Clifford Crenshaw
(39:41) Clifford Crenshaw describes his life and his career as one of the first African-American police officers in Florence, Alabama. Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive Interview with Clifford Crenshaw January 6, 2013 Florence, Alabama Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood C...
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Florence-Lauderdale County Public Library
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Electronic |
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Oral Histories Collection |
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Florence-Lauderdale County Public Library |
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Florence-Lauderdale County Public Library |
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Oral histories -- audios and transcripts |
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Oral histories -- audios and transcripts Clifford Crenshaw Florence-Lauderdale Public Library |
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Oral histories -- audios and transcripts Police ; Law enforcement officers ; Race relations |
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(39:41) Clifford Crenshaw describes his life and his career as one of the first African-American police officers in Florence, Alabama. Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Clifford Crenshaw
January 6, 2013
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 1 of 1
Clint Alley: Well, today is January 6, 2013, and I am Clint Alley and with Rhonda Haygood at the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library with Mr. Clifford Crenshaw. Mr. Crenshaw was a police officer for the Florence Police Department for many years and he’s going to tell us about that today. Mr. Crenshaw we just, we start off by asking all of our interview subjects, when and where were you born?
Clifford Crenshaw: I was born here in Florence, Alabama.
CA: Okay. So, you went to school here –
CC: I did.
CA: – and grew up here.
CC: I did.
CA: What school did you go to?
CC: I went to – at that time back in the fifties, when I started in school, elementary school was called W. C. Handy. W. C. Handy –
CA: Okay.
CC: – Elementary School. I lived about two or three stone throws from there so I got a chance to walk to school and back every day. But that was the name of the elementary school I went to.
CA: Okay. Was that, is that close to where his cabin is down there?
CC: No, this is out on the west side of Florence, out where the stadium is. The football stadium.
CA: Okay, okay. So it was named after him, but it’s –
CC: By the recreation center. Um-hm.
CA: Okay. What year did you graduate high school?
CC: I graduated high school, wow, 1962.
CA: 1962. Okay.
CC: Um-hm.
CA: And you were telling us you went to the military.
CC: I did.
CA: Is that right out of high school that you did that?
CC: No, not quite. I kind of scuffed around a little bit before I went to high school – went in the military. I guess, let’s see, I went in the military in ’65, so that was like three years.
CA: Okay. Now, were you drafted or did you volunteer?
CC: I volunteered.
CA: Okay.
CC: I was sitting at home one day and the recruiter came by the house, the Air Force recruiter and he said did I pass the examination my senior year in high school. I’d forgot, I didn’t even know what the examination was about and I had forgotten about it. So, I said, “Give me about two weeks then I’ll see you.” He said, “No, you need to go in now and get your basic training out of the way.” Next thing I know, I was in formation marches –
CA: Oh, man.
CC: – in the military.
CA: So you went to the Air Force, then?
CC: Um-hm.
[2:00]
CA: Okay. Did you have basic training I guess in the –
CC: I, I did.
CA: Okay, and, was it in, ah –
CC: It was in San Antonio, Texas.
CA: San Antonio. Okay.
CC: Lackland Air Force Base.
CA: Well, where did you go from there?
CC: Ha. Nowhere. After basic everybody got orders to go to Florida, California, all the good bases. I got orders to go across the street to Air Police School.
CA: Okay. So you, ah, you, that was your specialty in the military then, was police work.
CC: Exactly. I’ve been in law enforcement all of my life.
CA: Okay. That’s good. What, what all did that entail, being an air policeman?
CC: It was, it was called air policeman back then, now it’s called security policeman. It entailed the same basic training that you go through here, and you know, in your regular local government and state government. Mostly training in classroom training, weapons training, conditioning.
CA: Yeah. Well, did you, I guess you enjoyed that kind of work then.
CC: I had, I had no other choice. I wanted to be a medic.
CA: Okay.
CC: I worked at the hospital – that’s what I did before I went in the military.
CA: Okay.
CC: I worked at the hospital before I went in the military as an orderly. And I got kind of interested in mus-, in music, in medicine and I wanted to be a medic in the military, but ended up being a cop.
CA: Okay. Okay. So and let’s see, how long did you do that?
CC: Oh, about three and a half years.
CA: Okay.
CC: I went overseas, I did a year and a half in the states – they sent me – my first duty assignment was Grand Forks, North Dakota. And I stayed there about eighteen months and, and we volunteered for Vietnam. And the closest we got to Vietnam was Japan. I went to Japan and stayed two years and by staying two years you get an early out; which is six months early out. So I took the early out and went home.
[4:03]
CA: Then when you came home, you, I guess you came back to Florence after that.
CC: I did.
CA: Okay. Did you, did somebody ask you to come and join the Florence Police Department or did you apply, or how did that work?
CC: Actually, I was working at TVA. I had went to work, they were building a, TVA in Athens, and they were building it and I was helping build that nuclear plant in Athens for TVA. I was working construction. And when I got the call to be a police officer, ah, go back a little bit. I got my old job back at the hospital – I shouldn’t tell this, but I’m telling you – and I got fired.
Rhonda Haygood: Uh-oh.
CC: And the reason I got fired, for speaking up to a nurse.
CA: Uh-oh.
CC: The transition from military to civilian was kind of hard. So a nurse said some ill words to me and I said some ill words back to her and they fired me. And I had applied for the police department and Noah Danley heard about it. And they said, “You don’t want him,” say, “he, he said some ill words to a nurse.” He said, “That’s the kind I want.” So, I got, I got the police job.
CA: That worked out pretty good then.
CC: Yeah. It did. Praise God.
CA: Okay. So you, let’s see, that was 1969, you say, when you started police work?
CC: Um-hm.
CA: Okay.
CC: April of ’69.
CA: How many African-Americans were on the force when you started?
CC: When I started?
CA: Yes, sir.
CC: Southward, Coleman and Smith. Four. There were four African-Americans on the police force when I started.
CA: Four total?
CC: Um-hm.
CA: Okay. Well, did they –
CC: Hold up, hold up. Southward had quit. He had gone to Reynolds, so there were three.
CA: Okay.
CC: Yeah, ‘cause I never worked with him.
CA: Okay. Well, we were, we’ve been doing some research about that, just kind of reading through it and we – was it ’63 when they fir-, hired the first African-Americans?
[6:04]
CC: You got it.
CA: Okay, ’63. Ah, well, did you have any, like, trouble with the white officers joining the force, or did they, – was there any bad blood or anything?
CC: No, it was just, you know, the condition was still segregation –
CA: Um-hm.
CC: – and we worked, Coleman and I, Officer Coleman and I worked in, in separate cars. I mean we worked together, but we, not, weren’t allowed to work with white officers during that time. Eventually, they asked white officers if they had a problem with working with us and the ones that didn’t have a problem with working with us came and worked with us. They had a choice. They gave them a choice. And if they didn’t have a problem, if everything was okay with them working with us, they came and worked with us. Two, two or three of my training officers were white. Coleman, William Coleman, he’s an African-American; he was my first training officer. Hollis Briggs was my next training officer. Virgil Wilson was my next training officer. Those two are white. And I’ll never forget them, you know, they were excellent training officers.
CA: Hm. So they kind of, I guess they kind of slowly worked integration into the
police –
CC: They did.
CA: – department then. Okay.
CC: They did.
CA: Well, did you have to work predominately with other African-American, like civilians, like if they had a call from a, a –
CC: Oh, yeah, we worked in the bl-, in the predominately black neighborhood.
CA: Okay. Okay.
CC: Yeah, we worked there and then eventually I worked, started working the east side of town, which was pretty rough at that time.
CA: Yeah.
CC: Especially for an African-American officer.
CA: Yeah.
CC: But, believe it or not, I retired there.
CA: Oh, okay.
CC: I worked there five years before I retired.
CA: Huh.
CC: But it was quite different back in ’69, you know, when I started.
CA: Yeah. Well, do you have any, any kind of, any big stories you remember? Anything unusual that happened to you when you first started?
CC: Where you want me to start?
RH: Oh, dear.
CA: Just wherever you want to jump in!
CC: Keep talking and it’ll come to me –
CA: Okay.
CC: – if you’re asking questions.
[8:02]
CA: Ah, goodness. Ah, let’s see. 1969. Well, Florence I guess was a, it was, quite, probably quite a bit smaller back then.
CC: Oh, yeah.
CA: Yeah.
CC: A lot smaller.
CA: I guess so, yeah.
CC: Let me tell you this. The police department was so small that when we changed shifts, the evening shift put the day shift in the cars and took them home. Nobody had to drive to work.
RH: Oh, dear.
CA: That’s pretty handy.
CC: Yeah. And it was routine.
CA: Yeah.
CC: We did that all the time until you know, the department became larger.
CA: Um-hm.
CC: But, but it was, it was a, it was a traditional thing.
CA: Wow.
CC: You know, everybody knew that when you come to – when you get off, you get in the car with the evening shift and they take you home. That’s how small it was.
CA: Um.
RH: What kind of shifts did you work?
