Abstract
Dee Perry spent 40 years as a Cleveland radio broadcaster. She hosted programs on Cleveland's public radio station, WCPN, where she was a leader in promoting the Arts. She has conducted more than 10,000 interviews and was the lead interviewer for the Stokes Oral History Project. This 2017 interview was collected as part of a yearlong, community-wide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Carl Stokes' election as mayor of Cleveland.
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Interviewee
Perry, Dee (interviewee)
Interviewer
Onkey, Lauren (interviewer)
Project
Stokes: Honoring the Past, Inspiring the Future
Date
9-12-2017
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
76 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Dee Perry interview, 12 September 2017" (2017). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 501016.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1207
Transcript
Lauren Onkey [00:00:05] So we are here on September 12, 2017 at the Jack Joseph and Morton Mandel Humanities center at Cuyahoga Community College to continue the Stokes Project Oral History Project. Can you please state your name?
Dee Perry [00:00:20] My name is. I’m sorry, I feel like I want to tell the truth. My name is Dee Perry. D, E, E, P, E, R, R, Y.
Lauren Onkey [00:00:29] And where were you born?
Dee Perry [00:00:32] I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. St. Luke’s Hospital, I believe in 1950.
Lauren Onkey [00:00:39] And what neighborhood of the city did you live in?
Dee Perry [00:00:43] Well, I started out with my mom at her parents’ house, my grandparents on Birchdale Avenue, which is in the Hough neighborhood. And once my mom remarried when I was about four years old, we moved not far away to the Central neighborhood. And Hough and Central were pretty much where most of the Black people that I knew and grew up with lived at that point in time. In the early ’50s. And when I was about 8 years old, we moved to our first house, that is my mom and my stepdad and I moved to our first house and that was in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood and stayed there until all the children were grown.
Lauren Onkey [00:01:27] What schools did you go to?
Dee Perry [00:01:29] I went to- My first elementary school was in the Central neighborhood, Washington Irving Elementary, which I don’t think exists anymore. When we moved to Mount Pleasant, I went to Charles Dickens Elementary. Then I went to Alexander Hamilton Junior High School and John F. Kennedy High School.
Lauren Onkey [00:01:55] All these names are really interesting in American history as you lay those out. What was the racial makeup of those schools?
Dee Perry [00:02:04] Washington Irving. I was in an elementary school class that was- The children were all Black, the teacher was white. At Charles Dickens, it was the first mixed class. There were Black and white children in the school and still in the neighborhood surrounding the school. At that point in 1958, through, really through my high school years, I remained in mixed classes in Hamilton and at John F. Kennedy too.
Lauren Onkey [00:02:40] What were your memories of Cleveland, say, as a, you know, up to high school? Just as a- Give us some general sense of where you were.
Dee Perry [00:02:52] Well, when we were living in Hough and in Central, looking back on it, I recognized that those neighborhoods were economically depressed, that there weren’t stores around in walking distance. The buildings were kind of ramshackle. But as a kid I didn’t see that. I didn’t get that feeling. My sense of it was that I lived in a neighborhood where the people knew each other. My grandmother was friends with all of the ladies on the block and they went out in their front yards and tended their flowers and they went in their backyards and grew vegetable gardens. And so I played with the children across the street and the words poverty didn’t make an appearance until, I think, we had moved out of the neighborhood and into Mount Pleasant, because at that point, compared to Central and Hough, they were considered the suburbs. And so we moved to Mount Pleasant to a house on a street that had Black and white neighbors. While I was growing up, the white population dwindled as time went on. So by the time I was getting out of high school, it was a mostly Black neighborhood. And my parents eventually moved because they began to feel less safe as the ’70s, late ’70s and ’80s came on. But at the time when I was growing up, I had a sense that I was safe walking to and from school, that somebody, if it wasn’t my parents, somebody was always looking out for.
Lauren Onkey [00:04:44] Where were your parents from?
Dee Perry [00:04:46] My mother was from Mississippi. Town called Lynwood, Mississippi, is where she was born. My father was from North Carolina, my stepfather was from North Carolina, and my biological father was from Hanon, Alabama. So all southerners who migrated north in the mid to late ’40s.
Lauren Onkey [00:05:14] Did you- As a young kid, did you feel that southerners were different from you and your siblings? I mean, did you have that sense of? There was a southern culture and a Cleveland culture?
