Oral history interview with Dr. Loren Schweninger, 2016

Lacey Wilson: And we're recording now. Today's date is the 10th of November 2016. I am here with Loren Swinger?

Dr. Schweninger: Schweninger, like vinegar.

Lacey Wilson: Schweninger, Schweninger, Dr. Loren Schweninger, long-time history faculty at UNCG.

Dr. Schweninger: Right.

Lacey Wilson: And we're going to start an oral interview about sort of your time before and related to UNCG. So, we'll start at the beginning. Where were you born?

Dr. Schweninger: I was born in Culver City, California on January 7, 1941. I was named after a good friend of my father at the University of Nebraska, Loren Eiseley. Loren Eiseley in the 40s and 50s was a famous anthropologist and my dad was there in 1931, and they were friends. It was neat to be named after him.

Lacey Wilson: That's cool. Kind of an interesting link to academia at the beginning.

Dr. Schweninger: Right, he was at the University of Pennsylvania, Eiseley was, for most of his career and he wrote a number of books that were best sellers, Immense Journey, which is about the world and about just really philosophical and his pros were just majestical. So, he was terrific. My dad, as they were apart for many, many years and then he never got up with Eiseley again and said "I named my son after you, and so on." Eiseley died in '75, so anyway. I didn't 00:02:00too. I was in Philadelphia and gave a paper, and I just should have tried to say, but what do you say? You know?

Lacey Wilson: I don't know.

Dr. Schweninger: Here I am. My name is Loren, just like yours.

Lacey Wilson: Sort of an odd conversation starter.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, it is strange. So, I didn't, and he was older then, so, anyway.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: So, you want to talk about background first?

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, we'll do like sort of a bio beginning thing and then leading into the ...

Dr. Schweninger: So, I was born in California, and my dad lived in Culver City with my mom. That was close to the movie business. He went to California in 1932, and he wanted to write. He wanted to do plays, and he wanted to get into 00:03:00the movies. None of it panned out, and he was there for nine years. So, right after that we moved to Merced, California, and he got a job in an electrical plant. On December 7, 1941 he was bringing me home. I had been out with him, and I was running and I slipped and bloodied my knee. So, he was carrying me home and my mother said, the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. So, he moved to San Francisco and during the war he was a crane operator on the docks to put stuff in ships to go to the Pacific. He was also a radio announcer.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, that's cool.

Dr. Schweninger: In the early morning. My mom, when I was old enough, when I was 00:04:00four or five, said this is your dad on the radio now, and he did advertising for a company. So, he had a number of jobs. They saved $3800, and he wanted to write still. So, we went to my grandparents' house in La Hunta, Colorado, which is a little town in Southern Colorado, and we were there for seven months. My granddad on my dad's side was an engineer on the Santa Fe Railroad from 1901 to 1946.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, and he was a fireman to begin with for about five, six years and then he became an engineer. They went to Dodge City and back. Dodge 00:05:00City and back. Though, he did go to Chicago a few times too taking trains. He was a wonderful man, and he died in 1964, and I visited him and went and stayed with him for 10 days on one occasion. So, at any rate my dad tried to write. I had a brother then who was five years younger, and he was a baby then. So, he wrote and wrote and then we moved to Denver, Colorado. He was trying to get a publisher, and he couldn't get a publisher. So, he took a number of jobs in Denver. My mom took a job with an airline, Continental Airlines and was a secretary to Bob Six, who was the president of the airline. So, it was ... my 00:06:00dad then got really sick, seriously. I mean, he had boils all over. It was just terrible. I remember, because I was just a kid.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: He went into the hospital, and he was in the hospital for six months taking shots all the time.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: And penicillin had just come in, so they shot him with penicillin and he recovered. They had a conference there, and the doctor called him to stand on the stage and say this man shouldn't be alive, but we saved him. But it was such a strain for my mom and dad that they had so many financial difficulties too.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: At any rate, they got a divorce in 1949 and my mom took my brother and me to California.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: Her folks were from LA. So, we lived in Los Angeles, and her mother was still there in Los Angeles. I went to fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, and eighth grade in Los Angeles. When I went to junior high, it was to Mount Vernon Junior High where the defender of OJ Simpson, Cochran, he had just left.

Lacey Wilson: He just graduated?

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, from Mount Vernon and went to LA High, but it was a really ... it was the third roughest, toughest school in Los Angeles.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: They had gangs and beatings. So, that was my first connection with African Americans, because African Americans had come from the South and were living in LA and the kids were going to school.

Lacey Wilson: Was that the first time you were in school with them?

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, yeah. Denver ... I went to school in Denver, and it was pretty much white school.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: So, I had bad experiences. I mean, I was beaten up and I was ... at any rate ... and I was beginning to get into trouble in the eighth grade as you would.

Lacey Wilson: Doing what?

Dr. Schweninger: So, my dad who had moved to Pueblo, Colorado, which is in the southern part of the state and had taught at Pueblo Central High School and who 00:09:00worked in the steel mill. He got a job in the steel mill. He left teaching. I think teachers made something like $2800 a year and when he left the CF&I, Colorado Fuel and Iron, Corporation he was making $5700 a year. So, the attraction of this big salary, but he didn't like it. He just did it for ... but he drove to Los Angeles, and he had three children then by another wife that he married in 1951, who was my step-mother who was just a wonderful person. But she was 20 when they married and he was 40 when they married. So, they had these three kids and then they had another one. So, they had four children and he went 00:10:00drove to California and then talked to my mom and said it would be best if he came and lived with me because I was already having problems. I had a broken foot. I was running around with the wrong people, and so on. So, in the beginning of the summer in 1954, I went to live with my dad. My dad was still trying to write, but you can't write when you are having a full-time job. I mean, it's just ... but he lived in Beulah, which was 27 miles from Pueblo, from the high school.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: He had a cabin, and they had another child while I was there. So, they had four kids, and Alice, my step-mother, it was unbelievable how she took care of those kids and then took care of me. There was no hot running water. There was no toilet. We were in ... and it got cold in the winter, and they put me on the porch to sleep. I used to heat bricks and bring them in and wrap them in a towel, you know?

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: And we were 27 miles from my high school. So, very early it was clear that I couldn't ride the bus that took everybody in, because they were clique-ish and they were cowboys and they were ... and at one point the driver of the bus very early took a first aid kit and threw it at me.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Dr. Schweninger: It was crazy stuff.

Lacey Wilson: Just because?

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, because I had a ducktail and I was from LA. So, I hitchhiked to school and back.

Lacey Wilson: Regularly?

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, for four years.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: I hitchhiked, and at the end of that time, a reporter for the Denver Post did an article, "Prepster hitchhikes 16,000 miles to play sports." I was into football, basketball, and track.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: So, my dad, he was always supportive, and he played football at Nebraska and at Colorado College and again at Nebraska. He also, in high school, ran track, ran hurdles and ran the mile relay. So, that's what I did.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: He was so influential.

Lacey Wilson: You followed right in his footsteps.

Dr. Schweninger: He was really a wonderful man. My mom and dad were both kind of sentimentalists and they were romantics. Dad never had any money. It was always a problem. When he left Pueblo he got a teaching job in Central City, Colorado.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: When I was a senior. So, he left when I left. He borrowed the money my granddad had given me for every touchdown I made. It was $300 and some dollars for $5 a touchdown to get to where he was going. They had two ponies for the kids from Beulah and they had all their stuff, and they drove up to Central 00:14:00City. At any rate, my dad was very influential in my life, and my mom was too. It was very difficult for her in Los Angeles, but she was a terrific typist, and she worked for a law firm for a number of years and so on. They both died about the same time, 1982. My mom was 62 and my dad was 71. It's amazing that my dad made it to 71. He smoked two packs a day for 50 years.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: Just terrible. Then, he got a job at Boulder High School in Colorado, which the University of Colorado is there and right down the hill is 00:15:00Boulder High School, and it was a terrific high school, and he was thespian's director for years and years. Eventually because he in the 70's wrote a play that was too patriotic the students protested and they fired him from his job as a thespian director. He had a wonderful record there. So, he was sad and kind of ... so he drank a lot and at various times in his life he drank a lot. So, we were there in '76. I mean, he had two inches of bourbon in the morning, 2 inches in the afternoon and he'd take a nap and drink more. Anyway, but he was always in my corner and he was proud of what I did. So, I went to high school in Pueblo 00:16:00and during my high school I was ... in fact, they had a Hall of Honor at the high school, the first inductees. I was one of the first inductees, because I had played all three sports and had done well and then got a scholarship, an athletic scholarship, to the University of Colorado.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And I was a running back. There's a football from one of the games I played at Colorado against Oklahoma when I was a senior. I scored two touchdowns, and the team that I was on had never beaten Oklahoma. This was the second time we played them.

