Abstract

This interview with Donald Ramos traces his upbringing in a politically engaged Portuguese immigrant family in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the 1940s and 1950s, his academic development as a historian of Brazil and Latin America, his long career at Cleveland State University beginning in 1971, and his time living in a faculty enclave in East Cleveland. Ramos reflects on labor activism, ethnic identity, language, race, immigration, and higher education, describing how his family’s experiences shaped his intellectual and political worldview. The interview explores his graduate study in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, his involvement with CSU’s experimental First College program until 1997, and his commitment to interdisciplinary teaching and mentoring first-generation college students. Ramos also discusses suburban demographic change, housing discrimination, school integration, and fair housing activism in Cleveland Heights during the 1970s and after, including his work with the Heights Community Congress and efforts to combat racial steering in the local real estate market. The interview additionally examines his political activism related to U.S. involvement in Central America during the 1980s and 1990s, including his leadership in the Central American Network, educational outreach efforts, travels to Nicaragua during the Sandinista period, and critiques of U.S. foreign policy in the region. Throughout the interview, Ramos reflects on the intersections of race, class, ethnicity, politics, and public life in both the United States and Latin America, emphasizing the importance of dialogue, historical perspective, and civic engagement.

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Interviewee

Ramos, Donald (interviewee)

Interviewer

Souther, J. Mark (interviewer)

Project

Provost Summer Program

Date

6-24-2013

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

116 minutes

Transcript

Transcription sponsored by Jose Eduardo de Lima Pereira in memory of Donald Ramos, who played a significant role in Luso-Brazilian History studies.

Mark Souther [00:00:01] Today is June 24, 2013. My name is Mark Souther for the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project at Cleveland State University, and we’re conducting an interview this afternoon, and I’ll ask you to please state your name for the record.

Donald Ramos [00:00:16] My name is Donald Ramos, or Ramos. There’s always options with my name, depending on what country I’m in.

Mark Souther [00:00:26] Can you tell me a little bit about where and when you were born and where you grew up?

Donald Ramos [00:00:32] Yeah. I was born July 12, 1942, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, then a relatively thriving industrial community with fishing as a kind of a sideline. I was raised in a fascinating home that was anything but normal. It was a multiple extended household. My father and my mother owned the house. My grandmother lived with us, and my mother’s brother, my uncle, lived with us. And the political views of that group were as wide as the world can see. They went from extreme left to anarchism to very conservative. Dinner was always a fireworks display. It’s a good way to grow up.

Mark Souther [00:01:33] What did your parents do for a living?

Donald Ramos [00:01:35] Both were factory workers. My father was a weaver in a company that eventually became Hathaway. Ooh. It was a Hathaway mill. And then it evolved and got bought. But he was a weaver his entire life. Cost him his hearing. He was- He would occasionally- He didn’t like to talk about it much, but if you could actually sit and make him talk about it, he began working in a room. And I have the pictures of the workers in the room. There must have been 40 people, maybe more workers in that one room. He ran two looms. When he retired, there were two people working in that room, and he was running 200 looms. They were highly mechanized, computerized. They had come in from Switzerland. So all of those people were gone. And that was part of the problem in New Bedford as the textile mills modernized, and particularly when they decided to go south, the unemployment rate just got very, very high, and things became difficult. But my father was a weaver his entire life. My mother was a seamstress, and she worked in a number of factories near the house. You could actually walk to the house, walk to the mill. Both were very active in union activities. Both thought that was really important for workers, were highly committed to those activities, and they were also committed to- This requires some history. Portugal had been dominated from the teens by a fascist government headed by a man named Antonio Salazar. My father, who came, and my mother, both came to the U.S. when they were very young. They were non-political when they were, when they arrived in the U.S. but they became bitter opponents of the Salazar government. And so they were involved in anti-Salazar activities within the ethnic community. I see this in Cleveland all the time. [laughs] And I think back, oh, my God, it’s the same story. Where’s my father? It was a large enough group. They had a building and everything. And it was an interesting way to grow up because my parents often hosted, in a very small house, Portuguese writers who were in exile in the U.S. and were coming in to give talks. And I was always amazed because these were- They were always introduced as my uncle. I always had lots of uncles. Here comes Uncle Francisco. It took me years to say, wait a minute, wait a minute. How are they my uncle? It forced my father, who had one year of education, to become incredibly literate in Portuguese literature. He read, he dominated Portuguese literature. He had no interest in Brazil. None. But Portuguese literature he knew, so he could talk to these guys in their language. So he had two Portuguese languages. And he flipped. And he would play games with me. He would just flip. And this is how you say it here, and this is how you say it there. And I’ve known union leaders in Cleveland who did the same thing. So it’s a generic kind of phenomena, because you got to talk to people at the level that they’re at. And if their level of language is very high, you need to get there as best you can. My mother tended to operate with the cultural association and shop activities in conflicts regarding efforts to impose piecework on the workers. And she wanted straight salary and the managers wanted piecework. And so that’s where her political activities were going on. So in many ways, I idealize the family environment because people thought ideas were important. They were willing to argue it out. I mean, we’ve had- In my house, we’ve had guests from various political backgrounds, various countries. And often we engage in real debates. And I just watch my wife just get so angry with me. [laughs] And I think it’s wonderful. I think this is how dinner is supposed to be. And she wants a quiet, peaceful dinner. Let’s enjoy the food. But I think it comes out of my background and my experience. So I came out of that world. Lots of family friends around, people. People I still recognize as family. It’s a very typical ethnic- I spoke only Portuguese in the house. I didn’t learn English until I went to John B. DeValles Elementary School, which is still there - Jesus - after all these years. And I have no experience of language conflict. None. So there were no ESL programs. There was no nothing. [laughs] You walked through the door, and they talked English and you talked English quickly. So I’ve watched that language learning process and I’m really interested in how it works through my own eyes. And I know that that’s different than other people’s experience, but mine has been, was just seamless. I have no recollection of any transition. And so I’ve spoken Portuguese as my first language, in effect, all along. And I’ve had to move from Portuguese Portuguese to Brazilian Portuguese. But I kind of go back and forth. Let’s see, what else would you want to know? I went to a, then it was a junior high. It’s now a middle school, Roosevelt Junior High, which was as integrated a school before there was integration, as one could imagine, with a large number of white kids, Black kids, Cape Verdean kids. It was this delightful mixture about which I have positive, very positive feelings. From there, I ended up at New Bedford High School and in the College 2 track. College 1 would have meant Latin, and I wasn’t going there. So I stayed with College 2 doing French, which has served me well, I must say. From there, this is a family where nobody finished high school. Nobody. My father had one year of school. My mother had six years of school in the States. My father’s one year was in Portugal on a small island in the Atlantic. [laughs] Doesn’t count for much. It doesn’t count for anything, actually. My mom had gone through the sixth grade. They had wanted her to go on so she could be a teacher, but the family decided she needed to go to work to help the family. So she ended up working in a sewing operation. But they had all along, every memory I have was, and when you go to college, you need to think about what college you need to- It was just an assumption. It was never a discussion. I didn’t have a choice in my life. Here it was, you’re going to college. So. And I was trying to figure out what color. What does that mean? And ended up at UMass Amherst. There was only Amherst at that time. And that was a good choice. I had really good- I’m still close to one of the kids I went to school with. It was- It was very, in fact, in a lot of ways changed my life in my senior year, talking with my college faculty advisor. He said, well, what are you going to do? I said, I have no idea. I’m going in the army. He said, but yeah, but when you get out, what are you going to do for real? And I said, I haven’t figured that out yet. He said, well, you Speak Portuguese, right? I said, yeah. He said, well, why don’t you do something with the language? Develop an academic program around the language, maybe Brazilian or Portuguese history. I said, I’ll think about it. And then I had two years in the army to think about it and decided I would do Brazilian history and teach at a college level. And I had no clue what that meant. None. None. I see that in my students, particularly in the early years in Cleveland State, where they were coming out of families where there were no college things. And you would talk to them about going on to college. And you clearly had a sense that you were talking about the moon. And then you talk about, hey, you can get an assistantship and you won’t have to pay. [inaudible] [laughs] And I had gone through that. I really felt bad not having had an academic structure around me as I was growing up. On the other hand, I cherished the structure I had, so I wouldn’t have traded it if I could. So I ended up in the army pre-Vietnam, right at the edge where Vietnam is beginning to light up. And I ended up serving in a place called Fort Huachuca in Arizona as a personnel officer and a museum officer. We had a- Fort Huachuca had been a Black cavalry post. And so there was a really nice collection of things which we actually organized well into a museum. And then I decided I was going to go the Brazil route. If I’d have gone the American history route, I would have been high school teaching. I decided, no, I wanted to do the Brazil route, but to do that meant you had to head to a university. So I applied to various schools, and I ended up at the University of Florida because one evening I get a phone call from some guy named McAlister. My first sergeant was named McAlister, and all I hear is McAlister. And I know it’s long distance, and I’m saying, oh, God, where is he? Has he gone AWOL? What the hell’s going on? So I missed the whole first part of the conversation. Just totally gone as I’m trying to figure out. Finally, I figure out this isn’t my first sergeant McAlister. This is some other guy named McAlister. And he was calling to remind me that the GI Bill had just been passed, that they were going to offer me a full ride, but that I should check to see how that would fit in with the GI Bill. And he had served way back when at Fort Huachuca, so we talked about that. And I ended up going there rather than Texas or Berkeley, because Mac called, and I mean, he’s the Dean of Latin America. I had no clue who the hell he was. I was just happy he wasn’t my first sergeant. [laughs] So I ended up going to the University of Florida, which has a wonderful Latin American Studies program and had some really good people on the faculty. Huge faculty of Latin American specialists, but very good. And I liked that experience a lot. In academic terms and social terms. I was not in love with Florida. Still not in love with Florida. I go because my daughter’s there. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be there. It’s a series of decisions that almost get made for you. My parents say, what college are you going to choose? And I’m saying, I got to choose something. And I can’t remember his name. The advisor says, hey, why don’t you do something with your language. Okay. And then Mac calls and I end up going to the University of Florida, which is a decision I never regretted. It’s incredible to be in that atmosphere where every night there was a Latin American dance group in town or an art exhibit or a speaker or some PhD student coming back from doing field research. It was as rich as rich can be. And that’s actually always been one of my difficulties with graduate programs at places like Cleveland State. That you can’t offer that enrichment that you do at a major, major institution where you’ve got people just flying in and flying out all the time and you’re adding to the experience. And I’ve always thought the real learning came at those events, sitting there with fellow grad students, debating something. And I- The other thing I liked about Florida a lot, and it caused me problems at Cleveland State, was that it was a, almost a family structure. We moved into a brand new building. Every graduate student had their own carrel, had their own office right beside faculty people. So you’d walk out the door and you’d bump into McAlister or Macaulay or Goslinger and so you could talk about the weather. It didn’t have to be, I’m going to go talk to him about a paper. And I liked that environment. It was socially rich. And these carrels or offices were such that one of my colleagues ended up living there for a few weeks after he got a divorce from his wife. [laughs] And everybody was pledged to secrecy, except everybody knew. But as long as you didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t an issue. It was a very rich thing. And when I came to Cleveland State, I thought that’s what a university was. That was my entire experience at the graduate level, so I figured that’s what I’m going to encounter. It was not what I encountered. And that’s the primary reason I left the History Department as my home to go to First College as my home, still teaching History, still working with History students, but doing it in a way that I thought was more positive and, for me, super comfortable. You got to know the students well. You knew their families. You dined with their families occasionally. So there was a nice- You could sense when things weren’t going all that well, and if necessary, you could provide some resources to help. But it’s been sort of- I haven’t thought about this, and talking about it makes me think about it. It’s a series of options that look like choices. Weren’t really choices. I had applied to Cleveland State and been rejected. I had applied to, I don’t know, thousands of places and had gotten job offers from a couple of places. And then out of nowhere, Julius Weinberg from Cleveland State called my dissertation adviser to ask if they had a student ready to go on finishing his research and all of that. [telephone rings] We’ll let that go. 