Dee Perry [00:05:27] Not really. I went south once when I was little, and so little that all I remember seeing is dirt. When I was outside, I was about knee high. And I do remember that when we were in the South, in Mississippi, visiting what would have been my great aunt, the woman who raised my grandmother, that everyone was very respectful around her, much more so than we were taught to be in Cleveland. But if she entered the room, you had to stand, you had to pull out her chair, you had to say, ma’am, and just show her a certain kind of deference. That wasn’t the case. When we were talking to our grandparents in Cleveland, we would have to say Grandma, Grandpa, please and thank you. But they didn’t stand on as much ceremony as I remembered from the South, but because they brought their traditions with them, it was kind of like being raised by- I mean, having that- Still having that connection to the South. And most of the people in the neighborhood had the same story. They came from Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia. And so the traditions were still the same. You grew your food for the most part. You got your poultry or other meat from outside little butcher shops and whatnot. And I remember my grandmother and my mother telling me the story of raising chickens on the farm in Alabama and catching a live chicken and then wringing its neck for dinner. And I could not imagine that until one day they took me to the butcher shop where they bought their chickens for the dinner table in Cleveland. And there were live chickens actually in the store. And I didn’t watch what happened to get that to the plate, but I recognized that those connections were still there.
Lauren Onkey [00:07:48] What did your mother and stepfather do? They work outside the home?
Dee Perry [00:07:52] Yeah, my stepfather was, but he had a number of different jobs while he was working his way into the department. I think he worked as a juvenile corrections officer. He worked at a Kroger store as a salesperson. And then he finally took the test to enter the fire department in the late 50s. And so he was one of the early Black firemen on the department. And my mom worked. My uncle Will had a store, a grocery store, and she worked for him part-time. But mostly she was a stay at home mom up until I was about 12. And my brothers were like 9 and 8 and 6. And she decided to go back to school at Tri-C and she studied nursing. And when she got her degree, she went to work at Mount Sinai and spent her entire career moving up the ladder at the hospital.
Lauren Onkey [00:09:07] Where was the store? Where was the grocery store?
Dee Perry [00:09:11] Actually, it was first he had a store on the corner of 55th and Quincy, and then he moved to another store on 38th and Central. So it was always in that Hough and Central area. My uncle never moved out of the neighborhood in terms of his business and really home too, because he shared the house with my grandmother after my grandfather passed away in the mid ’70s.
Lauren Onkey [00:09:41] What were some of your first jobs?
Dee Perry [00:09:44] Oh, gosh, let’s see. My very first one was working for the phone company, for Ohio Bell. And that was after I had gone away to school in New York and quit school because I had no sense then and then came back home and realized I needed to find some work because my parents said, now you’re on your own if you want to continue your education. So I went to work at Ohio Bell as a phone operator who pushes the plugs in. But this was at the tail end of when they were just transitioning from that style to a more digital style that put a lot of operators out of work. So I took that experience and then worked at it for about half a year and decided I’m going back to New York and finish exploring the city so I’ll have something to write about when I write that great American novel. And so I transferred to New York Telephone Company and at that point they were also doing that transitioning. So I had some interesting jobs that Taught me how to use a camera to take pictures of all the traffic that was going on the phone lines, the old ones, so they could judge how much traffic they were going to get and handle on the new equipment. And so I learned a lot of interesting skills. And that’s also in New York, where I decided to go to broadcasting school because I figured the phone company was going to be not as we knew it pretty soon. And I needed some other skill to fall back on. And that was it. When I finished broadcasting school, I came back to Cleveland and worked part time on air. My first job was at a daytime AM station, WABQ. And I made just enough so that I could go back to school and take one class a semester. So it took me about 12 years to finally finish college. But once it was about 1976 when I got in the business. Once I started on that track, the rest of my working life has been in broadcasting of some kind.
Lauren Onkey [00:12:12] Was radio meaningful to you, say, in adolescence?
Dee Perry [00:12:15] High school? Oh, yeah, that was- I mean, we had a TV when they first came out, but radio was really. I mean, that was kind of a special occasion thing. We’d turn it on and the family would sit and watch a program together. But most of my entertainment came from radio. And listening to radio is what made me want to be in it in the first place. Because I was on the tail end of when they were still telling stories, I mean, like serial dramas or comedies on radio. So I would listen to hit music, but I could also tune to a station that would- If I sat on the floor and turned it to the right station, someone would tell me a story. And I love that. It felt like someone was speaking directly to me.
Lauren Onkey [00:13:09] What year did you graduate from high school?
