Abstract

Winston Ritchie, a Shaker Heights resident, was the Vice Mayor of that city. He describes his childhood experiences and how issues of race affected him as a child. Some of these issues were faced by his children while they were going to school. While Ritchie used race a light-hearted source of humor during his campaign, he takes the integration of Shaker Heights very seriously. It was the most important issue for him during his time in office. He is proud of his efforts in Shaker Heights and of his small role in the Civil Rights Movement. He shares interstesting stories about how he and his wife went to the March on Washington in 1963 and heard Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

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Interviewee

Ritchie, Winston (interviewee)

Interviewer

Halligan-Taylor, Gabriella (interviewer)

Project

Shaker Heights Centennial

Date

6-29-2012

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

53 minutes

Transcript

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:00:00] Shaker Heights Oral History Project. So why don’t we start off with just kind of where were you born? What area did you grow up in?

Winston Ritchie [00:00:10] I was born in Jersey City and came to Cleveland at an early age. Grew up in, where did I grew up? I guess Glenville was- Well, first it was, yeah, Glenville and then, Glenville and Shaker mostly.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:00:36] So why did your family move to Shaker? Did they have family here?

Winston Ritchie [00:00:41] Just to go back again. That’s inaccurate. You can start over again. You’re not recording.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:00:48] You’re good.

Winston Ritchie [00:00:49] Yeah. I was born in Chicago and then we moved to Cleveland. I lived in Glenville and then we moved to Glenville. From Glenville into Cleveland, the Shaker part of Cleveland, so that I could go to Shaker schools. My kids could go to Shaker schools, not me.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:01:16] And what year did you start at Shaker schools?

Winston Ritchie [00:01:20] Well, I went to the, start growing up, you mean? Yeah, that was in Cleveland. Yeah, we stayed in Cleveland until I got ready to, I guess I went to college in Cleveland, too. We walked to Western Reserve in undergrad school and grad school. And then after I got my, well, then I moved back to Cleveland for a year after I got my dental degree and finally moved to Shaker in ’52, I think.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:02:09] So you were kind of at the beginning of all the integration movements?

Winston Ritchie [00:02:14] Yeah, well, it was just a little bit- One year I was in, one year, I guess I was in Cleveland. And then we moved to Shaker after I’d been practicing about a year. That might not be too accurate, but I hope you aren’t going to put me to the test. Okay.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:02:40] Great. And what was it like kind of growing up in Cleveland? What did you do as a kid, kind of for fun?

Winston Ritchie [00:02:48] What did I do? What?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:02:50] What did you do as a kid for fun?

Winston Ritchie [00:02:53] Oh, I used to go spend a lot of time in Hamilton School, Alexander Hamilton, the playground, and Lafayette School. Around the schools, I was probably, I had spent a lot of time in playgrounds and I probably was a bum pitching horseshoes, playing ball and, you know, all those kiddie things.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:03:24] And did you know a lot of your neighbors growing up?

Winston Ritchie [00:03:29] Not the neighbors. They might have been neighbors, but mostly it was just kids. I wasn’t, there were kids that were in school with me that I would know their names, but only from the classroom. I didn’t have any friends. I had some, maybe you’d call them friends, but I think I was more loner than I was.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:04:04] So you said that your kids went to Shaker schools as well, right?

Winston Ritchie [00:04:08] Yeah, they started. Well let’s see. Yeah, Winston went to Ludlow. He was the first one. He went a year into Ludlow from the Cleveland portion of Ludlow. And then we built a house. We built a house on Green Road, and I guess that’s where we spend most of my time.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:04:48] And what year did you build your house? Do you know?

Winston Ritchie [00:04:53] Ed was probably 50, 61, I think.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:05:03] And did your son have a good experience?

Winston Ritchie [00:05:05] Yeah, he had a real good experience. They had a good experience in Shaker. We went one year to Shaker from Glen, from one year in Shaker from Livingston. Do you know Livingston?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:05:32] Yeah, I’ve heard that. I don’t know where it is, but.