CC: I worked, I think I worked day shift a little, nah, I worked evening shift, yeah, that’s what it was. I started out working evening shift, three till eleven. And I worked that mainly. Sure did. When I first started. Yeah, we worked the evening shift. Coleman, Officer Coleman, Officer Humes and myself, worked the evening shift. And Officer Smith.
CA: Okay. I bet you saw a lot in the evenings that didn’t happen in the daytime.
CC: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
CA: Well now, was there a problem in Florence with any kind of drugs or anything at that time? You know, you hear so much from the sixties.
CC: Drugs hadn’t peaked as much at that time. It was usually alcohol. It was mostly alcohol back then, in 1969.
CA: Yeah.
CC: It might, we didn’t, no, we didn’t have too much problem with drugs then. It was alcohol mainly. You know, everybody drank. Of course, Florence was dry at that time.
CA: Yeah.
CC: You know, before Florence went wet.
CA: Okay.
CC: And wasn’t too much of a problem with drugs. We didn’t even have a drug task force, you know, like we’ve got now.
CA: Um. Yeah.
CC: So it wasn’t that big, you know.
CA: Yeah. Yeah. Where, where did people get their alcohol, if Florence was –
[9:58]
CC: Good question. Good question. Florence was dry, if you didn’t go next door to the bootlegger’s house, you went to Tennessee to the State Line –
CA: Okay.
CC: – and got your alcohol and brought it back.
CA: Was bootlegging a big problem?
CC: Bootlegging was not a big problem, it was a big thing.
CA: Okay.
CC: It was a big thing.
CA: Yeah. Yeah.
CC: Ah, bootlegging, I don’t know how profitable bootlegging was at that time, but you could go to any house, you know, and buy it, and get it. And every now and then we did go on raids, alcohol raids, which sounds, sounds funny now. But we did, you know.
CA: Yeah.
CC: We’d knock on the door, sometimes they’d see us at the door and they’d go pour it out. Sometimes they wouldn’t have the chance to go pour it out and we made arrests for selling alcohol, for bootlegging. Also, we had them in the cars. Officer Coleman, now he’ll have a chance to tell you about this himself, but they called him eagle eye because he saw a car and he knew it, he recognized the car immediately as a, as a person hauling liquor in the car. And they used to come down from Tennessee and everywhere, you know big time bootleggers. And at one time they begged him to stay off them; he, he was so hard on them.
CA: That’s amazing. Could he tell by like how, how low it was or something, or just-?
CC: I don’t know how he could tell. He would tell me, he would say –
CA: He just had the gift, I guess.
CC: – “That car there, they got alcohol in it,” you know. And boom, they would have him.
CA: That is amazing.
CC: He also could tell about weapons, too, if somebody had a weapon on them.
CA: Really?
CC: And you asked me to tell an amazing story. We picked up this guy one night at Locust and Mobile, no, we picked him up on Mobile. When we got to Locust and Mobile – the window was down, we put him in the back seat and the window was down and we heard a clunk and Coleman went like this, and I said, “What is it? What is it?” And he got out and went and picked up the gun that the guy threw out.
[11:59]
CA: Wow. Oh, my goodness. And he just knew.
CC: Yeah. He, he heard it when it hit the ground.
CA: That’s amazing.
CC: See, but I was a rookie, you know I wasn’t, I wasn’t experienced in things like that. I wasn’t trained in things like that, you know.
CA: Wow. Gollee.
CC: But he did. He did. The essence of that story is that we could have both been dead. You know?
CA: Yeah.
CC: Could have shot both of us in the back of the head.
CA: That was a dangerous work y’all did.
CC: It was. It really was.
CA: Yeah. Well, so you were in a, in a car, I guess and not on a motorcycle or a –
CC: No, I never did motorcycle.
CA: Okay.
CC: Never did. Always a car.
CA: Yeah, I saw your, let’s see, this picture of your car here, this is, that’s, that’s a solid vehicle there.
CC: That’s a – yeah, that’s a Dodge. I think it’s a ‘70, ‘70-something Dodge.
CA: Okay.
CC: No, ‘80 Dodge, I think of it.
CA: Well, ah, now Florence – we’ve heard, we’ve interviewed several people from the time and they said there was never really any, a lot of racially charged violence or anything in the Civil Rights Movement. I, did you ever see any of that, any kind of – as a police officer?
CC: [Mr. Crenshaw shakes his head to indicate “No.”]
CA: Okay.
CC: I never seen any racial violence as a kid. I grew up here.
CA: Really?
CC: I’ve had some experiences, you know. But, I’ve never seen any just white on black, you know, violence. I’ve never seen any of that here.
CA: Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s the general idea that we –
CC: Yeah.
CA: – get from just about everybody we’ve talked to.
CC: Yeah. I think we were blessed in that area. And then there’s really not a lot of blacks in Florence, you know.
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
CC: The percentage of blacks in the population is real low and it was real low then.
CA: Yeah.
CC: But, no, I’ve never seen, we never seen – we never had to go to a racially violence call.
CA: Yeah.
CC: You know, white against black. We never had to do that.
CA: Yeah.
CC: In all my whole career. In all my thirty years.
CA: Oh, wow.
CC: I never had that.
CA: That’s good.
CC: We had some school incidents, you know, that may have led up to that. But just publicly, no.
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
RH: What would you say was the hardest part of your job?
[14:02]
CC: The hardest part?
RH: Um-hm.
CC: Or the most difficult incident that I had?
RH: Ah, what part of your job did you dislike the most –
CC: Did I dislike?
RH: – I guess is –.
CC: I disliked going to a real critical, a bad accident, traffic accident. And I did see a few of them. I disliked some domestic calls that we had to go to where the wife was battered and so forth. I disliked abandoned children. Seeing abandoned children. I had to go rescue a baby that was left in an abandoned house one night. In the wintertime.
RH: Hm.
CC: And we found that baby up under the floor in the house and when I say baby, I’m talking maybe three months old, maybe.
RH: Oh, my goodness.
CC: And if I told you the rest of the story you’d start crying, so I’m not going to tell you.
RH: Okay.
CC: But anyway that was the, that was one of the things I hated most.
CA: Hm.
RH: Well, which shift was the most active?
CC: I think, I think three to eleven was. Now, sometimes they say it was busy on midnight shift, probably on the weekend. But, I think, I think three to eleven, our shift would, it would get going, sometimes it would get going. Sometimes we run all night.
CA: When you first started was there any pay discrepancy? Did the white officers get paid more than the black officers or anything like that?
CC: They just made a rank faster than we did. So, yeah, they got paid more.
CA: A little bit, yeah.
CC: Our chances of making a rank were very bleak. Ah, this was in ’95 and this is a grade called E-9. It’s one step below a sergeant and that’s what I finished as. I finished as that. After thirty years.
CA: Okay. That’s the –
[15:57]
CC: I worked investigation while I was there, twice. I worked there as a training program back in the late ‘70s. Then I worked it, ah, in the late ’80s, yeah, late ‘80s. But, you know, I had my fair share of it. I won’t say that I was mistreated, you know, or anything. It’s just a condition, you know, and the change. You have to go with the change, you know.
CA: I’m looking at this picture of you when you were a young man, here. Did y’all, y’all didn’t wear bullet-proof vests back then I guess, —
CC: No.
CA: — did you?
CC: No. There was no such thing, no such thing as bullet-proof vests back then.
CA: So, you saw, you saw quite a few changes just in the, in the, the career during—
CC: Oh, yeah.
CA: — your tenure then.
CC: Yeah.
RH: Did you have to go through a police academy training program?
CC: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I went to a police academy in 1980 and when I— I missed something, ah, there’s a break in my career. In 1978, I left the police department and went to TVA, Yellow Creek Project. You, you ever heard of that?
RH: Um-hm.
CC: In Mississippi. I stayed there for about eighteen months and when I came back they sent me to the academy.
CA: Okay.
CC: In 19-, I graduated from the academy in 1980. See, see by that time everybody had to be certified with, I think it’s two hundred and eighty hours of, ah, of law enforcement training. So, yeah I went, went to a police academy. When I came back from Yellow Creek, it had just started. That program had just started. In other words, it was a mandated program. Everybody had to be certified.
CA: Hm. Okay.
CC: And when you look at this picture here there was no such thing as police academy.
CA: Yeah. In this early picture here.
CC: Unh-uh.
CA: Yeah. Well, you had your, let see, I, what kind of pistol there were you—?
CC: That’s a ’38.
CA: It’s a ’38?
CC: I’ve still got it. It was chrome plated and western grips on it.
CA: I was about to say, it looks like a wood handle on it there.
CC: I still have it. Yeah.
CA: That’s nice.
CC: I’ve still got it.
CA: Let’s see, now I guess they use, they use Glocks now?
[18:00]
CC: Yeah, something like Glocks. We’d carry Beretta, Smith & Wesson.
CA: Um-hm. Probably now—
CC: What I use now on my job is a Sig Sauer, called a Sig Sauer. It’s a little short 9mm like that. [Mr. Crenshaw indicated the size of the 9 mm.]
CA: Okay. Yeah.
CC: Ah, yeah, but everybody’s gone, everybody’s gone to a 9mm, some 40 caliber.
CA: Yeah. Why, why did they do that? I’ve always wondered that. They went from –
CC: Well, the streets got bigger and badder and law enforcement had to, too.