Mark Souther [00:19:16] I’m going to press pause- [crosstalk] 

Donald Ramos [00:19:20] Okay. Yeah.

Mark Souther [00:19:19] -finish ringing because that’ll be on the recording. I’m okay if it’s on the recording. I just don’t want- [crosstalk] 

Donald Ramos [00:19:25] Right. Right. Background. Oh, come on. Supposed to be four rings. Okay. I’d applied and gotten accepted at a couple of places, and then Julius Weinberg had called Florida, talked to Neil Macaulay, who was my advisor, and he had recommended me. And I had a phone interview with Weinberg and was hired without ever coming to Cleveland. And I accepted Cleveland over the other institutions because it was in an urban center. I assumed a liberal environment, more like Massachusetts than Florida was. So I accepted that and then I got another offer from a university in my hometown that created a lot of stress, actually, but I had given my word. Although the dean who was making me the counteroffer kept saying, Is it in writing? I kept saying, No, but I gave my word. He said, Oh, they can’t do anything about it. And I said, Well, I can’t do that. Can’t do it that way. That’s how I ended up here. And that’s been a good experience. Been a good experience. I’m not sure what would have happened had I gone. Actually, my best friend in grad school ended up with a job that I turned down at what is now UMass Dartmouth. So that’s that process, the educational process. It is interesting to me- I have very close, very close contacts with my mother’s side of the family. They come from the Azores, from the island of San Miguel, and I have been there a number of times. They have come here. When I go to Florida, my cousin from Canada who was born in the Azores, he’s 10 minutes away, so we spend a lot of time together. A lot of contact there. I don’t have a lot of contact with my father’s part of the family, in part, I suspect, because my father got very angry over how one of his brothers was treating their mother and just cut off ties. And there’s lots of connections in life that you don’t ever think about. My father- My early research in Brazil was on female-headed households because everybody knew that Brazil’s traditional family was male dominated. Except when you look at the historical record, women often headed households at almost 50% rates. And it cut across social lines. And that sort of forced a redefinition of the Brazilian traditional family. It’s less typical than one imagines that when you look closely, there was a Brazilian historian who was working at the Sorbonne, doing the same sort of work as it turned out, and our work came out at the same time, so it really forced some nice rethinking. But my father comes out of that situation. He was raised by a single mother, and so were his brothers. And it’s a strange thing that that’s what I end up studying without knowing any of that. Took me a long time to piece that part back in again. My mother’s family had come from a very- They were very upper class on a small island. Big, big fish, very small pond. My father was small fish in a really smaller pond. And in Portugal they would never have met, could not have been in the same room together. It took the United States to get them to meet and to marry. So that’s sort of the intellectual background of what led me to Cleveland. I’m not sure if you want to go in any other direction here.

Mark Souther [00:23:59] Well, before we move forward, a couple of questions. Before I forget, the one that you just prompted. How did they get to the United States?

Donald Ramos [00:24:09] They were part of the Portuguese community. And then as now, actually the Portuguese community was a very- It’s like a typical ethnic- The Hungarian community, including Cleveland, does the same thing. The Slovenian community, the Portuguese were in New Bedford, an isolated and discriminated against community, and it tended to bring people together. My sense, and it’s only my sense, was that they met at one of these social gatherings that occur fairly regularly. The different environments. My father came over alone. He came over when he was like 13, alone. It’s an incredible notion that you’d send a kid off on their own. Now he had already siblings in the U.S. and he arrived in Massachusetts and ended up going to California where he had a brother, and they worked together as loggers. And then my father decided that there was no future in California. He wasn’t good at this stuff. Decided there was no future there. So he came back to Massachusetts. His brother stayed there. And they were living on what now is the? Oh, God, the farm. Oh, man. Huge commercial enterprise now. Lots of amusements, things like that. Not Disney, but it’s the other thing. But they- My father remembers going to buy jam at the little wagon down the street and all of that. But he had decided that California was not the future.

Mark Souther [00:26:03] Knott’s Berry Farm.

