Samson Alexander's grandfather was named Eddie Spencer. During the Great Depression, his grandfather ran off a plantation in Mississippi one night by hiding in a wagon carrying hay, fruit and vegetables. The wagon driver was going to the French Market in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was not a slave, but he was owned by a white man mentally. He was provided a house in exchange for work and following the rules. There, he married Lorena Spencer from Donaldsonville [Annotator's Note: Donaldsonville, Louisiana]. They had Alexander's mother, Carrie Harrington who married Earl Harrington. Out of wedlock, a man named Felix Foucher was married to a lady on Olive Street. At that time, men had two or three wives or girlfriends. Foucher had impregnated Alexander's mother when she was a young girl. You had to have a father to have a name. The wife of Foucher said that if it was true that he was the son of her husband, she would kill the baby and his mother. His mother denied it and a man named Sam Alexander volunteered to sign the birth certificate and gave him his name. He does not know who he really is but that is why he is called Samson Alexander. He went to school with his brother who had a different name. The teachers would ask them why. Alexander asked his mother and she went to the school and told the teacher to mind her own business. She was a fiery person, and that teacher stopped. They were taught to read, write, spell and count. In order to enter first grade, they had to know how to spell Telemachus, a street name. He and his mother practiced it and practiced it. He got in.

Samson Alexander was born in July 1930 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He grew up in Gert Town [Annotator's Note: a neighborhood in New Orleans] during the deep part of segregation. Most of the people in that community were black and white. The whites owned all the grocery stores and if you lived in a house that belonged to white people, they could sign for groceries from those stores. The blacks and whites were closer together in those times. They would play ball in the backyards together. Once they turned 15, they could not play together anymore. That was one of the rules of segregation. Alexander's grandmother worked for a judge named Mr. Halbert [Annotator's Note: cannot verify individual]. Every Christmas, Mr. Halbert would buy a pair of pants for Alexander and his brother. His grandmother worked in the home. The Halbert family had segregated roles within their home. They had a butler and a chauffeur. His grandmother put the silver on the table every night. The Jewish people ate at six o'clock without fail. When Alexander would come to play there, they knew the rules. As a kid, it was all he knew. Black women worked all over the city. His grandmother could sit in the white section of the streetcar when she had the Halbert baby with her. If alone, she had to sit in the back with the blacks. Blacks understood the rules of segregation. Alexander feels it was not a cruel rule. They had much more of everything than they do now, there was a different spirit. White people were not mean, and he did not know that they could be. They were always giving him something, instructing him, encouraging school and learning. Maybe some places had that meanness, but they did not.

Growing up, Samson Alexander used to follow around his brother who was in Boy Scouts. The white people had what they called the Doll and Toy Fund. The white kids would go to Heinemann Park [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] on Christmas Eve. The black kids would go there at three or four o'clock Christmas morning to pick out one toy. Alexander would always pick skates. There were about 5,000 black people who would get the toys. They would have to cross the New Basin Canal to get there. The black people believe that if the Canal was still there, there would not have been the flooding of Betsy and Katrina [Annotator's Note: Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina]. It was sold to the state. The first sheriff of Jefferson Parish sold the airport to the Parish, although he did not own it. All white people owned everything and could sell anything. There was a street called Burdette Street. About 50 white boys were studying to be priests at the Chateau of Notre Dame. They would come in to Gert Town [Annotator's Note: a neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana] and try to read the bible to the kid but the kids would run from them. [Annotator's Note: Alexander laughs.]

Samson Alexander was at the Lincoln Theater when he heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They showed pictures of airplanes flying and Ronald Reagan [Annotator's Note: Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President of the United States, 1981 to 1989] was playing a pilot. They saw cowboy pictures there too. The Lincoln Theater was the only theater that black people did not have to enter through a back way. The Orpheum Theater was across the street and they would go there once in a while. They would go there because they could see the Roosevelt Hotel, which would be decorated for Christmas. Blacks could not go in, but they could look in and see Santa Claus. They could not go to college, but blacks studied, got jobs, and ate well. Blacks would not allow another black to be without food. The community took care of widows. If someone died, the body would be in the first room and food would be provided in the back room. If they did not have food, they could go and get fed at a funeral by going in the back. Once the Japanese attacked and Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, 1933 to 1945] had made his talk, the people were always listening to the radio. None of them had television. They had heard that rich people had them and thought it was amazing. He never thought he would have a television. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, black people were looking for black people to be involved. They heard that Dorie Miller [Annotator's Note: US Navy Cook 3rd Class Doris "Dorie" Miller, 1919 to 1943] had shot down three Japanese planes. He was a cook in the Navy and that is all he could be as a black man. The news in the theater showed it. The draft began the next week. Alexander was 11 but he knew people who had been drafted. One man pretended to be blind to not get drafted and got away with it.