Lacey Wilson: Oklahoma or Ohio?

Dr. Schweninger: Oklahoma.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: So, it used to be the Big 8 and now it's ...

Lacey Wilson: Big 10?

Dr. Schweninger: Some of the teams have gone to the Big 10. It's the Big 12.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: Now. There are only 10 schools, but it's the Big 12. It has the Texas schools and Oklahoma and Oklahoma State and Iowa State in the Big 12, which is the Big 10. Colorado went to the PAC 12 out on the coast.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: The last 10 years have been disastrous, but this year they're very good. They were 12th in the country.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, good.

Dr. Schweninger: First time in a decade they have been ... it's the first time they have won a game with a punt return in the last few minutes the last game just recently. It was the first time they had run a punt return for a touchdown in 10 years.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, and they had really ... they had some bad coaches and they are turning things around. But it was a tough road. But at any rate, in 00:18:00high school really good teachers at the school. I liked history a lot at the time, though I was interviewed when I left, and I just gave my papers to UNCG. I was reviewing some of this stuff, and in a newspaper article I said I wanted to be a lawyer. He quoted me, "He's going to be a lawyer. He's a senior in high school and he's going to be a lawyer."

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: So, at the University of Colorado I just looked back on it and to think how fortunate I was to come when I did. The coach for my freshman year was fired and a new guy came in, and all the worst about college athletics that 00:19:00you can imagine was a guy named Sonny Grandelius who was an All-American at Michigan and he came in with a very young staff and he molded a team in two years. When we played that game with Oklahoma we were ranked seventh in the country and we went to the Orange Bowl.

Lacey Wilson: Oh wow.

Dr. Schweninger: And so I was 20 in the Orange Bowl and ran for a touchdown with an intercepted pass of 58 yards. It was our only score.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: So, it was exciting to end your college career with that.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: Now, on that team it was when you played both ways, defense and offense.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: So, I was on the field 60 minutes some games, 59 minutes other 00:20:00games. Among the 15 top players that got most of the playing time, nine were drafted by the pros.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: I mean, it's kind of like Alabama is now.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: But it was ... and we had some really great players. I mean, two-time All-American Joe Romig who was a Road Scholar too. We had a guy named Teddy Woods, an African American, who played in the Canadian league for seven years. So, that ... my high school and college were essentially consumed with athletics.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And years later Lou Holtz, who coached Notre Dame, is talking 00:21:00about players and so on. He said, "you know players now have to spend seven hours a day in one way or another on football. Traveling, chalk talks." Just when you think about it, and that's true. So, my grades weren't as great as they should have been to say the least. And I had a social studies major at the University, which is economics, sociology, history, and psychology.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And I taught high school. I got a job in a really good district, Junction County, outside of Denver, and I taught there three years and coached. I coached football. I was thinking about going into coaching and my former freshman coach who came back when the next guy was fired, and Grendelias 00:22:00was fired when I left.

Lacey Wilson: What for?

Dr. Schweninger: For paying players money.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Dr. Schweninger: The first year he was there he gave 72 full scholarships. Now, it's 86 for all ... 72 full and 30 partials, 100 players came. There's team after team after team and here were our little group from Colorado basically vying against the hoards that came. There were some really good, good players that played on our senior team, but most of them didn't finish college. Our 00:23:00All-American end who then was 6'3", 234, which was huge then. Now they talk about somebody 250 that's small.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: He was a first-round draft pick for the New York Giants who hadn't won the championship. So, he played pro ball for nine years. These others played for seven and eight. Some of the linemen were just terrific, and they played pro ball for years.

Lacey Wilson: Did no one look at you for a pro team?

Dr. Schweninger: Actually the guy from the Denver Broncos came in and offered me $500 if I'd try out.

Lacey Wilson: That's an offer.

Dr. Schweninger: Then, Hildebrand who was an All-American end, and his thighs were as big as my waist, 32 inch thighs and he was fast.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, wow.

Dr. Schweninger: And I've seen him on the field throw a ball 70 yards.

Lacey Wilson: Geez.

Dr. Schweninger: He kicked a field goal 54 yards, which was a record for a long time. I think it's been equaled. And he had these wonderful hands, and he was great on defense. He personally won two of the games of the nine we won that year.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: I mean, he ... On the goal line stand against Miami in Miami, he knifed through and got the guy. They were on the 1 yard line, and it was 9 to 7, and he ... then in the game against Kansas. They were ranked third in the nation at the beginning of the season. They had great players. He caught the 00:25:00winning pass, and we came back from a 19-zip score in the first half to 20-19 in a great comeback, one of the four or five best in the school history, according to most. Anyway, so football was a big thing, and I coached and taught. Then, I went back and got into a Master's program in history.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: Then, went back to the University and also was an Assistant Freshman Coach on the football team. A new coach had come in and ...

Lacey Wilson: This was at what school?

Dr. Schweninger: The University of Colorado.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: So, then I thought, what do I want to do with my life? Here I was 24, and I decided that I'd like to go into history instead of coaching. 00:26:00Coaching, the assistant coaches were really unimpressive to me. They were kind of like used car salesmen. It was just ... so, I applied to a number of graduate programs, and I was accepted to three, and the one that I wanted to get in, I wasn't accepted to, at Western Reserve. There had been a professor at Colorado who went to Western Reserve, and I wanted to work under him. But I was accepted to Chicago, and my step-mother said once that came I knew where you were going. In the meantime, we got married, Patricia, who we had been married 51 years. So, 00:27:00that's not a bad ...

Lacey Wilson: Congratulations.

Dr. Schweninger: Record.

Lacey Wilson: No, that's a good record.

Dr. Schweninger: We had four children, and they're close by pretty much. Alamance County and then one lives in Greensboro, and our daughter is now in Equatorial Guinea working for UNICEF.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Dr. Schweninger: She's been in Africa. She was in Mozambique for a year and a half, two years. She's been Equatorial Guinea working on AIDS prevention. She's just a wonderful, wonderful person. We're happy with her. We have family gatherings. We have two grandkids that come. So, it's all the family. Pat, who 00:28:00herself is very talented. She got a BA and taught, and then she taught in Jefferson County where I taught, and that's where we met.

Lacey Wilson: At the same school?

Dr. Schweninger: No, she taught art in what is now a middle school. It's called a junior high school now.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: And we got married in 1965, and I was coaching at the University of Colorado and doing my Master's. So, we went together to Chicago, and I'd never been to Chicago to begin with, and here's ... and this marvelous university, and I just felt so privileged to go. We were the house mother and father for one of the dorms that was Burton Judson, and in that dorm another of 00:29:00the house heads was working under Professor Franklin.

Lacey Wilson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Schweninger: So, that when we first came, I took Professor Franklin's course the first semester I was there in the Old South. He, Dick Fugue, got me an interview with John Hope, and that was hard.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah?

Dr. Schweninger: Because he was so busy, it was incredible. They called him Professor of American Airlines, because he was going all over, and he'd been to .. he had just come back from Cambridge where here was the Harmsworth professor. In his life, he had 130 honorary degrees.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: I mean, I think it's a record.

Lacey Wilson: Probably, it has to be.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, I think so. The President of Notre Dame was behind him. They used to joke about it. "How many do you have now? How many do I have now?" At any rate, I took his course the first semester. Dick Fugue got me into ... Dick Fugue was his research assistant.

Lacey Wilson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Schweninger: From Maryland, actually.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: He got his masters from the University of Maryland.

Lacey Wilson: College Park?

Dr. Schweninger: Pardon?

Lacey Wilson: College Park?

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. College Park.

Lacey Wilson: Not too far from where I was.

Dr. Schweninger: And John Hope had taught there a semester. He taught at so many places.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: He invited Dick to come and be his Research Assistant, and Dick recommended me to follow him. So, in '67 I became John Hope's Research Assistant. I was his Research Assistant for four years. Then, as we went through 00:31:00our careers or as I went through my career, he lost track of the fact that I was there for four years. We mentioned ... we were talking years and years later, and it's hard to remember who's ... but he said, "well, he was my research assistant for two years." I said, "No, John, no! It was four." But he was so generous with his ... my last year, I was writing my dissertation and so on. He said, "now you just do what you have to do with your dissertation to get it in, and you can leave my research that I want you to do and here it was until you're done with yours."