Donald Ramos [00:26:03] Knott’s Berry- You got it. Thank you. Yep. They were right beside it. And in their mind, this wasn’t. It wasn’t anything the Portuguese did. They were into farming themselves. My uncle went into dairy work for a while. In fact, most of his life, ended up being dairyman. And my father just didn’t think that had a future. So he came back and ends up working in textile mills, which has no future either. [laughs] But he couldn’t get that far down the road. And my mom- The curious story that I still don’t quite believe, but I was told this all my life, very upper-class family. And my- They made their money by growing pineapples for export to Europe, to the mainland, especially Germany. They grew them, as they still do, in greenhouses, huge greenhouses. And I visited those places when I get back to San Miguel. But they- And my grandfather also grew grapes - very traditional Portuguese thing to do - from which you get wine, from which you get drunk. And my grandmother was apparently very nervous about what happened when her husband got drunk. She always felt that he was going to mistreat the workers. So apparently she put pressure on him to come to the U.S. It’s bizarre. So the three children and my grandmother [and] grandfather came to the U.S. My grandfather never worked. He died 10 years or so after he got here, but never worked. My grandmother never worked outside the home. It was the kids who were. So they go from this really upper-class environment where they’re about at the top of the social pyramid. They come be workers or to have their kids be workers in the United States. And my uncle just hated it. He hated his parents for making that decision. It was a very, very difficult thing. So again, I’ll repeat myself, they would never- My father would never have met my mother in Portugal, but in the States, that’s what you did. You got flattened out through immigration, and they were now roughly the same. And they met. I assume, at a social gathering every Saturday night at the club, whatever the club is, it’s still true. You go to the dance. I assume that’s how they met. And they lived- I’ve actually done some, as you would imagine, some census work to track down for immigrants. It’s not easy because the name changes and the misspellings and the confusion around this, but I’ve been able to at least figure out where parts of the family were. And they had stayed together, the three children and my grandfather [and] grandmother had stayed together. They had another child in the U.S. who’s now 89 and still wonderfully together. And they got married at a civil wedding. By then they were no longer Catholics or practicing Catholics. They got married at a civil wedding, undoubtedly shocked and scandalized my grandmother, who was a devout Catholic. And another branch of the family was very Protestant, Baptist. A relative had left the Azores to come to the U.S. to work, had stayed in the U.S. for we don’t know, we think five, five, seven years, and had become a Protestant in the U.S., had returned back to the Azores as a Baptist, and had converted the family. So our family has always been diverse in any way you want to imagine, it has been crazily diverse, often creating problems. When I was growing up, this was not a positive thing, this was a negative thing. It divided the family on one occasion or another. But it meant that you had insight into a lot of different ways, whole different ways of thinking about things that as a kid you don’t analyze, you just sort of study and look at experience. And that’s been helpful to me, particularly in dealing with the students we’ve had over the years.

Mark Souther [00:31:11] I also wanted to ask about the origins of First College and ask you to describe that.

Donald Ramos [00:31:16] Okay. I was not with the origin. I was the first wave in after that. It was set up by a group designed by three faculty members, I think, none of whom ever really taught extensively in First College. Leonard Trawick in the English department, Barbara Green in Political Science, and the third person who I never knew and I can’t remember his name, was out of the sciences. It was really designed from the beginning to be an experimental unit, to have control over its own curriculum, but not to have its own faculty. That is, not to have the tenure-granting power of a mainstream college. And. And I think it was set up in ’72, and I moved over in ’74. Bob Wheeler was the first historian to go over, and then I followed him and we shared an office, God, 20 years, big offices, but they were shared. And that’s part of why we became so close and are still very close. It allowed for what I believed I had experienced at the Center for Latin American Studies at Florida. It was interdisciplinary. You were taking classes in different disciplines. Your own particular course was hopefully interdisciplinary. And people did that in strangely different ways. Sometimes worked well, sometimes not so well. But the heart of it was the workshop. At that time, a full quarter - we were on quarters - was 16 credits. A workshop was eight credits. And so it met six hours rather than four hours. And the extra two hours were intended for research. So you could make heavy, heavy demands on student research. And the faculty had committed to the notion that that’s what you did and that you didn’t tell them it was unusual. You just said, this is what we do, and they do it. And many of them loved it. Some did not, but most who came in still- I mean, we still have reunions, First College student reunions organized by a group of students. They’re still in contact with me. It was a really interesting, interdisciplinary community environment. Kind of like a Hampshire College, an Evergreen, except it ran within a college. And that was ultimately its demise because it was always seen as weird. What are they doing over there? Well, the students are outscoring the mainstream students. That was never a good enough argument to be made. So it was controversial constantly. And one of the real hassles of being the director, of any person being director, was that you were putting out fires all the time. All the time. Another special committee to study First College. And so you’d have to go into war mode and gather the data. But then First College was chosen as one of the program excellence awards in Ohio. CSU only got two when those programs were alive. And First College got one, and we would have had a second, people in Columbus told us, had we been able to get it out of CSU. But the provost’s office at that time decided that the history department should send its documentation up, which, of course, was not successful. So we didn’t get the second award, but it was fine. We had been evaluated by external reviewers, and people decided that this was, this was fine, a good program. Particularly people from Santa Cruz thought it was an exceptional structure, that it worked well. But you couldn’t get faculty- One of the mistakes that I made when I came, I thought that a new university would be a new university. I forgot that people come to the new university, come from other places. They’re not new. They’re coming into a new structure, but they’re bringing with them all of the ideas that they had. And so it got old quickly, really quickly. And I couldn’t imagine that thinking at that time that that’s what was going on. And if you did something really exceptional, like our English program was unique, we kept getting attacked by, by people in the English department who later did the same thing. Without footnoting. [laughs] Same thing with our freshman student mentoring program, which became the Heart of the Universities, which I had designed for First College based on my daughter’s experience, experience at Heidelberg College. And there’s no sense that these were lessons that you could learn from an experimental unit. It wasn’t that expensive. It wasn’t that big. I think when I was director it topped out, we hit max, and our max was like 400. It was, it was provocative and you could have- I mean I remember doing a paper that I was going to present at an AHA meeting and I presented it to a fireside meeting and the discussion was phenomenal. It was enlightening because you had anthropologists and mathematicians and physicists as well as literature and history all coming at it. [laughs] Never thought about that way. Got to think about it. And that was positive. And we don’t do that in the rest of the university, pitifully, I think, because we lose a lot. But everybody’s busy. You can’t do it. First College, it was an expectation. We met one day a week, every week. And if for some reason the meeting was called off, most of the faculty would end up walking down to the meeting room and having a meeting anyway because that’s what you’ve been doing. And you could get that- You could talk about what a specific student needed, what was going on, why the purple hair. And you could try to figure out how to. What would be best. Somebody needs to talk to her and figure this stuff out. And I like that sense of reaching down to individual students. It’s what I thought the university should be doing, ain’t doing, and won’t do - anywhere, I think, outside of maybe a small school, a Heidelberg or something. Because it’s hard and it’s difficult, and not all faculty are good advisors. But it’s an important function. Particularly, as I said earlier, in my experience, dealing with first generation kids, they have no clue what’s possible. And you ask them to close your eyes, tell me what you, if you could do anything in the world, what would you be doing in 10 years? I think maybe a school teacher. I’m saying that’s a wonderful thing. But think again, let’s see if we can go beyond that. [laughs] It’s hard. You need to have the experience to know what it is that you don’t know. And for our kids, that was a problem. What we ran into in the early years was that ethnic families, many of them, would send their sons off to college at Bowling Green or OSU and send their daughters here because you could keep an eye on them. And many of these daughters chafed at that. It was really a difficult problem for them. So you, you often were hearing stuff that we couldn’t affect in any way, but that you could sense were real problems for young people. And they’re sorting out a heck of a lot of crazy stuff anyway, and then you add that layer. So I liked that experience, particularly in the first two decades. And that was one of the things I did not like about teaching in the History department was that I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t track a kid. In First College, I could track a kid for four years because they walked by my door all the time and would stick their heads in. And this one young lady would do, she would stick her head in with orange hair. Two weeks later it was blue, then it was green. And each time she’d say, Hey Doc, what do you think? How do you like it? I’d say, Looks wonderful! [laughs] But you could follow that person. You could see how that person grew into a really good student. In History, I miss that part. I suspect other people may not have had my difficulty with maintaining a tie with students. But if you’re doing Latin American history, you don’t see- You see a small number of students and they don’t come back. There’s not enough courses, so you’ll see them in one introductory course and maybe never again. And I liked, loved, adored the First College experience of being right with the students, of knowing I could go out the door, go down to one of the reading rooms and I knew who would be there and I could sit down and talk to somebody that I needed to talk to. We set up in First College the first IBM token ring network in northern Ohio. The people who put it together were two idiots who knew nothing about computers: me and a wonderful lady who had been a butcher. And as I often did when I hired for the lab, I wanted somebody who could teach and I didn’t care if they knew anything about computers. We got to the point where we could teach them about computers, but we couldn’t teach them to teach. And Sue and I worked forever 60 hour weeks in there putting the lab together. And what we ended up with was a lab that was socially- And I had to be led to this because this is not my instinct, led to this by colleagues and students. I mean, at one point, my question was, first time we’re going to put in word processing, do we put in spell checker? And I’m thinking that’s cheating. And one of my then students, and now very good friend, professor up in Canada, he said, what do you mean? That’s how you’re going to learn. You get it corrected, you learn. So we put in the spell checkers. We also encouraged people to talk. So we had a noisy lab. And it turned out that most of the students who used it were not in First College. They came over because they thought they’d get instruction and that they could be talking with folks and working on projects together. And that was not my objective. [laughs] I wanted you sit at the machine and you work at the machine. And this was a physicist, Bob Klein, said, no, let him talk. Come on, what are you going to do? You build community that way. And he was right. He was right. So I thought we developed a lot of interesting approaches to teaching at a university level that are viable. They would work. Now it takes an incredibly dedicated - and here I’m referring to others - faculty, because each one of those eight credit courses we counted as a course, one course. So we were teaching overloads every year, every quarter, teaching overloads. And nobody ever really complained about that because what you got out of it was worth the additional cost. So it was a good experiment. It ran its course in part by the steadfast opposition of a couple of units and a couple of people in other units, including History. And we couldn’t replace the people, people we were leaving and people like me were getting tired of it. And I had wanted to just go back to traditional teaching without all of the ancillary things. And that’s when I ended up back in History being chair. So I didn’t get to do what I wanted to do. I didn’t get to do that until I was done being chair. Took a long time to get back because I’m perfectly happy just teaching. Love it. Still love it. So that’s the First College saga. We’ve had people who were interested in doing studies of First College. And that hasn’t happened. And I don’t know how you would do it, but I do know that there’s students who are still committed to the concept of First College. It’s amazing. It worked. Good experiment.