Samson Alexander worked at the American Drugstore as a 12 year old boy. He could read, write and count so he got the job. He had the rules explained to him. He could be on the same floor as the white people but he had to enter and leave through the back door. In another drugstore, if you were in line and white people came in after you, you had to step out of line and let them go first. It was the rule of the day and it did not bother him. The blacks survived; that was the name of the game. Black people are being shot today by police but that did not happen then. White police were friends of black people. Blacks did not have crime, they did not know what it was. People were taught differently. They were taught not to steal. A white man was a pastor of the blacks at the Methodist church. He would bring movies to show to the community every Thursday. He told them they must learn how to read if nothing else. He would bring things by Frederick Douglass and told them about Douglass. The slaves would not have been free because when Abraham Lincoln and his wife went to the theater, Douglass was there and asked Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation [Annotator's Note: Executive order by President Lincoln that made slaves free, 1 January 1863]. Lincoln said he could not that day. A man told Douglass to leave or they would make him a slave again. Before the actor [Annotator's Note: John Wilkes Booth] could shoot Lincoln, Douglass had gotten the Emancipation Proclamation signed. He was assassinated the next day.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic were important to black people when Samson Alexander was growing up. They knew they could not be in the war like the white boys in the movies and wondered why. The blacks were in the Seabees [Annotator's Note: members of United States Naval Construction Battalions] preparing the way in Bougainville, the Marianas and Saipan, the road to Japan. The Tuskegee Airmen [Annotator's Note: African American pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group and 477th Bombardment Group] came along in 1941. B.O. Davis, Jr. [Annotator's Note: US Air Force General Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr.] was a pilot and he recruited other blacks to learn to be pilots. Alexander became aware of them through the movies in 1944. Davis would make talks telling the audience that the white boys flying over Germany requested them. In 1942 and 1943, the flights over Germany were hit hard by the Messerschmitts [Annotator's Note: Messerschmitt fighetr aircraft] of Hitler's [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler, 1889 to 1945] Air Force. They were shooting down the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses. The white pilots then asked for the Tuskegee Airmen to protect them. When the Airmen went over in 1944 and 1945 they protected the bombers into Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany]. Alexander was in school in the Magnolia Project in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was a wonderful place. His mother only brought Alexander with her to live there. At the Thomy Lafon School, there were very educated black teachers. The principal saw that he had a special talent. He had an unusual mannerism that they picked up on. They taught him times tables and English composition. He absorbed it more than others because he listened to the radio at night. He heard on the radio that bombs were dropped on Hiroshima [Annotator's Note: Nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima, Japan 6 August 1945]. He heard that the Americans were always winning everything. He would ask, "well, how did they capture you in Burma?" [Annotator's Note: Alexander laughs.] Burma was a different thing. The Americans were trapped there and thought they could get out. The Japanese made them march. General Stilwell [Annotator's Note: US Army General Joseph Warren Stilwell] was part of that. Alexander kept up with all of the war. It was very important to black people.

Heavyweight champion Joe Louis [Annotator's Note: Joseph Louis Barrow, professional boxer] joined the Army. Samson Alexander saw Louis later when Alexander was in the Air Force. When Alexander joined the Air Force, Harry Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] got to be president. [Annotator's Note: The phone rings and Alexander does not finish. Tape breaks and restarts.] Alexander bought stamps and war bonds to support the war effort. It took about 30 days to raise enough money to buy a war bond. He sang songs, hymns and songs were changed to war songs. He did not like one thing. A German submarine was found in the Gulf of Mexico with eight men. There were white girls at the USO [Annotator's Note: United Service Organizations]. Alexander was a little boy shining shoes there. The Germans were brought there, but the black boys could not go in. The Germans were dancing with the white girls. When Alexander went back to school, he talked about it. He could not understand how they could do that. He was told, "well, they are white people too." He did not care so much about the skin color as much as the fact that they were prisoners. He did not understand how he was free and could not go in, but a prisoner could.

