 Well, hello, my name is Gino Passi. The date is Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018. Today I am interviewing Dr. Fritz Casey Leininger as part of the History 3097 Honors Seminar entitled Bearcat Legacies and also as a part of the Emeriti Association History Project. Fritz, thank you for being willing to do this interview with us. Glad to do it. To begin, I know Fritz, I'm assuming, is a nickname. It is. So could you, for the record, just state your full name? Charles Frederick Casey Leininger. OK. Now I know your father was a Leininger. Right. And your mother's maiden name was Dean. Yeah. So where does the Casey name? My wife. Your wife's name, OK. So we hyphenated. Good. And when and where were you born? I was born on February 22nd, 1949. My parents lived in Woods Hole, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. I was born in Toby Hospital in Wareham, Massachusetts, just off Cape. I'm sorry, in? Wareham, Massachusetts. Wareham, Massachusetts, OK. Were both of your parents East Coasters? Yeah. OK. Though they met in Chicago. OK. And again, just because I know a little bit about your history, how then did the family emigrate to Ohio? So my dad worked for, worked in the retail cooperative movement, which had customer-owned grocery stores in a number of cities around the country. And he got his start doing education about the cooperative movement, how to set up stores, what the philosophy of the cooperative movement was. He was doing that in Chicago. So he had gone to Divinity School at Harvard and become a Unitarian minister. And after about six years of that, he discovered, as he said, it wasn't that he was defrocked. He was unsuited to being a minister. It was about 1940. When back, his parents had moved to Ohio by that time. His dad and his brother were in the sheet metal business. They brought him into the sheet metal business. It wasn't something he wanted to do. Went to work in the co-op movement in Ohio and then moved to Chicago. My mother was a nurse, had done her training at Boston Children's Hospital, worked there and then New York City. By 1940-ish, she had decided she was wanted to try some new stuff and got some training as a physical therapist and then got a job in Chicago as a physical therapist. And my parents met in a cooperative co-ed rooming house in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. My mother almost voted against my dad moving in. But he did and they fell in love and got married. I think they both wanted to return to New England. And dad decided that if he was going to do education around cooperative stores, he ought to run one. So they moved to Needham, Massachusetts where he ran a store and then to Woods Hole where he ran that store. And eventually come back to Ohio at some point? Yes. Or come to Ohio. The cooperative movement in the early 1950s was disappearing as the economy, so the Quad Movement had developed in part in response to the collapsing economy in the 1930s that looked like the death of capitalism. By the early 1950s, capitalism was doing very well. And the commitment to alternative economies was disappearing. And his store was not doing well, so he was fired. Moved back to Ohio to work with his father and brother in the sheet metal business again. And eventually after a couple of different jobs ended up working for a small folks-on-book publishing company in Delaware, Ohio where I grew up. So you grew up in Delaware, Ohio? Pretty much, yeah. I was going to ask if you had a blue-collar upbringing or white-collar, but it sounded like it was a little bit of... The answer is yes to both. Dad had working-class jobs most of my life. Mom was a nurse, which was distinctly poorly paid when she was a nurse. So we had working-class incomes. Dad grew up working-class. My mom grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Maine. But her career was a working-class career. But now after you were born, had your father, was he an academic at that point or was he in the store at that point? He was in the store when I was born. Okay, but had a college education. He had a master's. My mother flunked out of college. And not because she was not committed to academics, but was a wonderful nurse and did very well. And had to get some schooling to become a nurse. Right, she did. I don't think she ever had a bachelor's degree, but you didn't need that to be a nurse in her era. So your dad had gone to college. Your mom, not so much, was going to college as a young man. Was that something you distinctly in your future or not so much? Oh yeah, I grew up, it was like my brother and I were going to go to college and that we would have professional jobs. Okay. And so as your senior year approached, where did you find your interests gravitating? Like what was it you wanted to study? Everything. Which was one of the interesting things about my family is that we sat around the dinner table talking about politics, theology, math, science, everything. And I literally, when I got to college I changed my major literally every couple of quarters. And as far as your upbringing is concerned, this is just, I hear co-op, I hear folk songs, I hear Unitarian minister. I'm assuming it sounds like a progressive upbringing, family. Yeah. My dad grew up Methodist and Republican. And when he went to college he apparently had some sort of conversion experience because by the middle of his freshman year