Press enter after choosing selection

There Went The Neighborhood - Studio Interview: Debby Mitchell Covington

When: October 3, 2022

Debby Mitchell Covington grew up in Ann Arbor near Summit Park (now Wheeler Park), and she attended Jones School in kindergarten and first grade. In 1965 when Jones School closed, she was bused to Dicken Elementary and she recalls feeling isolated in the majority-white school. 

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

  • [00:00:05] DONALD HARRISON: I'm going to start off with some basic info. You can start with your full name and any notable nicknames.
  • [00:00:13] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: My full name is Deborah Mitchell Covington and my nickname is Debby, which I prefer over Deborah.
  • [00:00:24] DONALD HARRISON: I'm going to have you mostly look at me, pretty much everybody's not looking at the camera.
  • [00:00:28] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Great.
  • [00:00:29] DONALD HARRISON: If you want to make a point, you can look at the camer. Debby, when and where were you born?
  • [00:00:37] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, St. Joe's Hospital in 1958 on a cold February 2nd day.
  • [00:00:49] DONALD HARRISON: Which you remember clearly.
  • [00:00:50] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I remember clearly my mother told me many stories about how cold it was that day.
  • [00:00:58] DONALD HARRISON: Where did you grow up that sounds like in Ann Arbor, what was it like?
  • [00:01:02] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I grew up in Ann Arbor. I lived at 111 West Summit Street, which was on the corner near Main and Summit. It was a very vibrant community. It was predominantly African American, and a lot of interaction among our community.
  • [00:01:29] DONALD HARRISON: Tell me a little bit more about that when you say closer interactions. Well, what does that mean?
  • [00:01:34] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: You knew your neighbors, you heard stories about neighbors. [LAUGHTER] Everybody played at everybody's house. Summit Park, which is now Wheeler Park, was a block long, wide. And folks from that neighborhood, from the tracks to Beakes Street, all played in Summit Park, and we just had great summers. There was a slaughterhouse there. It was funny when the pigs would get out and run around and you'd see the workers trying to catch the pigs. There was a junk yard across the street from the park, Lansky's junkyard. If you hit a home run into Lansky's junkyard, you knew it was over because you couldn't go there they had dogs. You couldn't get there periodically because it was close to the train station. You'd see hobos walking along every now and then. We would play in the park from sunup to sundown and all year round. Everybody was excited about Spring and then Summer. The Ann Arbor Recreation Department, Parks and Rec had instructors there all summer. They call them camp counselors I think and they had activities for us. We had a Junior Olympics and I remember competing in one-year going to Detroit for the Southeastern Michigan Junior Olympics. It was a lot of fun. Then in the winter we could not wait for them to ice over the park. Then we played hockey and skated all winter long and we'd stay until our fingers were frozen and our toes were frozen and we'd go home and they thought out and we'd have wrinkled fingers and wrinkled toes. But it was just so much fun with all of our friends and the community.
  • [00:03:55] DONALD HARRISON: What is expected about that time are there sounds, snows, sights that really stand out, that jumped out when you think back to that time the most?
  • [00:04:07] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: The sounds I think of is a lot of laughter, a lot of joy, a lot of gossiping about who's doing what in the neighborhood. I didn't mention the Ann Arbor Community Center. It was the hub of the Black community at that time. When we went to school, after school programs, sewing and cooking, and we learned how to play pool and their art classes. It was just the hub of the community. But I remember my childhood in the community being a lot of laughter, a lot of fun, and a lot of kids in our house all the time.
  • [00:04:51] DONALD HARRISON: Debby, can you tell me about your parents, like their names and what they did for work?
  • [00:04:56] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Lena and Thomas Mitchell. They migrated from Savannah Georgia in the early 1950s and they were in skilled trade and after a while, my mother did domestic service. They purchased five homes in Ann Arbor, and one in Ypsilanti and one in Savannah Georgia, and with the exception of our family home, they rented them out. They were landlords and so we interacted with a lot of different people through that business. When they die, they were like the millionaires next door. But they never saw themselves in that way. They always saw themselves as based on liquid income and not necessarily what their net worth was. But yeah, they were hard-working folks from the South, had instilled in us a high work ethic, and they just worked all the time. But they took care of their family and that's what they were focused on. I remember my father telling me stories about coming from the South to the North and not expecting racism in the North. When he worked, he was a plasterer in skilled trades and he was one of a few Black men that had that particular skill trade--because it was more stylized, more specialized, more artistic--and he talked about how his co-workers would steal his lunch and he'd have to work the whole day without lunch. He'd buy tools and they would steal his tool so he had to spend money buying tools over and over again because of racism. When I told him my stories about racism, he's like, you don't know anything about racism, trying working, doing manual labor for eight, nine hours a day with no lunch. Anyway, they were very good people, very hospitable. Like I said, there were always kids in the neighborhood. The Mitchell house was welcoming for all. My parents unofficially fostered a number of kids that were having problems. Interesting enough, they were white kids and Mexican kids, no Black young people, but it was just an open-door policy.
  • [00:07:36] DONALD HARRISON: Debby I was going to ask this too, as far as I don't know if you could speak to what their sense of Ann Arbor was coming from the South? Like you just said, your dad, thought there'd be no racism and found that there was. But do you have a sense now what their feelings were about Ann Arbor? Like were they happy that they had chosen it?
  • [00:07:57] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yeah, they were happy that they chose Michigan because they were from the South. They we're always race-conscious. There was a certain way that we had to carry ourselves and we could--there's certain kids that we could not associate with and we had to present ourselves as very intelligent people and no cursing, no drinking. It was a very stable Christian home. There was no domestic violence. They saw Ann Arbor as a place of opportunity and they wanted us to represent our family well. There was always the white gaze, if you know what I mean. It was like, "Don't do this because white people will think that," and "Don't do this because white people will think that. You have to be better than white people because it's going to take you twice as much to get half as far." There was always the white gaze and the presence of whiteness in the home, almost like a monitor of our behavior.