Lacey Wilson: Oh, very nice.

Dr. Schweninger: Now, who would do that? I mean, you know?

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, he's paying you to help him with stuff.

Dr. Schweninger: Right. So, he was a great ...

Lacey Wilson: Help him with stuff.

Dr. Schweninger: Right. So he was a grand person to have as a mentor, and well, let me just finish with some kind of up to... I should mention that my dad had four children by Alice, which I look upon as my brothers and sisters. One of them just passed away which is really sad.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Mary, she was an artist and Lee, my brother, who is 10 years younger, is a Professor of English at University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He's been there 30 years and he's published five books.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. He's incredible.

Lacey Wilson: That's impressive, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Then my sister, she's the oldest, Anne, was an artist and a drawer and she published 42 children's books during her career. Ann Schweninger.

Lacey Wilson: Ann Schweninger. Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: She's now taking care of her husband whose older and suffering from dementia, which is really sad.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: My other sister, Jan, had a fellowship to Stanford.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: And my brother, the one that was born in San Francisco, went to Stanford and he got his Master's from Stanford, so there was a lot of support along the line and Jan is an artist herself, so and my brother, Mark, taught for 00:34:00a number of years in high school in Lake City, California, which is down from south of San Francisco.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And mostly itinerant workers, mostly Hispanic workers whose children went to school.

Dr. Schweninger: So the family is very important and the stalwart, the matriarch, Patricia, has organized things so that we see each other often, we talk often. She's so great at liking all the family members and she got an MFA from UNCG in '78 when she had two children and it was... you know.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: She taught for 13 years and she put me through the University of Chicago. I didn't go with a fellowship, I had an assistantship but she paid the tuition. She taught high school in Berwyn which is outside of... so each day she'd go 20 miles and come back 20 miles and be a house mom. So at the end of my five years at Chicago in 1971, I interviewed for jobs. It was the worst year for historians up to that time and beyond.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. Why is that?

Dr. Schweninger: So many PhDs. The '60s, there was kind of an idealism and I 00:36:00remember when I was up in the fifth floor of the social science building in Chicago in '68, '69, there would be people from various universities coming and trying to get faculty members. I mean it was just... but then there was a glut on the market.

Dr. Schweninger: So I went to a convention in New Orleans and-

Lacey Wilson: Convention for what?

Dr. Schweninger: One of the jobs that was open... Pardon?

Lacey Wilson: What was the convention for?

Dr. Schweninger: It was the Organization of American Historians.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: They had a job thing. So the head of the History department at UNCG, Richard Bardolph, was there to hire. He himself was a student and a 00:37:00scholar in African American History. He wrote several books on the subject and he was really a wonderful scholar and wrote very well. He was Head of the department from 1960 to 1978, 18 years.

Lacey Wilson: Wow, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: He came to the convention looking for a scholar in African American /history, which was called negro history then, and John Hope, he knew John Hope from way back.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: Since he was in the field, he thought John Hope was wonderful.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: Bardolph came up to John Hope and said, "I need somebody in 00:38:00negro history. Do you have any candidates?" He said, "Loren Schweninger," and Bardolph said, "That doesn't sound black to me." John Hope was angry about that and though they were friends, he kind of went off in a huff, John Hope did, because he thought I was really a good scholar and a good historian.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: So Bardolph then later called him and apologized and said, "I'd like to interview Loren." So we met, we talked and he offered me the job. That was unusual for... it was a time of black studies and explosion of blacks in the 00:39:00classroom and African Americans who were teachers as well. So I came... Pat and I got in our Volkswagen and we came to Greensboro in August of 1971 and we got a room in a motel which is like 150 yards from where we are right now. You know where the Reynolds building is?

Lacey Wilson: Yes.

Dr. Schweninger: They just, two days ago, tore it down. There used to be a signing up area for a motel and the motel went to the back all the way back this way and now it's just a field. They knocked it all down. But this little 00:40:00entrance to the motel was there for years and years, so I walked by and I think, "That's where we were in August of 1971."

Dr. Schweninger: I began here teaching in '71 and during the '70s there were very few, almost all women and all white women, in the classes. This was the premiere school for white upper class and the gentry would come, so these were terrific students and I taught four classes, different preparations, and...

Lacey Wilson: What were the classes?

Dr. Schweninger: Pardon?

Lacey Wilson: What were the classes?

Dr. Schweninger: One was African American, one was American, Western Civ, and I 00:41:00think another Western Civ or since I taught in high school that wasn't too bad but it was exhausting. I mean there were like 120 students a semester, 110 students a semester.

Lacey Wilson: Right, it's a required course.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. So here... But African American was not required and I have taught that every semester since I was here. 40 years I've taught African American ... and in the old days I thought I was very good as a teacher. As time progressed, the last couple years, I used to be able to go into class with an outline and just talk for an hour, an hour and 10 minutes. The first semester I was here I went for an hour and students would come in late and I just went on 00:42:00with what I was doing. Come to find out it was a 50 minute course and I didn't even know about it. Can you believe it? It was kind of funny because that's how clueless I was as to what was going on.

Dr. Schweninger: But for the first two years it was just inundating. I mean four classes a semester just... Everyday you're there for an hour, for an hour and a half, another class for an hour, hour and a half. But then I became an Assistant Professor and there were a whole range of instructors here then and by the end of the '70s all but one besides me were gone. There were probably eight instructors, and they were really good people.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: There were just cutbacks in the late '70s. At any rate, I 00:43:00taught... I still taught three courses a semester and then to be a good part of the department, I took on extra classes from time to time. One semester I taught four classes again in the late '70s, European urban history. I didn't have a clue about urban history but-

Lacey Wilson: Taught it.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, I taught it. Then what's worse is we didn't have an Africanist, so I tried to teach African history in the early '80s for four semesters I taught it and I really... just to know the 50 countries in Africa is... I could get the basics but...

Dr. Schweninger: So at the end of the second year-

Lacey Wilson: '72?

Dr. Schweninger: No this was in '82.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. So this is when you were teaching African history.

Dr. Schweninger: I had gone through the '70s and then into '80s and I was trying to help the department.

Lacey Wilson: Right. So you're teaching other classes.

Dr. Schweninger: Right, right. At the end of the second year, like '83 in the spring semester, this student, was so good, came to every class, listened to every lecture, sat right in the front on the right and at the end of the course came up to me and said essentially, "You tried very hard, but it just..." I felt for him because I did try hard, but my gosh. So during that period up until the mid '80s was trying to juxtapose this heavy, heavy teaching load and new 00:45:00preparations and I taught 15 courses before 1991 and it was just really tough to try to get your scholarship done, because scholarship is what I thought I was here for but I'm not.

Dr. Schweninger: I was able to go from Assistant to Associate in '78 and full Professor in '85. When I was put up for full Professor, Allen Trelease was Head of the department and he is a very good historian. He wrote four books, one on Indians, one that won the Sydnor Prize on carpetbaggers in the South. Excuse me. One on the Ku Klux Klan in the South. We had in our department Richard Current 00:46:00who wrote on the carpetbaggers, I wrote on blacks, so we had just about all areas covered in the Southern history.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: During that time too I taught history of the South one semester when our Chancellor who stepped down as Chancellor and then became a member of the History department and was teaching Southern history and he was from Mississippi, he got his doctorate at the University of North Carolina in History and-

Lacey Wilson: What was his name?

Dr. Schweninger: Jim Ferguson.

Lacey Wilson: Jim Ferguson, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And the Ferguson building. He was a wonderful, wonderful man. He was just... he was gentle and sweet and there was uproar in the... there were protests and so on in '69 before I got here and he just handled everything so 00:47:00well, and the first History department party in December of '71, Pat and I went and not only was the Chancellor there because he was a historian but the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, Stan Jones, was also there so here's the history department got Bardolph who's an icon and you've got the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, all historians so it was wonderful.

Lacey Wilson: A lot of support.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, a lot of support. Then what I found out, he was a tremendous football fan. He was... he knew where everybody was in the Southeastern Conference. I was just so stunned. He knew I had played. That was 00:48:00most enjoyable. He was really a good Chancellor and the transition period that he went through was really important for the University and Bill Moran came in '79 and the position with Ferguson stepping down and then a few years later he died, but he was still alive when Bill Moran came.