Samson Alexander says the Japanese people [Annotator's Note: Japanese-Americans] were the backbone of Americanism during the war. They were a dedicated people to Americanism. They were much more American than some of the citizens were. They obeyed the rules. They had divorced themselves from the motherland and it what was done to them was not right. Black people complained about it all the time. They had marches and told people about the camps. He saw many of them crying. It was the saddest thing that the Americans ever did. The Japanese were ready to fight for America. It shattered the black community. They thought it was a good way to steal the Japanese businesses. The black community wanted no part of the Germans because of Adolf Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler]. The black community was also very close to the Jewish merchants on Dryades Street [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana]. Rampart Street, Dryades Street and Canal Street were all highly Jewish. The Jews would talk to them about what was happening in Europe at the hands of the Germans. That gave the blacks an attitude. It made them think that they would have to do something to be free in case that kind of thing happened to them. That is when the Civil Rights Movement actually began. Up until then they had been satisfied and not into so called, free. It changed them as a people. Alexander would go to the plantation where his relatives lived and talk to the French owner. He could speak Creole. His grandmother had two white girls as well as black boys. The black kids had to walk five miles to school and the white kids would get to ride. When the girls grew up and had long, blonde hair, the sheriff told his grandmother she should send them to the North. The grandmother was Creole. The two aunts came to New Orleans after they were older, and their husbands had died. One of them lived across the street from Alexander. In many towns, it was both white and black living together. Both blacks and whites cut sugarcane and they all spoke Creole.

Samson Alexander got the idea to join the US Air Force but did not have a college education. The principal of his school told him he was a special young man and he offered to help Alexander learn what he needed to know to pass the test to enlist. He went down to take the test with his mother who told him he could pass it. He took the test at nine o’clock in the morning and at three o’clock he was on a troop train to San Antonio, Texas. When he got to Lackland Air Force Base and Scott Field, he was amazed to see all of the airplanes. He went with a friend of his. That is where his life began. Guys who had finished West Point were over the offices. One of them taught Alexander to type, read better, write better, spell better. Alexander became an instructor in the Training Command [Annotator’s Note: Air Training Command] in Denver, Colorado. He taught the other guys who came in – 60 men to a class – he was the only black person on the base. Some had never seen a black man. It was a strange thing – he was the only black man in the barracks. Some of the white boys were from Alabama and Mississippi and did not want to sleep near him. Every night he had to fight with one of them, but some of the white men were on his sides. He could tell stories and jokes. One of the guys had a picnic in the Colorado mountains – said it was white guys only. He said if Alexander came, he would get a gun and shoot him. Alexander did go and the man tried shoot him. That was the worst thing that ever happened to him in the service. He had never had an experience where someone would try to hurt him.

Samson Alexander was the first black fireman in the Air Force. He was given a certificate from the Treasury Department [Annotator's Note: United States Treasury Department] for inventing how to save a pilot when he crashes in a one seater airplane. He trained the firemen in how to do this. Harry Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] gave him the certificate for that. He had a great experience living with white people. There was one theater on the base, and he was the only black man to ever go in it. Half of the white people were with him and half were not. The half with him, protected him from the others. He became an instructor for the Superfortress [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-50 Superfortress strategic bomber]. They had a problem flying in the clouds. He made a suggestion in the TOs [Annotator's Note: Technical Orders] that they should move the deicers from the front of the wings to the back of the wings. There was a device to shake the ice off. He received a certificate for that. He could not get rank because he was black. He understood it was how segregation worked. Segregation was not broken until Harry Truman said all blacks and whites will be just one. Some of the men did not like Truman. Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: US Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe; 34th President of the United States, 1953 to 1961] beat him for another term in office.