  • [00:09:19] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yes. My parents had six children and I'm number five of six. I have three older sisters, an older brother, and a younger brother.
  • [00:09:33] DONALD HARRISON: For you professionally, what have you done in terms of your own career, family?
  • [00:09:44] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I professionally, well, I went to Western Michigan University, got my bachelor's degree from Michigan State University. Then I got a master's degree in social work from the University of Michigan. Then I got a master's degree in theology from Ashland Theological Seminary and then a doctorate in ministry from Ashland Theological Seminary and I also had a cosmetology [LAUGHTER] license. I spent most of my professional career, at least half of it in human services and early childhood education. Then the second half has been in higher education at the University of Michigan, where I'm the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Equity Initiatives and that has a lot to do with recruiting under-represented minorities and making sure there's educational access for marginalized people. I do a lot of work around anti-Black racism and anti-racism in general and unconscious bias.
  • [00:11:06] DONALD HARRISON: What part of University are you in?
  • [00:11:08] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I work in the College of Engineering, but I've also worked at Rackham Graduate School, School of Public Health, and the medical school and engineering twice so.
  • [00:11:19] DONALD HARRISON: Great. Thank you.
  • [00:11:20] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I worked for the State of Michigan and their youth in transition program, which was an independent living program for students leaving foster care. I also worked at the Ann Arbor Community Center where I was a substance abuse therapist and a program manager. I worked at Head Start for 14 years and I was a Staff Development Coordinator there with the local program and then on a regional level, I was a program consultant for professional development. I think that rounds out my career.
  • [00:12:00] DONALD HARRISON: Thank you for all the services in our community.
  • [00:12:02] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Thank you. I also started in 2007, a ministry called All Things Artistic Ministries Inc. It's a worship arts ministry with the mission to glorify God and serve humanity through the arts. Our cornerstone program, it's called History Alive Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. I developed that program because growing up in Ann Arbor, it's of rich vibrant community. With the University of Michigan there, we had famous people and politicians coming through the community. Ann Arbor Community Center was a real hub when politicians wanted to connect with the Black community. It was often at the Ann Arbor Community Center, so I was exposed to a lot of great people. I don't know if you know Dr. Eva Jessye, but she was a professor at U of M. She was the first coral director of Porgy and Bess. The very original, the first production. She lived in Miller Manor and she asked me to come over. I'm also a performance poets, so from eight years old, I performed around Washtenaw County. I was well-known in the community because I was young and doing poetry. But Dr. Eva Jessye saw me performing one day and she asked me to come and clean her apartment for her on Saturdays. All I thought about was I get to make some money and I went to her apartment and I didn't clean anything. Her apartment was like a museum and what I got there, she would just we'd sit down, she'd make tea and we would chat. She pull out sheet music and bill, what do you call the books from plays?
  • [00:14:24] DONALD HARRISON: Playbill.
  • [00:14:24] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: It's the playbill. There you go. Playbill. Thank you. The playbill, she would pull out playbills from productions where she worked and she would tell me all these stories. I was 14. I'm like wait a minute, I'm just trying to make some money here. I didn't come, but it was like a museum. I didn't realize that at 14, I was being exposed to one of the greatest human beings that ever lived. There are many more Jon Lockard who will know local artists, the well-known globally. He wanted to spend time with me. When Jon said, "I want you to work with me as an adult," I was, you know what, I missed a lot of opportunities where I wasn't even aware that I was in the company of greatness and I'm not going to miss this time. Jon Lockard and I ended up being great friends. We were artistic partners. I would write poetry for his art and we'd perform, I'd perform at his exhibitions, usually the openings. Also as a teenager, I traveled to Carbondale, Illinois with Morris Lawrence. He was a professor at Washtenaw Community College. He was an Afromusicologist. Him and Jon Lockard took a group of artists, musicians and dancers and singers and poets. We did a major performance at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. It was an amazing experience and there was an African naming ceremony. I chose a name. I got to name myself and it was Femi [INAUDIBLE]. Love me, the beautiful Black one. That really was an amazing life-changing experience for me because I got to name myself rather than having other people named me. Ann Arbor was just a great place for me. It was a wonderful experience because of my community. Outside of my community, it wasn't so friendly.
  • [00:17:09] DONALD HARRISON: Thank you. Tell me more about that and then I'll ask you a little bit more about Jones. But I was going to ask you, sounds like Ann Arbor had a lot of opportunities and things that you really cherish. Then what were the aspects that maybe weren't so positive?
  • [00:17:26] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I want to just say one more positive thing. At 14, I performed in Purlie. The University of Michigan did a production of Purlie and Von Washington, who was a professor at the time, he produced it and directed it and I got to meet Ozzy Davis Junior and that was the most amazing time. He came backstage and met all the actors and singers. He was just so grateful that we put on the production.
  • [00:18:01] DONALD HARRISON: More than one way to skin a cat?
  • [00:18:03] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: There's more than. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] I can't sing.
  • [00:18:07] DONALD HARRISON: My high school did Purlie.
  • [00:18:11] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Really? Okay.
  • [00:18:12] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yeah. That was a hit and it was what the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance. We had the opportunity to rub elbows with the Black students there and there was this fluid relationship between the university and the Black community. Black students came to our community and taught us Black history. I was already race-conscious because of my parents. But then they taught us about the greatness of our people and that really drove me throughout my life. I ended up doing my bachelor's degree in racial and ethnic studies. They took us to Kalamazoo, it was called a topographical center and we were entrenched for a whole day in Black history. It was a very stimulating place to grow up. The professors went to church with us and it was just fluid and Ypsilanti. I went to church in Ypsilanti, so there were a lot of Eastern Michigan University folks there. But my roots are really in Ann Arbor.