Dr. Schweninger: So, the history department was a nurturing place in many ways and really good scholarship. I mean, Richard Current was a distinguished, held a Distinguished Chair for the whole university system and he was surely good to me 00:49:00and good to Pat and we were close friends. He wrote 26 books in his life.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: He lived to be 100.

Lacey Wilson: Oh wow.

Dr. Schweninger: We kept up. I saw him in 2002. I was a librettist for a concert in Boston and TJ Anderson, who is an African American composer, composed the music, and here we were in the major operatic hall in Boston doing this. It was on the slave petitions. It was Slave Petitions was the name of it. So I saw him then and he was in good shape until the last few years. He published a book when 00:50:00he was 92.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: He was incredible.

Lacey Wilson: That's amazing.

Dr. Schweninger: He went to Overland and then he went to the University of Wisconsin, so when he left here, he left in the early '80s and got married and moved to Illinois. We helped him pack. In fact, the couch in our living room was given to us by the Currents and there's a chair around the corner that goes with it that he bought on the 1st of September 1939 in Philadelphia. He remembered because it was the day that the Nazis in Germany invaded Poland and it's just kind of... we love the couch. At any rate, he left in '82 or '83, but the 00:51:00department was just so strong and he was a terrific scholar, the President of the Southern Historical Association. And Allen Trelease was a very good scholar too, but as an administrator he was not very good.

Lacey Wilson: That's too bad.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. That's sad. And he didn't like me and I'm not sure exactly why, but when it came to putting up people for a full professor he put up two other people in our department and me, and what's the chances of three historians being promoted to full professor in one year?

Lacey Wilson: Not very high.

Dr. Schweninger: Not very high. Very, very small. As it turned out, my friend Bill Moran stepped in when I was the bad man out and my scholarship without 00:52:00being self indulgent was much greater than the other two and I had taught all these courses and I had been on numerous committees.

Lacey Wilson: What had you written about at that point?

Dr. Schweninger: I had published two books. One, my dissertation on James Rapier who was a congressman from Alabama, and the other was on his uncle, who was a slave who became a wealthy late 19th century owner. He was a barber as many black ... in both Nashville and then in St. Louis, and he had a big barbershop 00:53:00in St. Louis, 10 chairs and shaving and so on. But he married a wealthy free black woman too, Antoinette Rutgers. Rutgers was a family name in St. Louis. A number of African Americans were... and she was wealthy, or relative. I mean $50,000 she was worth. Then, now it would be-

Lacey Wilson: How was she worth $50,000?

Dr. Schweninger: She was a member of a family that had land.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And had property.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And James Thomas, there's a few extant letters from him and there was this autobiography. The autobiography, I saw and read part of it when I was doing research on my dissertation in 1969 which was at the Spingarn 00:54:00Research Center at Howard University. I'm sure you're familiar with that.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: I had a person that was supposed to bring me the letters and I'd sit and wait for 40 minutes before she'd come and she just hated white people basically. What was I doing there researching this? But the Head of the Spingarn, Dorothy Porter, she too was incredible, and she stepped in and got me all the information. So I had this... part of it was this auto... I couldn't figure out what it was nor did I know who wrote it. It was only after being connected with James Rapier that I began to understand that this was his uncle and that he had a barbershop in Nashville that was really important so I went 00:55:00back there and looked at that, introduced it, and then fit it all together.

Dr. Schweninger: He was, at the time, Antoinette had died, two of his kids had died, he was 87, but when he died there was an article in the paper about it in 1913. So here's a black man who did all this and the article was about his relationship with Alexander Polk. Polk was the relative of the President of the United States, with whom Thomas went on two trips to the North as his personal 00:56:00servant. Polk had told him, "I want you to come with me and if need be, I'll buy your barber business and shut it down." He was a... he had a huge plantation and a lot of money. So Thomas went and he wrote about those excursions to the North.

Dr. Schweninger: John Hope used it in his book on Southern travelers in the North, used this episode. It was really interesting that people would say "Why don't you run away? Why are you still with this guy? Are you a slave?" Excuse me.

Dr. Schweninger: The second book was that and then I was working on a third project on wealthy blacks in the South, property owners. So I had a van and I 00:57:00took the van and went around to various Southern states and this was really hard on Pat and the kids.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: And the money was what was... it was really tough. I mean she never complained, she took care of the kids. At any rate, it was in 1978 I had my first leave from the University so you could take a leave for a year at half salary or take a leave at full salary. I took a leave for a year on half salary and we went to Washington, DC and I worked at the Library of Congress for a semester anyway, and my salary was $7500 in 1978. Now that was half salary, but 00:58:00still, we could have gone on food stamps. We had two kids up there and she was... Plus she got her MFA that year. She was working, getting her... Becomes a little emotional.

Dr. Schweninger: At any rate, I worked on what I call the black middle class there. I went... Then, you could go up to the stacks in the Library of Congress. Now you can't get anywhere near the stacks.

Lacey Wilson: Someone goes for you.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, yeah. You'd have to order each book separate. I just went through the rows of books and I had a little table there and set them down and came back the next day. At the end of the time, I must confess, I couldn't bring 00:59:00it all together. I had all this information. I took notes and Booker T. Washington papers and read about Du Bois and all that. So I had this in the back of my mind from '78 and in the late '80s, I began to kind of figure out what I was doing and I published a number of articles on property-owning blacks in the South. The book, my book, Black Property Owners 1790-1915 came out in 1990. I had articles, a half dozen or so. My first article was in 1970 and that was when I was a graduate student. I was so proud of this.

Lacey Wilson: Well you'd have to be.

Dr. Schweninger: John Hope before I left said, "I'm trying to find your article 01:00:00and I can't. Will you give me a copy?" I just felt heartbroken. How? This has got to be the center of your universe. How on earth... It was about the American Missionary Association and Northern Philanthropy in Reconstruction Alabama.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Dr. Schweninger: That was the same state that I did Rapier in.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: Anyway, Black Property Owners won a prize. It was I think an important piece of work. I'm still getting calls from various people about "My ancestor owned property. Can you guide me?" Recently, here's a paragraph that says and this was my grandfather or my great-grandfather that did this. So there 01:01:00was a lot of material in the book. So that was up and I must say that I would divide my career at UNCG into two parts. One is from '71 to '91. The other is from '91 to 2012. I taught 40 years at UNCG. The first was a struggle, economically and research wise and I published a lot of things, a lot of articles, and in really good journals, the American Historical Review is the premiere journal in American history. But I was still wondering about African Americans in the South and having some project that possibly would bring the 01:02:00property owning to a larger audience or just to... So when I did the research for Black Property Owners, I visited. I would just start out in the van and I went to South Carolina and Georgia and across. I went to Louisiana and then up to Missouri and over, and I had some really great stuff, especially in Louisiana which had all these free people of color that owned slaves. So there was good material.

Dr. Schweninger: So I sent an application in to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which is at the National Archives, and does this kind of research based program that would give money to somebody, and I had 01:03:00sent one application in. It was denied. But there was some really good... what they do is they send them out to experts and they write really good reviews so I adjusted my next one to what the reviewers had said and then I got ... with John Hope's help, I got a Fulbright to the University of Geneva in Italy.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, wow.

Dr. Schweninger: In 1991.

Lacey Wilson: Oh that's cool.

Dr. Schweninger: I'd never been abroad in my life and so the six of us, there were two... there were two children born after '78, in '79 and '81, the daughter that's in Equatorial Guinea was born in 1981.

Dr. Schweninger: So here we had four kids, and they ranged in age from 20 to 10. Emily was 10, and Jim was 11, our other son. So it was so exciting. I went first to get an apartment and get things settled, and then here they came. I went down to the station in Geneva, and the long trains coming in from Milan. You'd fly into Milan. And waiting for all of them and hoping, it was ... You couldn't do emails. You couldn't ... So this train comes in and stops. I was standing right in front of the door. So we had this wonderful apartment overlooking Gulf of 01:05:00Geneva. And you know Columbus sailed out of the Gulf of ...