Winston Ritchie [00:05:36] I think it’s over there. And then the rest of the time we were in Shaker schools.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:05:43] When you bought your house in Shaker and then you said you built your house, were you kind of the first black family to do that or were black families is already kind of in Shaker?

Winston Ritchie [00:05:54] There were two of us. I was here, and Ted Mason was back to back with me. He’s a dentist. He was a dentist, and he was two years ahead of me. So we were pretty close. His wife and my wife were inseparable for a while. You see one, you see the other one. He had four kids. He had three boys and a girl, and I had three girls and a boy. And they were back to back. So they had pretty close. And they were between the ages of, his kids were maybe four years older than mine, something like that. But they ran back and forth between the two houses.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:06:48] And did you guys encounter any kind of discrimination or anything?

Winston Ritchie [00:06:55] Nothing ever was heard. I had people that wouldn’t sell me property, even though one of them was a classmate of mine in Glenville in high school. And he had a lot for sale on Warrensville, and I had an open house. And I drove up to this open house and asked him how was business, blah, blah, blah. And he said, it’s terrible. Just can’t sell anything. He said, oh, is that right? So I said, I asked him about could he sell it to me. He said, you know, I can’t sell it to you. I couldn’t do that. I said, well, no wonder your business is bad here. You got a cash customer and you don’t sell it to him. Kind of stupid. I didn’t say stupid. Yeah, I did say stupid.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:07:53] And did you just kind of brush it off or did it kind of affect?

Winston Ritchie [00:07:57] Well, it was right after the Supreme Court had ruled that you couldn’t hide behind those restrictive covenants. They were no longer valid. So I didn’t need it to get what I wanted out there. But they had a provision in the accountants and deed restrictions that if you were denied a permit to move into the neighborhood, you could overcome that by going 10, five houses on either side of the street next to the property you’re trying to buy. And I didn’t have to do that because I already had the Supreme Court decision. But I thought it would be nice to go up next door and say hello to some of the people I was going to be neighbor with. And I suppose there was a little bit of kind of, but anyhow, I went and talked to five neighbors on one side of the house and five on the other house. And the rapid was right there. So that’s all I needed. And that was that hurdle. And that was about the only one, I think, that was big.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:09:28] And in Cleveland, did you encounter anything or was it just kind of?

Winston Ritchie [00:09:31] No, No. I didn’t know what discrimination was, I was too young I think. There were times I was called the name, but that was, wherever you are.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:09:51] Did your kids encounter anything or was that kind of?

Winston Ritchie [00:09:52] Nothing to speak of. In fact, they kind of worried me for a while because I didn’t want to leash them from a wonderful kind of the best of a bad lot kind of neighborhood. And to turn them loose into an area like Palmer or somewhere else where it was a little more blatant what people were thinking. But they got out. They didn’t encounter anything in Shaker, I don’t think at all. Well, some. But if they went outside the confines of Shaker, they might run into no telling what.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:10:49] And did you live in Shaker since? Have you lived in Shaker ever, since the 60s, 50s?

Winston Ritchie [00:10:58] No. Let’s see what we do then. I lived in Shaker. I think we got a condominium now in Lyndhurst. Three Villages, real nice place. But that was way after the kids were grown and out. They’re all everywhere you’d want them to be. They’ve all been to a portion of their education I’d say would be in a foreign country. My daughter went to Germany as an AFS student. My son went to Kenya as a Peace Corps instructor. His wife went to Kenya, too, and she, Kenya, Laro went to Spain just to take a semester off. And he went to Hong Kong as part of her job assignment after she finished school. So they been all over. We went to visit, I think everyone. Every time they’d move, we’d get a chance to go visit. So we kept airlines pretty busy.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:12:31] I know that you were the vice mayor at one point in Shaker. Can you talk a little about that? How you got involved in that?