Mark Souther [00:46:17] Let’s shift gears and have you told me a little bit about when you first came to Cleveland, including where you first lived here. And go from there.

Donald Ramos [00:46:32] It’s one of the images that’s crystal-clear in my mind. I’m not good on memory. But I remember our first arrival in Cleveland. We were coming from Florida. I had done my dissertation research in Brazil, came back to Florida, spent a couple of months writing, and then we got hired at Cleveland. We drove up. We came into downtown, what I assume, what I now know to be downtown. But when I arrived, it was dark and it didn’t strike me like a downtown of a major city. So we were on Euclid Avenue and we just kept driving. [laughs] We must have gone 10, 15 miles out of Cleveland on Euclid Avenue before we finally said, no, it has to be way back there. So we drove back, found a motel near the university, and the next day I bop into the History department. There’s nobody there. The then secretary - it was a wonderful young lady - Martha Sickworth, I think, who looked up at me and she said, Oh, I live on the west side, but you’re not going to live on the west side, you’re going to live on the east side. I said, okay, no idea what that means. And so she picks up the phone, she calls Bill Shorrock, who was in the building. And we were the first- That was the first, first move into Rhodes Tower. That was the first occupancy. So Bill came by and helped me find housing in Shaker. So we spent a year in Shaker and then we moved to East Cleveland to a wonderful environment in a little colony of History profs. Harry Langworthy lived across the street, Tim Runyon across the street, Leon Soule across the street. You could throw a rock and hit four. And there was a political scientist and a communication prof down the street. It was this little enclave right on the edge of MacGregor Home. So you had fields all around for a child to play in. It was just- We felt a lot safer then than we would today. And we rented a duplex, one side of the big house. And the people who owned the building became my daughter’s grandparents. I mean, it became a really nice, warm environment. They would take care of Monica if we needed help, but they would just be outside and would play with her and all of that. And we ended up- We lived there, let’s say maybe four or five years, and then we decided we needed to buy a house. And we had decided pretty much that we wanted to live in Cleveland Heights, in part because of the diversity of the community, which I liked, still like. I thought it was a plus, and I liked the tone of it. And so we looked at several houses in Cleveland Heights, and then we were shown this one, and Pat walked in and looked around and said, This is it. I say, no, let’s go back and look at the other one. She said, No, this is it. This is it. So this is it. We had to go above asking price to do that, and we did, and we got the house. So that’s how we ended up here. And it was- This has been a great neighborhood. Still is a great neighborhood. As you know. I like the neighborhood. I like the people. I like my immediate neighbors. We’re close, we eat together. I mean they take care of my cat when we’re moving. And that’s a positive thing. So that’s how we ended up here. And by the time we were looking, we knew the Cleveland Heights community reasonably well. So we were making a kind of an educated choice. By the way, our house in East Cleveland, John Kerry moved in and stayed there. And then after John left, ooh, anthropologist, Maya Indians. Oh, God, Martin. Laura Martin moved in. So sort of the academic house there. When Monica was a baby, for some, I’m sure, logical reason that I can’t even imagine, we had painted the ceiling of our bedroom blue so we could have clouds up there. Can you imagine John Kerry moving in, looking up there and going, oh, my God. [laughs] I knew they were crazy, you know?

Mark Souther [00:51:24] Where were you? What street were you referring to?

Donald Ramos [00:51:28] Stanwood. We had lived on Ingleside in Shaker, right above Vijay Mathur - duplex - and Vijay Mathur and Marsha lived on the first floor. He was in the Economics department. Now retired, living in Utah.

Mark Souther [00:51:47] When you were in Shaker before you came up to Stanwood, since you were on Ingleside, I know that was one of the streets that was ultimately barricaded?

Donald Ramos [00:51:56] Right. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Souther [00:51:57] Do you have any memory of that happening?

Donald Ramos [00:51:59] No, no. This was pre-barricade, and I didn’t detect a problem. And I’m often oblivious to problems going on around me. But I didn’t remember anything. I mean, Monica was too young to go out into the street, so we weren’t walking the street a lot. And I was working incredibly long hours. But I don’t remember there being a big issue with people driving by at high speeds or a high rate of traffic. Might have been. I didn’t detect it. I was more concerned with whether our daughter was making too much noise for the people on the floor below us than the cars. So I don’t have a recollection of that. And in East Cleveland, we lived on Stanwood, which abuts the MacGregor Home, and that was just a wonderful environment. We had really History department gatherings up there fairly regularly, particularly with Leon Soule, who was a gourmet cook and loved to test things out on the neighborhood friends. And so that was- And that was a kind of a double dead end. So there was no traffic up there. It was very quiet. Yeah, actually, and Walter Leedy lived right there as well. I forgot Walter. So you really had a good density of CSU faculty with, I guess, four History people. Yeah, yeah. Hmm.

Mark Souther [00:53:39] Do you remember concerns about the changing state of East Cleveland that people always talked about?

Donald Ramos [00:53:46] It had already changed when we moved in. We knew where we were going. Leon Soule was a very enigmatic man, whom I liked, but he always had visions of things. When we were looking for a house, he would say, Hey, I found the perfect house. All you got to do is rip out the walls, push out the ceiling over there, and it’ll be perfect for you. I’d say, No, Leon, it’s not what we’re interested in doing. But that’s his vision of stuff. And he’s the guy who got us into the neighborhood by telling us, you may want to move there. This was a- It was an integrated pocket, but it was, I would say, and I’m not sure of this, I’d say 50–50. And the rest of East Cleveland had already gone Black. I mean, there had been this mass movement of folks into better housing. Strange thing, isn’t it? So we knew well what we were doing and supported it. Our problem was the quality of the schools and the fact that our neighbors, all of them, were pulling their kids out of elementary school, all the while saying it’s a good education, it’s a good program, it’s a good education. But! And the kid is going off to St. Ann’s or whatever. It was- I mean, most of Monica’s friends were African American kids, except for one girl down the street. And so she grew up in this really mixed environment, which I liked. I had not had that opportunity as a kid until I went to junior high and by then, people’s opinions are formed. But she- And it was interesting. Her babysitters- Monica’s adopted. She was adopted in Brazil when she was, like, a week old. Her babysitters happened to be adopted kids. And one of the African American kids she went to school with was adopted. And after a while, we began thinking, maybe she’ll think the whole world is adopted. [laughs] And kids born in their natural households are the weird ones. Everybody around her was an adopted child. So it was, in that sense, very special. But people around her - at school, on the way to school, coming home, our neighbors - were African American. And it was fine. There was no conflict. There was no tension. I could Feel tension in East Cleveland, in the majority part of the city, which I tend to attribute to social class, not just race. Although I’m aware that race contributes to social class and vice versa. It’s the ultimate superstructure, give and take. And it was that class issue that bothers me to this day. And how one can deal with class within the context of race or race within the context of class, which we haven’t figured out. And it’s one of the issues that I’m really interested in in Brazil. When I’m in Brazil, that’s what I keep- My friends get sick of me talking about race in Brazil to the point where that’s the only thing you want to talk about? But I think it’s so central and I’m trying to understand how different systems function because it’s hard. It’s hard to understand what’s below the surface, what is happening that motivated people. I mean, this stuff that I just got from my friend from Brazil is because I’ve been watching Brazilian TV. It’s a right-wing network. I read their right-wing paper and I read the left-wing paper and I can’t figure it out to my satisfaction. I don’t have a position and I trust this guy. Tell me what’s going on. [laughs] So he sent me this really long email and then six articles that he had published so that I could understand his political background before I- These things are hard. So yes, we lived in an integrated, I would say maybe 60% white, maybe. But kids Monica went to school with were African American kids. She was raised with them. She was comfortable. We had- In fact, I can remember them having this conversation and I was eavesdropping and I’ve used this in class. To me it was fascinating. They would describe each other’s colors. Somebody is coffee colored, somebody is black. And they decided that Monica was a “nigonkey,” that she was mixed, part honky and part n. And that was it. There was no value. I thought that was so beautiful. There was no value to anything. It’s a description of who you are and not a statement of who you are. And somehow we screw these kids up when they get older because at some point they see things naturally. And then we just layer on all of the stereotypes one can imagine. But it was interesting watching her grow up. She still sees herself as mixed. And she sees herself as Brazilian. Without knowing Portuguese, without having gone back to Brazil, without not wanting to go back to Brazil, without not wanting to read about Brazil, she’s Brazilian. Her reason for living in Florida was she was born in Brazil. It’s hot. So she wants to go where it’s hot because it’s in her blood.