Dr. Schweninger: And my first, at the university when the person that was monitoring me on that side of the ocean said, "What do you want to teach?" And I said, "Well, I brought all this stuff about African Americans and Americans and so on." She said, "Well, what have you just done recently?" And I said, "Well, I published a book on black property owners." She said, "Well, that'd be a good thing to teach, black property ... " I said, "Well, I can do that. I think I can do that." And she said, "Now, we're going to have an interpreter that'll interpret. Most of the students speak English, so you can give your lectures in English. But when ... If you want to set your schedule up for Tuesday and 01:06:00Thursday, you come in for 45 minutes and you talk about black property owners ... Or 35 minutes, and the fellow that's translating will talk for 10 and talk about what you said. And other than that, you surely want to see various parts of Italy."

Dr. Schweninger: And so here we were. It was just so wonderful. I would take two kids to ... I would take one or two kids to some place. We went to Sicily one time. We went to Rome. We went to Venice. We went to Milan. And Pat would take two. So she ... We switched off on the weekends, and two would stay at home and take care of the other two. It was really fun and enjoyable, and it was so 01:07:00exciting because it was ... When I was going up the escalator in Milan to get to the railroad, I tripped and dropped my luggage. I was so excited, you know. And it was a terrific experience to be abroad. Pat had been sent by her wealthy grandfather once she graduated from college on a 10 week trip, so she hung that out over me for all those years. "Oh, this is my second time to Rome. I've been to London and so on."

Dr. Schweninger: So we went to various cities in Europe. We went to Czechoslovakia right after it had opened up, took all the kids here on a train going across the Czech countryside. And we went to England. And we went to the 01:08:00low countries. And we went to Spain. We just went to Austria. We stayed in Prague for like 10 days or so. And going back on a subway on one occasion ... Going downtown on the subway on one occasion, we had to get a place way outside. On one occasion, a person sitting next to me, I had a black parka on, and she started talking to me in Czech. She thought I was Czech. And Pat said, "Well, you look Czech. Big long nose, and you're rather tall, and you had a black jacket on." At any rate, it was a great.

Dr. Schweninger: So from '91 to 2012, it was a different ballgame. So I got ... 01:09:00When we were in Geneva, I got a letter saying that my grant from the NHPRC had been okay-ed and that when I came back, I'd have $21,000 to travel and to hire assistants. You couldn't hire many assists, so ... But that was the first of a total of 22 grants that this project, which was called The Race and Slavery Petitions Project, got over the years. And for humanities, that's a lot. And $1.478 million, which at the time of the ... when we had gone up to full speed, so to speak, I had grants not only from NHPRC, but from the NEH and from the 01:10:00Mott Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan. And so it all total to ... And when you look at getting grants by historians, that's a lot.

Lacey Wilson: It's very impressive.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. And the one ... the person that got me the grant from the Mott foundation was Bill Moran. We had become friends when he came. And I really like Ferguson, and I also really liked Bill Moran. He was ... he had four children. We had four children. He had three boys and a girl. We had three boys and a girl. And two, though not the same year, had the same birthdays of the 01:11:00four ... Can you believe it? I mean, what's the chances of that.

Lacey Wilson: What are the odds? Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, unbelievable. Anyway, we had a group that got together, and social group that went until the 2000 election when there was such harsh divisions. I wonder what they would do now.

Lacey Wilson: I can't imagine.

Dr. Schweninger: But Bush was ... At any rate, that caused ... One in the group was just outraged that anybody else in the group would support Bush. And I think the one in the group that was outraged was closer than the one that was not. At any rate, Bill and I have maintained that friendship all the way through. And when he stepped down as Chancellor, he wrote a letter to Bill White, who is the 01:12:00Head of the Mott Foundation, and said, "Here's a project. All you got to do is look at it. If you can't fund it, that's fine." But they funded it, and they funded it for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: And so the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at its height had eight or nine graduate research assistants and assistant editors and so on. And some of the students that worked on that were really very good. They loved the project, and the project was very successful. There was a New York Times article about the about the research, a slew of articles about what this meant to African American history and so on.

Dr. Schweninger: Some of my students became part of the research and the efforts of the project. One was Marguerite Ross Howell, who became the Associate Editor by the end. She was so good. She was older. She was like in her forties when she went here. And the other is Adrienne Middlebrooks, who still works at the University. And she was on the project for a number of years. At any rate, the students, the 47 students, most of them were dedicated and very good. There was this ... I went around the south from '91 to '95 and I spent ... In the first 01:14:00three years, I spent 540 days on the road going around. I couldn't have done that at any other school, I don't think. And I got petitions to southern legislatures and county courts dealing with race and slavery. And part of that was Maryland, Annapolis at the State Archives.

Dr. Schweninger: The upshot was that we began to process all this material. There were almost 18,000 documents, and there were about 140,000 pages, and all handwritten or almost all. And you had to decipher who was who and how these names were written and so on. And so we ... I got a contract with what later 01:15:00became ProQuest, but it was before. It had a different name. And they did the microfilming. So there are 151 reels of microfilm, and there were two books that came out that were documentary histories, University of Illinois Press. And then it was taken over by ProQuest, and we had been working with the UNCG library to put the microfilm in and to have a digital archive of it. The library created a digital library from all the information that we had, and which is now in the library. Have you been on it or seen it?

Lacey Wilson: I've been on the online version.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, that's what I've been on. I haven't seen the actual microfilm yet.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. Well, the actual microfilm now is with ProQuest. In 2012, if you go under S for ... What is it? At the top of the research or-

Lacey Wilson: Subject?

Dr. Schweninger: What is it? I can't remember exactly, but you can go on the website at the library and find this digital project, and there's a list of digital ... or a list of projects that they have up at the top. Go under S, and it's slavery and the law.

Lacey Wilson: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Dr. Schweninger: And ProQuest put all of the documents online, so you can ... We had a code called a petition analysis record code, the PAR. And you can put that code in, and up comes the original, the handwritten version.

Lacey Wilson: Right. That's amazing.

Dr. Schweninger: So that was my main project, and I have a lot of people. I should mention my students from the '70s too, Thomas Johnson, who got an MA here, who is now a lawyer here, a very distinguished lawyer here.

Lacey Wilson: Wow, that's impressive.

Dr. Schweninger: He's African American, and there were very few African Americans then, in the ... And African Americans, it isn't until the, kind of the mid '80s that blacks came to campus a lot to go to school. And by the '90s, 01:18:00by the early '90s, we had the largest African American undergraduate population of any predominantly white institution in the whole system. So there's a long history of that. And Thomas Johnson was among the first. And he has defended our kids, when they get into trouble, you know, and they all have, for nothing. I mean, he will not accept any money from me. And I keep saying, "Your time." And they're down on Elm Street, Johnson and West, I think is his partner.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, I've passed by them.

Dr. Schweninger: He's terrific. And he's a football fan too, and he loves the Carolina Panthers. He's got season tickets.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, nice.

Dr. Schweninger: And he's taken me, and he's taken Pat too. Pat's actually a bigger fan than I am.

Lacey Wilson: Of the Panthers?

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. It's a sad time for the Panthers. So Jim Ferguson, William E. Moran. Bill Moran and I had many things in common. But among other things, he loved scholarship. He loved research. What is a university? It's a place for the expansion of knowledge. And you know what? There's a lot of faculty members who don't agree with that, or they have ... They get caught up in a bunch of other things, administrative things and so on. And you get paid more if you get the answer. And the salary situation got a lot better as time 01:20:00progressed. And then John Hope wrote a letter for me to be in an endowed chair. He was asked in the letter to write a letter of recommendation for the Excellence Award for Research at the university, and he didn't write about that. He wrote about how I should have an endowed chair. His secretary told me this. He wouldn't. He just said, "How could you not?" So anyway, I got the Elisabeth Rosenthal Chair in American history, which ...

Dr. Schweninger: And then at the end of my career, I was getting so much in salary that I felt embarrassed. Each month I was making as much as I did the first year, $10,000. You know what I mean? At any rate, the University's been 01:21:00... I couldn't have done this in any other university. I've said that before. And Bill Moran was ... We had many things in common, but among other things is what he thought the spirit of a university should be. He got a BA in English, and he was widely read, and he was in economy. He had a PhD in economics. We read books together. He loved the Biography of Samuel Johnson by a guy named Jackson Bate. And Bate had taught at Harvard for 30 years, and he had taught a course in Samuel Johnson, who created the first dictionary in the English language. And here he was, Johnson, alone with six others that were supposed to 01:22:00be helping, and he created this dictionary that was incredible.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: And in France, they had 34 scholars dealing with the same thing. He did it. He was incredible. So, we both read that book together. Bill loved the book. And he also was a student of Newman, who ... John Henry Newman, who was a famous Anglican at Oxford who became a Catholic, and Bill's a Catholic.