Dee Perry [00:13:11] 1968. So I was out in June of ’68, and Carl Stokes had won the mayoral election the previous fall. So I was in town for about a year of his first term.
Lauren Onkey [00:13:33] Where did you go in New York?
Dee Perry [00:13:35] I went to Barnard. And just because I had always wanted to go to New York, not because I knew it was a good school or had a reputation. My parents took me on a go see the school trip in my senior year and I had chosen either NYU or Barnard. And I made Barnard my choice because it had a patch of grass out front. And that said to me, oh, okay, I’m from the Midwest and I’ve always seen grass. I need something like that to make me feel less alien. So based on a patch of green out front, Barnard was my school.
Lauren Onkey [00:14:17] Were you eager to leave Cleveland?
Dee Perry [00:14:19] At that time I wasn’t so eager to leave Cleveland, but I was eager to explore New York, or in any case, a different world. Because I was- I was definitely the teacher’s pet kind of kid. I did what my parents told me. I did what my elders told me. I did what my teachers told me. And everybody said, you should go to college. No, not you should. You are going whether you think you should or not. Because my first instinct was I wanted to join the army and see the world. And so getting out to go to another city was the closest I could come to seeing the world. And I loved my hometown and my friends and family, but I really felt like I needed to be out on my own in a place where they couldn’t reach me and I could make my own mistakes. And I did.
Lauren Onkey [00:15:20] Before everybody could find everybody with a cell phone.
Dee Perry [00:15:22] Right, exactly.
Lauren Onkey [00:15:23] So you mentioned Stokes. So let’s kind of circle back. So Carl Stokes first runs for mayor in 1965. What memories, if any, do you have of the ’65 Stokes campaign?
Dee Perry [00:15:37] Just very dim ones of seeing his face on the TV screen and hearing my parents talk about whether he had a shot at it or not. And they did not think that he did. And it was partly their experience from the South. A Black man is not going to get a chance to do that. That’s just not going to happen. And my father was already in the fire department at that time and experiencing the kind of pushback from the majority white department that said they didn’t want him there. But whatever there was of what passed for affirmative action at that time, and his own studying and hard work got him the position. And he wasn’t going to let go of it. So I knew that he was running. I knew that Carl Stokes was running. And I knew his face from years before because my mother and Carl were the same age and were in the same class in high school. So his picture was in yearbooks that I came across, and just small Black and white photos that he hand wrote, like, you exchange your high school photos. So he was a presence. Before I knew he was a politician. In our house, it was different A couple of years later. I was more aware of who he was from the first time around and just from the family talking about it. And this time, the talk around the house was that they felt like it was possible. This time in ’65, he came closer than they and friends and family around them thought he would, and that gave them hope and encouragement. So they were rooting for him this time and thinking that maybe he could Possibly be the first Black mayor. And we weren’t calling him. We weren’t calling him the first Black mayor. The first, I think we were Negro at that time, because for a long time we were. When I was growing up, we were colored people. And then at some point, I think as Martin Luther King began to gain widespread notoriety, Negroes seemed more dignified. And then by the time the late ’60s were there, and this wasn’t until I was in college when I started saying, I’m Black and I’m proud. And when I went home with that attitude, it took my parents a while to catch up. So. So they were really to circle back to the election, really confident this time around that there would be a Negro mayor for Cleveland.
Lauren Onkey [00:18:53] It’s interesting to think about his two elections against that historical trajectory you just laid out there. What kind of memories do you have, if any, of the Civil Rights movement here in the city, maybe even leading up to the two elections?
Dee Perry [00:19:10] And I’d have to say not much. My parents were very aware or very diligent, I guess, about sort of creating a bubble around all of us. For instance, my grandparents were still living in the Hough neighborhood in the ’60s when the Hough riots broke out. And I knew that there was some concern. I could hear hushed telephone calls and grown ups having meetings in rooms where they would usher us out. And I think they were trying to decide whether to bring my grandparents to their house. But my grandparents weren’t going anywhere. So in that sense, I knew something was going on. And I saw news reports for the little bit of time that my parents would allow it to be on TV when we were in the room. But for the most part, they tried to keep that news away from us and let us not worry about the things that they were probably terrified about at that point. So it wasn’t until after, actually, I went away to school in New York that people in New York classmates were asking me, so, were you around in the Hough riots? And I had to say I was around, but I didn’t really know what was going on.