CA: Yeah.
CC: You ever heard about the shooting they had in Los Angeles when the criminal’s weapons outweighed the police officers and they had to go in the gun store –
CA: Yeah, I saw that. Yeah.
CC: –and the guy in the gun store gave them, gave them some fire power?
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
CC: That’s, that’s why.
CA: So they had to—, yeah that makes sense. Yeah.
CC: Yeah. Yeah.
CA: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like every, just about every city department around here that I know of has a 9mm –
CC: Yeah.
CA: – issue. I, I’m from –
CC: It’s, it’s basic now.
CA: –yeah, I’m from Lawrenceburg and I think that’s, that’s what they use up there, too.
CC: Yeah, I remember when we changed to a 9mm. Of course you had to qualify, you had to re-qualify with that and it was, it was kind of awkward, but you get used to it, you know.
CA: Um. Yeah. I guess this was a revolver here that you started out with.
CC: Yeah, that was a revolver.
CA: Now, which one did you like better?
CC: I liked the 9mm better.
CA: Do you?
CC: Yeah. Revolver’s kind of slow. When you give out, you’ve got to open your cylinder and take out a loaded thing and put it into your revolver and all.
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
CC: Where with your, with your 9mm you’ve got about fourteen rounds that you can fire before you have to reload.
CA: Okay. Yeah.
CC: And when you reload all you do is drop your clip, slap another one in there and you’re ready to go.
CA: Put another one in there, yeah. That’s, that few seconds makes a big difference.
CC: Exactly.
CA: Yeah.
RH: Have you noticed any change over the years that you were at the police department in the way that people reacted to the police officers?
CC: I have. I have. You talking about now compared to then when I was a police officer?
RH: Um-hm.
[19:55]
CC: I have and I notice it every day, you know. It’s kind of an upbeat thing now. You know, we used, I used to stop at a stop sign and work it and when I call work it, it means stop there and wait and see if somebody’s going to run it. You don’t see that too much anymore, now. You don’t see it too much. And I guess that’s the reason why people, you know, don’t stop. They’re disobeying stop signs now. You know, it’s not like it used to be. That officer’s not there. He’s doing something else. But, I don’t know what. But they’ve got computers in their cars and they got, you know, it’s equipped with all kinds of hi-tech, you know high technology stuff now, the police car is. So I guess that keeps him busy, you know. He can, he can, he can receive his calls – this happened before I left – he can receive his calls there on the screen. The dispatcher doesn’t have to call him and give him a verbal call. It comes up on the screen there. And I haven’t worked, it’s been ten years since I’ve worked in a police car but, you know, it probably got, that’s probably stepped up now. So, yeah, I’ve seen a lot of changes, you know. I can tell a lot of difference from when you compare then to now, you know, I can tell a lot of difference. And when you see a police officer now, the windows are so tinted you can’t recognize who’s in there and there’s no more waving at them because, I tell you, you can’t see them, you don’t know who it is to know who they are.
RH: What about the people that you, you arrested, could you tell a difference in the way that the community reacted to you when you had to approach them about a crime?
CC: Yeah, I’ve had a different reaction. You, you talking about how did people react—
RH: Were they more respectful in your earlier years—
CC: Oh, yeah.
RH: —than they were in later years?
CC: That’s why I was saying I liked to work that East Florence area because those people out there were respectful to law enforcement. Now, they dr—don’t get me wrong, they drank and they, and they, then they fought you know, and they were ru-, ah, disorderly and all, but when you came to arrest them they went to jail. But when you worked the north part of Florence, it wasn’t so easy locking people up. Because those people had jobs and all, you know and they you know, they looked at us differently. And then when you went down on the west side of Florence in the predominately black area you got to catch them first. They wouldn’t stand there and wait on you.
[22:15]
CA: So you had to keep up on your, I guess you had to, had to –
CC: Physical fitness?
CA: Yeah, had to run quite a bit then.
CC: Yeah.
CA: Yeah.
CC: Yeah, I’m not bragging or anything but back in the 80s I was the top physical fitness guy they had in the department. Because I, I stayed in the gym all the time and I kept my physical fitness up.
CA: So—
CC: Well, you had to really, you know, because you never knew, you know.
CA: Now, when y’all started out I guess, I mean, you didn’t have Tasers or anything I guess.
CC: No. No. We didn’t have any of that stuff.
CA: Probably no pepper spray or anything?
CC: Nope. No pepper spray. We had what we called a slapjack.
CA: Oh, yeah?
CC: A slapjack was a piece of leather about this long [Mr. Crenshaw indicated a size of about 12 inches] and it had a little apparatus on it you could put around your wrist and you could slap people with it and all. And then that probably went out in like two or three years and then we had a PR-13, it’s called a, you know, like nightstick.
CA: Um-hm.
CC: But before it was a PR-13 it was just a Billy club, what they call a Billy club. And it was just a long stick, you know about ten, ten to twelve inches long. But the PR-13 had some meaning to it. It had a handle on it and we had to have training with it where you could use it in apprehending people and all, you know you could, you know, take down, take people down with it and all. And that went out, also. Because like you say, we got Tasers now and all.
CA: Um-hm. I know that a lot of police officers I’ve talked to they said before they were issued a Taser they had to be tazed.
CC: Yeah.
CA: Did you ever have to go through that?
CC: We had pepper spray. I’m glad you mentioned that. We had pepper spray. And you had an option. I’ve got glaucoma and I didn’t know it back then, but I know it now. You had an option. Either you could be sprayed with the pepper spray or you could be doused in the eye. But I couldn’t do either one now. If they did that to me now, I’d probably go blind.
[24:07]
CA: Um.
CC: And I think on my job now we’re gonna get pepper spray and there’s no way that I can have that touching my eyes, you know.
CA: Um. Yeah.
CC: I might even have to give my job up because, you know, it’s either that or go blind, you know.
CA: Yeah.
CC: And I don’t want to go blind.
CA: Yeah.
RH: No.
CA: I don’t blame you.
CC: Not before my time. But, yeah, it was pepper spray. So, that’s what we had back then when I was working.
CA: So you said you got a few perfect attendance—
CC: Yeah, I got a few of them.
CA: —certificates there. Is that like a whole year without taking off work?
CC: Um-hm, that’s a whole year of perfect attendance without being sick, without taking off for a whole year.
CA: That’s great.
RH: Wow.
CC: Got one in ’94 and got one in ’96 and this is a recognition for ten years of service here.
CA: Okay.
CC: And what year is that?
CA: That’s 1990.
CC: ’90, yeah.
CA: Okay, so, that’s after you came back, then?
CC: Oh, yeah. That’s way after I came back. I came back in ’80. That was ten years after I came back.
CA: Um-hm.
CC: I also won some physical fitness awards; I didn’t bring those. About three of those, three years in succession.
CA: And you were telling us earlier you, you worked under, was it four chiefs?
CC: Um-hm.
CA: Four different chiefs?
CC: Um-hm.
CA: Okay.
CC: Yeah, I worked under four different chiefs. I worked under one in the ’60—in the ‘60s, and one in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s all the way to my retirement in 2001.
CA: Okay. That’s, that’s a lot of experience.
RH: Can you tell us their names again for the, for the record?
CC: Um-hm. The first chief was called Noah Danley. The second chief was called Chief Bailey; he was from Birmingham. The third chief was called Rick Thompson or Richard Thompson. And the fourth chief was called Rick Singleton.
[26:00]
CA: We won’t ask you which one was your favorite. We don’t want to get you in trouble.
CC: My favorite was Rick Singleton.
CA: Okay.
CC: He was the one that sent me home, in good standing. He was the one that helped me get home.
CA: Well, that’s good.
RH: There you go.
CC: Good guy.
RH: Well, I asked you what was your least favorite thing about your job, what was your favorite thing about your job?
CC: Favorite thing? You got a chance to help people. You got a chance to know people. You did something different every day. You met somebody, that’s why I say I like my job now because every day I get a chance to meet somebody that I don’t know, I get a chance to talk with them. I’m a people person, anyway. And I should be because of my, because of my job. But I love to talk to people. I love to talk to people. Some questions that people ask get on my nerves, but I still love to talk to them, you know. But, yeah, that’s my, that’s what I like about my job. And believe it or not, once you meet someone and talk with them, you might forget their name, you might forget their face, but they don’t forget you. They don’t forget you. My wife always tells me, says, “Can you go anywhere that people don’t know you?” We were walking down the street in New Orleans, somebody way on the other side of the street, “Hey, Crenshaw!” And that’s everywhere. Everywhere. But it’s a good feeling, though, you know. It sure is.
CA: Now, did you have to do a lot of paperwork? I know I hear a lot of police officers just they can’t stand that—
[27:40]
CC: Let me tell you this story. I’m glad you asked that. I, I had a picture of, of me walking down Court Street, I couldn’t find it. Anyway, I was walking down Court Street and the photographer took my picture, as they do all the time, and it got in the paper and Eddie Frost—you remember Eddie Frost? He was the mayor at that time and I was walk, walking a beat again and him and Thompson approached me and they asked me was I ready to go work in investigation. And I said, “What?” I had heard bits and pieces I was going in investigation, but I didn’t believe it. I said, “What?” He said, “Are you ready to go in investigation?” I said, “I guess.” They said, “We need somebody up there that’s got a legible handwriting. We’re having trouble reading the reports.” So by, by me having a legible handwriting I got a chance to work investigation, because they couldn’t read the reports.