Dr. Schweninger: So, what changes have I implemented at the university? I was on a number of committees. And among others, I was on what was called ACIA, the 01:23:00Advisory Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics to the Chancellor. And I was on that for 10 years. And that was during the transition from a lower division school, 3A, to what we are now. And my good colleague and friend, Dave Knight, who was a chemist, was the Chair of that committee and he was really good. And Nelson Bobb, who was the Athletic Director, they really did a lot for the University. Also important, I think-

Lacey Wilson: For sure.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, I think I should.

Lacey Wilson: Go ahead.

Dr. Schweninger: And then we can wind things up if you want to. I had no idea we 01:24:00were talking this long. Is that too much?

Lacey Wilson: No, it's fine. They usually tell us to keep it under two hours. You've only done an hour and a half.

Dr. Schweninger: Okay. Good.

Lacey Wilson: It's good. You've been on a roll. I haven't had to come in at all.

Dr. Schweninger: The changes that I've implemented at the University as a History Professor, well, two are important, I think. One is the inauguration of PhD program in History. I was on the committee and wrote a draft of what course could be. The other is, I was on a committee with the Joseph Himes, who came here in 1969 from North Carolina Central, which North Carolina College for 01:25:00Negroes. And he was a sociologist. He published a hundred essays on sociology, a hundred articles and six books, and he was blind. Unbelievable.

Lacey Wilson: Really?

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. And he was blinded when he was 15. He still went undergraduate and got a doctorate from Ohio State University, the Ohio State University. And he was ... and his brother, Chester Himes, was a novelist who wrote about Harlem, Detectives in Harlem.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, that's cool.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. And he was ... He left and went to France to live, you know, a lot of expatriates from racial problems in the United States. And he 01:26:00fell down an elevator shaft.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, just terrible. But we met him afterwards. He had a white, French wife. They were both older then. And Estelle Himes, who really helped Joe all the way through, you know. And he was very, very interesting to say the least. Well, Joe Himes and I were on a committee to create an, what was called a Negro Studies Program we worked on. Now, John Hope wasn't in favor of black studies. He wanted it integrated into the mainstream of American thought and writing and scholarship, and was in favor of whites teaching the course because 01:27:00they were ... Who was qualified, who is the best qualified should teach, not as he used to say, "Some minister that is going to do rhetoric, and this is not ... This is serious business. Research and scholarship is serious business." And he always stood by that, and he always stood up for me.

Dr. Schweninger: On one occasion, I was invited in the '70s to Neo-Black Society, Pat and I both were. And the occasion was an author, Lerone Bennett, who published Before the Mayflower. So it was a survey of African American history. So we went, and we heard him give a lecture. And then at the end, I'm 01:28:00not sure if it was the President of the Neo-Black Society. One of the members said, "You don't think that a white person should be teaching African American ... black history, do you, Professor Bennett?" And here Pat and I sat, and there are no whites in the room. It was just kind of, "Oh, what am I going to do next here?" And to his credit, he said the same thing as John Hope. And there was, I'm sure some African American students that didn't want to take the course because I was of my race, but there was nothing I could do about that.

Dr. Schweninger: Anyway, the last 20 years, I taught only African American history. All those other courses were [inaudible 01:28:56]. And I taught, 01:29:00instead of four courses a semester, two courses one semester and one the next, and then one and one. And they were at night, and so I'd go over once a week to ... on Monday night and teach. Of course, I was running this project too, so I was ... That took a lot of time.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: And I really disliked 18 years of writing sixth month reports to the various agencies about progress, you know? Jeez. And that takes away from your scholarship. Of course, it was connected with my scholarship some. But Joe Himes and I were on the committee, and we created the program, the African American Studies and Cultural Program that they have now, which is really terrific.

Lacey Wilson: Right. Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Two of my students in my last class, which was one of the worst 01:30:00classes I've ever had. One girl, she came like three times in the semester, you know, just weird stuff. And another quit and got ... I never had ... This was undergraduate and graduate. I had never given an F in any ... I had never given a C. In this class, there were two Fs and three or four Cs. But the two best students sat next to each other, and they were so good. And they both got As.

Lacey Wilson: Good.

Dr. Schweninger: They both came from the African American Studies program. So it was, you know. And by then, I wasn't doing as well. Anyway, my hearing wasn't as good. And I used to do, just a little outline I'd talk on. Now, I had to have the manuscript in front of me. I hate to admit how bad it was. But Joe Himes was 01:31:00this wonderful person. We worked together on that. And then we were friends. He came ... I don't know how ... I imagine he was the first African American to teach here, I would think. He actually had a chair-

Lacey Wilson: I think that might be true. Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. Anyway, and here he was, blind. He was ... And then he had an operation on his eyes. It was partially successful. And he came over here, and we had dinner, and so on. And he was looking at us, and he could see. And then it went away. Unbelievable.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, that's unfortunate.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. Anyway, so the social and academic events that stand out 01:32:00in my mind was my Research Excellence Award here in 2002, and then the book signing for Runaway Slaves, which there were hordes of people, you know, John Hope. It wasn't me, but I did a lot of the writing of Runaway Slaves.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: And then the digital advancement of the work, it went from photocopying to microfilming to our digital archives here, and now to ProQuest which has put every single petition online. And I'm still using them. I go over and check. And I just finished a manuscript, which will be my ninth book on the ... Appealing for Liberty. They changed the name somewhat. That's why I was slow.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And you know slaves could come to court with lawyers and argue in favor of freedom. So this is all about them. I had 2,000, most of them came from the project, but 2,000 freedom petitions, a little over 2,000. And it was really an exciting project. I sent the manuscript off to Oxford, and they accepted it and sent me a contract, which you never know, you know, whatever you've done in the past ... And I haven't heard from them since, but I signed the contract, so I'm sitting pretty comfortably. Hopefully there's not a problem there. I'm still using ... I'm now using ProQuest all the time to get on to the actual documents. Because you're writing and going along, and you need to look at a name again to make sure. It doesn't sound right, or it doesn't look right 01:34:00and so on.

Dr. Schweninger: And then another thing we did that I think, besides the librettists in Boston, that was really cool-

Lacey Wilson: You want to talk about that?

Dr. Schweninger: They bow ... Oh, it was ... It had big feature articles in the Boston Globe.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah. How does a project like that get started though?

Dr. Schweninger: T.J. Anderson had moved to Durham, was a good friend of the Franklins for years. And then when a Aurelia Franklin had dementia and was really ill, they along with John Hope would go and visit her in this nursing home. Dementia is so sad. She remembered John Hope close to the end, but she 01:35:00didn't remember much else. It was just really sad. And it actually started ... We came back from Italy, and we all went out to dinner. It was a family thing.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: We'd go down with all our kids, and John Hope would host the thing. At one supper, Jimmy, after he came back from Italy ... First of all, he picked up Italian in no time flat. I mean, we're talking about six weeks. And he went to school. He went to an Italian school. I came home one day, and the phone rang. You know how it goes [inaudible 00:01:35:42]?

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: He answered and said, "Pronto?" I went, "Jim!" He started talking to me in Italian. Unbelievable.

Dr. Schweninger: Before we left, they had a dinner for us at this downtown 01:36:00Geneva, in a ... a really wealthy family, and the patriarch of the family didn't speak English, and they had about eight people around this table, and we had a wonderful supper, had wine, and so on.

Dr. Schweninger: Jim sat on the other side of ... I can't remember the patriarch's name, I'm sorry. I was conversing with him, and Jim was interpreting. Can you believe?

Lacey Wilson: No.

Dr. Schweninger: Five months.

Lacey Wilson: That's insane.

Dr. Schweninger: It's so cool. When we were leaving, he spoke a little English. And there's different dialects of Italian.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. Regional, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Geneva, they think they're king, the main purity of the 01:37:00language is there. He said, "He speaks Italian correctly."

Lacey Wilson: Just six months.

Dr. Schweninger: Unbelievable. So, let's see, where was I there?

Lacey Wilson: Librettist? You were telling me how that project got started. With the composer?

Dr. Schweninger: Oh, I was talking about John Hope and Jim.

Lacey Wilson: Right.

