We have copyrighted a play based on the collected interviews, and produced our first series of live theatrical performances. We also have plans for a book, a documentary, radio shows, community conversations, photo exhibits, curriculum materials, college residencies and an interactive web site. I'm Dr.Lillian Dunlap and for as long as I can remember, I have loved interviewing people and hearing th
eir personal stories. For over 30 years, I have worked in journalism, first as a TV news reporter and producer, then as a professor of journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and later the prestigious Poynter Institute for Media Studies. For over twenty years, I have helped journalists on four different continents to report across differences of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation and physical ability. I believe that when reporting is not inclusive it's not accurate. It's really not journalism. Long before becoming a journalist, I was a civil rights activist. I marched and stood against racial injustice, inequality and restricted opportunities for people of color in Gary, Indiana. I come to the Your Real Stories Project in part because of what happened when I left my racially-segregated hometown to go to the predominantly white Defiance College in Ohio. Here's what I wrote on our website www.yourrealstories.org under the title "The (Real) Help":
" I lied to my white friends about what my mother did for a living. I didn’t tell them that she left home in early morning darkness and returned tired at night. I didn't say that she had to take at least one train and two buses just to get to her job in the next city. I didn’t describe how she worked cleaning the houses of people who were not nearly as well educated as she was. The kicker is that Momma made that trip every day for years–for me. And, for a time, I was ashamed of her. My mother did ‘day work’. She was a real ‘domestic help’ to wealthy white families, who barely knew her." I'm Jaye Sheldon, and I have spent my adult life as a singer, actor, professional voice teacher, and music director working predominantly with diverse communities. For the past six years years, Lillian and I have combined our various skills and backgrounds (in journalism, music, theater, and community outreach) to interview hundreds of members of our local community and tell their stories through a variety of media. Together we have been able to help each storyteller experience the healing power of simply being heard. I grew up in a small town in rural upstate New York. When I was ten years old, two little girls moved in down the street from me, and we became fast friends. It was then that my father began to "educate" me. You see, my little town had been all white until that point. With no need to "teach," my father had remained silent. But now, he objected to me inviting my friends over. Moreover, he began to assert that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1950's while he was working as a traveling salesman in the South, and that I needed to keep away from black people or I would “learn the hard way.”
I am passionately committed to this project - a commitment that increases with each subsequent interview - because I hear my own childhood confusion and disbelief at how skin color could possibly be used to prevent relationships, echoed over and over again in each story. But, I also hear a separateness repeated over and over. I have heard surprise from black families who encountered white people at the funerals of their loved ones; surprise that the people who employed their loved ones would come to pay their respects; surprise to find that there was love between their mothers or grandmothers and the white children they cared for. Loving relationships developed separately. This system of separateness that created the world that we all live in today, predated all of us, yet it continues to entrap us in routine behaviors created by oppression, fear, and hatred. Inspired by the writings of Paula Giddings (When and Where I Enter), Kathryn Stockett ( The Help) and others who write about domestic workers, YRS chose to produce a series of live performances called "Decades of Day Work." Each show reveals the restricted opportunities available to Black women who worked "in service" and the challenges they and their white employers faced over the decades since Reconstruction. A black Ph.D. in her late seventies whose parents and grandparents were college graduates told us during one performance that "the only job available" to her college-educated mother in Buffalo, NY in the 1940's was 'days work'. And then there was the white male storyteller who was told by the neighbor lady to never again sit outside in front of the house sharing lunch with his black maid.
