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Audio clip from interview with Jean S. Childs, December 2, 2013

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Audio file
Download ohr000870.mp3 (audio/mpeg; 3.02 MB)

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Date

2013-12-02

Description

Part of an interview with Jean S. Childs, December 2, 2013. In this clip, Jean Childs describes an experience she had helping someone at the Concentrated Employment Program.

Digital ID

ohr000870_clip
    Details

    Citation

    Jean Childs, 2013 December 02. OH-00182. [Audio recording] Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada.\n

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    This material is made available to facilitate private study, scholarship, or research. It may be protected by copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity rights, or other interests not owned by UNLV. Users are responsible for determining whether permissions are necessary from rights owners for any intended use and for obtaining all required permissions. Acknowledgement of the UNLV University Libraries is requested. For more information, please see the UNLV Special Collections policies on reproduction and use (https://www.library.unlv.edu/speccol/research_and_services/reproductions) or contact us at special.collections@unlv.edu.

    Standardized Rights Statement

    Digital Provenance

    Original archival records created digitally

    Language

    English

    Publisher

    University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Libraries

    Format

    audio/mpeg

    I start talking and they say how old are you, Jean? But anyway, so that's where the name KCEP comes from. So the Concentrated Employment Program was the first Manpower. Now, it's been called a lot of things since then—CETA or whatever it is—but it's still the same thing. They started dealer schools, teaching black people how to deal, bartend, all these things that they had not been allowed to do. Some of the first dealers on the Strip came out of those dealer schools. We had adult education schools. I worked with the adult education school under Verla. That was one of the supporter services. So we were getting people GEDs and what have you. We also got people if they were eligible for welfare, if they needed other services, whatever, so that they could be ready for jobs, training, whatever. I'm going to tell you a story. This is a true story. This is one of the most fascinating things that ever happened to me and I was a very young woman; that's why I knew I could do all this stuff because if I could do this. I don't know if you know it, but a lot of people from here, black people from here came from Tallulah, Louisiana. And Fordyce, Arkansas. Right. Well, I didn't know that. I came from California. And this young woman wanted to do nurse's training. She was a single mother already and I was working under Verla doing these social services and the Manpower; that's where I was before I did Head Start. She came in. And she ended up crying, which I'm like all of 24 years old, so that just really rocked my boat. That's when your brain goes, should you even be doing this? So I guess one of the high schools near or in Tallulah—McCall High School—had burned down and there weren't records of a lot of the graduates. So she said, but I graduated. So I'm sitting there and she's crying and I'm sitting there and I finally said you've got to stop crying because I can't. And I said, I'm thinking now—Tallulah, Louisiana. Okay, now, people have described to me that Tallulah was as big as a second and most people lived in farms around Tallulah. So I got this picture. And I said do you know who the principal was of your school? She said yes. So we sat there and we called Tallulah. We found the principal. When I got him on the phone, I said, can you vouch for some of my people coming in that graduated from high school? He said, well, let me talk to the school district and let me see if they'll let me do it. He called back within a couple of days and they let him. So that was one of those things. Once I did that I said you know... So the rest of my life in Head Start was about—you can't do everything, but you sure should not be short of trying or asking.