Dr. Schweninger: Okay. Jim. John Hope loved Jim. Jim was the rebellious ... [inaudible 01:37:40] everything. So, okay. We're down there having dinner with ... He had a huge table. They still had the house, the son still ... John Franklin, John Winnington Franklin. Our son is named John Franklin Schweninger.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Dr. Schweninger: He was born in '70, in December, just before we left. John Hope 01:38:00was just so happy, so cool, you know.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, such an honor.

Dr. Schweninger: He says that again and again and again. We're out somewhere, "His son's named after me!" We did a lot of stuff together.

Lacey Wilson: Of course.

Dr. Schweninger: He was the reason we got the Lincoln Prize for sure, and we had all kinds of interviews. We were on Charlie Rose together. It was kind of a head-spinning time.

Dr. Schweninger: We're down having dinner, and John Hope, as he does, was pontificating, and the master of ceremony, and so on. Jim said ... They were talking about Africa. Jim says, have you been to Chad? He was 12 or 13. 12. 01:39:00Maybe he was younger. No, I think he was 8 or 9. This is before we went to Italy. Anyway, he was a young kid. Here's this little kid saying, have you been to Chad? John Hope was caught aback, and he hadn't been to Chad.

Dr. Schweninger: So there was an award banquet, an awards ceremony at Duke, for John Hope. We all went and I spoke, and I brought out this postcard from John Hope in Mali. He went to see the great kingdom of Mali, and Timbuktu and so on. It was a long trip and he was older and it was hard and it was dusty and so on. He wrote to Jim, and he said ... "I still haven't been to Chad." Can you believe it?

Lacey Wilson: No, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: That was 20 years later, 15, 18 years later.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: He was just such a wonderful man, and as I said at the end of the acknowledgements to appealing for liberty, John L. Franklin, the memory of John L. Franklin will ... continues to give strength and inspiration. He was basically a scholar, and a writer, and historian. He did stuff politically that was very important. He got the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: But he is ... When he was early in his career, he wrote these wonderful, long articles. I remember one about a free black in North Carolina 01:41:00who came across this manuscript box of. He wrote Free Negros in North Carolina, 1790-1860 was his dissertation, which was published really without revision.

Lacey Wilson: Wow. That's so impressive.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. Speaking of revision ... We're at a party after Runaway Slaves ... during the writing of Runaway Slaves, because all African Americans, and I was the only white. It was a middle class, upper class group. At the end, we had a nice dinner and talk, and at the end, he was sitting across the room, and there were probably 30 people around and so on, and the hostess said, "Have you and Loren collaborated on anything else?" There was a pause and he said, "Just his dissertation." Which is a written ... He did. He went through it with 01:42:00a fine-toothed comb. It was more than a collaboration.

Dr. Schweninger: So, John Hope was wonderful, and we still think of him now, him and his memory is great. Another thing I was going to mention was - we did a theater piece in 1997, began in 1994-96 with the Touring Theater Ensemble of North Carolina, and we used the petitions to ... episodes from those petitions in little vignettes, and we had about 12 of them. It lasted for ... The theater piece, the actors, which were really good ... They're all amateur, but they're really good. It lasted for about 50 minutes. At first, it went too far, and we 01:43:00cut some stuff. The same six were on it when ... We presented it 78 times in 30 North Carolina counties, and in New Hampshire, in New York, in Virginia several places, in Omaha, Nebraska, in Georgia. It was a powerful play, and went on from ... We premiered in '97, and went on 'til 2006.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: We had very little cast change, and the vignettes were powerful, about a divorce in Texas, where the woman gets up and says, "He's the largest slaveholder in Brazoria County, and here he's sleeping with one of his 01:44:00slaves, and then this other slave was just outrageous toward me and said ..." The dynamics of what went on was so great. That was a good experience.

Dr. Schweninger: Most of the time, I drove everybody around in North Carolina. My big mistake was when we went to Asheville one time, was putting the wrong ... I got off and it was a diesel, and I put diesel in the car. We were going along, chunk, chunk. I never lived that down. They went on and on about it.

Lacey Wilson: I'm sure they did.

Dr. Schweninger: The head of the touring ensemble is Brenda Schleunes, who ... 01:45:00Her husband's in the history department, or was.

Lacey Wilson: Last name is Schleunes?

Dr. Schweninger: S-C-H-L-E-U-N-E-S. S-C-H-L-E-U-N-E-S. Brenda Schleunes. And Karl Schleunes came when I came.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Dr. Schweninger: So we both came. He was in German history, and we went through the process together. He was associate when he came, but he was one of the ones who was put up with me to full professorship. So that was good.

Dr. Schweninger: I really liked Pat Sullivan, who ... She wrote me little notes saying, "I'm glad to see this article," or "your picture looked real good in the Chronicle of Higher Education." Just little things that really made me feel good. Franklin Gilliam, I only knew him ... I haven't met him. I only knew him 01:46:00from the two emails he sent out ... Or, he sent out a lot of emails, but from two, dealing with this election, today. Did you read it?

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, I did.

Dr. Schweninger: I just thought, that's wonderful.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: We've had good people at the top. That's for sure. I think we've had really good Deans. Walter Beale and Timothy Johnson both were supporting of this project, as was the library. The library digitized all this. Really, a lot of work, and it's a big collection for their library, I think.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, it is.

Dr. Schweninger: Those were the Deans that I really liked. Let me tell you about another administrator. One is Stephen Mosier.

Lacey Wilson: Stephen Mosier.

Dr. Schweninger: He was the Head of all the research at the university in the '80s, when I was applying for grants, and when I got my first grant ... I'd go through him, and made out the budgets and so on. Well, NHPRC, National Historic ... They did not pay overhead, so they're giving me all the money to use on the project. It's a research scholarship project, and you need all you can get.

Dr. Schweninger: For two years, they refunded ... The next year, third year, same thing. Then I was applying to the NEH at the same time. So I had a two year 01:48:00track record, and then more, and Mosier called me in. No, Mosier wrote a long letter to me, and said, "The university can't keep supporting you, your scholarship." I thought, this is just weakening. Here's my life, 540 days on the road, and bringing all this stuff together. That's what a scholarship ... That's what we're here for.

Dr. Schweninger: He said we're not going to support it anymore. So what am I going to do? Three weeks later, I got a letter from the NEH saying they had funded $112,000 to the project. That silenced Mosier. The Dean called together the Head of the department, Mosier, and me, to discuss this letter. Mosier never 01:49:00showed up. So, it's just ... He's looking at a different ballgame. Where's the money coming from, where's it going, how's the university supporting this, and what are you doing to help the university? The overhead was 29% of all these other grants that I got, but I thought, if he had gotten his way and I had not gotten the NEH, what I would have done ...

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: I didn't save it. I should've saved it. I think we've probably gone over pretty much ...

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Everything.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah. There were just a couple of things I wanted to go ... There were two ending questions I have to ask you, and then I wanted to ask ... You've 01:50:00mentioned protests very offhand when you got here. What was that about?

Dr. Schweninger: What was what, protests?

Lacey Wilson: Yes.

Dr. Schweninger: The big protests came in '69, and they marched on the Chancellor's office. I came in '71. It was just a residue of the few African Americans who were here. There weren't many, hardly at all. In fact, in my classes, even in African American history, very, very few. Johnson and Latisha Watkins was another African American student. She later became a docent at the Civil Rights Museum, as a matter of fact.

Lacey Wilson: Very cool.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. Other than the Neo-Black Society thing, there's nothing I ... One time, in the midst of it, I wrote John Hope and said I'm sad that I 01:51:00can't ... What can I do? He usually responded, and he just never responded. So I knew how he felt, and what can you say? There's something to that, that African Americans surely have ... with the right credentials, have a good chance to inspire young people, I would say, young African American people.

Dr. Schweninger: I was not involved in campus activities, other than being on all these committees, for the most part. The culture of the campus, I was pretty much ... said the way you get culture is in the library.

Lacey Wilson: Just focus on the scholarship.

Dr. Schweninger: Right.

Lacey Wilson: That makes sense.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. We'll just do the last two, and we'll be pretty much done, then. All right? Tell me how UNCG has affected your life, and what it means for you.

Dr. Schweninger: Well, it's been of fundamental importance, and I couldn't have done what I've done in any other place, and though there have been bumps in the road and so on, I really love the University. All life is a struggle, and there were struggles at the University as well. But there was such a history in the History department, and there were so many really good people in the History department. The scholarship was very strong, and when I came, I was just so glad 01:53:00to be here. Glad to have a job.