Lauren Onkey [00:20:46] Were you interested in the news and reading the newspaper as a high school student?
Dee Perry [00:20:52] Not that much. And it pains me to say that now because I was in classes that were supposed to be for advanced students. But the advancement didn’t carry over to current affairs, English, Social Studies, studying past history and highlighting events. I don’t think I even heard the phrase black history until I was in my senior year of high school. And we got a history teacher who was, I would have to say, militant for those times in a teaching setting. He made sure that we knew about black historical figures and as much as he could, try to get us to have opinions about them, even though that might have been the first exposure a lot of us had to some of those stories and some of those histories. We knew, in a vague sense that slavery had existed, but we didn’t really understand what that meant or what the legacy of it was, even for our grandparents or their parents before them. So there was a lot of willful ignorance, I think, in my high school days.
Lauren Onkey [00:22:29] Do you remember that teacher’s name?
Dee Perry [00:22:32] I don’t remember his name, but the funny thing is I do remember his teaching assistant, C. Ellen Connolly, because she went on to study law and become a judge in the city, and. And she was mentoring under this teacher’s wing, as he was. I think he was teaching all of us, including her, about the necessity for knowing your history. And that became. I mean, the necessity didn’t become apparent to me until much later when. When people around me in college were expressing these heartfelt opinions and strong points of view. And I didn’t even know what my point of view was when it came to those things, except in the moment when I first heard James Brown. And I’m in my dorm room unpacking things and listening to the first radio station I found in. In New York that played music I could identify with. And he’s singing say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m proud. And in that college dorm room was the first time I actually said that out loud. And at first I whispered it. I wasn’t saying it loud, but I was just trying it out for size. And the more I tried on that identity, the more I realized what I’d been missing up to that point.
Lauren Onkey [00:24:07] Wow. Hearing that record. And you hadn’t heard it before in New York?
Dee Perry [00:24:12] No, no, I hadn’t. It might have been out before, but I was so focused on getting out of high school and getting out of town that I don’t think I was paying much attention to anything else except what I needed to do to get those things done.
Lauren Onkey [00:24:29] What memories do you have of the ’67 mayoral campaign, either the primary or the general campaign?
Dee Perry [00:24:37] I think just hearing my folks sitting around the dinner table talking about what Carl said today or what other people were saying about him. And we got the Cleveland press at that time, what was in the press. And so they talked about the coverage of Carl. They talked about how well he carried himself on television and whenever they heard him in debates. And I got the sense that they were proud of him, that they felt he was representing himself and the people as a whole. Because there was a. There was. When I was growing up, there was something that they used to do on the news. If someone Black had committed a crime, they didn’t have the mug shots. There was like the sketch artist. And we would be hearing about whatever it was and silently praying, I hope he’s not colored, I hope he’s not a Negro. And they would show the sketch and we would feel crestfallen. Whether it was a true case or whether it was a trumped up case, we would feel that he’s let down the race. And so there was a sense that whatever one person who was in the spotlight was doing affected everybody. And I remember that clearly, that there wasn’t the sense that you could just go out as Carl Stokes and be on your own, be representing yourself and your own ambitions. You had to be supporting everybody else’s hopes and dreams. And that’s a big burden to carry.
Lauren Onkey [00:26:41] So you’re describing a kind of community response to him too, right? That it’s not only a candidate, but how the community is navigating this experience that’s happening.
Dee Perry [00:26:54] Yeah, he’s our, right, he’s our first, best hope for a kind of power that we hadn’t seen or been able to hold before, even in the free North. And so everybody was holding their breath to see that he would make all the right steps, make all the right moves, say the right things, portray the right image. And this was whether he won or lost, but especially as a way to get closer to winning.
Lauren Onkey [00:27:34] Do you have any memories of victory, victory night in ’67?
Dee Perry [00:27:38] Let’s see. I would have, yeah. I remember watching part of the returns, but I don’t think I was up long enough to find out whether he won or lost until the next day. And so I probably was asleep by the time it was actually decided. But I could tell when I came down to the kitchen the next morning that he had been victorious, because my parents were both about as giddy as I’d ever seen them. And they were not frivolous people. So the fact that he had won meant a lot to them. I mean, the celebration for me was in watching how happy they were. But a few months down the line, this would have been the fall of 1967. We were. I was at high school at John F. Kennedy, and it was a new high school at the time. It had just opened in ’65. And so we were starting our first National Honor Society, and we wanted to name it in honor of the new mayor. And we were getting pushback from our advisor that maybe we shouldn’t do that, maybe we should wait and see how he worked out as mayor before we put his name on the honor society. And we heeded that advice. But I was disappointed because we were as students so excited about this prospect. And the majority of our class at that time was Black, but it was still mixed. But all of the students, as I recall, were in favor of it, but the advisor was telling us no. And the message I was getting from that was that so they’re expecting him to fail and they don’t want to have his name on something that applies to the school at this point. And that left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth or in my mind, maybe I should say.