he was a pacifist and a socialist. So you then chose to go to what college as an undergraduate? I went to Antioch College, which was a very interesting, very progressive school. It had a co-op program for everybody, not just for science and engineering, which was a wonderful experience. Was Antioch's progressive nature part and parcel of why you chose to go there? Yeah. Had you applied anywhere else or you really had your sights set on Antioch? I applied to University of Chicago. My dad thinks I also applied to Oberlin. I don't remember that. I actually graduated after my junior year in high school because I wanted to get the hell out of my small, very conservative, Central Ohio town. Chicago had a program where they accepted juniors out of high school, but they waitlisted me. Antioch accepted me and I would have chosen Antioch anyway over Chicago. And what did you end up, you said you changed your major several times. What was it that you ended up settling on? Well, I didn't really. Antioch allowed you to build an interdisciplinary major, which meant that I could actually graduate. So it was called environmental studies, but it included history, anthropology, hard science. At the end, I was actually thought I was going to become a geologist because I was doing a lot of hiking and camping and really liking being out in the woods. So I thought, you know, being a geologist, I could get paid to do a lot of hiking and camping and climbing mountains. And so you graduated with this environmental science degree? Environmental studies. Environmental studies, I'm sorry. It was a BA. With the intention of possibly going into geology as a career. And I went to Boston College and got a master's in geology. So let me step back. Was it just nature in general that you were enthralled with that you just wanted to study? You said you enjoyed hiking. Is that pretty much what led you to focus on geology or were you still kind of unclear and you just picked something? I thought I was clear towards my senior, you know, I think by the beginning of my senior year its geology seemed like a way to be paid to be out in nature. And, you know, the geology courses I took, I found really interesting. And what year did you graduate? 1971. And so you said you go to Boston College? Yes. Then directly after undergrad? Yes. So early in my senior year it was like, hmm, I'm going to graduate from college. What the hell am I going to do next? I guess I'd better go to graduate school. And so you spent two years at Boston College? Yeah, it took me five years. Okay. Probably because I didn't have a strong undergraduate background in geology. So I had to be retrained. I had to take extra undergraduate courses. And then I was required to do a thesis, which just took me a long time. What was your graduate, your master's thesis on? Brittle fracture of granitic rocks. Okay. Which sounds fascinating. Don't get me wrong. Occasionally I look at my master's thesis and go, I have no idea what this means. So, okay, so you go there for about five years. What are you doing to earn an income? Do you have a family at this point? No. I had a free ride in my first two years, tuition and $200 a month, which in 1971 was just barely enough. My third year I had tuition, remission, and borrowed money. Fourth and fifth year I was only registered for like one course a semester and had a part-time job in an outdoor store, backpacking store. Which seemed to fit with your inclinations. And I was also beginning to do some carpentry and home repair stuff as well. And so when you graduate with your MA, do you then continue to study granitic rocks? Actually it was an MS, a master's thesis. These kinds of distinctions, talking to the students, the distinctions between BAs and BSs and MAs and MSs are really important in the academic world. They are. To some people. So do you go in then? I mean, do you become a geologist? No, I discovered that almost all of the people I was in graduate school with were going to go to work for oil companies and mining companies. And as I thought of it at the time, they were going to go help raid the earth. Sure. And I had had a checkered career as a graduate student. Was not well liked by my faculty by the time I left because I talked back to them. So I moved to Ohio where my brother was living. And we went into the home handyman painting that's a self-employed home handyman business. Was that in the Cincinnati area? Cincinnati, yeah. How long did you do that? How long did you stay in that? Off and on from 76 through 89. So that became a career? Yes, actually. I was also involved in progressive politics. Started reading history on my own. And thinking that history might be helpful in thinking about how to change the world. And decided that maybe I should take some graduate courses. Called up the history department here. Talked to Gene Lewis, whose department had at that time. And he said, sure, you can, you know. Why don't you sign up for introduction to the Literature of American History. And I did that. And did that sequence my first year part-time. And did well enough that I was offered an assistantship and tuition remission. So I could go full-time the next year. And that was what year? Started part-time in 82, was full-time in 83, 84. And in 83, I took a course on the history of Cincinnati. Where the professor required the graduate students to do a piece of original research. Not