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Interviewee: Jack Preiss November 19, 2014 Michelle Lanier: Today is Wednesday, November 19, 2014. This is Michelle Lanier interviewing Jack Preiss in his home in Durham, North Carolina. Do I have your permission to audio record this interview? Jack Preiss: Yes.

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Michelle Lanier: So, Mr. Preiss, would you share with me your beginnings here in Durham? Talk to me about what brought you here to Durham. Jack Preiss: Well, the initial event that brought me to Durham was my appointment to Duke, and I came down here in 1959, and my appointment was initially a dual appointment in sociology and in the Department of Psychiatry in the medical school where I was hired in that dual capacity to, obviously, deal with sociology, but also to help the medical school to orient their medical student classes with some of the issues that students faced then and still do, actually, in working with people from different cultures. And since I’d had some work in group dynamics in my own previous experience, I was half time in those two departments and working particularly in the medical school, implementing medical training with cultural training so that students would be able to deal constructively with their relationships with patients who they were learning to, their medical work—put it that way—with people from cultures that they didn't really have any contact with, most of them. They were mostly northern students from major cities and states outside the south, so that they needed to deal with the patients that were basically another society. So that was a learning experience for them and also for me, trying to make that transition for them a productive one, so that their clinical work and their training would be helpful to them, since they would be dealing with folks who were not only medically a problem, but also culturally a problem. So that's how I came to get to Duke. I was in that capacity for about, oh, I would say, 8 or 10 years and, of course, my other relationship was with the community here at Duke, which was basically, well, I'd say a completely segregated society. And Duke itself was, was segregated and certainly one of the problems initially was to try to rectify that situation. And some of us were coming down from other areas than the South, from the Midwest, from New England, and from other parts of the country. It was more like a modest invasion, you might say, of the Duke faculty, which had basically restricted, not by law, but simply by divisions of geography and culture from the larger society, ‘cause Duke in those days was a small institution, relatively a young institution essentially, and it was Trinity College initially, which is stuff I found out about when I got here, basically. So I was living in a society which was segregated and was functionally a significant impact on my family life and my other social activities, so it was a, rather a impactful introduction to the new civilization essentially that I was in. So in adapting to that my family, my wife and I particularly, became interested in the Civil Rights Movement generally and more specifically how to bring that into focus for this particular community. And in some ways it was a kind of a harsh introduction. I particularly remember the first year I was here, I was going to teach summer school just to implement, basically, my own income, and so I got a job teaching at what was then North Carolina Central College. And I had a summer school class in sociology, introductory sociology, and in those days, and I think it probably still is the case, public school teachers have to take courses from time to time to certify, basically, improve their own particular qualifications to be teachers, and so many of them in the summer time took courses where they could get them. And the course that I had at North Carolina Central was one of those courses where people could get credit for taking the course and presumably that would enhance their standing and enable them to keep their jobs essentially or to advance to a better job. Well, that was a rather stark introduction to the state of public education and, I guess, education generally in the South, assuming you can extrapolate from my experience what was happening all over, all over the South. So my experience in that class brought me up pretty sharply to the differences in what black people—in those days we called them “Negroes,” were doing and how they were functioning on what was, at least as far as the Supreme Court was concerned at that time, “Separate but equal.” So what I found out was that the students who took the course—I think must have had about 12 students, not all of them were black, but the majority were, and, to make a long story short, I found out that at least half a dozen of these students were not in a position from their own experience to take a course like I was trying to give, which was basically reading basic textbook and having the students write short papers on their reactions to what they were reading and our discussions in class. And, as I say, what I found out in the long run, which was pretty long because even though the course chronologically was not that long, but it was a long for me, and I think for them a pretty heart-wrenching experience, because I found out that three of the, that I remember pretty well, three of the students were simply unable to write any kind of a coherent short paper about anything that they had read. And the fact that these people were teachers—they weren't just folks who were from the community who might be doing other kinds of jobs where their capacity to do coherent writing was important. These were the people who were teaching black children education, and it put me in a kind of a dilemma because I knew these students were depending on the course to advance themselves and to qualify themselves for their job, and I could not, in these several cases, without prostituting my own sense of what was acceptable work in a course I was giving, put me in a pretty grave dilemma. And I wound up wrestling with it. I talked with my wife about it and maybe one or two other people and I simply said that I had to draw the line somewhere. I couldn't, because of the difficulties that they were in, the students were in, I simply couldn't pass two of these people who essentially could not write coherent sentences, you might say, in some sense of a paragraph. And I had to fail them. So I wasn't dealing here with simply what I read about the South or what segregation was or, you know, that it was essentially bad for, not only for the people that were subject to it, but for the country as a whole. I had concrete evidence of how bad the system was and that separate but equal was simply not true. And I had evidence to show it. It wasn't what I was reading in the papers, you know, or other people had made these comments about the fact that this kind of decision was simply false; I had my own evidence of it. And, if I needed any, you might say, push to try to do something about it… (Phone rings) Jack Preiss: Well, I guess I made that point pretty clear.