CA: That is funny.
CC: It is.
RH: How did you like investigations?
CC: I loved it. I worked it back in the ‘80s, mid ‘80s. Had my own car. The only thing bad about investigations is when something happens, regardless of what time it is, you’re called out, you got to go. Two or three o’clock in the morning, you got to go.
CA: Um.
CC: But I like it. I like it.
CA: So, now you’re working security for, ah—
CC: For Social Security.
CA: Social Security. Okay.
CC: I work, every work I do now is contract work.
CA: Okay.
CC: And we have to have training for that. We, our training there is I guess about the same as police training. We have to qualify with our weapon; we have to be physically fit; we have to have classroom training. We have a little academy we have to go to and pass it before we go. It’s, it’s comparable to a police one.
CA: Hm.
CC: It sure is. And we have to continue, it’s continuous training, too. You can’t just do it and sit down. You got to do it every year. You have, we’ve got what you call credentials that you take with you. [Inaudible] and check it, and check, and everything has to be up to date, you know, your first aid, your weapon. Everything has to be up, ah, baton training, have to be up to date.
RH: Now, where did you go to high school? You said you went to W. C. Handy—
CC: I went to Burrell Slater.
RH: Burrell Slater.
CC: Um-hm. Ah, you know where it’s located at, on College Street.
RH: Um-hm.
[30:00]
CC: That’s where I graduated from. 1962. ’62. I’ll tell you the story behind this picture. It’s on Cloyd Boulevard right across the street, you remember the hospital that was on Cloyd Boulevard?
RH: I used to live over by there.
CC: Um-hm. I was sitting across the street, I don’t remember the day or anything but I, I know I was sitting across the street from the hospital and the next thing I knew there’s a, there’s a newspaper guy there. I didn’t have the radar on. I was just sitting there and he started talking with me, and just, just a normal conversation and the next thing I knew he had took my picture. No, he, he asked me to cut the radar on and play with it and that’s what I was doing there. And he took a picture. But what happened is, the story here is from the Chief. It’s from Rick Thompson. And he was telling about, this is before we got our Florence Boulevard extended, you know, widened out, and he was telling about that we had got the grant to do that. And, and he was saying that the police was going to crack down on violators; they wasn’t giving them anymore warnings or anything.
RH: Uh-oh.
CC: But that’s the story behind that one.
CA: Now, when you caught a speeder were you big on giving warnings or did you just write the ticket?
CC: No, I gave them a ticket.
CA: You’d just give them a ticket.
CC: No, I didn’t, I didn’t warn anybody. I had a reputation for giving tickets. No. In some instances, you know, you have to, you have to, ah, you give breaks sometimes, but not all the time.
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
RH: Did you have girls cry to get out of a ticket?
CC: Yeah, I had girls cry and expose themselves and everything. Yeah, wanting to get out of a ticket. And when they, the more they did that, the more I wrote.
RH: Oh, my goodness.
CC: I had guys cry, too.
CA: Did you really?
RH: Well, is there anything you can think of that you can share with us that would be of interest to the community?
[32:00]
CC: Hm. There were some times, you know, during the time that we first started when the black officers had to work together that were not so pleasant. Ah, I remember one Easter Sunday, the supervisor, he’s deceased now, he’s not here anymore, he ordered Coleman and I to work together all day that Sunday. And I hated to work on Sunday, but the vehicle was a dog vehicle, a vehicle that the dog had been riding in the backseat in and naturally the fumes were there and we rode around all that Sunday in that, in that vehicle. I never will forget that. And that was unpleasant. Plus unfair.
RH: Um-hm.
CC: And that’s, that’s what stands out more in my mind about, you know, being misused, ah, because of, you know, the color of my skin. But those days are gone. They’re not here anymore. Thank goodness.
RH: I can’t imagine how hard that would be though—
CC: Yeah.
RH: —to try to do the job you were having to do.
CC: Yeah. Yeah. It didn’t stand out, you know, but when things happened you could see the results. You could see a difference, you know. It wasn’t like in our face. You know, racial prejudice wasn’t in our face. But, when it came to getting promoted or came to, ah, first notification or something, you know, you could see it. It was there, you know.
CA: So, it was a lot more subtle, I guess. Like subtle racism, maybe. Or—
CC: Right.
CA: —subtle. Yeah.
CC: Right.
CA: Yeah.
CC: Exactly.
CA: Yeah.
CC: Exactly.
RH: Had it improved a lot by the time you retired?
CC: Oh, yeah. By the time I retired, I’m, I’m talking back in the ‘60s and ’70s.
RH: Yeah.
CC: By the time I retired it had improved a whole lot. Yeah. Yeah, I, when I retired they gave - I started, I should have brought my retirement plaque - they gave, me and two more officers retired together and they gave us a retirement party, the department did. They planned it – when I, when I retired they made me turn my badge in and I didn’t know why. But I found out at the retirement party that they made plaques, they made two plaques. One about this tall and one about this tall and those badges, my badge went on one of those plaques.
[34:17]
CA: Oh, okay.
CC: And they had our name engraved in there. It was really nice, you know. I’ve got it at home now. And they gave us a big going off. You know, a big retirement party.
CA: I guess the department had gotten quite a bit bigger, as well, by the time you retired; it was—
CC: Oh, yeah. It was, altogether—
CA: About how many, how many police officers do we have now in Florence?
CC: I have no idea. We had a little over a hundred when I, when I retired.
CA: Okay.
CC: I have no idea now how many we’ve got. That was ten years ago. So, I, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you.
CA: So, it went from, when you started you said it was about, about thirty or forty?
CC: Thirty, I think it was thirty-five.
CA: Yeah, to about a hundred.
CC: Yeah.
CA: That’s, that’s a pretty big increase.
CC: If we took the, the dayshift home - you know it was small - in the car.
Looked like the department was, was closely knit back then than it is, than it is, was when I retired. I guess because of the increase in, in personnel.
CA: Um-hm.
CC: Because by the time I retired in two-‘01 we had so many officers some of them I didn’t even know, you know. And some of them you didn’t have a chance to bond with, you know. But by the department being so small back in those days everybody knew everybody, you know and knew everybody’s business. Which was good in some cases and bad in others.
RH: How did your family feel about you being a police officer?
CC: Oh, goll. Um. It had its positives and had its negatives. I had to arrest my brother one time.
RH: Oh.
[35:49]
CC: You know, it was an awkward situation. He’s in real estate now. He lives in Birmingham and he’s far, far improved from where he used to be when he was a teenager. But, one night him and a group of kids got together and trashed the police department. They [inaudible] threw cans all out in the front of the police department. Not knowing that he was in the car, I was ordered to go stop the car and arrest everybody in it. When I started taking people out I looked and there was my brother. And he said, “You’re not gonna arrest me, are you?” I said, “Come on.” I had to put him in jail. That didn’t go over; Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t too good that Thanksgiving.
RH: I guess not.
CC: But that was, that was a trying experience. It’s something that, you know, it doesn’t just go away. It have to be prayed away. It have to be loved away, you know.
CA: Um-hm.
RH: Yeah.
CC: But, that’s some of the things that you experience in law enforcement.
RH: What do you think are some of the traits that make someone a good law enforcement officer?
CC: Personality. Moral and spiritual values. Observation. And being focused. Staying focused. Because it’s a matter, it’s a matter of you going home at night, I mean, yeah, when you get off of your shift than someone taking you somewhere else. So you got to stay focused. And there’s all kinds of distractions. All kinds. But you got to stay focused on what you’re doing. And what you are and who you are. ‘Cause it’s a dangerous job. You know, you hear every day a police officer walking up on a car and somebody taking out a short barreled shotgun and shooting him. It’s a dangerous job and it always will be a dangerous job. It sure is.
CA: Somebody’s got to do it, though.
CC: Yeah. Somebody. And I enjoyed my career as a police officer. I enjoyed it. And if people ask me if I’d do it again I’d say, “Yeah, if I was forty years younger.”
[38:04]
RH: Well, you live here, you go to church here, you go to the grocery store here, how hard has it go to be to patrol and, and you said you arrested your brother, but I mean, giving your next door neighbor a speeding ticket or your, the guy that goes to church with you or having to go to some incident, I mean, how hard, how hard must that be? Did you run into that very often?
CC: I’ve arrested people for being intoxicated and they actually curse me out that Saturday night, but that Sunday morning they knock on the door and apologize. Sure have. On the other hand, I’ve given some people tickets fifteen, twenty years ago and when they see me they still haven’t gotten over it. So it, you know, it’s a positive and it’s a negative. But it’s still your job. It’s your job. It’s something that you’ve sworn to do. You’ve sworn to uphold the law and protect, and protect the public’s interest and that’s what you have to do. You’ve got to do your job. Your job, our job is just like the garbage man, he’s got to go around every morning and collect the garbage. We’ve got to go around every morning and see that everything is safe. Make sure that everything is safe. That’s what my job is now where I work, to see that the building is safe, also that its occupants. I love my job. I loved the job I had as a police officer; I love the one I got now. I love it.