just write a book review or do library research. And I had been living from 77 to 81 in a communal household in Avondale. And almost all of my neighbors were African American. Many of the houses on the street had been clearly middle class and upper middle class houses. We lived in a three-story Victorian mansion. And so I proposed to him that I figure out. It was clear to me that at some point this had been a wealthy white neighborhood. And had been told by Cincinnati that that was true. And so I decided to do a research project to see if I could figure out when it changed from white to black and why. And that laid the basis for almost all of my future research down to the present. And at this point, are you thinking, this is my next career. This is what I'm going to do. Yeah, it became clearer and clearer to me that I love doing nitty-gritty, getting my hands dirty in the archives history, putting together stories, getting an understanding of stuff that had happened in the past that no one else really had ever figured out. It was just, it was fun, it was exciting. And I thought that the story of racial change in Cincinnati's neighborhoods was an important story to understand in the history of racism. Because you started to gravitate toward that housing social justice, the history of housing in neighborhoods, did your background in home renovation have anything to do with that, or are they completely separate? They're completely separate. But the interest in racial justice goes back to the fact that I grew up at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, was aware of my, my dad was, my parents were not activists. They were paid lots of attention to progressive politics, the Civil Rights Movement. Remember, my dad brought home a comic book that had been put together, to publicize the Montgomery bus boycott, the Rosa Parks Martin Luther King story, and being really influenced by that. And in fact, at some point I was left home alone with my older brother and he told me to do something. I said, no, I'm engaging in civil disobedience. You can't make me do that from reading this comic book. And I had a black cousin whose godfather was a prominent civil rights leader in the 1960s. And he was almost exactly my age and I really kind of grew up with him and knew his story. His dad was an African American lawyer in New York. His mom was my dad's younger sister. So race, racial justice, social justice was an essential part of who our family was. And so it was no surprise that when I decided to do history that I would want to do history of race, social justice. And I keep coming back to it. Occasionally I'll work on a project that's not really that. And I was like, this is interesting but not what I want to do. And a lot of your research is focused around neighborhoods and white flight and housing and things like that for African Americans and the underrepresented. And that has kind of become your thing. My career. Right. So you come back to graduate school in the early 80s and then you get an MA. Is that right? Right. This one took me seven years. Okay. In part for two reasons. One is that my advisor kept asking me questions. He wanted me to answer on my thesis. And I had told him that once I got my MA I had a preneutral agreement with my wife that we would move back to New England which is where she's from in Massachusetts. Is this a real prenuptial? It wasn't written down but it was like, okay, if you move to Ohio to marry me while I get my masters once I get my masters we'll move back to Massachusetts. So you met her while you were living in Boston? In Boston. I'm getting my first masters. And we had an on again and then a long time off again of relationship before we decided that we actually should be on again. There's a ten year gap in there. And you sucker her into moving to Ohio? Well, when you negotiated for a move to Ohio in exchange for we'll move back. And I think my advisor was like if I keep asking him questions and make him keep working on this thesis he'll give up the idea moving back to Massachusetts. But, and then we have twins which you know how much worked for him. And then we finally moved back to Massachusetts where I worked as a house carpenter for a couple of years and kind of continued to take her with the thesis and a book chapter that I had been asked to do. And so in, so we moved to Massachusetts in the fall of 86 spring of 88 my wife's former employer in Cincinnati came out to Boston for a conference and basically said I will give you a lot of money if you come back to Ohio. I'll pay you really well and I'll give you a signing bonus so you can afford to make the move and buy a house. And I've been working as a house carpenter for wealthy people. She had been working as a wedding planner for wealthy people. Both of us were doing good work but not making enough money. I was tired of dealing with rich people. Jenny was tired of dealing with rich people. These were not careers we wanted. And I knew that from what my advisor had said that if I finished my masters and came back they would give me an assistantship and tuition and remission that I would have a free ride to get my PhD. Jenny's offered lots of money to come back to Ohio. My advisor said if you come on back finish the masters I'll give you a free ride. And who was your advisor? Zane Miller UC's long time urban historian. For many years he was the person you went