  • [00:19:29] DONALD HARRISON: In terms of how you done outside of the tight-knit community experience, the Ann Arbor and the race-conscious, a conscious to the white gaze, what was your experience of the Ann Arbor?
  • [00:19:43] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yeah, so we lived really close to downtown. It was in walking, the stone's throw away. As we became older, our parents gave us a little more leeway, so we'd go downtown and the Kresge's is there and Cunningham drugstore and Goodyear's and Kline's. We'd go shopping. We'd have a little, money that our parents would give us.
  • [00:20:18] DONALD HARRISON: Allowance.
  • [00:20:19] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Allowance, thank you. We'd have our allowance, so then we could go downtown and go shopping. When you went shopping, you know you were really surveilled. That's where I began to feel the experience of racism.
  • [00:20:39] DONALD HARRISON: Any memories that come to you or any other aspects of that, that feeling of being watched or surveilled did you feel welcome in certain places and not in others or anything else that stands out when you think back to that?
  • [00:20:55] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Until I know that whenever there was interaction with a store, I know I wouldn't be followed and it's scary for me being young and people weren't really nice. They weren't nice to us. It took a lot of courage as a young person to navigate those spaces.
  • [00:21:27] DONALD HARRISON: Speaking of spaces I'm going to shift to Jones because that was your elementary school. Can you tell me roughly when you went to Jones and give me an intro to your experience at Jones?
  • [00:21:40] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Sure. Jones School was our neighborhood school. I went there for kindergarten and first grade. That was 1963-1965 when I went there. When I think about Jones School, I think about the farmers market. I think about the Farm Bureau that was there. I think about Diroff's grocery store. I think about walking to and from school with our friends and the community and how much silly things we did to each other. I also think about Fifth Ave because I think it was a second or third house my father bought and he was a jack of all trades. He could do anything in a house. Every day after school, I would stop off at 703 North Fifth Ave and help him with any repairs. I was a runner. I cleaned up, I just enjoyed spending time with my father and so I'd hang out with him after school so on my way from school, instead of going home, I'd stop off and visit with my dad. That was so convenient and had built a closeness between the two of us. They had after-school programs there, which actually the after-school programs came after they closed. But also after Jones School, we would go to the Ann Arbor Community Center and have the cooking classes and the dance classes and piano classes and we'd have as a teenager, we'd have youth night, but when I was younger, it was basically those instructional classes that we'd have.
  • [00:23:51] DONALD HARRISON: That it's interesting. I asked about Jones. You're talking about the things surrounding Jones, the communities that are entire. What do you think about the school itself and the education, you are just there a couple of years?
  • [00:24:04] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yes.
  • [00:24:05] DONALD HARRISON: Does anything stick out or do you recall what was that experience at the school itself was?
  • [00:24:11] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yes. I remember when I think of Jones being in the building, I think of lunch hour because we were in a large room, the cafeteria, and everyone got together at that time and we exchange food. I don't like this apple, I like these chips. We'd have our food exchanges. It was just a very social time. I remember loving learning. I had a love for learning and I just soaked up everything. We had books and I thought the books were fine until we were bused out. When I noticed that the books looked a lot different [LAUGHTER] at the new school. The desk were older wooden desk with the wrought iron bases and there was a gym. I don't remember much about gym classes at that age. I was really young. I remember I never felt ostracized. I never felt belittled. I felt like I was as strong a student as any other student and I had a pretty decent sense of myself. The kids were kids. Some of them were cool, some of them were cruel as kids are and will be and so there were times when the social experience wasn't the best for me. But overall, it was great because I had siblings that were in classes above me. We were all together. We walked to school together, of course, my brother, he'd always break off and run with his friends because he was the only boy for most of his life. He'd run off with the other friends, but my sisters and I would walk to school together. We'd have the maypole. We'd have our May Day. I remember the May Day and the cake walk. Parents baking cakes and bringing them in and doing the maypole dance. It was so inclusive, I felt comfortable and protected and safe.
  • [00:26:51] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Pardon.
  • [00:26:51] DONALD HARRISON: At Jones School?
  • [00:26:51] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: At Jones.
  • [00:26:53] DONALD HARRISON: When you think about being raised race conscious at that age, that's pretty young, do you have a sense of what your feeling was in terms of race or racism within Jones, I think by then it would have been more predominantly Black. But I think maybe pretty much still all white teachers or maybe one Black teacher. Do you have a sense thinking back on race or racism, if that was a factor or something for you at Jones?
  • [00:27:21] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: No, we knew that there were white kids there, there were a few white kids and so we knew them and we didn't think anything of them. I don't think they thought anything of us other than we were kids to play with, but I didn't experience racism to be aware of at that age. I felt very comfortable.
  • [00:27:50] DONALD HARRISON: You're going into second grade, you're told it's closed or at the end of first grade. Do you remember what you thought or what you were told at the time?
  • [00:27:57] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yes. We were just devastated that we weren't going back to our school and we didn't understand why we had to get on a bus and go across town to another school. Then the worst part of it is that our friends all went to different schools. You know, after school, you play with the kids that go to school with you. You have a common day when you're in school with folks. You can talk about who did, what, when, where. And when they closed Jones School and bused us out to separate schools, that sense of community, it was more fragmented. We couldn't relate to kids that went to Pattengill because their daily experience was very different from going to Dicken Elementary or one of the other schools. It disrupted our community, but the Community Center was still the hub but the relationships we're not as close because of busing. It became a little more competitive. Kids that went to Pattengill over here, kids that went to Dicken over here. Some kids moved out and went to Mack school, and so there were more rivalries between schools than the unity that we had at Jones.