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Clifford CrenshawPolice ; Law enforcement officers ; Race relations (39:41) Clifford Crenshaw describes his life and his career as one of the first African-American police officers in Florence, Alabama.Florence-Lauderdale Public LibraryFlorence-Lauderdale Public LibraryClifford Crenshaw2013-01-06sound; textaudio/mp3; text/docxEnglishIs part of the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library collection.Contact the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library for permission to use. Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Clifford Crenshaw
January 6, 2013
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 1 of 1
Clint Alley: Well, today is January 6, 2013, and I am Clint Alley and with Rhonda Haygood at the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library with Mr. Clifford Crenshaw. Mr. Crenshaw was a police officer for the Florence Police Department for many years and he’s going to tell us about that today. Mr. Crenshaw we just, we start off by asking all of our interview subjects, when and where were you born?
Clifford Crenshaw: I was born here in Florence, Alabama.
CA: Okay. So, you went to school here –
CC: I did.
CA: – and grew up here.
CC: I did.
CA: What school did you go to?
CC: I went to – at that time back in the fifties, when I started in school, elementary school was called W. C. Handy. W. C. Handy –
CA: Okay.
CC: – Elementary School. I lived about two or three stone throws from there so I got a chance to walk to school and back every day. But that was the name of the elementary school I went to.
CA: Okay. Was that, is that close to where his cabin is down there?
CC: No, this is out on the west side of Florence, out where the stadium is. The football stadium.
CA: Okay, okay. So it was named after him, but it’s –
CC: By the recreation center. Um-hm.
CA: Okay. What year did you graduate high school?
CC: I graduated high school, wow, 1962.
CA: 1962. Okay.
CC: Um-hm.
CA: And you were telling us you went to the military.
CC: I did.
CA: Is that right out of high school that you did that?
CC: No, not quite. I kind of scuffed around a little bit before I went to high school – went in the military. I guess, let’s see, I went in the military in ’65, so that was like three years.
CA: Okay. Now, were you drafted or did you volunteer?
CC: I volunteered.
CA: Okay.
CC: I was sitting at home one day and the recruiter came by the house, the Air Force recruiter and he said did I pass the examination my senior year in high school. I’d forgot, I didn’t even know what the examination was about and I had forgotten about it. So, I said, “Give me about two weeks then I’ll see you.” He said, “No, you need to go in now and get your basic training out of the way.” Next thing I know, I was in formation marches –
CA: Oh, man.
CC: – in the military.
CA: So you went to the Air Force, then?
CC: Um-hm.
[2:00]
CA: Okay. Did you have basic training I guess in the –
CC: I, I did.
CA: Okay, and, was it in, ah –
CC: It was in San Antonio, Texas.
CA: San Antonio. Okay.
CC: Lackland Air Force Base.
CA: Well, where did you go from there?
CC: Ha. Nowhere. After basic everybody got orders to go to Florida, California, all the good bases. I got orders to go across the street to Air Police School.
CA: Okay. So you, ah, you, that was your specialty in the military then, was police work.
CC: Exactly. I’ve been in law enforcement all of my life.
CA: Okay. That’s good. What, what all did that entail, being an air policeman?
CC: It was, it was called air policeman back then, now it’s called security policeman. It entailed the same basic training that you go through here, and you know, in your regular local government and state government. Mostly training in classroom training, weapons training, conditioning.
CA: Yeah. Well, did you, I guess you enjoyed that kind of work then.
CC: I had, I had no other choice. I wanted to be a medic.
CA: Okay.
CC: I worked at the hospital – that’s what I did before I went in the military.
CA: Okay.
CC: I worked at the hospital before I went in the military as an orderly. And I got kind of interested in mus-, in music, in medicine and I wanted to be a medic in the military, but ended up being a cop.
CA: Okay. Okay. So and let’s see, how long did you do that?
CC: Oh, about three and a half years.
CA: Okay.
CC: I went overseas, I did a year and a half in the states – they sent me – my first duty assignment was Grand Forks, North Dakota. And I stayed there about eighteen months and, and we volunteered for Vietnam. And the closest we got to Vietnam was Japan. I went to Japan and stayed two years and by staying two years you get an early out; which is six months early out. So I took the early out and went home.
[4:03]
CA: Then when you came home, you, I guess you came back to Florence after that.
CC: I did.
CA: Okay. Did you, did somebody ask you to come and join the Florence Police Department or did you apply, or how did that work?
CC: Actually, I was working at TVA. I had went to work, they were building a, TVA in Athens, and they were building it and I was helping build that nuclear plant in Athens for TVA. I was working construction. And when I got the call to be a police officer, ah, go back a little bit. I got my old job back at the hospital – I shouldn’t tell this, but I’m telling you – and I got fired.
Rhonda Haygood: Uh-oh.
CC: And the reason I got fired, for speaking up to a nurse.
CA: Uh-oh.
CC: The transition from military to civilian was kind of hard. So a nurse said some ill words to me and I said some ill words back to her and they fired me. And I had applied for the police department and Noah Danley heard about it. And they said, “You don’t want him,” say, “he, he said some ill words to a nurse.” He said, “That’s the kind I want.” So, I got, I got the police job.
CA: That worked out pretty good then.
CC: Yeah. It did. Praise God.
CA: Okay. So you, let’s see, that was 1969, you say, when you started police work?
CC: Um-hm.
CA: Okay.
CC: April of ’69.
CA: How many African-Americans were on the force when you started?
CC: When I started?
CA: Yes, sir.
CC: Southward, Coleman and Smith. Four. There were four African-Americans on the police force when I started.
CA: Four total?
CC: Um-hm.
CA: Okay. Well, did they –
CC: Hold up, hold up. Southward had quit. He had gone to Reynolds, so there were three.
CA: Okay.
CC: Yeah, ‘cause I never worked with him.
CA: Okay. Well, we were, we’ve been doing some research about that, just kind of reading through it and we – was it ’63 when they fir-, hired the first African-Americans?
[6:04]
CC: You got it.
CA: Okay, ’63. Ah, well, did you have any, like, trouble with the white officers joining the force, or did they, – was there any bad blood or anything?
CC: No, it was just, you know, the condition was still segregation –
CA: Um-hm.
CC: – and we worked, Coleman and I, Officer Coleman and I worked in, in separate cars. I mean we worked together, but we, not, weren’t allowed to work with white officers during that time. Eventually, they asked white officers if they had a problem with working with us and the ones that didn’t have a problem with working with us came and worked with us. They had a choice. They gave them a choice. And if they didn’t have a problem, if everything was okay with them working with us, they came and worked with us. Two, two or three of my training officers were white. Coleman, William Coleman, he’s an African-American; he was my first training officer. Hollis Briggs was my next training officer. Virgil Wilson was my next training officer. Those two are white. And I’ll never forget them, you know, they were excellent training officers.
CA: Hm. So they kind of, I guess they kind of slowly worked integration into the
police –
CC: They did.
CA: – department then. Okay.
CC: They did.
CA: Well, did you have to work predominately with other African-American, like civilians, like if they had a call from a, a –
CC: Oh, yeah, we worked in the bl-, in the predominately black neighborhood.
CA: Okay. Okay.
CC: Yeah, we worked there and then eventually I worked, started working the east side of town, which was pretty rough at that time.
CA: Yeah.
CC: Especially for an African-American officer.
CA: Yeah.
CC: But, believe it or not, I retired there.
CA: Oh, okay.
CC: I worked there five years before I retired.
CA: Huh.
CC: But it was quite different back in ’69, you know, when I started.
CA: Yeah. Well, do you have any, any kind of, any big stories you remember? Anything unusual that happened to you when you first started?
CC: Where you want me to start?
RH: Oh, dear.
CA: Just wherever you want to jump in!
CC: Keep talking and it’ll come to me –
CA: Okay.
CC: – if you’re asking questions.
[8:02]
CA: Ah, goodness. Ah, let’s see. 1969. Well, Florence I guess was a, it was, quite, probably quite a bit smaller back then.
CC: Oh, yeah.
CA: Yeah.
CC: A lot smaller.
CA: I guess so, yeah.
CC: Let me tell you this. The police department was so small that when we changed shifts, the evening shift put the day shift in the cars and took them home. Nobody had to drive to work.
RH: Oh, dear.
CA: That’s pretty handy.
CC: Yeah. And it was routine.
CA: Yeah.
CC: We did that all the time until you know, the department became larger.
CA: Um-hm.
CC: But, but it was, it was a, it was a traditional thing.
CA: Wow.
CC: You know, everybody knew that when you come to – when you get off, you get in the car with the evening shift and they take you home. That’s how small it was.
CA: Um.
RH: What kind of shifts did you work?
CC: I worked, I think I worked day shift a little, nah, I worked evening shift, yeah, that’s what it was. I started out working evening shift, three till eleven. And I worked that mainly. Sure did. When I first started. Yeah, we worked the evening shift. Coleman, Officer Coleman, Officer Humes and myself, worked the evening shift. And Officer Smith.