to if you wanted to know something about the history of Cincinnati. He was the guy that got quoted in the newspapers. So you come back here then and you decide that the PhD is the route you're going to take and continuing on I assume building on your master's thesis and the research you had done there. What do you end up doing your dissertation on? Race and housing in neighborhoods. My masters was specifically on the Avondale neighborhood. I expanded it to a wider area. Looked at city planning how that impacted it how racial discrimination and housing had impacted where blacks could live and so that that story is from about 1945 to 1970. Looked at the transition in the thinking amongst planners and housing reformers from believing that racial segregation was a good thing to realizing that it was a bad thing and coming into coalition with civil rights activists who came to who wanted there to be laws making racial discrimination in housing illegal. So my story is neighborhood racial change why that happened and then the growth of a fair housing movement and how that was related to very much intimately tied up with well actually massive displacement of African-Americans from the old West End black community when I-75 was driven right through the middle of that community and the planners decided that the housing there was so horrible it had to be leveled and the people needed to be re-housed they did a great job of leveling that housing and they did a terrible job of re-housing the people were displaced so African-Americans were tens of thousands of African-Americans were displaced from the West End within a tightly segregated housing market which meant that they were all funneled into the margins of existing black neighborhoods at the same time that whites were moving in large numbers to the suburbs because federal housing policy made it possible to buy for whites to buy a brand new suburban home on a grassy lot and then take the interstate the brand new interstates to work so whites could escape the city easily at the same time that blacks can only move into certain neighborhoods Now in the early 1990s is this a topic that a lot of scholars are working on or at least in UC do you find yourself kind of alone in that scholarship? There wasn't anybody else certainly in the history department was working on that topic but it was a pretty hot topic nationally lots of other scholars working on it from a variety of points of view there are a whole series of books starting in the late maybe late 50s, early 60s examining how what we then called ghettos developed almost exclusively African-American neighborhoods tight, intense racial segregation enforced by discrimination so there were a series of books that examined that in a number of cities and actually there had been a previous doctoral student at UC who looked at those issues for Cincinnati in the pre-World War II up through the end of World War II and I was able to take what build on the work he had done if he hadn't done his book I would have had to go back to the early 20th century but fortunately Bob laid this very nice foundation that allowed me to start at World War II So you get your dissertation you get your PhD do you what happens next? Are you immediately given a faculty position here? Do you adjunct? Do you do something else? Go back to renovating homes? Did not go back to renovating homes except my own worked as an adjunct at UC for about a year and a half was on the job market had lots of interviews including several finalist interviews and was never hired At this point you were willing to move wherever the job was Yeah for a variety of reasons So I got the PhD in 1993 and the fall of 1994 I heard about a position doing social policy analysis for the Cincinnati office of a national organization called the Children's Defense Fund The executive director of that was my wife's executive director's sister So I got hired to do social policy I got that job for the old gals network as opposed to the old boys network and did that from 1995 through 2002 while continuing to teach one or two courses a year at UC keeping my hand in the I think I did one other academic publication article in that period but was mostly doing social policy stuff and doing some writing for that And maybe a little UC history here as an adjunct because I think adjuncts notoriously talk about you know overwork underpaid getting screwed How was the adjunct culture at university compared to nationwide trends So 1993-94 I worked It was basically three-quarter time as an adjunct So three quarters of a full teaching level And what courses were you teaching? Basic American History Survey courses? And I was making less than I did as a doctoral candidate My income Right Because the pay was so lousy I think I was making about $3,600 a quarter three times that So I was making about $10,000 a year At what point do you get hired as a full-time faculty member a year? So that was a long and winding road I left Children's Defense Fund at the end of 2002 set myself up doing Social Policy Consulting Since I My work was well known in the Cincinnati Social Service Community A lot of what I was doing still had to do with race and poverty And continued to teach a couple of courses a year at UC And just about the time that I left the Defense Fund, the Evening College which I was teaching in was wiped out by the University Administration So