Lauren Onkey [00:30:15] It sounds like there was great enthusiasm amongst the students that this election had happened in ’67 and that he’d won. Any memories of other memories about school and whether maybe anybody you knew who worked on the campaign o-
Dee Perry [00:30:36] I don’t think none of the students that I knew, possibly their parents and possibly some of our teachers. It strikes me that at least two of the teachers that I had in high school later went into politics besides C. Ellen Connolly. Una Keenan also was a phys ed teacher who transitioned into law and then became a judge. And I suspect that both of them were probably people who were active in politics at that point in time and probably had something to do with the Stokes campaign. But I couldn’t say that as something that I knew for sure because they didn’t talk about it in classes. And I guess at that point in time that was something that would have been frowned on by the administration. Although I do remember a lesson on the Vietnam War from one of our Social Studies professors who was having us write papers taking a position one way or the other. And that was another instance where I found out I couldn’t have an opinion because I didn’t know enough about it. Some of the assignments that I was getting in senior class in high school just pointed out to me how much I didn’t know about the world around me and that it was time for me to get out into a space where I could explore it on my own.
Lauren Onkey [00:32:20] A new point of view that you brought to it?
Dee Perry [00:32:22] Absolutely. Like I said, I liked history, or at least I didn’t have anything against it when I was in high school, but it always seemed so flat and lifeless. And now that I have a sense of real rounded, red blooded, flawed, but ultimately admirable people are at the Heart of it. It’s made me explore other areas of history in that way, like the 19th century and the abolitionist movement is really fascinating to me. And I mean, Slavery is still going on in parts of the country during the 1800s, but there are other parts where it’s abolished and people are working to get. To get the whole country to get on board. And that’s a really fertile period of history where there’s all kinds of foment and rebellion and danger. And oddly enough, it reminds me a lot of the period of time that we’re in. There are dangers in lots of different areas and people who are working to combat those things and putting themselves in harm’s way at the same time. And I think there’s of a lot, a lot to learn from the past that we can bring into the present and future.
Lauren Onkey [00:34:06] That’s great.
Unknown speaker [00:34:09] Can I add one? I was going to ask you- Dee, you’ve heard lots of people talk about legacy. You’re looking at Laura.
Dee Perry [00:34:17] Right! Yeah. I just remembered that.
Unknown speaker [00:34:21] You’ve heard lots of people talk about legacy and Stokes brothers. Could you talk to what does the Stokes legacy mean to you? What do you think their legacy is for you personally and how has it impacted you or influenced you?
Dee Perry [00:34:38] See, for me, I think the legacy actually in a weird way has been this project. If they hadn’t existed in the way that they did in their time, even though I was in the same time with them, if it hadn’t been so powerful, we wouldn’t be having this conversation about what does it mean 50 years later. And I feel like the legacy to me is to have learned curiosity and vigilance more. I mean, as an interviewer, it was always my job to be curious, but it wasn’t so much part of that job to say, what does that mean? What does that mean for our times? What impact did the work that they did, how did that change the way that people live and think? And so there’s been a real sense of this is something. This is something beyond just politics. I mean, it goes to the heart of what it means to be human, to strive for something, to not just be content with living a comfortable life, but to see what you can do to make life better for your. Not just for yourself, but for everyone around you and beyond you, beyond your lifetime. Because I think the Stokes brothers didn’t think about what will people think of me in the future. What they thought about was what can I do now to make life better for people in the future? I may not be here, but what can I put in place that will improve the quality of life? Not just for the people that look like me, but for all the people who need that kind of help and support. So it’s given me a stronger sense of social justice. Seeing what around me I can do in some small way, to make life better. Not for me, but for somebody who’s coming after me. For a young man or woman who’s questioning but doesn’t know what path to follow. Maybe making a way for them, or saying, “Here’s some resources over here, or other here, that I can point you to, I can connect you with.” It’s given me the impulse to be a better citizen, and a better human being.
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