A pioneer in the preservation of Southern Nevada history, Claytee White is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Born into a family of sharecroppers, she dreamed of moving away from her hometown in North Carolina and, after high school, did just that, living in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and then, in 1992, Las Vegas.

Earning a graduate degree in American history at UNLV, the university later hired her to lead its efforts in preserving Las Vegas history by recording thousands of firsthand accounts from Southern Nevadans.

Claytee White, Director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you for having me.

-So the Oral History Research Center at UNLV opened in 2003.

More than 4,000 oral histories have been conducted, and of them, how many have you personally conducted?

(Claytee White) I guess I should have expected that question.

Probably individually, probably around 700.

And some of those were collected before there was an Oral History Research Center.

We had a professor in the History Department named Dr. Roske.

He had students collect oral interviews almost every semester, was brilliant enough to take those to the library and have them, have the Special Collections Department, save those, and so we have a base.

-How would you explain to someone the importance of an oral history versus the written history that you can read in a book?

-So a lot of people don't have the opportunity to write their story.

Most of us don't, but we do things every day that help to promote the history of a region, a city, an area in that city, but no one knows that.

But if we can talk about it and record it, have it transcribed and make it available to the public, it adds more to the history of that community.

-With that said, I found out that there is no oral history of Claytee White at UNLV.

Why is that?

-There is.

We are just preparing it right now.

-Why did it take so long?

-Because I didn't have anything to say.

But now I have a few things to say, so my oral history was collected last October.

And people in the Oral History Research Center, the editor one of our major interviewers, our project director, Stefani Evans, they're working on it right now.

Stefani and Donna are working on it.

-Okay, well, I'm going to attempt a mini version of that until it is released.

-Okay, great.

-Back to your childhood and that desire to leave your hometown of Ahoskie, North Carolina.

You told me prior to this, you were about six or seven years old when you wanted to start leaving.

Why, and how did you dream of accomplishing that?

-Probably no dream of accomplishing leaving, but started to want different, something different.

I didn't want to work.

I didn't want to work in the fields.

I knew that there had to be something better, because we had family members who had migrated out of Bertie County, North Carolina, and had to move to cities.

So I knew that there was a better life.

There was a different life.

Maybe not better, but there was something different.

And there was a place where you did not have to work in the fields.

And I began to work in the fields at six years of age, so I knew what work was all about.

-How did you figure-- and I did say, How did you dream of accomplishing that?

Maybe you weren't thinking of that at that point, but at some time, you must have thought, This is how I will move away?

-Well, I wanted to live in a city.

That was the major thing.

-Because you thought what would be there?

-Work that wouldn't be outside in the sun, in the heat of the day, working, picking cotton in the fall of the year, none of that.

-That makes sense.

-Yes.

-You wanted to be a teacher.

-I wanted to be a teacher.

I wanted to be in a city.

Those were the only two things that I really wanted-- to get away from the agriculture environment and to be a school teacher, because female school teachers were our role models.

African American women, we didn't have any African American female doctors or preachers or morticians, but we had school teachers.

So those are the people that my girlfriends and I looked up to.

They dressed beautifully.

They spoke wonderfully.

They drove nice cars.

So we wanted to be, especially me, I wanted to be a school teacher.

-What was your education like then?

-In elementary and high school?

-Mm-hmm.

-Probably not as good as it could have been, but I thought it was great.

Our teachers were educated at HBCUs throughout North Carolina.

We had lots of HBCUs.

Some of them had attended Elizabeth City State University.

Others, Shaw University, Saint Augustine, North Carolina Central University.

So we had a whole chain of those universities there, and, at that time, they were colleges.

They are universities now.

So we had women from our community who had grown up in our community that our families knew, and those women came back to be school teachers there.

Now, I wanted to be a school teacher, but I didn't want to come back to Bertie County.

Okay.

-I want you to tell our viewers before we talk about-- you ended up going to a historically black college, but before that, the role your brothers played, perhaps in a roundabout way of you obtaining that education.

-I had four older brothers.

One was career military, and the others went away to find work in cities.

My mother made sure that they left North Carolina, our area, as quickly as they could after high school.

One went to Boston with family friends, got a job there, still lives there now.