  • [00:29:32] DONALD HARRISON: Do you remember what you were told or try and think back again, first grade, it's pretty young, but do you remember like, how they explained it or why or how it was explained, if at all? [OVERLAPPING]
  • [00:29:44] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I don't remember a whole lot of explanation other than, this is going to be a better education and from my parents, don't embarrass us. You're going over there with white people. Do not embarrass us. You know what our family values are. You behave yourself like a Mitchell, and I was like, Okay.
  • [00:30:14] DONALD HARRISON: Where did you go and how did it go?
  • [00:30:16] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: We went to Dicken and I think there were between 13-18 of us that were bused from Jones School. We had to catch the bus on the corner of Main and Summit, and it was pretty scary because that was a busy street. Our mother had to, she would go to the bus stop with us and make sure that we were okay, that we were safe. Then as we got older, she knew we knew how to comport ourselves and we didn't play around on the corner. I remember it being freezing cold in the winters and we were upset. Why do we have to stand out here? Why couldn't we stay at Jones School? But the thing that we remember and have discussed, my siblings and I over the years was that first day. The first day was so traumatic. The school was new, and we went into a neighborhood--we could literally see that neighborhoods change as we traveled across Ann Arbor. Then we went into this neighborhood, I was like, wow, these houses are, they're ranch style houses and they're all new and the lawns are just plush and well cared for, and then we got to the school and it was all brand new. We were like, wow, we're a long way from home. Anything happens, we're a long way from home. Then when we went in, now, Jones School had big windows in the hallways, so there was a lot of natural light that came through. When I went to Dicken there wasn't a lot of natural light. It was kind of dark. We saw parents grabbing their kids and pulling them out of school on the day that we came and it was terrifying. And the kids were like, "The niggers are coming, the niggers are coming" and we were scared. We were like, "Where are they?" Because in our house, that was a curse word. That was something that we could never ever say. It was really scary to hear that, and we were like, "where are they?" Then our parents were there. We were just there together. Over time, you got used to it, used to being in that environment. There were two Black females and two Black males on my grade level, and the Black female left second semester. It was just me second semester, second grade to second semester, sixth grade. I was the only Black female on my grade level. It was very lonely, especially because they put the other Black female. I think I was the only Black person in my second grade class. The Black girl was in another class, of course. It was almost like should we even talk to each other? At the end of the day we were just glad to get back on the bus and get home because it was quite traumatic at that age. It was quite traumatic. It was the first time that I really had the full experience of being othered. I think I spent most of my elementary days at Dicken feeling invisible. That is a feeling that impacted my identity and my self worth for many years. Do you want me to talk more about my experience at Dicken?
  • [00:34:53] DONALD HARRISON: Yeah, I do. Especially the contrasts from going into Jones. I'm wondering if so how you were prepared or the teachers were prepared or was there any sort of preparation for this happening for both on your side and for the teachers and students that you remember happening at all?
  • [00:35:15] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I don't remember. It happened over the summer. We were happy-go-lucky over the summer and then we were told, you're going to a different school. They're closing down Jones School, and there was no, maybe they talked to. I'm sure they must have had a meeting with our parents but there was nothing to smooth that transition for us as students. We were just thrown in there. The newness over everything. The desks were new, the books were all new. They weren't hand me downs with dog-eared pages. Everything was new and bright in the classrooms, and the teacher that I had for second grade, she was very nice. She was a Southern woman, but she was very nice, and yet there was a situation that happened. Have I covered the transition enough. Have I answered that question sufficiently enough?
  • [00:36:25] DONALD HARRISON: If there's anything else you think is important. I think that's part of--the impact of them closing the school really rippled out and we haven't talked to very many people who were bussed. So anything that you think is important to share about that, important you share it.
  • [00:36:48] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yeah. There was there was no preparation, and of course we only knew the people that we came on the bus with, and recess times were different, so we didn't get to see one another a lot. At lunch hour, we were the largest group in lunch because everyone else went home for lunch. They could walk home for lunch. That was a time that we got to see each other and the other white students that did not ride the bus. Lunch hour was good because we played soccer and all kinds of group games, but of course, there were times when we wouldn't feel comfortable in that space either.
  • [00:37:45] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I remember my younger brother--he did not transition with us he was younger, but he was accused of doing things. My mother had to fight to keep him out of special ed because there was nothing wrong with him. There was nothing wrong with his ability to learn, and he had done well in preschool, and so she had to fight to keep him out of special ed, and other Black mothers had to do the same thing with their sons. It felt like we were always fighting on some level, not physically but emotionally, psychologically. Some people did fight physically, some people didn't transition as well, but it always felt you were pushing against this force that did not want you there, did not believe in you, had very low expectations of you. I remember my second grade class--the low expectations. I experienced that almost immediately when I went to Dicken and at Jones, I didn't feel that at all. At Dicken there was a young lady, we had the same name, Debby, and then we had the same last name, so when we turned in our papers, I always got a higher grade than she did--90% of the time in my recollection in case she happens to see this video. But I remember distinctly that a number of times I would receive my homework back and I would have to turn it back in to the teacher because it wasn't my work, it was her work. And inevitably, my grades were higher than hers, but the teacher automatically assumed that she had the better grades so she gave my graded homework to her. I started changing the spelling of my name, and she started changing the spelling of her name to match my name. So the teacher was always giving her my paper and me hers. I spelled the D-E-B-B-I-E she spelled the D-E-B-B-I-E. I spelled it D-E-B-B-I she spelled her as D-E-B-B-I. I spelled D-E-B-O-R-A, she spelled her as D-E-B-O-R-A. I spelled my D-E-B-O-R-A-H she spelled her as D-E-B-O-R-A-H. Then finally, I spelled my name D-E-B-B-Y. Now I was a scared little girl, skinny, scared in a different environment, but I went to her and I said to her, I am spelling my name D-E-B-B-Y, and if you spell your name D-E-B-B-Y I'm going to beat you up. That's the only way that she stopped spelling her name the way I spell my name and I went to the teacher and told her every time it's this is not my paper, this is not my paper but it wasn't until the other young lady stopped spelling her name like mine that that situation stopped. She started correcting the teacher though this is Debby's paper, this isn't mine. Under threat, she [LAUGHTER] protected my name.
