:06:09] DONALD HARRISON: It was older than that?
• [01:06:09] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah, I went there in '74, '75. The school year of '74-'75. The big thing there while I was there was administrators and some other downtown folks wanted to get rid of the arch, and those kids put together a protest movement, so they did not get rid of the arch. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:06:59] DONALD HARRISON: Was that an arch at the school?
• [01:07:00] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah, the arch that joins the two wings together.
• [01:07:12] DONALD HARRISON: Joetta, is there any last thing that we didn't cover? Because again, for you, you didn't grow up in Ann Arbor?
• [01:07:19] JOETTA MIAL: No. I came here when I was 21.
• [01:07:29] DONALD HARRISON: Yeah. I guess in terms of coming from Jackson, your experience in Ypsilanti, in terms of Ann Arbor, and to get a sense for the segregation that was here when you got here. When you moved to Ann Arbor and Fourth Street, did you feel that you weren't supposed to go to certain places at Ann Arbor? Did it feel segregated at that time or not as much as Jackson or where you had been?
• [01:08:01] JOETTA MIAL: Jackson is just so far behind that there was a roller skating rink and they had a special night for the Black folks to go. But it was really an integrated setting, though, in my elementary, junior high, and high school.
• [01:08:42] DONALD HARRISON: In Jackson?
• [01:08:43] JOETTA MIAL: In Jackson.
• [01:08:52] DONALD HARRISON: When you came to Ann Arbor, did it feel more or less integrated than what you grew up with?
• [01:08:59] JOETTA MIAL: Where I was living, yes, in Ann Arbor, it was more segregated except when we were at the Terrace Apartments. Yeah. Brown Street, there were white people mixed in there. But Fourth Avenue, that was definitely Black folks.
• [01:09:27] DONALD HARRISON: Then you moved here early '70s up to here, up the hill, 1972, maybe?
• [01:09:34] JOETTA MIAL: Fifty years, whatever that is.
• [01:09:35] DONALD HARRISON: '72.
• [01:09:35] JOETTA MIAL: You do the math. [OVERLAPPING]
• [01:09:37] DONALD HARRISON: I'm about to turn 50, so 1972. What was it like up here when you moved to this part of town?
• [01:09:51] JOETTA MIAL: Everyone was really nice. One time my husband had forgotten his keys, and it was nighttime, and was trying to get in and somebody called the police. He said, "I live here." But now, this neighborhood, we are so together. We just depend on each other. It is really, really a nice neighborhood.
• [01:10:44] DONALD HARRISON: That's great to hear. It's pretty up here. Well, Joetta, any last thing that you'd want to share about? Again, we're going to focus on Jones as an anchor of the Black neighborhood. In a way, it's like these dominoes started to fall when the churches left and the Dunbar Center moved and the housing opened up and that community changed and the whole neighborhood changed. Anything as far as when Jones was closed or the busing happened. Were you worried? Were you and Harry excited about that time? It felt like progress, or? I know it's a long time ago.
• [01:11:30] JOETTA MIAL: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] I thought that Harry made a great impact on Jones School. It was kind of wild that he was the first Black teacher in the school system. So more teachers came after that. But he loved what he was doing. The same at Northside. He was there for 15 years. They're having a 30-year reunion. I think they said 30-year. They called me and they want me to do something. I don't know, I haven't responded to the call yet. [LAUGHTER] He dearly loved teaching at Jones School. And like I said, in so many of the African American Museum interviews, people mention his name.
• [01:12:54] DONALD HARRISON: Thank you, Joetta.
• [01:12:57] HEIDI MORSE: Thank you so much.
• [01:12:57] JOETTA MIAL: Thank you.
• [01:12:58] DONALD HARRISON: Thank you for taking the time and sharing all your stories. And cut.