-Why did she want them out of there quickly?

-Because we lived in the South, and it wasn't safe for young black men to be in the south, especially with nothing to do.

Not that much work, so you can't be in the town loitering.

It meant that they would have to continue to work in agriculture.

My mother wanted something different and something better for them.

-And then I bring up what I was referencing with the roundabout way, was that you were able to go to school because they were working in the fields, correct?

-Oh, you're talking about when I was still in high school?

-Mm-hmm.

-Okay.

So when we were in elementary and high school, I didn't have to take time off from school.

I could have a perfect attendance.

If I didn't have a cold, didn't get sick, I had a perfect attendance in school.

My brothers made that possible, because if someone had to work in the fields, they could do a lot more work than I could.

So they had to take a day out of school, or they had to take a couple of days out of school.

I didn't have to do that.

And you mentioned something else.

Because they were older when I went away to college, they were able to help me because they had left home and they had gone to the city to work, so they could send money to help the family.

So, yes, so my brothers helped in all kinds of ways with my education.

-What was your view of sharecropping as a child?

-Oh, I thought it was awful.

I didn't even know it was called sharecropping.

That was later in school we learned the term "sharecropping."

At that time, it was just working.

It meant working in fields to harvest tobacco and all of the work leading up to the harvest.

Cotton, the same thing.

All of the work leading up to that, picking the cotton, picking the cotton is just one thing.

You've got to chop it and do all kinds of things to it during the summer, and then in the fall of the year you harvest all of those crops.

So-- -It was hard work.

Okay.

Now, according to the National Archives, the system of sharecropping, quote, tethered black farmers to land owners in an arrangement closely resembling slavery-- -That's correct.

- --end quote.

At what point in your life did you realize the oppressive nature of sharecropping?

-I don't know at which point.

I know that, I know that early on, if we had to, let's say that the school was going on a trip someplace and you had to take 50 cents or $1 to school to pay for your way on that trip, I was anxious, because I knew that my mom would not have that money.

Somehow, if it was important enough, they could come up with it, but that was just a burden.

So I knew early on that we were poor.

I hear people today say, "I never knew we were poor."

That's bull.

-You knew it.

-I knew it.

I think everybody know It.

Of course, you have other people in the community in the same situation that you're in, and then you have other families that are different.

I had friends who owned their own property.

I had friends who-- one had a father who had been killed in the military, and that family was taken care of by the Veterans Administration.

So we had different scenarios, but I knew mine.

I had no qualms about saying that my family was poor.

We were poor.

-I have to fast forward here, because we're running out of time.

-Oh, no.

-So you work in Washington, D.C., you told me, at a telephone company.

Later, LA, you are working doing switchboards at an attorney, a CPA's office.

-CPA firm, Arthur Young & Company at that time.

-You wanted to change.

You moved to Las Vegas.

And at that time, did you know that Las Vegas had once been called the Mississippi of the West?

-I did not know that, but I also, though, knew that the country was the same.

Maybe not as stringent as some of the places in the South, but the United States of America is a prejudiced place.

Racial discrimination still exists today.

We call it "systemic racism."

It's the same thing.

-Of the interviews that you have conducted here, who has been most inspiring?

-Oh, my God.

Most inspiring.

I don't-- I'm not going to answer that, but I'm going to answer the most interesting.

-Okay.

-The first interview I collected as the director of the Oral History Research Center was of a man who grew up here doing the building of the Hoover Dam.

Five-, six-year-old boy.

He would ride back and forth to Hoover Dam, across Hoover Dam into Boulder City with his father, because his father opened a small hardware store in Boulder City.

So they would go back and forth every week.

And to see the joy on his face, even as an older man, talk about seeing that construction over the years and how fascinating it was, and then that gentleman went to the U.S. Military.

As part of his service to this country during the 1950s, he went into the trenches at the Nevada Test Site.

That means that they used our military to test the radiation from bombs, and he was one of those soldiers in one of those trenches.

They would put them five miles from the blast, three miles from the blast, and then they would test.

-I feared that this would happen, you would end up talking about other people more than yourself.

People are going to have to listen to your own oral history coming soon.

-That's correct.

-Claytee White, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-You're welcome.

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