Mark Souther [01:00:48] Tell me a little bit more about when you mentioned tensions, an idea of what you mean by like- [crosstalk]

Donald Ramos [01:00:58] I wish I could, I wish I could.

Mark Souther [01:01:01] Give me an example.

Donald Ramos [01:01:02] Yeah, I’m going to. I’ll give you a strange example. We had lived in Brazil for two years when Monica was adopted. I was down doing dissertation research. We had gone down for a year and the Ford Foundation had said, you know, if you could find enough material, we might consider extending that. There was material for eight lifetimes. And so it got extended and we were there for almost two years. And we had, we had to get Monica back into the U.S. She was not officially adopted. She was our legal ward. And we had all the paperwork and we were all set. And we had needed her visa to enter to the U.S. And I had set it up so that we would fly to Belem in the north, in the mouth of the Amazon because I hadn’t been there, I figured, this will get me there. We’ll go to Belem and then get the paperwork and fly. And then I had wanted to go from Belem to one of the Caribbean islands, and I don’t remember which, and then from there to Florida. So we had set it all up with Pan Am. We arrive in Rio at about the appointed hour and the people at the counter say, there’s no such flight. I said, what do you mean there’s no such flight? They confirmed it. She said, I don’t know what they did, but there’s no such flight, I’m telling you. So the question is, when is the next flight? Well, the next flight is the one minute flight. It leaves at one minute past midnight. So we’ve got a one year old baby and a whole day because we had gotten there for the morning flight to Belem. So we finally wasted the day, flew up to Belem and found out that there was no flight from Belem to the island where we had reservations to fly to. [laughs] Wonder why Pan Am went out of business. And so we ended up going to Jamaica. We get off the plane in Jamaica and we’re going to spend a day or two there. And I walk through the airport and I am horrified by the tension. How do you describe tension? I don’t know, how people looked at me. There was an unease that I could feel and I can’t really describe and I can’t quantify in any way. And for a quantitative historian, that’s a problem. But you can feel it, you know when you’re out of place. And that’s what I felt in East Cleveland. Not in the immediate neighborhood and not in any of the institutions that function there. But walking down on Euclid Avenue or something. I didn’t feel danger. I didn’t feel any of that. But I felt like people were staring. And that’s what I mean by attention. And I could easily have lived through that. That’s not a biggie, but you could feel it. And if I’d have thought about it, I would have said, do I really have to go through this? It’s an interesting premise. How do you know? How do you feel? In Brazil, you knew I had African, Afro-Brazilian friends and you could talk about race. Comfortable thing. Their pop music is often built around racial terms. The N-word term is used there all the time as an endearing term. Nego is a loving term. Here it isn’t that. And so to go from there to Jamaica was palpably different. To go from Jamaica to Gainesville- There was not a lot of difference between Jamaica and Gainesville. [laughs] Not at all. There was and is, I think, in Cleveland a difference. It’s not like Brazil, but it is different. And the tone is better. And I think a lot of it is still class-based. We have good African American, African American friends. They are middle class, middle upper class. The kids I saw at school came, cut across class lines - African American kids - cut across class lines. And they were interesting in how they themselves had problems with the class lines. Where a well-known African American student can lash out at Black racism because I’m dark. I think our whole culture is shaped by race. And we haven’t had the guts to talk about it. And until we talk about it, as I talk- I mean, we have a good African American friend. In fact, he was here for dinner a couple of days ago. We talk about it, but he’s also a Brazilianist. He’s lived in Brazil. And so we talk about this all the time. And it’s comfortable. There’s no- You don’t back away from the topic because it’s too sensitive. You enter it because it’s too sensitive. But we don’t. Clinton tried at one point and that didn’t go anywhere. For the most part, we avoid it. It’s not a problem. We’ll move on.

Mark Souther [01:07:16] When you came to Lincoln Boulevard in Cleveland Heights, you’d have to be up to about 1974 or 5?

Donald Ramos [01:07:24] Yeah, yeah. Let me see. Monica? ’70- ’76, probably ’76.

Mark Souther [01:07:31] Is that when you became involved in Heights Community Congress? 

Donald Ramos [01:07:34] Right after that. I’m not even sure how I got plugged in, but I was interested in the issue of race, housing, fairness, social justice. Dare I say it? First weekend we were here, I went walking down the street. And there were a bunch of guys painting a garage. I was thinking that’s a weird thing because there was some writing on it. Somebody was painting it. So I went over to see what was going on, and some kids had written some anti-Semitic stuff on the garage. There were kids who lived on Euclid Heights Boulevard. And the neighbors had said, hey, let’s paint this. So I said, got a brush? Get in there and paint. And I like that idea that the community looks after its own. This was an ugly event. Could have been worse. And I think the fact that the neighbor, the immediate neighbors down the street- And that family is still here. To me, it was a really telling statement of the tone of the street and the nature of the street. So I was very happy, not about that happening to them, but about the reaction to it. So my sense of getting involved, I guess, was pretty automatic. And it started- June Wortman. That was the name of the lady. You will run across her. She was a force to be reckoned with. She had gotten me into watching the city council. So I went to every city council meeting, which is a trip. And then I’d report to her, and whatever nuggets she could glean from that, she would pass on to the committee, and they would react if necessary. And I think it was from there that involvement that I ended up at Heights Community Congress, which I obviously liked. I thought they were doing valuable work, and I thought that it was difficult work because the economic interests were all in favor of blockbusting and forced integration. And I obviously supported integration, but I wanted it to occur naturally. And I think the only way that could happen is if you opened up all of the suburbs to integration, not just East Cleveland. Whew. One decade? My God! Incredible. And I ended up talking with Black realtors as well. And, I mean, they were like the white realtors. If it’s a house sale, it’s a house sale. I don’t care. And if I can use that as a vehicle to sell a house, this. So what’s your problem? And I think, oh, the community, maybe. That’s not my problem. That’s- I’m a seller of houses, and however I can sell a house is how I sell it. And we used to get these letters. Your neighbor’s house has been sold to a Black family, and your house prices are going to go down. You need to sell your house now. I mean, those things used to come. I mean, they were real. And that’s what produced Heights Community Congress was the fear of what had happened in East Cleveland happening here. And I think what they’re, as I understood their original mission, was to encourage integration, but without it being resegregated. And so the issue- And that’s a thin line. How do you do one and stop the other? Not easily. And I like their objectives a lot. So I had volunteered, joined. It was a nice group. And there are moments in my life when I think of rejoining them, but it’s sort of like the elder statesman coming back, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. And the odds against Cleveland Heights pulling it off were immense. Immense. The economic interests involved are substantial, and so it’s hard to do. And until we could open up the eastern suburbs more, you couldn’t do it. In isolation, you’re going to get swamped. One way or another, you’re going to get swamped. And when we did the household surveys for new homeowners, it was fascinating. White families moving in would talk about location, education. Black families would talk about education. This was the prime reason for coming, was education for their kids. And it’s about as laudable a goal as one could have. And so I kind of enjoyed looking at the data. [telephone rings] Pat, would you get this? Downey, California? It’s a dilemma. Again, go back to our previous comment. We don’t- We don’t talk race. And until you talk race, it just isn’t going to happen. I keep hoping that the boom in the Latino population is going to force a whole broad range of discussions about race. It’s almost an obsession with me to think about it, and I know it isn’t going to get solved in my lifetime. But at some point, you got to keep plugging away at it.

Mark Souther [01:13:52] Going back to 1976 - I’m not sure if you were in a position to know or observed this - I’m aware of a case that a lawsuit in 1976 in which the Heights Community Congress got involved and went to the city and said, if you, you know, if you don’t put some measures into place-

Donald Ramos [01:14:14] No, I don’t know that. No. Wouldn’t surprise me. I remember being stunned that the vote to put the fair housing ordinance in place was unanimous. I had been led to believe it wasn’t going to be unanimous. And so I was taken aback by it, and I’m sure it was that we articulated our position just perfectly. But it’s always sort of intrigued me as to why it went that way. Maybe there’s a connection. No, I’ve not heard of that case. I wasn’t involved. I was off in a sub- Well, I’m not even sure I was at the Fair Housing, I mean, Heights Community Congress in ’76. Because we moved here. Here about 7. 76. I couldn’t have gone over to the Congress for at least maybe two or three years. So it would have been after that. And maybe their push for the fair housing ordinance came as a result of that. I don’t know. No comment.