this was a teaching an Evening College at UC Right, a separate Evening College Which had been really important to and actually I think had remained really important to a lot of working-class Cincinnatians who work full-time Catered to non-traditional Yeah, I had lots of adult students who were you know, had working-class jobs but and many of them were UC employees who got tuition free but they were they were wonderful to work with because they knew why they were in college They wanted to be there not always well-prepared but willing to work hard really satisfying to work with But the UC Administration decided to wipe out Evening College for a variety of reasons One of which was that it was retaliation against the dean of Evening College for fights between her and the senior administration She retired and the senior administration said now it's time to get rid of Evening College And UC decided to move what were open access parts of the university away from the Clifton campus Open access meant that if you had a high school diploma you were automatically admitted not to ANS or any of the professional schools but Evening College and a two-year college on this campus called University College Now that work is done by Claremont and Blouache Would you still get a degree like an associates degree if you attended those or would you just eventually matriculate into a professional school You would get an associates degree from Evening College You might have been able to get a B.A. and Evening University College was just an associates degree and you could if you were successful with your associates apply to arts and sciences or any of the professional schools your admission was not necessarily guaranteed So the history courses in Evening College were brought back into the ANS history department which brought me back in contact with people who had been my teacher Barbara Ramosack was department head at that time and she was was very pleased to have me teaching Evening courses and then I picked up 2006 I picked up a contract to write a history of the local legal aid society actually Jean Lewis' wife Donnie worked there in fundraising and she did me with the executive director of the legal aid society and I got a fairly substantial contract to write what turned out to be 100 page history of the legal aid society that was very successful really brought me back to the attention of my colleagues who were teaching during the day was hired to teach full time for one year as what was called a visiting professor and friends of mine within the department started talking about how do we we want friends full time on the faculty how do we do that and their budgetary problems persuading deans that they should hire someone with my expertise but eventually I was able to pitch myself as a public historian because I had worked outside of the academy outside of the university doing both social policy and contract historical research and so eventually the department was able to sell me to the then dean and I was hired full time in 2012 so there was no national search or anything there was a search the rules require that they have to do a formal search but I was I was asked to write the job description and to be fair they interviewed two other people who they said were quite impressive but I had a track record now is this something that sort of um that trajectory is that something that happens at other universities somebody joins a department people like them they want to keep them on I think so I don't know a whole lot about it I do have a friend who actually had a full time tenure track job at Wilmington college a small college about an hour from here her husband taught over in northern Kentucky they lived in Cincinnati close friends with a senior faculty member who had been her PHD advisor at UC and he wanted to bring her back into the UC psychology department and eventually was able to get UC to hire her as what they called an educator assistant professor which is how I was hired it's not a ten year job three year contracts that are renewable indefinitely and with a possibility of promotion so I think it's not uncommon if someone knows someone and wants them to figure out how to hire them but there have to be formal searches and the dean has to sign off on that the way my advisor was hired at UC was that the head of the department in the mid 60s called his buddy who was the head of the department at University of Chicago and said hey have you got anybody who can teach urban history Zane had done his dissertation on late 19th century Cincinnati history and said they hired him that was enough I'm sure there was no formal search no competition very different certainly so you kind of as an adjunct and maybe visiting professor were kind of on the outskirts of departmental culture history department A&S college arts and sciences college when you became a full time professor was it an eye opening experience for you now being completely submerged in this culture or was it no surprises well there I knew a lot of what to expect going in what I hadn't realized even when I was a full time visiting professor was the incredible workload I taught two courses a semester I supervised the internship program served on committees met with students and it was I mean you know it does not sound like a huge amount but it was it wasn't 24-7 but it was more like 10 hours a week 10 hours a day, 7 days