Winston Ritchie [00:12:38] Well, when my kids got ready for school, one day, they were going to school and I guess they went down. I was on the board of Garden Valley neighborhood house at that time, and somehow I was going to pick them up or something. And all the way the people that I picked up were a couple of white kids. And then in this all-Black settlement house. So we were driving across Van Aken and one of the kids, the white kids that I thought was real friendly and knew me pretty well because I had done this to have travel port transport, they said, doc, what are white kids like? You know? And that kind of alerted me to the fact that I wouldn’t want my kids growing up not knowing what white kids were like. I kind of coined the phrase and - didn’t coin the phrase, you probably have heard it - dumb white kids. And I wanted them to know that there were some. All kinds of people and they can compete with any of them. The dumb ones and the smart ones. They saw the smart ones out here, but they hadn’t seen any dumb ones. But they, they came out here and they did wonderfully well in the school. And I think some of it certainly wasn’t because they were going to school with whites. I have a daughter at the PhD in Chicago that runs a program there for integration. I got another daughter that’s president of the WNBA, the basketball league, the national, the top position in that organization. And my son was working with John Hancock in a pretty rough position, too. And then Annie is the last one. She was, I don’t know, something out of the bank. But she has a PhD too, so they’ve all done pretty well. Did she have a PhD? I don’t remember. I guess they were coming so fast. No, she had a PhD. She had a PhD. Okay, that’s it. But I guess that happened almost exactly like I would like to have had it happen. The fact that they could go to any school they wanted to. I have three kids that went to Dartmouth and one that went to Cornell. Another one went to, Where did he go? Duke. I could drop names on them. I’m pretty proud of those.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:16:14] Going through the vice mayor process, Did you have to go through any political campaigns?

Winston Ritchie [00:16:19] Oh, yeah.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:16:21] What was that like?

Winston Ritchie [00:16:22] It was fun. By then I was really having a pretty good time shocking people and doing the unusual. I remember when I ran for council, the first time, there was the history and, you want to change the tape?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:16:48] Oh, no, I’m just thinking.

Winston Ritchie [00:16:52] The history of council membership in Shaker was the incumbent councilman would hand pick his replacement when he got ready to go. Well, there were three. There were three seats going to be vacant and only one of them had a replacement. So there were two open seats waiting for somebody to be elected. And there were three of us that wanted to be running from the office. And I was the only Black, of course. And we had a lot of fun with that. I remember one of the meetings we had. Are you a student at Shaker?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:17:51] No.

Winston Ritchie [00:17:53] One of the meetings we had, we were making a pitch for who you should vote for. And the three of us got together to run for this empty seat. But that was against the Shaker, the Shaker would have had us. Just two of us run, if any one would run and the other two would be the incumbents rerunning. That’s the way it was supposed to work. But we upset the Alpha card. I got the second highest vote title count. I remember during the campaign, we were all telling them what a great people I am. They are. We have to tout ourselves pretty well. And I said, the other two guys that were running, we decided we were running the three of us together. We were all pretty, pretty good people, I thought, and probably better than the ones that were going to be defeated when we let it lower the boom on them. I remember one meeting we had here. I was at the high school and when I got ready to speak, I said something like, I hope you will think of the three and three of us and elect us to the three seats, and that would be replacing the two incumbents. And I said something like, I hope you will agree with me that we three are the, how did I have? Oh. I said, I hope you’ll elect the three of us to these three empty seats. But something like, if you only had one vote, vote for me, because I think I’m the best of the three candidates that not working with the committee. I said, perhaps I’m a shade better than just those, the other two. And that brought quite a bit of laugh. So we had those kinds of fun. I had those kind of fun things. There was a fellow social science teacher that was sitting in the front row when I said that. And he fell off the chair almost because it was a room full of whites, mostly whites. And I said, I hope you will agree with me that perhaps we’re a shade better than the others. Well, we had that kind of fun and won big. But I didn’t have any problem. In fact, I was just overwhelmed with support, because by then, everybody was anxious to prove what kind of citizens live in Shaker. It was right about the time who took the, well, I said at a public meeting once, perhaps if you vote for me, it’ll be one step for Shaker. One step for Shaker will be a giant step for mankind. Did you know that quote? Yeah. Well, that kind of brought the house down, too. I think I was an enviable physician because everybody wanted what not everybody, but most people in Shaker wanted, what I was selling. And it was just a matter of, you know, communicating, showing I’m a pretty good guy after all. We had a lot of fun in Shaker, and I think we did some good things, too. We’ve been up and all over the country. Went to, I forget the country where the kangaroos live.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:22:57] Australia?