CA: Okay. I bet you saw a lot in the evenings that didn’t happen in the daytime.
CC: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
CA: Well now, was there a problem in Florence with any kind of drugs or anything at that time? You know, you hear so much from the sixties.
CC: Drugs hadn’t peaked as much at that time. It was usually alcohol. It was mostly alcohol back then, in 1969.
CA: Yeah.
CC: It might, we didn’t, no, we didn’t have too much problem with drugs then. It was alcohol mainly. You know, everybody drank. Of course, Florence was dry at that time.
CA: Yeah.
CC: You know, before Florence went wet.
CA: Okay.
CC: And wasn’t too much of a problem with drugs. We didn’t even have a drug task force, you know, like we’ve got now.
CA: Um. Yeah.
CC: So it wasn’t that big, you know.
CA: Yeah. Yeah. Where, where did people get their alcohol, if Florence was –
[9:58]
CC: Good question. Good question. Florence was dry, if you didn’t go next door to the bootlegger’s house, you went to Tennessee to the State Line –
CA: Okay.
CC: – and got your alcohol and brought it back.
CA: Was bootlegging a big problem?
CC: Bootlegging was not a big problem, it was a big thing.
CA: Okay.
CC: It was a big thing.
CA: Yeah. Yeah.
CC: Ah, bootlegging, I don’t know how profitable bootlegging was at that time, but you could go to any house, you know, and buy it, and get it. And every now and then we did go on raids, alcohol raids, which sounds, sounds funny now. But we did, you know.
CA: Yeah.
CC: We’d knock on the door, sometimes they’d see us at the door and they’d go pour it out. Sometimes they wouldn’t have the chance to go pour it out and we made arrests for selling alcohol, for bootlegging. Also, we had them in the cars. Officer Coleman, now he’ll have a chance to tell you about this himself, but they called him eagle eye because he saw a car and he knew it, he recognized the car immediately as a, as a person hauling liquor in the car. And they used to come down from Tennessee and everywhere, you know big time bootleggers. And at one time they begged him to stay off them; he, he was so hard on them.
CA: That’s amazing. Could he tell by like how, how low it was or something, or just-?
CC: I don’t know how he could tell. He would tell me, he would say –
CA: He just had the gift, I guess.
CC: – “That car there, they got alcohol in it,” you know. And boom, they would have him.
CA: That is amazing.
CC: He also could tell about weapons, too, if somebody had a weapon on them.
CA: Really?
CC: And you asked me to tell an amazing story. We picked up this guy one night at Locust and Mobile, no, we picked him up on Mobile. When we got to Locust and Mobile – the window was down, we put him in the back seat and the window was down and we heard a clunk and Coleman went like this, and I said, “What is it? What is it?” And he got out and went and picked up the gun that the guy threw out.
[11:59]
CA: Wow. Oh, my goodness. And he just knew.
CC: Yeah. He, he heard it when it hit the ground.
CA: That’s amazing.
CC: See, but I was a rookie, you know I wasn’t, I wasn’t experienced in things like that. I wasn’t trained in things like that, you know.
CA: Wow. Gollee.
CC: But he did. He did. The essence of that story is that we could have both been dead. You know?
CA: Yeah.
CC: Could have shot both of us in the back of the head.
CA: That was a dangerous work y’all did.
CC: It was. It really was.
CA: Yeah. Well, so you were in a, in a car, I guess and not on a motorcycle or a –
CC: No, I never did motorcycle.
CA: Okay.
CC: Never did. Always a car.
CA: Yeah, I saw your, let’s see, this picture of your car here, this is, that’s, that’s a solid vehicle there.
CC: That’s a – yeah, that’s a Dodge. I think it’s a ‘70, ‘70-something Dodge.
CA: Okay.
CC: No, ‘80 Dodge, I think of it.
CA: Well, ah, now Florence – we’ve heard, we’ve interviewed several people from the time and they said there was never really any, a lot of racially charged violence or anything in the Civil Rights Movement. I, did you ever see any of that, any kind of – as a police officer?
CC: [Mr. Crenshaw shakes his head to indicate “No.”]
CA: Okay.
CC: I never seen any racial violence as a kid. I grew up here.
CA: Really?
CC: I’ve had some experiences, you know. But, I’ve never seen any just white on black, you know, violence. I’ve never seen any of that here.
CA: Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s the general idea that we –
CC: Yeah.
CA: – get from just about everybody we’ve talked to.
CC: Yeah. I think we were blessed in that area. And then there’s really not a lot of blacks in Florence, you know.
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
CC: The percentage of blacks in the population is real low and it was real low then.
CA: Yeah.
CC: But, no, I’ve never seen, we never seen – we never had to go to a racially violence call.
CA: Yeah.
CC: You know, white against black. We never had to do that.
CA: Yeah.
CC: In all my whole career. In all my thirty years.
CA: Oh, wow.
CC: I never had that.
CA: That’s good.
CC: We had some school incidents, you know, that may have led up to that. But just publicly, no.
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
RH: What would you say was the hardest part of your job?
[14:02]
CC: The hardest part?
RH: Um-hm.
CC: Or the most difficult incident that I had?
RH: Ah, what part of your job did you dislike the most –
CC: Did I dislike?
RH: – I guess is –.
CC: I disliked going to a real critical, a bad accident, traffic accident. And I did see a few of them. I disliked some domestic calls that we had to go to where the wife was battered and so forth. I disliked abandoned children. Seeing abandoned children. I had to go rescue a baby that was left in an abandoned house one night. In the wintertime.
RH: Hm.
CC: And we found that baby up under the floor in the house and when I say baby, I’m talking maybe three months old, maybe.
RH: Oh, my goodness.
CC: And if I told you the rest of the story you’d start crying, so I’m not going to tell you.
RH: Okay.
CC: But anyway that was the, that was one of the things I hated most.
CA: Hm.
RH: Well, which shift was the most active?
CC: I think, I think three to eleven was. Now, sometimes they say it was busy on midnight shift, probably on the weekend. But, I think, I think three to eleven, our shift would, it would get going, sometimes it would get going. Sometimes we run all night.
CA: When you first started was there any pay discrepancy? Did the white officers get paid more than the black officers or anything like that?
CC: They just made a rank faster than we did. So, yeah, they got paid more.
CA: A little bit, yeah.
CC: Our chances of making a rank were very bleak. Ah, this was in ’95 and this is a grade called E-9. It’s one step below a sergeant and that’s what I finished as. I finished as that. After thirty years.
CA: Okay. That’s the –
[15:57]
CC: I worked investigation while I was there, twice. I worked there as a training program back in the late ‘70s. Then I worked it, ah, in the late ’80s, yeah, late ‘80s. But, you know, I had my fair share of it. I won’t say that I was mistreated, you know, or anything. It’s just a condition, you know, and the change. You have to go with the change, you know.
CA: I’m looking at this picture of you when you were a young man, here. Did y’all, y’all didn’t wear bullet-proof vests back then I guess, —
CC: No.
CA: — did you?
CC: No. There was no such thing, no such thing as bullet-proof vests back then.
CA: So, you saw, you saw quite a few changes just in the, in the, the career during—
CC: Oh, yeah.
CA: — your tenure then.
CC: Yeah.
RH: Did you have to go through a police academy training program?
CC: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I went to a police academy in 1980 and when I— I missed something, ah, there’s a break in my career. In 1978, I left the police department and went to TVA, Yellow Creek Project. You, you ever heard of that?
RH: Um-hm.
CC: In Mississippi. I stayed there for about eighteen months and when I came back they sent me to the academy.
CA: Okay.
CC: In 19-, I graduated from the academy in 1980. See, see by that time everybody had to be certified with, I think it’s two hundred and eighty hours of, ah, of law enforcement training. So, yeah I went, went to a police academy. When I came back from Yellow Creek, it had just started. That program had just started. In other words, it was a mandated program. Everybody had to be certified.
CA: Hm. Okay.
CC: And when you look at this picture here there was no such thing as police academy.
CA: Yeah. In this early picture here.
CC: Unh-uh.
CA: Yeah. Well, you had your, let see, I, what kind of pistol there were you—?
CC: That’s a ’38.
CA: It’s a ’38?
CC: I’ve still got it. It was chrome plated and western grips on it.
CA: I was about to say, it looks like a wood handle on it there.
CC: I still have it. Yeah.
CA: That’s nice.
CC: I’ve still got it.
CA: Let’s see, now I guess they use, they use Glocks now?
[18:00]
CC: Yeah, something like Glocks. We’d carry Beretta, Smith & Wesson.
CA: Um-hm. Probably now—
CC: What I use now on my job is a Sig Sauer, called a Sig Sauer. It’s a little short 9mm like that. [Mr. Crenshaw indicated the size of the 9 mm.]
CA: Okay. Yeah.
CC: Ah, yeah, but everybody’s gone, everybody’s gone to a 9mm, some 40 caliber.
CA: Yeah. Why, why did they do that? I’ve always wondered that. They went from –
CC: Well, the streets got bigger and badder and law enforcement had to, too.
CA: Yeah.
CC: You ever heard about the shooting they had in Los Angeles when the criminal’s weapons outweighed the police officers and they had to go in the gun store –
CA: Yeah, I saw that. Yeah.