a week but when you did submerge yourself in that culture you begin I know faculty members you not only teach class, you serve on faculty committees you have to involve yourself in professional service were there committees that you enjoyed serving on some that you did not enjoy serving on and if so could you talk about some of those served on the undergraduate studies committee I think for three years and there were some satisfactions there it's okay by the way if you say no committee provided me satisfaction that is perfectly acceptable you notice I said some satisfaction there the faculty member who was the head of the committee was disorganized I was like you know let's try to get us back on track maybe we can get this process done this year instead of having to work on it again next year right you know the history department while I was there full time those five years was generally a good place to be good people liked each other respected each other so mostly that kind of administrative stuff that committee stuff worked pretty well there were varying amounts of lack of respect for me because I was an educator faculty instead of a ten year line faculty and because I wasn't doing research and publishing the way they were and I really had to kind of push remind the department that I was there that I was a competent contributing member of the department you know an example of this is about three years ago I had taught a class where we wrote a history of us in any neighborhood next fall there was a party at another faculty member's house to celebrate other faculty members who had published books in the previous year and mine was ignored because it was not published by an academic press you know and I had mentioned it to her by the way we just finished this book that I think is a really nice history of this neighborhood I'll bring it to the party and when she announced who the published authors were she didn't remember to mention me so there was there is a hierarchy within the academic world that can be sometimes hard to deal with well and for me personally as a public historian I tend to think public historians traditionally over the well since they've been increasingly more a part of traditional academic history departments kind of feel like the you know second class citizen yeah yeah so the difference between a public historian and a academic historian is academic historians publish books full length books that have been published by university presses or if they're really good if they have become a star their books get published by commercial presses but they're always reviewed by other people in the field you also have to write articles that get published in professional journals you go to conferences and give papers public historians tend to do smaller projects sometimes peer reviewed but not as often they're not necessarily as I was going to say academically rigorous but I don't think that's quite the word there help me out here academically rigorous traditionally I think it's changing where public historians are being more and more accepted whereas an exhibit for instance is being accepted now as scholarly work by some by some academic historians but others were like well that's nice exactly where the hell is your book you kids did a nice exhibit there where's the real scholarship and part of it is that the academic historians are writing primarily for other academic historians whereas public historians are writing putting together exhibits web pages for the general public so you're writing stuff that can be understood by ordinary citizens museum exhibits the text the text is written for eighth grade or tenth grade level it's simple it's a hundred words and academic scholars are writing three, four hundred page books that quite frankly take a huge amount of work our department had just last year published a book that he'd been working on for 20 years it's won tons of awards and he deserves every award he's gotten and he put a huge amount of work into it so yeah so increasingly public history the creation of history for the general public is more and more accepted within academic departments but there are still you know still people who are like why are we paying these people to write text for tenth graders right well I think there is a tradition there among public historians too where at times it has not been that academically rigorous I mean I do see both sides of the coin and that's true that small museums are often amateur or semi-amateur operations staff there are not always trained and in order to keep their doors open they often do stuff that is incredibly ahistoric stuff that people will pay money to come see that really is not well done and so that you know I actually found myself sort of torn between you know traditional academic rigor and the complexity of the stories I wanted to tell and the fact that I also wanted to make sure that at the very least that an intelligent educated public could read the stuff I was writing and understand and I think I was pretty successful at that you'll sometimes find historians not as much as some other fields but sometimes historians will write highly theoretical stuff with jargon that you're you know you go yeah there's something to be said for the public intellectual that can distill concepts and ultimately I see the historians job as as being able to talk about the work they do in a way