Mark Souther [01:15:26] I can share- I have Kermit Lind’s interview.

Donald Ramos [01:15:29] Yeah, yeah. Well, Kermit had been deeply involved in all of this. In fact, we used his Cuyahoga Plan. God, amazing! [laughs] We used his checkers, which was a really positive thing, to identify problems with the real estate industry. And then we would identify the people who were involved and have them come in to talk to us.

Mark Souther [01:16:01] Can you comment on the brokers or companies that were most problematic?

Donald Ramos [01:16:12] No, no, I don’t remember it that way because we dealt with individuals, and every company said the same thing. They’re independent. We have no control over them. And then you’d say, well, then the whole company has to come in for a series of educational programs. [laughs] And then you could talk. But I don’t remember anybody who was unusually good or unusually bad. I’m sure they were. And Kermit would be the person who would have kept track of that. We were dealing with specific agents and not specific companies. And I don’t remember a bulge of agents from a particular company.

Mark Souther [01:16:54] Were these small independent companies, as opposed to- 

Donald Ramos [01:16:57] Both. 

Mark Souther [01:16:58] Smythe Kramer, for instance?

Donald Ramos [01:17:00] I don’t know about Smythe Kramer, but it cut across the board. They weren’t all independent, and often they had fairly large operations in the Heights. And that was where they- Well, then you got to bring them all in for educational program. [laughs] It will only be four hours for everybody, and they all have to come, in case you want to hold on to your license. It was- I thought we should have gone further with the threat of punishment, but the ordinance that got through placed real limits on it. And so what you were doing was forcing people to come in for training and taking their time away from them. And it involved white and Black realtors. And if anything, I would say there was probably- This is off the top of my head, but there may have been age issues. The standard excuse always was, well, I didn’t know we couldn’t say that. Well, that’s why we Have a training program which is perfect for you. You will know, but. And that tended to be. And you could feel it. I mean, there’s some compassion for older real estate agents who had spent their world doing it a particular way. And suddenly you’re saying, no, no, no, you can’t do it that way anymore. You really have to do it a different way. And sometimes you felt bad. On the other hand, they were doing as much damage as everybody else, and so you really had to sort of stay on it.

Mark Souther [01:18:45] Now, thus far, have you been referring mostly to blockbusting versus steering?

Donald Ramos [01:18:51] No, no, no. Steering mostly. Most of this is steering. Blockbusting, by the time I got involved with this, I think was over. I think these block letters and stuff that we got was the end. Because after that people could sign up not to receive anything from real estate agents. And occasionally you would get one, but it never had a followup. And so I think these were just stragglers or newcomers or whatever.

Mark Souther [01:19:18] We could pause a second.

Pat Ramos [01:19:19] Oh, okay. [crosstalk] They gave him an award for all the work he did with city hall.

Donald Ramos [01:19:29] They do for everybody. I can’t remember your question. 

Mark Souther [01:19:35] Well, steering versus-

Donald Ramos [01:19:37] Yeah, it was all- I hesitate to say all because I’m sure there were exceptions, but it’s overwhelmingly steering by individuals, which happens. I mean, I can remember being out in the front yard working and a real estate agent showing a house next door to a couple. He was white, but what they were saying was clearly in violation of the city ordinance. And I couldn’t avoid reminding him of that. He says, I mean, you know, I mean, I didn’t know that. I mean, prove you didn’t know. But what he was saying was outrageous. He was giving statistics that made no sense. The racial composition of Coventry School. He didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. And so you get- It’s that sort of steering, this thing of trying to move people- Well, I’ll tell you what happened to me. When I first came going to a shaker, talked to Bill Shorrock. I called the housing office, tell them I’m new in town, I want to rent a place. First question was, what is your race? I said, huh? What do you mean, what is my race? I had a lot of trouble in college because I kept writing human. And I got in lots of trouble at UMass over being human. And so I said white. And then they said, well, you might want to look in this neighborhood. And I thought that was unconstitutional. And they got away with it. And it was a form of steering, I’m sure, but they were never called on it. And I don’t know if what happened to me was an exception, although I don’t know why it would be. But it was a strange question when you would have asked, I would have thought they would have asked other things. You say you have 20 children, might have been a good one. So it’s the steering that was going on, as we could see, was invasive. It was happening at all levels of the community where people were being steered to, from. And Kermit Lind’s got to have the best data around on that stuff. I mean he was in there. Well, he had taught in the department as well. Good guy.

Mark Souther [01:22:14] The incident that you mentioned next door, was it a question- Or was it a white client?

Donald Ramos [01:22:21] Yeah, it was a white client. It was a white client. To me, the issue is simple. If you want to know that, walk down to the school and go look at the kids playing. But unless you’ve got the statistics, I mean real school-based statistics, anything you say is going to be wrong. And at that time Coventry had a very large international community of kids and a very large African American population of kids. And the number he was giving and I can’t remember what it was, but it was overwhelmingly white. I go down there with my daughter. That’s not what I see. And you don’t know. I mean, to me the issue is you don’t know. You can’t say that unless you know. So it was a white couple, white real estate agent. And they didn’t end up buying here. So I don’t know. I don’t know anything else. That was the end of it. But I thought it was interesting that here I am on the housing board and here is this guy just sort of blabbering away with material he doesn’t understand.

Mark Souther [01:23:33] Did you ever come across any talk about, from real estate agents, for example, that - they might not admit it - but either from them or from anyone else in the ’70s, about protecting any particular line within the community or any particular district?

Donald Ramos [01:23:51] No, no. I think they were doing that, but I think they were doing that on economic grounds. That is, you’re not going to- Well, again, that’s a stereotype as well. What we saw were the bad- We saw the Kermit Lind people who got nailed and then got referred to us. And I think Cleveland Heights had a contract with Cuyahoga Plan to do that. So we got those people plus referrals from the community. And we could- I could not find some areas that were sacrificed to integration and others that were protected from integration. That would have been very offensive. I don’t remember any of that. I said I don’t remember discussion about that. And we had frequent deep discussions of the board with staff people about patterns that we were seeing. But I don’t remember anybody forming protective walls. What I was concerned with was opening, I mean, where people were being, where African Americans were being aimed, were being steered to, as opposed to being protected out of. It seemed to me more a pull process. But I don’t, I don’t remember. I don’t know. This is a long time away.

Mark Souther [01:25:28] Well, the reason for my question is that I understand that Lee Road, east of Lee and north of, oh, you know, north of Euclid Heights, north of Boulevard School-

Donald Ramos [01:25:40] Yeah.

Mark Souther [01:25:40] There were some streets down there that integrated early.

Donald Ramos [01:25:43] Yeah. And I think further up around Monticello Middle School probably, and also north of Mayfield integrated early. But we- I don’t remember us dealing with cases from those areas.

Mark Souther [01:26:05] When you say north of Mayfield, are you referring to what some call North Coventry or areas which were single family homes?

Donald Ramos [01:26:14] Well, they’re mixtures. Single-family and apartment buildings. And you could see movement. That’s actually what that research case that I was referring to earlier with those areas tended to have high mortality rates, infant mortality rates as opposed to, you know, Cedar Hill or whatever. There were stark differences within a tiny community, which didn’t seem to make an impact on a lot of people, but it did on me. I was really amazed by it. And I was amazed by her ability to do the research project. It was- And I think she did publish something in the Plain Dealer about it at some point, comparing parts of Cleveland Heights to Third World countries.

Mark Souther [01:27:08] What was her name again?

Donald Ramos [01:27:09] I think it was June Wortman. W O R T M A N. [crosstalk] 

Mark Souther [01:27:17] I could search the Plain Dealer index now, knowing that name.

Donald Ramos [01:27:20] Yeah, take a look. I was just- I mean, you don’t expect that. And you- So when you hear it- And I was mostly talking to her. She lived just a couple of blocks away and she was absolutely immersed in this material. And so if you said hi, she would give you the latest data, you know. [laughs] How are things going? Well, let me tell you. And you would get the data. But it was depressing. And it comes back again to the central problem of American history. We haven’t figured it out.

Mark Souther [01:28:02] Well, looking at the time, I wanted to give an opportunity to sort of wrap up. Or we could go another direction.

Donald Ramos [01:28:11] I don’t know. What direction do you want to pursue?