CC: –and the guy in the gun store gave them, gave them some fire power?
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
CC: That’s, that’s why.
CA: So they had to—, yeah that makes sense. Yeah.
CC: Yeah. Yeah.
CA: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like every, just about every city department around here that I know of has a 9mm –
CC: Yeah.
CA: – issue. I, I’m from –
CC: It’s, it’s basic now.
CA: –yeah, I’m from Lawrenceburg and I think that’s, that’s what they use up there, too.
CC: Yeah, I remember when we changed to a 9mm. Of course you had to qualify, you had to re-qualify with that and it was, it was kind of awkward, but you get used to it, you know.
CA: Um. Yeah. I guess this was a revolver here that you started out with.
CC: Yeah, that was a revolver.
CA: Now, which one did you like better?
CC: I liked the 9mm better.
CA: Do you?
CC: Yeah. Revolver’s kind of slow. When you give out, you’ve got to open your cylinder and take out a loaded thing and put it into your revolver and all.
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
CC: Where with your, with your 9mm you’ve got about fourteen rounds that you can fire before you have to reload.
CA: Okay. Yeah.
CC: And when you reload all you do is drop your clip, slap another one in there and you’re ready to go.
CA: Put another one in there, yeah. That’s, that few seconds makes a big difference.
CC: Exactly.
CA: Yeah.
RH: Have you noticed any change over the years that you were at the police department in the way that people reacted to the police officers?
CC: I have. I have. You talking about now compared to then when I was a police officer?
RH: Um-hm.
[19:55]
CC: I have and I notice it every day, you know. It’s kind of an upbeat thing now. You know, we used, I used to stop at a stop sign and work it and when I call work it, it means stop there and wait and see if somebody’s going to run it. You don’t see that too much anymore, now. You don’t see it too much. And I guess that’s the reason why people, you know, don’t stop. They’re disobeying stop signs now. You know, it’s not like it used to be. That officer’s not there. He’s doing something else. But, I don’t know what. But they’ve got computers in their cars and they got, you know, it’s equipped with all kinds of hi-tech, you know high technology stuff now, the police car is. So I guess that keeps him busy, you know. He can, he can, he can receive his calls – this happened before I left – he can receive his calls there on the screen. The dispatcher doesn’t have to call him and give him a verbal call. It comes up on the screen there. And I haven’t worked, it’s been ten years since I’ve worked in a police car but, you know, it probably got, that’s probably stepped up now. So, yeah, I’ve seen a lot of changes, you know. I can tell a lot of difference from when you compare then to now, you know, I can tell a lot of difference. And when you see a police officer now, the windows are so tinted you can’t recognize who’s in there and there’s no more waving at them because, I tell you, you can’t see them, you don’t know who it is to know who they are.
RH: What about the people that you, you arrested, could you tell a difference in the way that the community reacted to you when you had to approach them about a crime?
CC: Yeah, I’ve had a different reaction. You, you talking about how did people react—
RH: Were they more respectful in your earlier years—
CC: Oh, yeah.
RH: —than they were in later years?
CC: That’s why I was saying I liked to work that East Florence area because those people out there were respectful to law enforcement. Now, they dr—don’t get me wrong, they drank and they, and they, then they fought you know, and they were ru-, ah, disorderly and all, but when you came to arrest them they went to jail. But when you worked the north part of Florence, it wasn’t so easy locking people up. Because those people had jobs and all, you know and they you know, they looked at us differently. And then when you went down on the west side of Florence in the predominately black area you got to catch them first. They wouldn’t stand there and wait on you.
[22:15]
CA: So you had to keep up on your, I guess you had to, had to –
CC: Physical fitness?
CA: Yeah, had to run quite a bit then.
CC: Yeah.
CA: Yeah.
CC: Yeah, I’m not bragging or anything but back in the 80s I was the top physical fitness guy they had in the department. Because I, I stayed in the gym all the time and I kept my physical fitness up.
CA: So—
CC: Well, you had to really, you know, because you never knew, you know.
CA: Now, when y’all started out I guess, I mean, you didn’t have Tasers or anything I guess.
CC: No. No. We didn’t have any of that stuff.
CA: Probably no pepper spray or anything?
CC: Nope. No pepper spray. We had what we called a slapjack.
CA: Oh, yeah?
CC: A slapjack was a piece of leather about this long [Mr. Crenshaw indicated a size of about 12 inches] and it had a little apparatus on it you could put around your wrist and you could slap people with it and all. And then that probably went out in like two or three years and then we had a PR-13, it’s called a, you know, like nightstick.
CA: Um-hm.
CC: But before it was a PR-13 it was just a Billy club, what they call a Billy club. And it was just a long stick, you know about ten, ten to twelve inches long. But the PR-13 had some meaning to it. It had a handle on it and we had to have training with it where you could use it in apprehending people and all, you know you could, you know, take down, take people down with it and all. And that went out, also. Because like you say, we got Tasers now and all.
CA: Um-hm. I know that a lot of police officers I’ve talked to they said before they were issued a Taser they had to be tazed.
CC: Yeah.
CA: Did you ever have to go through that?
CC: We had pepper spray. I’m glad you mentioned that. We had pepper spray. And you had an option. I’ve got glaucoma and I didn’t know it back then, but I know it now. You had an option. Either you could be sprayed with the pepper spray or you could be doused in the eye. But I couldn’t do either one now. If they did that to me now, I’d probably go blind.
[24:07]
CA: Um.
CC: And I think on my job now we’re gonna get pepper spray and there’s no way that I can have that touching my eyes, you know.
CA: Um. Yeah.
CC: I might even have to give my job up because, you know, it’s either that or go blind, you know.
CA: Yeah.
CC: And I don’t want to go blind.
CA: Yeah.
RH: No.
CA: I don’t blame you.
CC: Not before my time. But, yeah, it was pepper spray. So, that’s what we had back then when I was working.
CA: So you said you got a few perfect attendance—
CC: Yeah, I got a few of them.
CA: —certificates there. Is that like a whole year without taking off work?
CC: Um-hm, that’s a whole year of perfect attendance without being sick, without taking off for a whole year.
CA: That’s great.
RH: Wow.
CC: Got one in ’94 and got one in ’96 and this is a recognition for ten years of service here.
CA: Okay.
CC: And what year is that?
CA: That’s 1990.
CC: ’90, yeah.
CA: Okay, so, that’s after you came back, then?
CC: Oh, yeah. That’s way after I came back. I came back in ’80. That was ten years after I came back.
CA: Um-hm.
CC: I also won some physical fitness awards; I didn’t bring those. About three of those, three years in succession.
CA: And you were telling us earlier you, you worked under, was it four chiefs?
CC: Um-hm.
CA: Four different chiefs?
CC: Um-hm.
CA: Okay.
CC: Yeah, I worked under four different chiefs. I worked under one in the ’60—in the ‘60s, and one in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s all the way to my retirement in 2001.
CA: Okay. That’s, that’s a lot of experience.
RH: Can you tell us their names again for the, for the record?
CC: Um-hm. The first chief was called Noah Danley. The second chief was called Chief Bailey; he was from Birmingham. The third chief was called Rick Thompson or Richard Thompson. And the fourth chief was called Rick Singleton.
[26:00]
CA: We won’t ask you which one was your favorite. We don’t want to get you in trouble.
CC: My favorite was Rick Singleton.
CA: Okay.
CC: He was the one that sent me home, in good standing. He was the one that helped me get home.
CA: Well, that’s good.
RH: There you go.
CC: Good guy.
RH: Well, I asked you what was your least favorite thing about your job, what was your favorite thing about your job?
CC: Favorite thing? You got a chance to help people. You got a chance to know people. You did something different every day. You met somebody, that’s why I say I like my job now because every day I get a chance to meet somebody that I don’t know, I get a chance to talk with them. I’m a people person, anyway. And I should be because of my, because of my job. But I love to talk to people. I love to talk to people. Some questions that people ask get on my nerves, but I still love to talk to them, you know. But, yeah, that’s my, that’s what I like about my job. And believe it or not, once you meet someone and talk with them, you might forget their name, you might forget their face, but they don’t forget you. They don’t forget you. My wife always tells me, says, “Can you go anywhere that people don’t know you?” We were walking down the street in New Orleans, somebody way on the other side of the street, “Hey, Crenshaw!” And that’s everywhere. Everywhere. But it’s a good feeling, though, you know. It sure is.
CA: Now, did you have to do a lot of paperwork? I know I hear a lot of police officers just they can’t stand that—
[27:40]
CC: Let me tell you this story. I’m glad you asked that. I, I had a picture of, of me walking down Court Street, I couldn’t find it. Anyway, I was walking down Court Street and the photographer took my picture, as they do all the time, and it got in the paper and Eddie Frost—you remember Eddie Frost? He was the mayor at that time and I was walk, walking a beat again and him and Thompson approached me and they asked me was I ready to go work in investigation. And I said, “What?” I had heard bits and pieces I was going in investigation, but I didn’t believe it. I said, “What?” He said, “Are you ready to go in investigation?” I said, “I guess.” They said, “We need somebody up there that’s got a legible handwriting. We’re having trouble reading the reports.” So by, by me having a legible handwriting I got a chance to work investigation, because they couldn’t read the reports.