that is going to help enlighten the general public now I know that you know this book that took 20 years to write will be read by lots of scholars and they will use that material in the classes they teach and some of the students will go off and teach high school social studies so some of Chris's scholarship will get to college classes obviously he's teaching it it's certainly informed his teaching and some of it will get to high schools and some of it will get to maybe to elementary school though a friend of mine posted on Facebook recently a quiz that her first grader was given about Martin Luther King and the three choices for answers, the two of them were obviously wrong and the third one was so simplistic basically it said what was the result of Martin Luther King's work and the correct answer was people are now treated fairly it's like wait I don't know if this teacher made up that quiz or whether she it was canned or it came from some other place but it showed a gross lack of understanding of the current state of race there's room there for there's room for significant improvement well Fritz listen I just want to be respectful to the class because we've been talking for a while now and I've got a few more questions to ask not that many but maybe some of the students here will pick up on some of those questions that I didn't ask about to the table that'd be great anything that you'd like to ask Fritz? Alyssa? I know you're talking a lot about your what was your involvement in and I just want to repeat that for the camera what was your involvement in activism regarding your dedication to social justice so that's a very fair question it's turned out that I'm a much better academic than I am an activist well it may not seem like it when I'm in the classroom I'm really kind of shy and careful and and having been trained as an academic fortunately or unfortunately makes me see things in complex ways which makes it hard to be gung-ho out in the streets you know tear down the walls so I'm a better I'm better writing about this stuff and educating people about it than I am about organizing or being a member of an activist organization though in the late 70s early 80s I was part of a street theater group that did social justice street theater which was kind of fun and we did our plays in a number of different venues that so that's my one claim to fame as an activist but I've always been and my dad was very similar in the ways that he understood a lot of what was going on but was not in the streets he did however when I was in high school black kids who rode the school bus to our high school were accused of slashing bus seats and I had a good friend who was one of those African-American students and she said we didn't do this you know we're being falsely accused and I took the story home to my dad and and got involved with a group of people who challenged the school administration on it and forced them to apologize to the black kids but yeah I think of myself more as being really good at it as a critic social critic and being able to lay out the history of how many African-Americans have been displaced and discriminated against and the results of that lay that out in a way that's accessible to the general public and every now and then someone will post on Facebook something related to my topic and it's like okay if you want to know more about this here's an article I wrote and here's a book that you could read and long form answers on Facebook which my closest friends read all the way through and my daughter's like other questions I'm just to interject here I'm reminded of, we have a case on her, Lucy Oxley, she was the first African-American graduate of the College of Medicine here in 1936 in an interview done in the 80s somebody said did you involve yourself in the civil rights movement and were you a civil rights activist and she said yes and the interviewer said well how, she said I showed up for work every day she had a private medical practice in Avondale primarily black neighborhood black patients and she did that for 40 years into her 90s I think significantly underserved medically underserved population yeah so I think she made a statement like my activism is my life it's my job you know I didn't have to be on the news throwing a Molotov cocktail I show up for work every day and I treat the community you know any other questions do you think you're kind of extended education you said you got two master's master's degrees and they both took a long time with periods of working between do you think that your life would have turned out saved very differently if you would have just went the normal I say normal standard route of going get your four years for bachelor's and two years for master's I don't think I was capable of doing that just who I am you know when I went to get the master's in geology in some ways it was kind of a whim I'd only discovered geology as something that was interesting in the last year and a half of college you know if it had been the last year and a half of college I'd been taking anthropology classes I would have gone to anthropology graduate school I really I wasn't ready when I graduated from college to commit to a career I didn't know what I wanted to do and sort of part of the problem or part of the positive side of that was that what I really wanted to do was explore and try different things out and so that when