Winston Ritchie [00:22:58] Australia, yeah. They sent us to Australia to tell them about our program. And we went all over the country there telling them what we were doing, and we stayed. I shouldn’t say stayed. We are still integrated in all the communities around us now, I think, are well on the way toward resegregation. And we were trying hard to prevent that by encouraging Blacks to move into areas where they were underrepresented and whites moving into where they were underrepresented. So we think we were very successful in what we were doing, although success won’t be, it’s not a finish line where we are where we ought to be. There’s still a lot of work to be done, I think. I’m not familiar with the makeup of the different communities like I was at that time, but we gave them a good start anyhow.

Winston Ritchie [00:24:13] What they do now is kind of beyond my control, certainly, except I could come out here and talk and tell you what I did, and boy, it’ll put you to sleep.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:24:27] When you were vice mayor was kind of keeping Shaker integrated, was that a big issue?

Winston Ritchie [00:24:32] It was a big issue for me, and I think it was a big issue for most of the people in Shaker. We had people amazingly supportive of what we were doing in Shaker. And it’s, it was so different than any other community around here. People would, my daughters came along, they’d go to the shopping centers, and one of them was out in Parma Shopping Center. And it kind of frightened me that they would go out in Parma because. And Parma was just an example of what the communities were like. I didn’t know whether they’d be just harassed, just going shopping out there like that, but they seemed to go through and weathered it. But then when it got time for them to, to go to college. They would go off to a place like Cornell or Dartmouth and they’d run into some prejudice there that they hadn’t seen in Shaker. And I didn’t want them to get so, you know, expecting everybody to treat them like that because there were some people in the outer world and even in the, in the part of Shaker too, that didn’t like blacks and made it just uncomfortable. But going to different places, like farmers, they learned that there’s another world out there and it’s not all like Shaker. And I thought that was a pretty important lesson. And they learned it kind of painless with less pain than they would have if they had gone from the city of Cleveland straight into just a normal American city. Because the normal was so different than what they had here. They had to cope. But they did.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:27:08] Did they go off to Parma often?

Winston Ritchie [00:27:10] No, no, because they’d go out there, they learned fast at places where you’d be more comfortable than other places. But the whites that were their running mates learned a lesson too, from Beth from the archives, that they learned that you could go some places with Beth without thinking in the black neighborhoods or the integrated place like Shaker. But if you start going off the beaten track, you could be called names and harassed like that. Fortunately, well, I did run my son home from shopping center once. He went to, I think he was coming from a shopping center and five or six white guys chased him home and couldn’t catch him. But that’s about the only thing that negative that I had here. They always call me a name every now and then if they see me cutting my grass out in front. I used to enjoy cutting grass and shoveling snow and occasionally I’d get some holler or something.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:28:46] Did you just kind of brush it off?

Winston Ritchie [00:28:49] Yeah, most of them. One guy, I was out cutting the grass and Annie, my 5 year old, was cutting her grass with a little play lawn mower. And a guy came by in a pickup truck landscaper and said something to my daughter. And I went out there, I said what I got to say to you? She said, he just said, hi, Daddy, you know. So at the height of my concern, there was nothing but a guy being friendly and standing a friendly hand. But all I could hear was, I didn’t hear what he said, but I didn’t know if he was harassing her or supporting. So I think the bad things that happened to me were that kind of nature where somebody would be maybe extending a welcome hand. And I thought I didn’t get it at first.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:29:59] Were there any other kind of big issues going on when you were vice mayor? Kind of besides integration, or was it kind of all connected?