Samson Alexander was in the Air Force during the Korean conflict. He had a girlfriend in Denver [Annotator's Note: Denver, Colorado] and they had a daughter. He sees his daughter often. Alexander went to Japan from Denver. When he landed in Tokyo, there were 1,000 women on a bridge who the lieutenant said were there to be his girlfriend. The Air Force knew Alexander ran track. He was told that if he got a rub down he would run better. He got one and he never ran that fast before. His name was known all over the Air Force for winning races. He went to run for the Air Force at Ohio State [Annotator's Note: Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio] and won a medal. When he was in Japan he was inquisitive. It rained for a week in Yokohama, Japan and he had never heard of this before. It was a wonderful adventure for him. The Japanese liked him because he was black. When he ran relay races he would take the last baton. There was 100,000 people in the stadium in Yokohama and he had never experienced that before. Alexander was a morning report clerk while stationed in Japan. He had to count everybody in the outfit that morning and typed their names into the report. He would type where they went and what training they had. There was a master sergeant, a technical sergeant and Alexander. The officers club was for whites only, but Alexander was allowed in. He did not smoke, drink or gamble so it made no sense really. They would gamble for a week each payday. His mother got an allotment out of his pay. It was a beautiful adventure and a wonderful thing. It was a life that was unbelievable. The people were kind to him because he could beat their champion. He could got out of the blocks fast in a race. The races were between the Japanese and the Air Force members. He was the only black on the team. He had trained to run in school before the service. Alexander visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. He was kind of frightened because he saw a body that was melted on the building. He had no joy. It was frightening to see what happened to those people when we dropped that bomb [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] on them. It made him think about what would happen if the Russians dropped one on us. He visited the sites three times. The Japanese want the world to see it. He had not known what the atomic bomb was prior to going to Japan. The people in Japan showed him the human element. The people who dropped the bomb did so like they were animals. The Japanese understood he was a minority and they treated him well. He wanted to be discharged in Japan but was not allowed to. He had to return to the United States to do so.

Samson Alexander had it made in the Air Force. In Japan, he had clothes made for him by Japanese women and he considered himself a playboy type. He began to play music and played bass fiddle with the Air Force Band. It was quite an adventure. He did not know then that he would change every year from being age 23 to age 80. He thought he would stay the same. Instead of losing his memory, his became a photographic memory. If he had known that would happen, he would have tried something else. He stayed in Japan for three years and thought he would stay there forever. He went to Japanese dances and took dance at Nanzan University [Annotator's Note: Nagoya, Japan]. He taught them about America. They really wanted to know about America. He says he made up some things. His confidence dropped when he returned to the United States. He became a nobody from a somebody. He had run a race at Ohio State [Annotator's Note: Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio] but went back to Japan. He decided it was time to leave the service. By that time, the Civil Rights Movement was coming on in the 1950s. Segregation was different now, men were being hung. When he was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with his mother to see his cousin, a man was brought in a wagon with a rope around his neck to be hung. His mother told him to shut up when the man was hung. They stayed hiding in the woods all night long. It was horrible and it changed his attitude.

Samson Alexander did a lot of things in the Civil Rights Movement. He did not know people had become hardened and mean. George Wallace [Annotator's Note: George Corley Wallace, Jr., 45th Governor of Alabama, 1963 to 1979, and 1983 to 1987] was standing in a door. Alexander was standing there looking at him at the University of Alabama, when Wallace said, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever." Alexander thought about that. He wondered if it was true. Kennedy [Annotator's Note: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, 1961 to 1963] sent Katzenbach [Annotator's Note: Nicholas deBelleville "Nick" Katzenbach, United States Attorney General, 1965 to 1969] down to order Wallace to move and let Lucy in. Alexander was there watching history in the making. He did not know that at the time. He was helping Bobby Kennedy [Annotator's Note: Robert Francis Kennedy, US Attorney General, 1961 to 1964; US Senator New York, 1965 to 1968] in California. He had gone out to help the grape growers and Kennedy asked them to help him. That's when Kennedy got killed. Alexander was campaigning with the track man, Rafer Johnson [Annotator's Note: Rafer Lewis Johnson]. Change was fast. [Annotator's Note: Alexander stops to answer the phone.] He had not wanted to get involved at first. He wanted to stay away. He was living in Denver, Colorado in 1955 and he took his daughter and left. It was snowing when they left for New Orleans, Louisiana. Before 1955, he had come down through Mississippi and Neshoba County where Emmett Till [Annotator's Note: Emmett Louis Till] was killed. He had not known then what that was about. A man told him he could see he was a serviceman and advised him to keep on going. His next stop was Montgomery, Alabama where he met some people talking about a lady who had sat on a bus and was arrested, and her name was Rosa Parks [Annotator's Note: Rosa Louise McCauley Parks]. They asked him to stay and help them. He then got involved in the bus boycott. He went to the Edmund Pettus Bridge [Annotator's Note: in Selma, Alabama] and then was arrested in Birmingham [Annotator's Note: Birmingham, Alabama] by Bull Connor [Annotator's Note: Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety 1936 to 1954 then 1957 to 1963]. When Dr. King [Annotator's Note: Martin Luther King, Jr.] and Abernathy [Annotator's Note: Ralph David Abernathy, Sr.] were in jail, they told Alexander to go to all the schools in Birmingham and ask the children to take their places. The children won the strike. Every year a former councilman, who is white, takes the black children to Birmingham to show them the monument where the church blew up and killed the four little girls. [Annotator's Note: A bomb was detonated in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on 15 September 1963, killing four young African-American girls.]