Mark Souther [01:28:13] Well, I wanted to ask just a little bit more about your own personal involvement in Heights Community Congress. Specific things, areas where you were involved. You mentioned writing some of the, helping draft some legislation.

Donald Ramos [01:28:29] Yeah, that’s really what my major piece was, actually drafting the ordinance or proposed ordinance for the board’s, for the city council’s consideration. And that was just an awful lot of research, looking at other communities to see what they- And there weren’t many. Sadly, there weren’t many, but there were some. And looking at their legislation and ripping off part of it, but adapting a lot of it to the Cleveland Heights situation, and that was basically what I was, that I remember. I’m sure there were other things, but I kind of chaired that and did a lot of the lead writing on it, I think.

Mark Souther [01:29:20] What communities did you study?

Donald Ramos [01:29:22] There was a city outside of Chicago.

Mark Souther [01:29:26] Oak Park? 

Donald Ramos [01:29:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was one major city. And there was another place out west, but Oak Park was- Everybody kept talking about Oak Park, which is why- At City Hall.

Mark Souther [01:29:42] Pasadena, by any chance?

Donald Ramos [01:29:44] No, it was a town I hadn’t heard of and obviously still haven’t because I can’t remember it. But Oak Park was the key one because that was in the air at city hall and people were talking about it and the housing people there particularly were talking about it. And so we actually looked at that very closely.

Mark Souther [01:30:10] I’m curious what connection, not necessarily for this in particular, that you saw between what was happening in Cleveland Heights and what was happening in Shaker Heights. To what extent was there any cross-fertilization of the effort?

Donald Ramos [01:30:23] To less than I would have liked. I thought they operated differently. And I always thought that Cleveland Heights was under more realtor pressure than Shaker. Again, that’s just a totally subjective sense. I would have imagined more sharing of approaches and ideas and best practices, kinds of things. And I didn’t see much of that going on. And I don’t know if that- I don’t know which side didn’t want to do it, but that always- When I first came to Cleveland, I thought that was one community. [laughs] What do you know? I first came to Cleveland, I thought that I lived in Cleveland. So we would sign our address on Ingleside Shaker Heights, Cleveland, Ohio. This is what you do in Brazil. Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro. [laughs] It took me a while to figure out this is a whole other city. And I couldn’t quite figure this out. Still can’t, actually. Makes no sense to me. So, yeah, I would have expected more cooperation. I would have expected more cooperation with all the nearby suburbs, including east Cleveland. And I didn’t see much of any of that happening then. Hopefully now there’s more, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Mark Souther [01:31:56] Do you think that the Cuyahoga Plan was the one sort of-

Donald Ramos [01:32:01] Yeah.

Mark Souther [01:32:02] Clearinghouse for that?

Donald Ramos [01:32:03] Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The city did a lot of stuff with Cuyahoga Plan. I think Cleveland Heights was limited into Cleveland Heights. And that’s the problem with this stupid division that we have. And Cuyahoga Plan was wherever it wanted to be. And Kermit was very good at sort of pushing out. So I would have thought- But again, it almost takes you back to county government, and nobody wanted to deal with that issue and everybody protecting their turf. And why should we have a joint fire department? Because we need our own fire department, which is better than your fire- Oh, God. And so you can’t really get- And then- And then you add race in and class. Oh, my God. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how you- I don’t know how you get people to look at issues beyond their front door. We don’t have a good record. I don’t know if anybody does, but we don’t.

Mark Souther [01:33:10] Well, there are places that have achieved metropolitan government.

Donald Ramos [01:33:12] Yes. Oh, yeah.

Mark Souther [01:33:13] Metropolitan school districts managed-

Donald Ramos [01:33:16] Yes.

Mark Souther [01:33:19] Real success. Of course, some of those- Charlotte Mecklenburg in North Carolina was successful many years with the schools.

Donald Ramos [01:33:25] Right. Well, Jack- I wasn- We were in Florida when Jacksonville went to county government, with the exception of a couple of beach communities which didn’t want to join, which I thought was cute. [laughs] Cut off their water or whatever. Yeah, it’s doable. It’s just very hard politically. I remember the battles in Florida went on forever over this stuff. To me, it made sense, just inherently.

Mark Souther [01:33:52] They had more incorporated communities, sort of a noose around the central city.

Donald Ramos [01:33:52] Right, right. Well, I mean, Columbus has done this by controlling the water system. You want water? Join us. Welcome. If you don’t want to join us, it’s okay. Get your own water wherever you want. That’s- I actually like that approach. It’s a little authoritarian, but I think it may be the only way you get anything done. We sure aren’t doing it. I remember when they were busing and we had a good friend whose wife was married to, whose sister was married to Judge Batista. Every time we met them, he was surrounded by guards. Jesus. Yeah. I’d love to have an answer. I don’t.

Mark Souther [01:34:47] And maybe finally, if you could comment on the changes you saw in the school system in the ’70s on.

Donald Ramos [01:34:55] Yeah. Well, I think what’s clearly happened, in Cleveland Heights, has been the infusion of very large numbers of African American kids whose parents did what all parents want, give their kids a better education. And so they went to a community where they thought they would be received well and that their kids would get a better education. I think part of the difficulty that’s happened is a class issue. And I mean, we have Black friends whose kids have done well, but they’re upper, they’re middle-class families, and they’re kind of like those white middle-class families. [laughs] Their kids will do okay. It’s really, again, a class issue. And that’s- And until you can deal with the economic inequalities in the United States and boy, try to get that conversation going. That’s what I’ve been reading about in Brazil is all these issues relating to- If you look at it on a macro level, things are going well. Millions of people moving into the middle class and millions moving from the miserable class to the poor class. But these people look at what’s going on around them and see that they’re not moving into the middle class. And in many cases the society has prepared them to do that, and we haven’t prepared them to do that. And the Cleveland system hasn’t prepared those kids, in the main, as well as they should have. And that’s still at the heart, in my mind, the heart of a number of issues that haven’t been resolved. So when people were getting upset that black kids were being bussed up to the high school, they were coming from Cleveland, my response was, that’s sort of neat. I mean, the family understands what their kids need and they’re doing the best they can. They can’t afford a house here and so they’re doing the best- And everybody, you got to find those kids. You got to check those records, you got to see who’s there. And then you got to make the family pay the tuition, the missing tuition. If you had a regional school district, this would not be an issue. And we are, oh, miles from that. Miles. And now you’ve got white withdrawal from the schools. It’s like the southern academies. I mean, in droves, in droves. And except for some handful of schools, these other schools, particularly charter schools, are no better than the public schools. No better at all. And you destroy the public schools, which I think is what we’re involved in right now. We’re privatizing the system, but we’re not privatizing it at the level of University School. We’re privatizing at a whole other level. And my daughter teaches in a charter school and we spend hours talking about that issue. Yeah, I think you still get a really good education in Cleveland Heights, but you got to be focused. The teachers are still here. Most. But if you spend too much time making up for academic lack of preparedness so the kids aren’t ready to deal with it and that’s a drag on the class. So eventually parents weary of that and pull their kids out and pay gobs of money to send their kids to Hawken or University School or whatever. And I think those schools have a place. I’m more bothered by the charter schools which haven’t proved that they were better and that was their purpose, prove that they were better so you could take best practices into the public schools. Well that hasn’t happened at all. With the exception of three or four charter schools, the rest are not good. And you can see it. My daughter taught at a charter in Florida where the principal had no academic experience, no teaching experience, no administrative experience. She was a good fundraiser, and so she formed the school. So she ran it. She hired and fired - without process. She liked you, it was cool. Didn’t like you, not so cool. And I think there is no oversight, I think, of private schools in general. But private schools that are really private are fine. Charter schools use public money. There should be an oversight structure over them, and they should meet higher standards than the public schools. And what bothers me is that the charter schools pull away active parents, who if they were in the public school system, would be fighting to improve their kids’ education. Instead they’re helping to build new schools which in the end can only have the function of weakening the public school system. And my sense from looking at the history of social studies is that public education has been the cement that’s held the country together. For good or evil. [laughs] And if you destroy that, then we really become isolated sub-communities. There’s no common understanding about anything. And then we’ll be in worse shape than we are now. And I think we’re in pretty bad shape now on those issues. [laughs] It’s going to get- Can only get worse. Can only get worse. So I fear and sometimes Pat and I get, we talk about, I get very despondent and I keep thinking it’s time to go live in Portugal. We may yet do that because the issues are so big and nobody talks about them. You cannot get a discussion about big issues. Oh, I can’t even think about that. No, no! And so- And our politicians- [laughs] We won’t go into that. It’s a whole other nightmare. Anything else on your list?