Lacey Wilson: Of course.

Dr. Schweninger: Even though the salary was pretty low. I think watching the campus develop was really enjoyable, and the physical layout is now so beautiful. I mean, it's just a gorgeous campus.

Lacey Wilson: It really is.

Dr. Schweninger: I know Ralph, who takes care of all the grass and for half of the University where the athletics are ... And we talk, and he has done a wonderful job. That's just ... The north field in soccer, oh, it's beautiful.

Lacey Wilson: It really is.

Dr. Schweninger: All of that. There's an emotional attachment. The Chancellors 01:54:00were close. I was really close to Bill, and Pat Sullivan, she just ... Shame. She dies and her husband die in a short period. It's just really tough. But she was ... When she came, they passed around a vita for us, and I thought, there's no way she's going to do well here. Small college. She was over in Winston-Salem, and at Salem College, and she turned out to be terrific. So I kept my view to myself anyway. I usually did.

Lacey Wilson: Sure.

Dr. Schweninger: But she was terrific. I think Brady really created an atmosphere that was toxic, just sad. But I was just in part. Another thing I 01:55:00should say is that I was on the Board of Governors for the University of North Carolina Press for 10 years. I was also on the board that advised the governor on research manuscripts in Raleigh for 10 years, and anyway, I served on more committees than I'd like to think. Maybe the one in Raleigh was for 15 years. Anyway, now it's statute. They passed a law so that the governor will have advice from scholars, so we'd meet at the State Archives. Very good state archives here. Have you been to it?

Lacey Wilson: Not yet, but I'm sure it's going to come up and I'll need to soon.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, yeah. They do a really good job.

Lacey Wilson: That's good.

Dr. Schweninger: Jeffrey Crow was the Director, and he was a historian, terrific. But the University ... I can't say enough about it. My life basically has been UNCG and family, so ... I can't say enough about the family either. Pat, how she did what she did is beyond me. Four kids, taking them all over.

Lacey Wilson: Right, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: I tried to be a good father, but I wasn't even close. They're all really good folks.

Lacey Wilson: That's good, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Do you have brothers and sisters?

Lacey Wilson: I have a little brother, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: How old is he?

Lacey Wilson: Currently 23.

Dr. Schweninger: Ah!

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, he just graduated from college earlier in this spring in journalism.

Dr. Schweninger: Oh, good. Where did he go to school?

Lacey Wilson: Morgan State in Baltimore.

Dr. Schweninger: Very good school.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, yeah. He's really enjoyed it.

Dr. Schweninger: One of my students, Doug Bristol, went to the University of Maryland, got his doctorate under Ira Berlin. He's now ... He worked on the project too, Doug Bristol.

Lacey Wilson: Doug Bristol.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. Now he's an Associate Professor of History at Southern Mississippi State University. I think he taught at Morgan State. Is there another school just around ... Townsend?

Lacey Wilson: Towson.

Dr. Schweninger: Towson.

Lacey Wilson: Towson, yeah. It's just maybe 20-30 minutes away from Morgan.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, he taught at Towson, which is mainly black, right?

Lacey Wilson: They're pretty close. It's not an HBCU, but it is not ... It is predominantly white, but it's pretty diverse. I didn't go there, but I've been told. My brother hung out there a ton.

Dr. Schweninger: Well, that's where Doug taught as he was working on his 01:58:00doctorate, and then when he finished, and then he got this job. He is a ... He was gay, he is gay, excuse me. When he was here, he was gay, but nobody knew it. One of the searches for our History department in '82 was for a new historian in recent American history. A scholar named John D'Emilio applied for the job, and he had written ... He was gay openly, and he had written about ... A really good University of Chicago Press book. He became a candidate, and Alan Trelease was ... I'm not sure if he was Chair of the committee or if he was on ... If Ann Saab was the Chair, and he was ... Or if he was the head, and Ann Saab was on 01:59:00the committee.

Dr. Schweninger: But when Ann Saab, Trelease, and one other person went to the convention, and we had spent two months going over vitas ... I had written out notes on all of the top 10 candidates, and my top choice was John D'Emilio. As it happened, my wife's good friend from college was John D'Emilio's partner.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, what a coincidence.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, incredible. So I knew about John, and Jim Olsen was his ... They come back from Washington, and they had as a top candidate, nobody that was on the top 10 list. And the other person was Arthur, was ... Bill Link.

Lacey Wilson: The three committee?

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, the three.

Lacey Wilson: Bill Link, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: And Bill Link was the head of the department later. Bill Link's father was Arthur Link, who was at Princeton, and who met them at the convention, and said he had a really good candidate. So they put him first.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: So when we started the process, once they had returned and gave a report to the department, the department voted 17-1 against John D'Emilio.

Lacey Wilson: Oh.

Dr. Schweninger: But then John D'Emilio came to campus, and gave a talk, and he was so good. At the end ... I was angry, because I'd done all this work, and they're popping in-

Lacey Wilson: Other people, yeah.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. What is going on? If you're going to have ... When I was hired, they didn't have committees. You're just hired. Bardolph, late in his life, told his son that I was his best hire. And he hired a lot of people, so it was really a tribute. I liked him a lot, so anyway ...

Dr. Schweninger: We went through the process, and in the end, it was 17 to the 1 in favor of John.

Lacey Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: The American Historical Association has a prize, the John D'Emilio Prize. He is so well known and such a terrific ... He wrote a wonderful history ... Now my mind is going ... of an African American who was a Civil 02:02:00Rights protester who was jailed in Kentucky, and he was an advisor to Martin Luther King, kind of a silent adviser. I don't ... have a terrible ... But he was gay.

Lacey Wilson: I think I know who you're talking about, but I don't remember his name either.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. He was gay. Anyway, John wrote a biography of him, which was among the last three in the National Book Award. He went to New York and he didn't get the award, but he was runner up to the National Book Award. So that, I'm proud of that, and everybody loved John by the time he was through. He thanked me for his entry into academe publicly in an essay he wrote about his 02:03:00life recently.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, okay.

Dr. Schweninger: I thought that was so cool.

Lacey Wilson: What a nice honor.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, UNCG has been very important, to say the least. We're close by.

Lacey Wilson: All right. Last one. We're coming up on the 125th anniversary, which is an excellent opportunity for reflection, but also helps to think about where we're headed in the future. What is the future for UNCG? Where do you see UNCG going as an institution in the next 25-50 years?

Dr. Schweninger: That's a hard question for a historian.

Lacey Wilson: Isn't it? So many options.

Dr. Schweninger: I think it's ... The soul of it has not changed, and the academic part of it, being as important as it is, has not changed. So if they 02:04:00can stick to that, the rest ... Athletics, even though I participated in college athletics and so on, you heard where the head coach for Alabama, they asked him what he thought of the election. Did you hear that?

Lacey Wilson: I did not hear that.

Dr. Schweninger: He said, I didn't know there was an election. How are you ... Student athletes are ... Three fourths of his team is black, and I didn't know there was an election? Or he knew there was an election. He didn't know it was that day.

Lacey Wilson: That day? Wow.

Dr. Schweninger: It seems incredible.

Lacey Wilson: It does.

Dr. Schweninger: That a head coach could be that involved with something else than ... So Mike and Mike this morning had a long discussion of that. I don't know if you know Mike and Mike, but they're a sports channel.

Lacey Wilson: Okay.

Dr. Schweninger: Historians are really weak when it comes to predicting the future, let me tell you. They have trouble with the past, and I don't see a wrong track at all. I think Gilliam's just doing a wonderful job. That was an emotional and powerful statement. Didn't you think?

Lacey Wilson: Yeah, I did.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah. He's terrific. African American Studies is expanded and is just a really good program. I think it should be integrated too, and it is, in many respects. Who doesn't teach slavery, who doesn't ... Anyway. The public 02:06:00history has just exploded, and it is top notch, and it is very competitive.

Lacey Wilson: It is.

Dr. Schweninger: That all I can say about that, it's very good. The Head of it, I saw in the library the other day. Who's the Head of the ...

Lacey Wilson: Benjamin Filene.

Dr. Schweninger: Yeah, yeah. Saw him. I saw the head of the department when I go over to the library. He said Jamie Anderson said I've had two calls in the last week about the race and slavery petitions project. What? I don't know. I didn't ask, I just said, well, the library's doing a great job disseminating the project. It'll be around for a while.