Winston Ritchie [00:30:11] I think I would answer that, It was a big issue with me, and I think it was a big issue with all of council. But it was bigger with me because, you know, I was preparing, helping kids become comfortable in a different kind of surrounding than what everybody else was being taught. They were being taught. They wanted to know it. But I had more of an interest in that than anything else that we were doing in Shaker. I thought the rapid transit was an issue too, but I didn’t say it. But I guess the other six guys could handle the rapid transit. I worked at it and tried to see that they were doing the right thing. But my main concern was the blacks and their acceptance at Shaker. There were no blacks on the police force when we joined, no blacks on fire, and no blacks at all at city hall as far as they had janitors, but nothing in a meaningful position. So that was something I thought was pretty important to redo.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:31:53] What was about the rapid transit that you didn’t like or did like?

Winston Ritchie [00:31:58] I didn’t have any trouble with the rapid transit. I was just saying that the Rapid didn’t need my support to maintain everything about the Rapid. And I didn’t go out and, it was just not an issue. It was the same way as an all white community was with me. There were things that needed to be done in the Rapid, but in those discussions I was very interested.

Winston Ritchie [00:32:42] I knew what was going on, but I didn’t have any life and death issues. Maybe I better put quotes on- [inaudible]

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:32:55] Did you need water?

Winston Ritchie [00:32:57] I don’t think so.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:33:02] Well, besides kind of housing plan with the integration and Shaker, what were other kind of plans and I guess strategies to kind of keep Shaker integrated besides kind of housing, or was housing a big one?

Winston Ritchie [00:33:16] Well, housing was the bottom line. If you could solve housing, you got licked. I think housing was the biggest one. There were smaller ones. Every time I’d see, in fact, even today, if I see something, a table like this, people doing some kind of special work, if there are 15 people sitting around a table, I’m concerned if they’re all white just because I don’t think it shouldn’t be that way. And so those kind of issues have been counting heads ever since we moved into Shaker.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:34:12] Do you think those issues kind of still hold today?

Winston Ritchie [00:34:18] When people ask how successful we have been, my answer is we’re better than nothing, in the way of integration, but we aren’t there yet. My daughter, the one that’s the president of the WNBA, she was also second in command in the Girl Scouts in New York. So she’s got a couple of big jobs there. But I’m sure you can name some people, Blacks that have done very well, too. So when people ask me, how have we done in our efforts to get even with other workers, it reminds me of somebody asked one of us, we were going out in Lakewood, I think, talking about our program, and they asked us, how are you doing with your integration? And my buddy answered, compared to what? You know, we’re doing better than most, better than any community around here, but we still have things to do.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:35:50] Did other communities kind of call, and kind of, check up on how you guys were doing it?

Winston Ritchie [00:35:53] Oh, yeah, we were the foremost out front people. But there was Cleveland Heights. University Heights had, well, all of east side of Cleveland, when I was in high school, I went to Glenville and I was one and I would be. Maybe two out of 100 would be Black. And so I was only Black on the basketball team and only Black on- And that followed all the way through school with me, only Black in my dental school class, only Black. And almost everything I went through to get where I am, that’s where I, education and just surviving. I was the only one in all my classes.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:37:11] And did that affect you, or was it just?

Winston Ritchie [00:37:14] I think it affected me truly good. I think the kids, it certainly affected them. They learned that there were some dumb white kids in this world, all of who weren’t geniuses, and that did well. I think sending a child to schools like Dartmouth and Cornell and Smith and all those kind of schools taught them to survive. And I taught them to step out and, you know, they could do it. And that was the lesson that I wanted them to learn from Shaker. And I think they learned it in spades because Shaker taught them that without even trying. You know, it just was a natural product.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:38:16] Correct me if I’m wrong, but I did read that you went to the March on Washington in 1960 [1963].