Mark Souther [01:41:53] No, I think- Oh well, one thing that we didn’t even get to, that I hadn’t written down at first. I would like to do it if we can take a few minutes before we close, your work in Central American political activities.

Donald Ramos [01:42:11] To me that was a big issue. 

Mark Souther [01:42:12] And when was that?

Donald Ramos [01:42:14] Throughout the ’80s into the ’90s. I got involved because I was afraid of U.S. policies in Central America, which I disagreed with profoundly, particularly policies in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nic- But all of them, I mean, they’re all of the same fabric. And there was a group of, a large group, actually, a large community, of people divided up into, I think, two groups, one sort of a religious group coming out of St. Patrick’s Church on the west side, and the InterReligious Task Force, which is still functioning. And then a secular group. Oh, God, I can’t remember the name, but it was clearly secular. And then the two worked together and formed an organization called the Central American Network, which was good because it brought together two different ways of thinking about the same issue. Agreeing on outcomes, not always agreeing on methods. But it was a group that talked, met regularly. I chaired it for a number of years. We published a newsletter, which is an interesting- Because you watch the home publishing industry. When we began it, we would publish be at this table. There’d be about eight of us, and everybody would bring in something that they had prepared, and we would cut out the stuff and we would paste it on the sheets and we would Xerox it and then get it to a publisher, printer. And then over time, the first desktop publishing began. And so I bought a program and ran it. And people would come with their articles and we would retype it into the computer. And then it was fewer people because you didn’t need all that many people to do it. And eventually it got to the point where I was doing virtually all the writing and I was doing it on desktop. And it was done immediately. It was fast. It was really fast. On the other hand, you didn’t have eight people sitting around talking about the issues. What’s wrong with this piece? I’m not sure that that’s really an accurate interpretation. You had a lively discussion, which is hard to do with one person when you’re the one person. [laughs] And so you got efficiency. And it was good. I mean, we got really good photographs into this thing. It was a really- And we were right. Ha! We were right. Even when the local politicians told us we didn’t know what we were talking about. And they were on the Intelligence committee. And you’re saying, no, no, no, no, you’re wrong. We were right, they were wrong. It lasted for almost 10 years. I mean, it was massive and it was a big operation. People came together for the mailing, and so you brought folks together for that. And I could ask people to write things. I was going to say a sign. But you really asked, often begged people to write articles and stuff. And that was one big activity of the Central American Network. Another one was just educational outreach and having workshops for people for giving talks in high schools or the Rotary or whenever there was three people at a bus stop, you could go and give a talk. And kind of out of that you had groups going in different directions and doing some interesting political work, organizing demonstrations at the Federal Building, closing down the building, all of it trying to find focus attention on what the United States was doing in Central America that was despicable. Would be a polite way of describing it. To me, it was a really big issue partly because I had the knowledge based on my educational experience and my research. So I knew what I was talking about, or I felt like I knew I was talking about. And there was nobody else who had an academic approach to this stuff. And so I know my talks were often overly academic, but it’s hard not to, trying to lay out facts for people as opposed to just emotional rant. And so that was 10 years. That was full time. I mean, that was a big issue for me. And then I sort of stopped doing that when I became chair of History and I sort of walked away. I had walked away just before that had happened. And I think the energy of at least the secular group was spent. It was gone by that point. The InterReligious Task Force continues doing its thing very nicely. They are a laudatory group of people. I don’t know where they are now, but they used to be a highly effective group. And they had a special audience that they could reach that we could not in the secular arm. And the secular arm could reach groups of people that the InterReligious Task Force would not be as effective at reaching.

Mark Souther [01:48:10] Was the InterReligious Task Force solely focused on the issue of Central America as it developed in the early ’80s, or was it broader than that?

Donald Ramos [01:48:22] My contact with them was always about Central America. But I was aware that they had broader social justice issues. But I don’t know if that was the focus of where they were. I mean, it’s always the problem when you have a small group and you don’t have a large paid staff. If you got one, you’re really happy. And so my dealing with them - and I had a lot of contact with them for a while I thought I was living over there - was always about Central America, not even Latin America. It was Central America. And then the School of the Americas emerges as a big issue for them, as it should, because it isn’t a big issue for anybody else in this country. So, yeah, in my worldview, it was on Central America, but I’m aware from the material that they tended to have posted and stuff that they were into broader, or at least concerned with, broader social issues.

Mark Souther [01:49:24] Was it the Reagan administration and the anti-Sandinista movement?

Donald Ramos [01:49:35] Oh, no. For me, that was it. I actually went to Nicaragua twice. The first time was my smile tour. I had taught a course on revolution in Central America. And as you do with courses, you read a ton, a ton of stuff. And so I had formed an opinion about what was going on in Nicaragua, but I couldn’t believe my opinion. [laughs] So I wanted to go down and just see if people were smiling. It was deeper than that, but that was really the essence of it. What’s going on there? How are people reacting? And it was a wonderful experience. I went down with a group led by Steve Cagan, and Steve clearly has a perspective which I often share, but not always. And what I loved about it was, one, nobody watched what you were doing. You were on your own. So you immediately figured got about this totalitarianism because they had no clue what you were up to unless you were going into combat. That was the second trip with LASA. We went into combat zones, and the Nicaraguan government was concerned about us. [laughs] So were we. But I was into just talking to kids. And I remember talking to some kid who goes off on how terrible El Presidente is. I mean, he does these awful things and he lists these awful things. And after a while I began, couldn’t figure out what he’s talking about. Who are you talking about? Who’s El Presidente? Presidente Daniel. And I’m saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. Where did you learn this? He said in school, from my teacher. Saying, so the totalitarian state, not watching that. Well, and it was that sort of thing that convinced me that my interpretation was right. I could live with it, I could defend it, and I could talk about it. But my talks were- I’ve always gotten nervous at people who make a trip to a conflicted area, spend five days there, come back as experts. That just bugs the hell out of me. Because what I saw in Nicaragua was that there were two tour groups. You had the pro-Sandinista tour, and then you had the anti-Sandinista tour. And you got to see a totally different world. I mean, totally different people. And my second tour down was led by a guy named Tom Walker out of OU [Ohio University], who’s an academic farmer who’s famous in Nicaragua for being able to come castrate bulls, which gave him entree into the right, into the left, into the center. And one of his students had been one of the Chamorro daughters. So we had entree to everybody, I mean, the La Prenza editor who’s fuming about the Sandinistas and the Communists are coming in and flying their Bear bombers in, and the pro-San- We got to see everybody and have nice conversations. And we quickly decided that Tom had contra- I know, was it Tom on one of these trips? We had an interpreter assigned or we had hired, or they had hired somebody, had hired an interpreter who was clearly so pro-Sandinista that she was dangerous. And there’s enough people in the group who spoke Spanish to finally just say, we’ve had a- We’ll do this ourselves. Go have a drink. And so we share the translating. And so you end up with people who get brainwashed one way or the other. And to me, it was important to physically go there, to be able to say, yeah, I smell the roses. Some were dying, but others were really vibrant. And here’s the academic evidence that I’ve accumulated over a lifetime of research on this stuff. And so I spent- I was- I mean, Pat used to get really frustrated because I would not be home in the evenings. I’d be at school all day, and then I’d be out at the evening giving talks to some wild group. I really thought, one, it was a professional responsibility, but it was also a political obligation to do. The two fit together nicely. So I did a ton of that. And we would do Central American Network workshops, a lot of outreach to politicians, people like Mary Rose Oakar, who didn’t like us a lot. [laughs] Because we protested at her home, and that was off limits, but she changed her vote. It was good. So, yeah, to me, that was a continuation of political activity. I had been involved in Civil Rights. I’d been in the army, but I came out and post to the war, post to war. And then the Central- Central American stuff. And then our government keeps presenting us with more opportunities to protest. So you get ready the same old songs and meet up with old friends on the line, and it just keeps going. Doesn’t change. Very aggravating. The guy I was communicating with in Brazil, I mean, it was cute, because he’s saying the same thing. He said, At 16 years old, I got arrested because I laid down on the trolley tracks because they had increased the fare of the trolleys. And that’s what the protest started with in Brazil, the increase in the bus fares. He said, you know, I was a kid in the ’40s and still same problem, hadn’t been resolved. So we keep playing this circle. Maybe we’ll figure it out. I’m not hopeful. You want to go in any other direction?

Mark Souther [01:56:02] I think we should probably close for today.

Donald Ramos [01:56:04] Okay, that’s cool. I’m available. You know where I live, okay? 

Mark Souther [01:56:09] I sure do. Not far away.

Donald Ramos [01:56:10] Not far away. Roll down the street.

Mark Souther [01:56:14] Thank you very much.

Donald Ramos [01:56:15] Sure. My pleasure.

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