I got to the history degree it was clear to me that that's what I wanted to do gave up I kind of gave up on the master's in history because we had two infants and we had to earn a living but my but I knew I didn't want to be a house carpenter anymore and my advisor and another senior historian kept leaning on me and when I had the chance to come back it was the right move it took me four years to get my doctorate it took me 12 years to get two masters degree and four years to get a doctorate and that was because I had I'd grown up you know I'd done a bunch of different things you know I run into to people who have had professional jobs who went you know went to law school worked for a law firm for 20 years and then went F this I'm going to become I'm going to go build furniture or I'm going to become a house carpenter I did that first and while I still I really enjoy building something with my hands and I started this when I was working on the master's I would go work rebuild someone's front porch you know at the end of the week I did something this was a mess a week ago now there's something new there so I still have a real satisfaction of working with my hands but doing history is much more important to me so that's a really kind of long and roundabout answer to your question but I think for me I had to grow up I had to experiment I'm really glad I think that if I had followed the sort of normal career path I would have burned out on it in my late 30s and said screw this I want to be a carpenter and probably would have done that for a few years and went yeah this is okay I'm earning some money but no this is not what I want to do so the experimenting and growing up got me to a place that was a place for me and that's something that I really worried about for my daughters generation and you guys is that most of you are going to graduate from college with a lot of debt and you are not going to have it's going to be much more difficult for you to experiment you know I was able to I had very little debt at the end of the geology masters since then had he lived in a communal household work maybe 10 months out of the year winter work slope way down I would just take two months off earn a subsistence living do political work go backpacking and have lots of choices both my daughters are saddled with huge but one of them went to graduate school and her husband owe several hundred thousand dollars in college debt they have to work they can't just say to hell with this we're going to go to Europe for six months before we have babies we'll have to have jobs and taking six months or a year to go to Europe or South Asia is not possible so it's sorry to build on that but if somebody had the opportunity to say what they believe they're passionate about but may not end up finding that they're the most passionate about that or taking more of a safe route and being able to build a foundation maybe exploring those passions later in life what advice would you give I guess well again a kind of roundabout answer to that is I learned stuff in doing the masters in geology that has stuck with me about certain kinds of rigor about certain ways of approaching problem solving you know I look back and it's like I've forgotten most of what I learned most of the technical stuff I learned but I did learn how to do research I learned a lot about problem solving so it wasn't a waste of time what I would say is that you as much as possible given the realities of a person's responsibilities and financial situation you should follow your passion do what you think is what is good for you taking into account everything that that environment the environment that you're in and be willing to experiment I think lots of people in your generation are going to change jobs multiple times careers multiple times that's fine it's one way to keep your life interesting I would say try not to get trapped into a career path that you're not sure you want to do Fritz I'm going to stop you there any other questions alright well then let me just bring the interview to a place Fritz by asking you um two more questions that one thing that you can encapsulate from your career here at UC of which you are most proud you had to pick just one thing the research and writing I've done about race and housing in neighborhoods I know that people use that every now and then someone contacts me and said I just read or I've been reading your stuff for years let's talk or a former student will email me 10 years later and say you know that stuff you taught me about race changed my life so that's really been your life's work I mean you've been carpenter, professor you've done work with political organizations but your life's work has been really about exposing issues in race housing yeah the research and writing and teaching um I've done good work anything we haven't talked about that you feel should be on the record before we close that you'd like to say I mean I could go into more detail about a bunch of pieces of this my parent's story I think is really fascinating story I don't have time to do that here a successive or a later interview no I think this has been nicely comprehensive well with that we'll thank you again and we'll bring this to a close thank you well thank you for your well put together questions you're welcome and as you said you were very compliant I didn't have to do a lot of lassoing thanks Fritz