  • [00:41:43] DONALD HARRISON: Debby, with a "Y."
  • [00:41:44] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yes.
  • [00:41:44] DONALD HARRISON: I appreciate you sharing this. I know this wasn't the happiest of memories. I'm curious in terms of your experiences with other kids. I mean, second grade is pretty young, and does anything stand out as far as.. It sounds like on the first day the parents were pulling kids out? Do you remember how the other students, it sounds like mostly white students--did it get better over time or was it always the same or what was your recollection of how the other students viewed you?
  • [00:42:24] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I was basically isolated. Nobody really wanted to interact with me, nobody interacted with me. Then this one young lady, she befriended me and I told her stories about being bused and what that experience was like and she wrote an essay about me being bused and there was a real rude awakening about economic disparity. Her father was an architect and his secretary typed up her essay, and so I was, wow, nobody's, and I was using my best penmanship and she brought hers in typed and I was like, man, I can't compete with that. It was like there's no way I can compete with that. But she and I became really good friends. She was the bright spot in my day every day because I had a friend and I actually spent the night at her house once we were in the Girl Scout troop together, and we were best buds. Then over the summer, we didn't see each other because there was no way to connect. When we came back for third grade, I was like, I cannot wait to see my friend and when we came back, she had another best friend and they wore the same dresses they had their hair the same way, and it was like, where do you even find the dress like that? My hair will never look like that. They became best friends and so third grade. It was from third grade on I basically grade level. I was isolated. I was teased if I would play it outside and my legs got dirty or if I hadn't used enough lotion, they would say, oh, you're dirty, your dirty and I was like no my lotion wore out and we call it ashy they called it dirty. There was that ostracizing and just the isolation and the teachers did not recognize me in class. If they asked a question and I'd be raising my hand because I knew the answer.
  • [00:45:21] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: And rarely would be called on when I was clearly eager to answer the question. Then if I didn't know the answer, then I'd get called on and put on the spot. I just began to shrink inside myself because I knew I wasn't going to be called on for anything. If I knew an answer and I knew that there was a danger of me not knowing the answer and being humiliated in front of the class. It was a tenuous situation emotionally and psychologically as I look back on it as an adult. But I know I experienced a lot of fear. I was afraid a lot in that environment. Every year they called it capsule night then, and so we had to, I think it was third grade where everyone did their self portraits. Now there was a Black guy and me, and we were the only two Black students in the class. We had to draw our self-portraits. I was just dreading this because I had to deal with the fact I'm the only Black female in this class. If I color myself brown, everyone will know it's me, I'm standing out and I could run the risk of being ridiculed. I was tormented that whole week leading up to capsule night because I was like, what am I going to do? Then it was a Thursday night that we had capsule night, and just after the bell rang and before I had to get on the bus, the thought came to me, if I don't color myself brown, my mother won't know me. I lifted up the top of the desk and put my portrait in the desk and I colored myself brown really fast. I put it on the teacher's desk face down, and I ran out and got on the bus. I was concerned because of course my mother was coming. She was at everything. We were going to school and I had capsule night, and so she saw my portrait and she told me, "That's you. You look so beautiful." I'm almost in tears now that I think about it. But anyway, it just meant a lot to know that my mother knew me and that I had the courage to be who I was in that moment.
  • [00:48:30] DONALD HARRISON: Thank you for sharing that.
  • [00:48:35] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: You're welcome.
  • [00:48:37] DONALD HARRISON: Debby I was going to ask you about this experience and then you'd come home after day one, and this being a difficult traumatic experience, did you talk to your parents about it? I'm just curious what their involvement was and how they responded.
  • [00:48:59] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yeah. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, and when we went to school she took a job, and she took a job as a domestic, so that she had flexibility in her schedule, so that she could be at the school whenever we needed her to be. She was very involved in the work. In our school she was on the PTO and she brought food and she was just very involved and just actively. My mother had this personality. She had magnetism, charisma, charm. She was the ultimate Southern belle. She won over every teacher, every administrator at the school. She made sure that to the extent possible that she could protect us. On the PTO the parents loved her, one of the parents was on the Board of the YMCA. We got all that scholarships to camp because my mother had this charm. That was her way of helping to smooth things out, and to make sure that we were safe. My father worked a job and then he was in demand to do handyman type work around the community so, he just worked all the time. He just made sure we were provided for and had everything that we needed and my mother was the person that was actively intervening with our school and she chose a job that would allow her that flexibility and not be boxed into set hours. That was a form of sacrifice for her, not being able to do other things.
  • [00:51:20] DONALD HARRISON: Then for you, tell me where you went to school after that, and how it went.
  • [00:51:27] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I went to Slauson after that and it was really interesting. I do want to say that in sixth grade, a young Black girl came to school. We were in the same classroom. I had a friend. From second semester sixth grade, and we hung out all through the summer. It was a great relief to have her as a friend at that point in my life. Then everyone from Dicken went to Slauson. Any relationships that we had at Dicken, people that we knew at Dicken, they barely even spoke to us once we get to meet junior high. In junior high, the Black people from my community actually, they were mostly kids that went to Mack School. My family and I went to Slauson. The kids that lived on the other side of the street, on that side of our Summit went to Forsythe. When I went to Slauson, with the exception of my best friend at the time, I had to learn a whole new group of people because the kids that went to Slauson went to Mack, and Mack was a different part of the Black community. I had to get to know those kids. There are some jockeying for position, but there was a real clear distinction between Black and white in junior high school. It was the late 60s. There was unrest. In Ann Arbor, there were race fights in schools all the time. In high school, in junior high school. I remember at Slauson that it was so contentious that the white boys were fighting, even beating up Black girls, and the Black guys were defending us and it was a crazy time racially. Remember that we were all at the community center talking about what we were going through at Slauson, and the Black guys who were at Pioneer which was the feeder--Slauson fed into Pioneer--they came down. They said, "Don't worry, we're going to take care of you." They came to Slauson after they got out of school and it was a wild race fight. It was wild. Chairs were being thrown, people were being scratched, beaten on both sides. It was wild.