Winston Ritchie [00:38:21] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Me and my wife both went. She came home, we had four kids, probably like I think they were 4, 6, 8, 10. And I came home and said, I got to go to this march on Washington. And she, of course, encouraged me, pushed me, go, go, go. Then at the last moment, she said she decided maybe she found a way to go and still take care of four kids. And my mother, who never was the eager beaver grandmother, and she volunteered to keep the kids overnight for two days, which was amazing because this is four kids. They were like 2, 4, 6 and 8. And she had long since passed a childbearing caring for kids. And she gladly took them and did a good job keeping them. Yeah, that was phenomenal.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:39:43] And did you drive down there or did you fly?

Winston Ritchie [00:39:46] No, there was a bus that went from Karamu. Well, they ordered a bus to take people down and back and they had left, well, we left about, must have been 7 or 8 o’clock at night and spent the night on the road. We got to Washington about in the morning, had time to get breakfast and get whatever freshen up you can do with all those buses and people and then came back afterwards, got home two or three o’clock in the morning, I think. But no, that was quite an experience.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:40:38] With all those people, what was that like?

Winston Ritchie [00:40:41] It was a madhouse. Not a madhouse, it was congestion, but it was a spirit of people. You know, everybody there was a very special person. Even the hoodlums. And there weren’t that many, I didn’t see them, but I’m sure there were some that were there just to make trouble. There were few in numbers because I didn’t see any of them. But just everyone you would see would be somebody that you could walk over, put your arm around and greet as a friend. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t have been down there or they would have been there with some acts of vandalism or something.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:41:29] And there were multiple speakers at the March on Washington.

Winston Ritchie [00:41:31] Oh yeah.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:41:34] Do you remember who exactly spoke?

Winston Ritchie [00:41:38] Yeah, Martin Luther King of course was a big one, but Bayard Rustin was one. This was before the guys, the heavy hitters really had names. Julian, what’s his name? Yeah, the heavy hitters of the, of the movement at that time all spoke down there. Everyone, and some of them that would speak down there now just weren’t old enough at that time. But no, this was everybody that was anybody in the black community had supported that star studded cast.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:42:40] And what is it like kind of thinking back and thinking to yourself, I heard the I Have A Dream speech?

Winston Ritchie [00:42:48] Yeah. What did you say about your arm?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:42:59] Goose bumps.

Winston Ritchie [00:43:00] Goose bumps. Yeah. That was awesome. That was simply awesome.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:43:10] Was that kind of a highlight of the march or was it the cherry on top to everything else?

Winston Ritchie [00:43:11] No, that was the highlight of the march. That was the highlight of everything that was done in those days. And nothing was done that was equal the spirit he had. We joined a white church, Fairmount Presbyterian, you know Fairmount?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:43:41] Yeah, yeah.

Winston Ritchie [00:43:45] And my one buddy at Fairmount, we got to be pretty good and we worked pretty hard to integrate for the church. The church, the most segregated hour is 11 or 12 on Sunday. I don’t know if you heard that or not. That’s the most segregated hour of the week. And we worked with some of the members there to encourage Blacks to move to go to that church and all the problems that went with that. But this one fellow that was a good buddy at the church, we became feel good buddies because we both, he was there trying to encourage blacks to move in and I was there trying to push blacks out there too, so to speak. But he said when he heard Martin Luther King speak, he said he would just run through the water if he told him to. You know, he just- He made you do it. Yeah.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:44:51] And I mean that kind of kicked off a lot of big legislation with civil rights. And did you feel proud to kind of be a part of that?

Winston Ritchie [00:45:01] Absolutely. Yeah. I’m kind of proud of being, Obama. Yeah. How could you not be proud of him unless you’re real nut?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:45:17] Right.

