“I don’t remember my daddy, he was killed in the coal mines. And my mother, she remarried when I was ten or eleven.”“She worked for a while in a dress factory, but she was everybody’s maid whenever they wanted to do something in the family. They’d…

“His mother and father passed away by the time he was eleven years old. So, he was raised by his grandfather. He had two brothers. He was the oldest of the three. Grew up during the Great Depression down in the rural south, and they were farmers. He…

"Well [my father, Manfred Heinemann] was born in 1922, and he lived in a town called Treuchtlingen, which was in Bavaria. And they lived a very comfortable life. My grandfather sold baking supplies. And eventually [my father's] brother was born in…

“Memphis is preparing to spend several million dollars in development of Mud Island for aviation purposes and the plan is to make it one of the most modern and finest fields in the entire country. Birmingham, Savannah, Augusta, New Orleans,…

"But now as far as the attitude, I went into the Army at age 20. And I -- I guess I have been familiar with the number of forms of discrimination that blacks were subjected to. I've lived all of my life in the south. I was born in Johnson City,…

"They met by accident. Kurt and Alexander, my grandfather, were walking out of their store at lunchtime, and they saw a woman trapped between two electric cars, or electric streetcars, down the road from where they were working, and she was…

"I was born in Prichard, Alabama, February 8th, 1922. I had one brother and two sisters. I lived with them for about 3 or 4—maybe 8 years, and then it was decided that…I should live with my grandparents. You must remember, in the early days,…

Editor's note: Louvinia Jordan was born in the house that her father, Cornelius Vanderbilt Kern, built with his brothers. "My father and his brother built. They cut the timber off of the farm, and dressed it, and built the old house. And…

"I was born on December 20, 1922 in the city of Krakow, Poland. My house was a house of [an] observant family. My father was a kosher butcher. The laws of the Bible were observed strictly... I always wore a head covering. I attended the Jewish…