  • [00:54:50] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: There was a lot of racial tension. I remember a friend of mine at the time she was running for student council. Only Black person running for student council. There was contention about that and she didn't win and we felt like they cheated her and it was all about race. We had a camp counselor, Bill Ratcliffe. He was a Black radical and I think he helped start the Black Student Union. He fed us with positive. He gave us positive feedback. He educated us about the Black cause. He had us put together a Black history program and we did an assembly for the whole school. That's when they first started with Black history week. He oversaw that whole production. It was the one time that we all felt like we could use our talents and we could tell our story. We told the story using the last poets and Don L. Lee with his radical writing and Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. Of course, we had The Temptations, we had a dance show, and we had pantomime, singing, and my sister was a beautiful modern dancer and she just tore the house down with her performance. For the first time we felt like, wow, we really did something. I had written a poem called "Be Like The Nice White Folks". It was a poem that talked about how a group of white people ended up killing a child. The white students went home at the end of the day and they told their parents that Black kids were just horrible. They made us feel so bad and so it's like okay. That discussion with the parents I believe it made the Ann Arbor News. We had to do another assembly at night and invited everyone, the parents, the students, and everyone. As it turned out, there was nothing that anyone was concerned about. They were like, Wow, that was a great show. [LAUGHTER] I remember that vividly as a part of going over to Slauson. I have pent-up anger for years and I couldn't express it in my elementary school. But once we got to junior high, then we were all. It was the Black Power movement. Blackness was everything and we were expressing it and all the anger that had been bottled up inside of me, I wrote poetry and I recited poetry that was radical. I wasn't taking any stuff off teachers. I challenged them if they didn't like my work. If they just didn't it's like why is my work considered less than this person when my punctuation was all correct and theirs was not? Why did they get a better grade? Then I became more of a self-advocate and an advocate for my people because there were kids who were afraid to fight for themselves and I became the one who fought for them. That was a significant transition in my life.
  • [00:59:17] DONALD HARRISON: Then from there, you went off to Huron, and how was that then from there? This was happening in middle school and did it continue? A lot of things started to come down there or did they continue?
  • [00:59:30] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: My experience was that there was still a lot of racial incidents going on. They had the greasers and they were white kids and they would ride their motorcycles through the arches. Some of them, one time I remember they had shotguns and I think it was just like an intimidate. Maybe guns that their parents had for hunting or whatever. But I remember that I saw my brother and sister, they were like, this is is crazy. Then there was drugs at the time in the early 70s, everybody was getting high. There were mixed groups of kids that would get high. There were kids that didn't get out. It was a different time, how you experienced for your own. But it was wild.
  • [01:00:34] DONALD HARRISON: When you think back on that now to go from that formative time in elementary and then the late 60s and that shifting so much. When you think back on that, what's your sense of how that impacted you?
  • [01:00:55] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Identity development. There was a lot to take into your spirit. For me, I had a lot of anger inside. Also, for African American students that were in school with me, I would always encourage them. "You guys need to do better. You have to do better. You can't skip school. You have to get your homework done. Here, let me help you." I'd stay in the library after school and try to help people do their homework. I felt this great responsibility as a Black person to help uplift other Black kids. I also felt like I had to advocate. I had to fight or we were not going to make it. A lot of kids did not make it and it was pretty sad. The number of kids that did not graduate, they thought they were going to graduate and then senior year they find out no, you don't have enough credits to graduate. Actually, you only have enough credits to be in the 10th grade. It's like, whoa and that was crazy. I remember I was a straight A student in math and my counselor told me after 10th grade, I had met all my math requirements and I didn't have to take math anymore. Now, I really did like math. But who likes math. I didn't have to take math anymore. I didn't take math anymore. I asked about taking a humanities class and my counselor told me, that's for kids who are going to college. I said, I'm going into college. I want to take the humanities class. Somehow I never took the humanities class even though I went on to go to college. I was a theater major because like I said, I performed in the community. When I was in 9th or 10th grade, I joined the Black theater, which was a community theater that was started by U of M alumni and current U of M student and I was the youngest person in the theater and I was holding lead roles in the theater group. I was majoring in theater in high school because my idea from fifth grade was to become a theatrical director. I took theater in high school and I never could get a leading role. They always put me backstage to work backstage and then I complained about it and they gave me a role of a nurse. I walked onstage, said one word and then that's all. I might have said, doctor your patient is here. That was my whole line through the whole play. But in the community, I'm a leading actress. I'm performing all over the place. I'm invited to speak at big dinners, and banquets, and receptors. I can't get a bit part. I get a bit part. I had to fight for a bit part in high school. My teacher told me, you can't act and it was like, wait a minute, now that is going totally contrary to my lived experience. But she would tell me that over. You can't act. That's why you aren't getting any parts because you can't act. When I went to college, I went to Western Michigan University because Von Washington who produced and directed Purlie, he had left Michigan and went to Western Michigan University. When I got to Western, they said, what do you want to major in? All I could hear was that teacher's voice in my head, you can't act. I said communications. I majored in communications and did not like it. I did community theater. I enjoyed that. That's high school. There were some really good times in high school and I had good friends and high school was fun.