Winston Ritchie [00:45:19] Yeah. You know, if somebody does something like that, what can you say?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:45:28] It almost amazes me that it took till 2008 to have a nonwhite President.

Winston Ritchie [00:45:35] Oh is that right?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:45:36] Yeah, it kind of boggles me sometimes when I think about it because in the ’60s, it’s 50 years later we’re just getting a nonwhite President, you know what I mean? Strange.

Winston Ritchie [00:45:52] Think of my statement. There are some dumb white people in this world and I think that’s to me classic dumb white people that would favor some of the people they favor over a guy like Obama and what’s his name? I don’t even know his name.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:46:18] Oh, Biden.

Winston Ritchie [00:46:19] Huh?

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:46:21] Biden you’re talking about.

Winston Ritchie [00:46:22] No, the opponent.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:46:26] Oh, Romney.

Winston Ritchie [00:46:27] Romney, yeah.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:46:29] You don’t need to know his name.

Winston Ritchie [00:46:31] But I mean the guy that’s going to win in my opinion and a lot of it is just because he’s Black and that’s good and bad that, there are some funny people, dumb people in this world. I don’t quote that. You can quote it if you want.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:47:15] So what was it kind of after the ’60s which were I hear was very turbulent. You know you hear that word a lot. Turbulent ’60s. Did things kind of calm down or were you still kind of battling the same issues in the ’70s and going into the 80s?

Winston Ritchie [00:47:31] 90s and the tens and the twenties and the thirties. We’re battling, I think we’re battling it now. My son, my grandson is at Beachwood. He was captain of the football team. He was the president of his class. All those good things, but he’s still Black in some people’s mind. And things, things for the most part, he’s living a charming life now. But if he were to go in certain areas of Greater Cleveland, he would be put upon just because of what color he is. And they’re missing out on a pretty good guy with him.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:48:34] And does that make you angry, or does it just make you kind of more motivated to, kind of keep it going?

Winston Ritchie [00:48:45] Well, that’s what somebody else is going to do. I’m not doing much of that now, but I will, if I’m not doing anything, come out and talk to you, people like you, like I think you are anyhow, I’m judging you just because you, you look like you’re an all right guy. But, you know, it’s still, my effort now is not nearly as involved as it was then, but I’m not sure the battle is won. I think it’s won if we consider success to be a comparative thing. You know, if you. I was going to tell you my grandson, who was a captain and all that jazz, went out to Independence and, you know, being around me and my wife and others around him. One of the first things we asked how many blacks are on the team, how many this and that. And he told me that he did, Independence, didn’t have a Black player at all on the football team. And my daughter, who is his mother, said, you know, isn’t that unusual that no blacks live in independence? And I said, if that’s the case, you know, in a community like we have in Greater Cleveland, to have one community that is still all Black sends a message. Dumb white people.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:50:51] Well, I am almost out of time. Are there any kind of like, final thoughts or any stories that you think I should hear?

Winston Ritchie [00:50:59] I think I about pulled your ear. I wrote down and, my kids were asking me to write a book, and I got a book that’s, I’d say about maybe three weeks from being finished or something like that. And when I get one, when I get it, you check back with me in about a month. And it may be finished by then. Yeah, I’m getting old now. Don’t move as fast. Okay. I don’t have anything, I could talk. In fact, when I finished writing this book and I thought about all the things I didn’t say that I wanted to say. So the book that I would be writing is never finished. I was going to write one that said something about this isn’t finished. And I’m going to write until, I’m racing with the Grim Reaper and the final takeaway for me to stop writing or stop thinking, because I think there will always be something that could be done to better this situation. I ran, you know, stuff over there. People who just don’t do things as intelligently as I think they should. And you probably don’t. You probably agree with that. The more you do it, the same thing. I could be talking to you about, you could probably be talking to me about in another situation. And I could be writing. I can’t write too well. Okay.

Gabriella Halligan-Taylor [00:53:12] Alright. Well, thank you so much.

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