Audio File
Transcript
My name is Maxwell Martin.
My name is Davon Hamlin.
My name is Michael Mosley.
My name is Xzavier Rogers and I am 11 years old.
I’m 13 years old.
I’m 12 Years old.
I’m 12 years old.
We interviewed Manny Gay,
Manny Gay,
Manny Gay on June 24th. 2016.
My birthday is April the 30th, 1947. Coming up here in Garfield, we had to create our own funds, so we had no activities and nothing to do up here, when I was a child anyway. Yeah. Garfield brought the fact that family orientated community, whereas if I did something wrong that I had no buisness doing, and Miss Jones seeing me up the street, she whipped my behind and before I got home, my mom and them was waiting for me to whip my behind when I got there too. My mom died when she went into the hospital to have my youngest brother. So the community stepped up. There was four of us left at home at the time my mom died. The community made sure we got up, had breakfast. Miss Hampton would take care of us. Miss Jones would take care of us over here, make sure we had lunch until my dad get back home. That’s what it was.
I’ve seen a big change in this neighborhood. At one time, this community here was about 50/50 black and white. Where it was at that time, the whites controlled everything. We didn’t have the field lights up there. Anywhere we wanted to do anything, we had to go elsewhere to do it. When we started here, we had what I call 3 little groups or gangs, as they call them today. Two female groups, “the 10 Tough Tigers,” and one was called “the We Stick Togethers” and they was all involved with the Brown Jackets and they was always fighting one another and everything. So what happened was the YMCA come in and was going to try to organize the community, and the lady called me up and asked me to go down to sit in on the meeting. So that’s how I got involved with the Y. And like I said, then we raised the money to get this building because we used to have to leave Garfield at 10:00 at night and we used to walk down to the East Liberty YMCA in order to have this gym and the swimming pool, and then we would come back at 12:00 at night. You can imagine 50 young black people walking from East Liberty YMCA up here to Garfield. The police started harassing us and everything, you know, “What’s going on, where y’all going?” And this and that. So I gotta brainstorm. And I said, “I got a big 4 foot by 8 foot plywood,” and we had it painted, “Police, we need your protection, not your harassment.” And I had it planted right at Aiken and Columbo. The next morning, my phone started jumping off the hook. The mayor called me, The chief of police, the news people, everybody was calling trying to find out what was going on, why we put the sign up. So this is how we started doing things. Because I explained to them what was going on. Dawn Allen used to be Dawn Allen Chevrolet at Aiken and Baum Blvd. They heard about what was going on. They donated 4 minivans to us. So we wouldn’t have to walk back and forth no more. When Martin Luther King died, we just started working for the Y that year, and that’s the year that they had the curfews and the National Guard came in and everything else. And I had a pass from The Mirror at that time that I was able to be out after curfew. But they had the National Guard, usually was stationed right down at the bottom of Aiken and Penn Ave, and you weren’t allowed out in the streets and nothing else. And it was angry time for black people in this community, you know, because Martin Luther King meant something to a lot of people in this area. I was down in Resurrection City when Martin Luther King gave his speech “I have a dream.” I took a group of kids from here because I felt that that was important for them to see this type of thing.
I went to University of Pittsburgh for one year, and then I dropped out because I was involved in starting the YMCA up here. I had a scholarship offer for UCLA when I come out of high school. But I was married at the time. I was married at 18. My emphasis was on my family and not going to school at that point.
I worked several places. I worked for Port Authority as a bus driver. I was the first director of the YMCA. We used to take kids on the summer. We take them to Washington, DC. We took them into Toronto, Canada. You know, we went to Philadelphia. We used to go somewhere every summer. Take about 30-35 kids.
I’m 69 years old right now. I’m happy to see my youngest two sons, Mike and Melvin, involved in the community, doing the things that they’re doing because that was my thing, cause everywhere I went, I always took them with me, so they was involved in much everything, all these softball, football and everything I played and everything else, they were there. So they get involved and I always told them, “You have children coming up in your community. Don’t look for nobody else to do it. You do it yourself. You create things, keep things going for your community, cause this is yours and then they come all meet the kids behind them. They’ll get involved and they’ll want to keep things going.” My message to young people today would be look back and see what the history is, because a lot of people gave their lives and sacrifices for you to have what you have today. If you don’t do nothing but save one life, do something, help somebody, somewhere down the line, help them get themselves together. The more you learn from the past, it helps you in the future.