While we were down there, I was going out with a girl in the town and she was white, a younger girl. She was in high school. Because the girl was white she literally lived across the tracks. And so I had been over to her house. It was like midnight and I was coming back, down this road toward an intersection, kind of parallel to the railroad tracks. As I came up to the intersection a cop car came up from the opposite way to the intersection and they were going to turn left, into the white section, into the downtown area. And I went to their right, which meant I was going deeper into the black section. They went ZOOP and pulled up alongside of me and asked what I was doing. It’s midnight and these two cops are standing there asking me these questions and I’m trying to explain this pretty unusual program, “Well, you know, I’m here with a bunch of guys and we’re going to a college up north and we’re coming down here to live in different parts of the country.” And they’re going, “Why is this exactly?” So after they had gotten what apparently were unsatisfactory answers they said, “Why don’t we just head downtown…” So I said, “OK.” I hadn’t done anything and I didn’t have a problem with that.

So I got in the patrol car and they took me to the police station a few blocks away and the sergeant at the desk was asking me the same kind of questions and I’m trying to explain it all over again and finally he gets around to saying what was really bugging him. He said, “Well, you know, basically we don’t like folks coming down here and living with nigger families.” And I said, “He’s not a nigger.” And he said, “He’s a nigger.” And I said, “He’s not a nigger.” And he said, “He’s a nigger.” And I said — and this was my mistake–I said, “Don’t give me that s—.” And the cop next to me whirled me around and slammed me up against the wall and I spent the night in jail.

They looked through my wallet and they did all that stuff and this was my rebellious phase but somewhat stupid phase. I had a draft card that I had torn in half. I kept it. They said, “We found this draft card torn in half.” But then they just said, “You can spend the night here” and they put me in a holding cell. It was a circuit court and the judge came around — I don’t remember how often, once a week I think — and it was like a Tuesday and the judge didn’t come until Thursday. So it’s a little cell maybe 8-by-8 with four bunks. There were two other guys in there, two other white guys in there, this little holding cell, you know, the open toilet and the sink and you did what you did. So I got in there with those guys and I didn’t sleep real well that night. I guess the next morning…

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…It was Randy and me. Randy [Thomas] and I were the two in town. Perry McNeal contacted Gaudino who I think was in the area somehow and came to the jail.

Jeff Thaler '74

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They had charged me with loitering. Some nice person in the jail made a copy of it and for a long time I had a copy of the ticket. I was charged with loitering. They let it go. Mr. Gaudino was commenting on how I had misread things about my host dad. I had sort of played it down. I sort of said, “Well, yeah, I was mouthing off or something.” I don’t remember how I explained it to Mr. Adams, Mr. Adams was my host father. But I didn’t tell him that this guy had called him a nigger because I didn’t want to upset him or something like that.

I remember distinctly being in my bedroom back in the Adams house and Mr. Adams came in and he said, “What did that guy say to you?” He must have heard it from either Rev. McNeal or somebody [that] I said that he called him a nigger and he was furious. Mr. Gaudino, when talking about it with him later, he was saying we misread this. This was an important thing. Mr. Adams had worked all his life so people could not call him a nigger and get away with it and we were wrong. I was wrong to not have said anything about it. He was kind of one of the wealthiest black men in town. He owned the pawn shop. That’s where I spent a lot of time hanging out in the pawn shop with the guys. But he also owned property and it was mostly rented out to black people. One of the other things I did was I worked on some of the houses that he rented and sheetrock or painted them or whatever. So he was relatively well-to-do. He lived in a very nice house. He had five kids and a couple of them were doctors. All his kids were well educated, very successful and living elsewhere. He had really made something of himself and he worked hard to get it and that “Mr. President” stuff in the NAACP meeting was not a small thing. I hadn’t understood that. A lot of what we talked about was Mr. Adams and what made me think that it was going to be OK for me to say “Don’t give me that s—” to some cop?