  • [01:06:15] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I learned a lot but I don't think I ever really found my perfect niche in high school. The search for identity was a lot. Not only identity but self-esteem. The greatest damage I think that experience early on did in my life really shattered my self-esteem, and my sense of being seen, and heard. That took a lot of years to overcome. A lot of years. I was formed in the context of criticism and condemnation and humiliation. I had to work through that over the years.
  • [01:07:11] DONALD HARRISON: I can tell that you've put a lot of work into it. Imagining you being invisible and not having your voice. It's coming through so clearly and confidently now. Thank you.
  • [01:07:24] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Thank you.
  • [01:07:27] DONALD HARRISON: I'm going to shift--since we don't have all afternoon--to hearing about your sense, with Jones closing, did you continue to live in that neighborhood? [OVERLAPPING]
  • [01:07:39] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I did.
  • [01:07:41] DONALD HARRISON: Then what do you remember of the changes? When the things started to change and close and people started to move. What's your sense of how neighborhood started to change and what do you remember of that?
  • [01:07:57] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Jones School closed. But I don't know how long after it closed that it became, I think it was the Ann Arbor Rec and Ed started having programs there on the weekends. There was a whole host of classes that they offered. Some of them we went to and kept the connection with Jones School. I remember taking a basket weaving class and a ceramics class. But it wasn't the same. Then I think at some point it became an alternative school. A lot of the Black kids that grew up together ended up in Community. Community High became the alternative kids. All the bad kids went to Community High or the kids who got pregnant. They had a Student Parent Center there. They went to Community and Community was wonderful, because they had unconventional way of teaching. The kids that didn't fit in the classroom. They tapped into the arts. Jones School was familiar for many of them because that was our home school. They ended up having one of the best jazz bands in the country. It started out with these kids that as an alternative school, now it's like, please let me into Community High. [LAUGHTER] Seeing that transition in the community it was interesting. Now seeing the area that they now call Water Hill, which was the area that we were redlined and restricted to, my family still owned houses and we just sold the last couple of houses recently. But as I was renovating the houses to put them on the market, I was in the neighborhood a lot and out working in the yard and people would walk by and they make snide remarks about me working out in the yard and they didn't know who I was. I got tired of it. One day this lady made a snide remark about, "Oh, are you living in the neighborhood?" I was like, "You happen to be in my neighborhood. Do you know there was a time that this was all Black and it was redlined because this was the only place that we were allowed to buy homes? Guess what? I lived in that house right there all of my life. I happen to own both of these houses now. Really, you moved into my neighborhood." She was, "Oh, I didn't know that." I said "Yes. You should read about it." Ann Arbor doesn't feel like home anymore. It's so different than the community that we grew up in. Even a lot of people are distressed by the way Ann Arbor is developing with so many high buildings and losing the character of the community. But the other thing I remember is that I think it was during the high school years, they started building scattered-site public housing around Ann Arbor. That was a way of dispersing the Black community. That's when white people started buying the property and the neighborhoods started changing. My father built a house for my mother out on Dexter Road. We moved out there and it was 3,000 square foot home and brick home. There were a couple of Black people in the area. But we experienced discrimination out there. People would come and pull up my mother's flower pots, slam them on the porch. There wasn't a place where we felt like we could just relax and chill and be who we are. But people started moving out of the neighborhoods. I was 14 when we moved out and other people had started moving out before. But we kept the properties and they were mostly, most of our tenants were either my aunt or a family member or other community members. Then we had a lot of U of M students throughout the years. But we held onto the property until 2019.
  • [01:13:13] DONALD HARRISON: Debby you've talked about the community center and it sounds like, I think it was already moved to Main Street from the Dunbar Center. Did you ever go to Dunbar or was it already--?
  • [01:13:28] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: No. When I went to the Community Center, it was always the brick building on Main Street. We had summer camp there. Then eventually Mr. Hill secured Camp Takoma, which was a former YMCA camp, and we had a bus and we rode the bus to Chelsea every morning and we sang songs on the bus. Throughout the school year we had teen night every Monday and Thursday night. I was really entrenched in the Community Center because of course, my mother knew everyone in charge at the Community Center and if we did anything wrong, we were going to get in trouble. Lived a lot of my life at the Ann Arbor Community Center. There was a real sense of community a lot. Some of the people that mentored me when I was 11-12 years old are still my mentors now. It was a very important gathering space for the community. Sad that we lost that space.
  • [01:14:41] DONALD HARRISON: Do you remember much about the Black Business District you sound like your dad had property near that he dropped pretty close to it, but do you remember as a kid and then as you got older?
  • [01:14:52] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Oh, yeah. Ann Street was the the block, they called it "The Block." It was one block that was primarily Black business owned. Ownership was in that one block. Eventually, over time it became up in the '60s, there was a lot of drug trafficking that went through Ann Street. There was the Derby Bar and there were barbershops. We could not go anywhere near Ann Street growing up. If we went downtown, you have to cross Ann Street. We could not walk on that side of the street. I grew up and my parents were very strict. We couldn't walk on that side of the street. I didn't even know all the shops on Ann Street because I never walked down that street. But I knew that there were businesses there. There was the pool hall and I think there was a laundromat somewhere around there. But I didn't not interface with the business district at all because by the time we were growing up, it was pretty dicey.
  • [01:16:11] DONALD HARRISON: Then when you got older, it was totally shutting down?
  • [01:16:17] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yes.
  • [01:16:18] DONALD HARRISON: Do you remember Summit turned into Wheeler Park and any of that happening?
  • [01:16:23] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Well, they had talked about it for years and we were always in anticipation of when we'd get this nice park. They talked about tearing down Lansky's junkyard. We were like, "Oh man, we're going to have a nice park." Well, it didn't happen until we were grown. Then there was a little something in your heart like when the community changed, now they get the nice park. When we were there, we weren't worthy of a nice park. But we were happy that it was renamed to Wheeler Park for the first Black mayor. There was still some ownership and pride in the space.