Samson Alexander says the people in New Orleans [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] were not for the marching [Annotator's Note: for the Civil Rights Movement]. They wanted things to stay the same. Completely different from everywhere else in the world. They told him to get away, Martin Luther King [Annotator's Note: Martin Luther King, Jr.] was a troublemaker. Alexander and others formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference there. When Dr. King came down, they tried to put him in a hotel on Canal Street but could not. Dr. King slept on a sofa in a building. They talked all night. King returned to Atlanta and preached and then had a movement in Chicago. In Georgia he was treated bad. When Kennedy [Annotator's Note: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, 1961 to 1963] was killed, the movement grew. Alexander was made the union organizer of the AFL-CIO [Annotator's Note: American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, United States federation of unions] and that is what placed him in Memphis [Annotator's Note: Memphis, Tennessee] with Dr. King, organizing the sanitation workers. Dr. King was before his time. Alexander is a reverend. He graduated in 1960. His grandmother had said that someday he would be a minister. He was always seeking to have peace, stopping guys from fighting. He was called a preacher boy when he was little. He learned about how the world was and is a great speaker. Being a great speaker is not something other blacks want to hear. They don't want you to be the focus of the church. He was able to tell his granddaughter different things. That is how she got a scholarship to Tulane [Annotator's Note: Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana].

Samson Alexander's most memorable experience of World War 2 was when Harry Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] stood in Independence, Missouri and said that "from this day [Annotator's Note: 26 July 1948; Executive Order 9981] forward, in the Air Force, everybody will be equal." There would be no segregation in the Air Force. This was early for something like this. World War 2 allowed Alexander to deal with the Superfortress [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-50 Superfortress strategic bomber], not the one that bombed Japan [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber], but the one that came after. It was bigger. He worries that with the people wiping the statues out [Annotator's Note: removal of Confederate monuments] he wonders what will happen if people say we do not want to hear about World War 2 anymore. We want to burn all the books there. We still have not explored every avenue of the war such as the blacks who built the roads for the white boys to travel on. The blacks were by themselves building the roads for the whites to defeat the Japanese. Alexander thinks institutions like The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] came late but are beyond important to be here. In 20 to 30 years it will be one of the focal points to stop war. People will not think of war like we do now. It will show the bitterness of war. How the suffering of war can make people suffer. It will be like the Jurassic Park [Annotator's Note: American film, 1993]. The tanks and planes and things we have not seen yet will be in the D-Day Museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum originally opened as The National D-Day Museum on 6 June 2000]. People will come and study and say "war no more." They will see the good and the bad. Lee [Annotator's Note: Robert Edward Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia] should stand. Lee is connected to Lincoln [Annotator's Note: Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, 1861 to 1865]. We love Lincoln so much, how could we eliminate Lee and the president of the Confederacy. They should stand. You will not know who they were if they are taken down. Concentrate on having statues of people since that time. There are no statues of Booker T. Washington [Annotator's Note: Booker Taliaferro Washington] or George Washington Carver. They have little statue of Martin King [Annotator's Note: Martin Luther King, Jr.]. No statue of Malcom X [Annotator's Note: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, born Malcolm Little]. He was down there once, and all the white people wanted their pictures taken with him. They did not know his opinion, if he wanted the statues to stay or go. It is not the blacks. Blacks are different when they do not know their history. Joe Louis [Annotator's Note: Joseph Louis Barrow, professional boxer] was in World War 2 and he was a brilliant man. He showed it was the right thing to do.