CA: That is funny.
CC: It is.
RH: How did you like investigations?
CC: I loved it. I worked it back in the ‘80s, mid ‘80s. Had my own car. The only thing bad about investigations is when something happens, regardless of what time it is, you’re called out, you got to go. Two or three o’clock in the morning, you got to go.
CA: Um.
CC: But I like it. I like it.
CA: So, now you’re working security for, ah—
CC: For Social Security.
CA: Social Security. Okay.
CC: I work, every work I do now is contract work.
CA: Okay.
CC: And we have to have training for that. We, our training there is I guess about the same as police training. We have to qualify with our weapon; we have to be physically fit; we have to have classroom training. We have a little academy we have to go to and pass it before we go. It’s, it’s comparable to a police one.
CA: Hm.
CC: It sure is. And we have to continue, it’s continuous training, too. You can’t just do it and sit down. You got to do it every year. You have, we’ve got what you call credentials that you take with you. [Inaudible] and check it, and check, and everything has to be up to date, you know, your first aid, your weapon. Everything has to be up, ah, baton training, have to be up to date.
RH: Now, where did you go to high school? You said you went to W. C. Handy—
CC: I went to Burrell Slater.
RH: Burrell Slater.
CC: Um-hm. Ah, you know where it’s located at, on College Street.
RH: Um-hm.
[30:00]
CC: That’s where I graduated from. 1962. ’62. I’ll tell you the story behind this picture. It’s on Cloyd Boulevard right across the street, you remember the hospital that was on Cloyd Boulevard?
RH: I used to live over by there.
CC: Um-hm. I was sitting across the street, I don’t remember the day or anything but I, I know I was sitting across the street from the hospital and the next thing I knew there’s a, there’s a newspaper guy there. I didn’t have the radar on. I was just sitting there and he started talking with me, and just, just a normal conversation and the next thing I knew he had took my picture. No, he, he asked me to cut the radar on and play with it and that’s what I was doing there. And he took a picture. But what happened is, the story here is from the Chief. It’s from Rick Thompson. And he was telling about, this is before we got our Florence Boulevard extended, you know, widened out, and he was telling about that we had got the grant to do that. And, and he was saying that the police was going to crack down on violators; they wasn’t giving them anymore warnings or anything.
RH: Uh-oh.
CC: But that’s the story behind that one.
CA: Now, when you caught a speeder were you big on giving warnings or did you just write the ticket?
CC: No, I gave them a ticket.
CA: You’d just give them a ticket.
CC: No, I didn’t, I didn’t warn anybody. I had a reputation for giving tickets. No. In some instances, you know, you have to, you have to, ah, you give breaks sometimes, but not all the time.
CA: Um-hm. Yeah.
RH: Did you have girls cry to get out of a ticket?
CC: Yeah, I had girls cry and expose themselves and everything. Yeah, wanting to get out of a ticket. And when they, the more they did that, the more I wrote.
RH: Oh, my goodness.
CC: I had guys cry, too.
CA: Did you really?
RH: Well, is there anything you can think of that you can share with us that would be of interest to the community?
[32:00]
CC: Hm. There were some times, you know, during the time that we first started when the black officers had to work together that were not so pleasant. Ah, I remember one Easter Sunday, the supervisor, he’s deceased now, he’s not here anymore, he ordered Coleman and I to work together all day that Sunday. And I hated to work on Sunday, but the vehicle was a dog vehicle, a vehicle that the dog had been riding in the backseat in and naturally the fumes were there and we rode around all that Sunday in that, in that vehicle. I never will forget that. And that was unpleasant. Plus unfair.
RH: Um-hm.
CC: And that’s, that’s what stands out more in my mind about, you know, being misused, ah, because of, you know, the color of my skin. But those days are gone. They’re not here anymore. Thank goodness.
RH: I can’t imagine how hard that would be though—
CC: Yeah.
RH: —to try to do the job you were having to do.
CC: Yeah. Yeah. It didn’t stand out, you know, but when things happened you could see the results. You could see a difference, you know. It wasn’t like in our face. You know, racial prejudice wasn’t in our face. But, when it came to getting promoted or came to, ah, first notification or something, you know, you could see it. It was there, you know.
CA: So, it was a lot more subtle, I guess. Like subtle racism, maybe. Or—
CC: Right.
CA: —subtle. Yeah.
CC: Right.
CA: Yeah.
CC: Exactly.
CA: Yeah.
CC: Exactly.
RH: Had it improved a lot by the time you retired?
CC: Oh, yeah. By the time I retired, I’m, I’m talking back in the ‘60s and ’70s.
RH: Yeah.
CC: By the time I retired it had improved a whole lot. Yeah. Yeah, I, when I retired they gave - I started, I should have brought my retirement plaque - they gave, me and two more officers retired together and they gave us a retirement party, the department did. They planned it – when I, when I retired they made me turn my badge in and I didn’t know why. But I found out at the retirement party that they made plaques, they made two plaques. One about this tall and one about this tall and those badges, my badge went on one of those plaques.
[34:17]
CA: Oh, okay.
CC: And they had our name engraved in there. It was really nice, you know. I’ve got it at home now. And they gave us a big going off. You know, a big retirement party.
CA: I guess the department had gotten quite a bit bigger, as well, by the time you retired; it was—
CC: Oh, yeah. It was, altogether—
CA: About how many, how many police officers do we have now in Florence?
CC: I have no idea. We had a little over a hundred when I, when I retired.
CA: Okay.
CC: I have no idea now how many we’ve got. That was ten years ago. So, I, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you.
CA: So, it went from, when you started you said it was about, about thirty or forty?
CC: Thirty, I think it was thirty-five.
CA: Yeah, to about a hundred.
CC: Yeah.
CA: That’s, that’s a pretty big increase.
CC: If we took the, the dayshift home - you know it was small - in the car.
Looked like the department was, was closely knit back then than it is, than it is, was when I retired. I guess because of the increase in, in personnel.
CA: Um-hm.
CC: Because by the time I retired in two-‘01 we had so many officers some of them I didn’t even know, you know. And some of them you didn’t have a chance to bond with, you know. But by the department being so small back in those days everybody knew everybody, you know and knew everybody’s business. Which was good in some cases and bad in others.
RH: How did your family feel about you being a police officer?
CC: Oh, goll. Um. It had its positives and had its negatives. I had to arrest my brother one time.
RH: Oh.
[35:49]
CC: You know, it was an awkward situation. He’s in real estate now. He lives in Birmingham and he’s far, far improved from where he used to be when he was a teenager. But, one night him and a group of kids got together and trashed the police department. They [inaudible] threw cans all out in the front of the police department. Not knowing that he was in the car, I was ordered to go stop the car and arrest everybody in it. When I started taking people out I looked and there was my brother. And he said, “You’re not gonna arrest me, are you?” I said, “Come on.” I had to put him in jail. That didn’t go over; Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t too good that Thanksgiving.
RH: I guess not.
CC: But that was, that was a trying experience. It’s something that, you know, it doesn’t just go away. It have to be prayed away. It have to be loved away, you know.
CA: Um-hm.
RH: Yeah.
CC: But, that’s some of the things that you experience in law enforcement.
RH: What do you think are some of the traits that make someone a good law enforcement officer?
CC: Personality. Moral and spiritual values. Observation. And being focused. Staying focused. Because it’s a matter, it’s a matter of you going home at night, I mean, yeah, when you get off of your shift than someone taking you somewhere else. So you got to stay focused. And there’s all kinds of distractions. All kinds. But you got to stay focused on what you’re doing. And what you are and who you are. ‘Cause it’s a dangerous job. You know, you hear every day a police officer walking up on a car and somebody taking out a short barreled shotgun and shooting him. It’s a dangerous job and it always will be a dangerous job. It sure is.
CA: Somebody’s got to do it, though.
CC: Yeah. Somebody. And I enjoyed my career as a police officer. I enjoyed it. And if people ask me if I’d do it again I’d say, “Yeah, if I was forty years younger.”
[38:04]
RH: Well, you live here, you go to church here, you go to the grocery store here, how hard has it go to be to patrol and, and you said you arrested your brother, but I mean, giving your next door neighbor a speeding ticket or your, the guy that goes to church with you or having to go to some incident, I mean, how hard, how hard must that be? Did you run into that very often?
CC: I’ve arrested people for being intoxicated and they actually curse me out that Saturday night, but that Sunday morning they knock on the door and apologize. Sure have. On the other hand, I’ve given some people tickets fifteen, twenty years ago and when they see me they still haven’t gotten over it. So it, you know, it’s a positive and it’s a negative. But it’s still your job. It’s your job. It’s something that you’ve sworn to do. You’ve sworn to uphold the law and protect, and protect the public’s interest and that’s what you have to do. You’ve got to do your job. Your job, our job is just like the garbage man, he’s got to go around every morning and collect the garbage. We’ve got to go around every morning and see that everything is safe. Make sure that everything is safe. That’s what my job is now where I work, to see that the building is safe, also that its occupants. I love my job. I loved the job I had as a police officer; I love the one I got now. I love it.
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