  • [01:17:09] DONALD HARRISON: Are there any questions that you have for Debby? Didn't want to dump Debby if there is anything. I have a few more questions to you. I think now might be your time.
  • [01:17:20] HEIDI MORSE: I just wanted to hear the names of your siblings. [OVERLAPPING]
  • [01:17:29] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: The names of my sibling are Arnes, Carroll, Larry, Maria, and Herman.
  • [01:17:40] DONALD HARRISON: Thank you.
  • [01:17:42] DONALD HARRISON: Debby, I feel like we could keep you here for five hours and I would keep wanting to know more because you have fantastic recall and also your experience there. You must know Roger Brown [LAUGHTER] like a half block away?
  • [01:18:01] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Roger Brown grew up in my face, but [LAUGHTER] his mother and my mother were best friends, and my sister was his babysitter and his brother's babysitter and all of us grew up in Summit Park. His grandmother lived up the street from us so he had to pass our house every day going through his grandmother's house. He says to me that I terrorized him. He's a pastor now, and if I go to his church, he said, my arch enemy is here. It's like, give it a rest Roger. We're old now. [LAUGHTER] But he still remembers those days. Now his wife and I became best friends. When she told me she was married to him, I was like you're married to Roger Brown? She's like, what's wrong with him? Did I marry a serial killer or what? [LAUGHTER] But yes, Roger and I go way back and we are still close.
  • [01:19:08] DONALD HARRISON: This will be our gossip section of the interview. We'll just do gossip right now. I'm kidding. Are there things that you feel are important that you didn't say? Because again, I think a lot of history that people don't know and it's important to, especially people who are younger. I know that there's now more talk about really honoring history, but are there things that wish more people knew about Ann Arbor about the old neighborhood and what we've lost or what maybe isn't recognized?
  • [01:19:41] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Yes. I can't believe I mentioned the Farmers' Market but I didn't mention the French Dukes. The French Dukes was a precision drill team here in Ann Arbor. It was started through the Elk's Club of Ann Arbor. They took these young men, some of them did not have fathers in the home, some of them were on a bad road, and they created this amazing drill team. We were so proud of them. Every Wednesday or Thursday we'd go down to the market and watch them practice. That was a big thing where all the kids in the neighborhood would go practice. Of course, the boys and the girls would be hooking up on the side during the drill team, but they were local celebrities for us. Not only local, but they were in the, I think it was President Nixon's inaugural parade. They put Ann Arbor, Michigan on the map for us. That was a great asset to our community, but I don't know how far their notoriety reached within our city. I don't know if it was just the Black community or if it was beyond that. They did match in the local parades so I'm sure people knew about them through that. I don't know the value that was placed on them, but for the Black community, it was a group that we are extremely proud of. The Community Center, the Elks, those are some organizations that kept the young people out of trouble and on a positive path.
  • [01:21:46] DONALD HARRISON: I think you already said you hit on this a little ways to go. You might have been too young, but do you have a sense of what your parents' opinions were when Jones was been talked about. Because this came out, the report, and there were a lot of studies showing that Jones wasn't delivering the education [OVERLAPPING]. The question became, well, so what's going to happen? Do you remember what they thought about and what their opinion was of that?
  • [01:22:17] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I don't. I was, I think, six years old. I was not attuned to that. But I do know my father was on the board of Model Cities and it was a community development organization. He was very active in making sure that there were some good things happening for the Black community in general. My mother was just concerned about our safety. We were just told you're going to get a better education.
  • [01:22:55] DONALD HARRISON: Again it's hard to have to reflect back on bigger questions. As they tried to improve things like from your experience, housing opened up but then the community split apart. The school was under performing and wasn't delivering, but then busing happens. Do have a sense of, looking back, on progress or how things were addressed and and where it got you?
  • [01:23:31] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I understand why Black parents and leaders wanted to close the school, because they wanted the best for the students. I believe that. That was happening across the country, desegregation. Here we are in Ann Arbor and there's a segregated school. Let's desegregate this too and make sure that these students get the same quality education as everyone else. I have mixed feelings about desegregation in general because of what it did to Black communities where you had mixed income people and professional mixed with working class people and so the whole community benefited from all the resources that were there. I think that another approach could have been to invest more money into Jones School and make sure it wasn't neglected because of the population, and keep the community intact by making sure that the students had an equal education. Not only keep the school intact, but if they were going to do busing, it should have been a mix so that there were white kids going into the Black community and Black kids going into the white community. Then we would have gotten the best of both worlds, so that looking back on it and in retrospect, I think that kind of an experiment could had much more positive outcomes. Because I think we lost a lot of children and we lost a lot of potential in what happened to our communities.
  • [01:25:38] DONALD HARRISON: When I got interested in this subject, I was reading the Ann Arbor News and working at Community High. Then you go to the Ann Arbor News and so much changed so fast looking at the schools and equality and civil rights era. Then so quickly you're flipping through the pages, it's like race riots and Black Power movement. It shows like what you went through in elementary through high school. Again, according to the newspapers and clearly your experiences, there is as such a huge shift in terms of the experience and especially within Ann Arbor and the Black community. I appreciate your sharing so much with us. Is there any other last follow up question or anything else you want to cover?
  • [01:26:41] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: I just want to say how grateful I am for the experience and the mentors, particularly African American mentors that I had growing up. Some of them you've interviewed already and I don't want to start calling names because there are so many that served as role models and friends and protectors and just guides throughout my life because I certainly would not have accomplished and reached my full potential without those people. I appreciate you all capturing this history because pretty soon Ann Arbor, I fear that there will be no traces of us in the next 20 years, and that's being generous. I think it's important to keep documenting and marking where we were in the city.
  • [01:27:45] DONALD HARRISON: Thank you, Debby.
  • [01:27:46] DEBBY MITCHELL COVINGTON: Welcome.