| Summary: | In this interview, Charles Zukowski talks about coming to Alabama and his work to help the progress of blacks in the south. Trained as a lawyer, Zukowski came to Birmingham from Saint Louis to work at the First National Bank of Birmingham. He found southerners "friendly" and "hospitable." He says that there were segregation and race problems in Saint Louis, but attitudes were more pronounced in Birmingham, "not only on segregation but on holding blacks down to very much lower standards." Zukowski began to work toward helping blacks. He wrote a column for ten years, under a pseudonym, addressing race relations. He also worked toward building a hospital for blacks. He explains that they had a Jefferson Country Coordinating Council which tried to push for a more segregated society, and this council had an interracial committee. They held a conference on progress for blacks which was attended by eight or nine hundred people. The interracial committee had to be abandoned eventually because the local group of businesses that funded the council threatened to pull their money from the organization altogether if they didn't. Zukowski says that Birmingham had some of the same problems Atlanta did, but it seems to him that the people in Alabama were more "backward," so they had a harder time of it. He talks about his southern friends saying they could agree with him intellectually about the need for change, but they couldn't get past the emotions of it. He also talks about how it was risky for him to keep up his column, and once people began to figure out that he was doing it, he was asked to take an early retirement from his job. Zukowski talks about the Depression and the various government agencies that helped people during that time. He also recounts the day the banks closed.The digitization of this collection was funded by a gift from EBSCO Industries.
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