Lelar Spears "When I was a little girl, my mother did my hair in the kitchen...She would wash our hair in the kitchen and dry it and braid it up. It was very thick cause it was very kinky and she would get that straightening comb...." We met Lelar Spears through Portia Morgan, a high school teacher in Cleveland who was in contact with our group. After making several wrong turns and getting stuck in rush hour traffic, we finally arrived at Ms. Spears' mother's home, where Ms. Spears was staying at the time. We spoke with her at great length, and found her to be a remarkable woman. The following is her story and her perceptions of the world, as she told it to us.
Didalious Hill (Ms. Spears' brother), Mattie C. Hill (Ms. Spears' mother), Lelar Spears	General Background Lelar Spears was born in Birmingham, Alabama and lived there until 1964, when she moved to Cleveland, Ohio in search of a better salary and better working conditions. After living in Cleveland for 34 years, she moved back to Birmingham to be closer to her family. Her father worked in a steel mill and her mother stayed at home. Neither parent graduated from high school.
Ms. Spears attended Parker High School, which was, at the time, one of the largest all-black high schools in the United States. During her years there, the school consisted of several buildings, each housing a different cluster of subject matters. Specifically, there was a girls' building and a boys' building. In the girls' building, teachers taught cooking, laundry, cosmetology, "any subject a girl'd want to take." In the boys' building, they learned shoe repair and other industrial arts "of all kinds." She graduated from Parker in May 1951 in a graduating class of 391 students. Jackson-Olin, the other all-black high school in Birmingham, was not built until 1952, which explains the large size of her class at Parker. While Ms. Spears was growing up, her parents made a point of instilling in her and her siblings the importance of hard work. She recalled endless hours spent learning to play the piano, not because she enjoyed it, but because her parents wanted her to learn discipline. Her parents opened a store so that she and her brothers and sisters would not have to work in white people's homes. Above all, her parents stressed the importance of education as a means of life improvement and insisted that their children spend all free moments studying. Her parents believed that college was the only way for their children to get ahead. Ms. Spears attended Miles College and later became a math teacher. "The clothes we wore to church were not the clothes we wore everyday." Ms. Spears used to wear hats and gloves to church and even had special "church shoes." On Easter Sunday, each child in her family always received a new pair of church shoes, and their old church shoes would then become their everyday shoes. What she wore to school was very different; in her days at Parker, she was required to wear a uniform. But, "when you came home from school, you took that uniform off." She and her friends and siblings would put on older clothes, clothes they had had for a while. For little boys, this meant knickers; for older boys, this meant pants. For the girls, it meant a skirt and a blouse.
Growing up as an African American in Birmingham "We only dressed as young men and women dressed. We didn't dress to impress." While Ms. Spears did not feel compelled to prove herself in her dress, nor in many other aspects of her appearance, there was pressure acting on her and other members of the African American community. The possession of "good looks" often dictated who would be successful and who would not: "Fair-skinned girls and boys had it much easier than dark-skinned girls and boys. I can remember incidents...I was always outgoing and I always wanted to be in the upper class or group, the smart group. We had a May Queen every year, and I wanted to be May Queen so bad. And my mother would work hard to raise money...for me to be May Queen. And there were other little black girls...that wanted to be May Queen. There was a girl in our class, and she was very fair with long blond hair, so you know there was some mixing in there, and she was pretty, we thought, because of her complexion and her hair. Cause, you know, I was a little girl with nappy hair, kinky hair, and my hair would not grow. I had long sideburns and I wore it in pigtails. I was never, I don't care how much money my mother raised, I never made queen of the school! And every year, that light-skinned girl was queen! Only thing I can say, our teachers caused a lot of that...light-skinned pretty girls—girl, if you were a child during that time, you could make it, but you can't make it now, cause you're too dumb. But, as dumb as they were, they were somebody. When we went to Parker High School, the only majorettes were light-skinned girls with long hair; in the drama department, nothing but the light-skinned kids with the long hair. At that time, it was a part of life." Although Ms. Spears did not herself attempt to alter her appearance so that she might have "good looks," she knew many people who did. "My sister used [a skin lightener]. She wanted her skin lighter. And there was an ointment called Black and White, and she used to use it. But it didn't do anything. It put a rash on her jaw. It was too strong. And now she stopped. A lotta kids used that then. And, no, it didn't work!" Ironically, in a culture so dominated by images of white people, the goal many blacks had in mind when they used skin lighteners was not necessarily to look like the white images with which they were bombarded: "It was not the whites we were trying to be like, it was the fairer-skinned blacks that we was trying to get like." Blacks had created their own social hierarchy, independent from that of whites. They did not, therefore, necessarily want to be "white;" they wanted the success enjoyed by those at the top of their own hierarchy, the lighter-skinned blacks.
Life in Cleveland "When I moved to Cleveland, I saw, really, no difference much in the dress, in the food, because most people I came into contact with had migrated from the South to the North because of working conditions and they carried their trends and everything there with them. At that time, I could not talk to...or find people that did not have some contact with the South. At that time, Cleveland was becoming more South." The areas of Northern cities in which Southern blacks settled often became very much like the places from which they had come, for the very reasons Ms. Spears mentions. In fact, Cleveland earned the nickname "Alabama North." "The houses, to me, are much larger here [in Birmingham] than in Cleveland. In Cleveland, all the houses are made alike. It's not like that here. People believe in fixing up their houses up, nice furniture. People usually fix it up room-by-room when they move into a house, but here, in Birmingham, people fix up the whole house. You're gonna find everything in order. Things are much neater here in Birmingham...What we have in Birmingham, we take care of." The interior of Ms. Mattie C. Hill's home in Birmingham