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Michelle Lanier: I have a follow up to that, if you don't mind. I find it interesting that based on your experience with the two students, that that helped to inspire you to get more involved. Some people would and have used examples like that to argue innate inferiority and therefore inequality between the races. You used the experience to become more critical of the systems themselves. Can you talk a little bit more about that, because some people would have taken those experiences in a completely different direction. Jack Preiss: Well, I think anybody could take it in a different direction who simply didn’t understand what the situation was. You can, if that's the kind of evidence that you would use to, or anybody would use to say that it shows the inferiority of the people who couldn't do the work, it just shows that anyone with that point of view simply doesn't understand what we're talking about. You'd have to be walled off in some kind of stockade where you assume that these people were different than ones who were capable of doing the work and ones that weren't, that it was a function of genetics or that was experientially ridiculous. Anybody who takes that point of view, would be really no point in arguing with them about it because they don't understand, basically, what they are talking about, and there would be no evidence in that experience to indicate some fundamental biological disparity of the two. So I usually write that off as ignorance. Michelle Lanier: Would you talk a little bit more about what happened next in terms of you getting more involved with civil rights? Jack Preiss: Well, I think that I was already going in that direction; this just amplified the need to do something. It was not something that said, “Oh, yeah, now that I've had this experience, I’m going to do this and this. I was already on the way to doing it and had intended to. I was just more surprised that I got such good evidence of the faults of the system with this experience that these folks had been simply deprived of, in their case was a reasonable upbringing and experience in their own communities and education, that they simply didn't have the opportunity to gain the information necessary to do their job. And the job that they were doing was simply in another world, essentially. You could see the two worlds clashing in the sense that one was for black people, negroes as I said we used to call them. We don't use that term much anymore, but, yeah, it was the two societies and there was the evidence that that's how it was, and that the, the dominant society, the white society, basically, which is still with us, by the way, was able to exploit that and to keep the resources that separate but equal would require, if you wanted to use it in the judicial sense, that you should spend as much money per person on all the citizens, even though you didn't have to associate with them if you didn't want to. But the oppressive nature of the thing was, I guess, the thing that really makes the difference. Two groups of people can live side by side, hopefully, that would be the way most people would like to live, even though we're different, culturally and background, that that's no reason to be oppositional. So it simply brings out the fact that separate but equal was a figment of the imagination in this case and was simply used to keep one system up and the other system down.

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Michelle Lanier: What year did you move to Durham? Jack Preiss: '59. Michelle Lanier: And what year did this happen where you started teaching at North Carolina Central? Jack Preiss: That summer—the summer I got here.

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Michelle Lanier: 1959. Jack Preiss: Yeah. Michelle Lanier: Can you think back. I imagine it looked extraordinarily different in Durham in '59 than it does in 2014. Jack Preiss: Like everywhere, the South changed, Durham changed. Every part of the country's changed a lot for a whole variety of ways. So what we had then was simply a...tobacco was the, the king of economic enterprises and also the fabric industry was very prominent. You know, a lot of people don't realize that we had a lot of cloth manufacturing which came down from New England all over the South, North Carolina in particular. Some cities, where Cannon Mills developed in Salisbury. But Durham had its own cloth manufacturing and stocking manufacturing in lots of the factories, so tobacco was sort of the dominant. In fact, the last vestige was just demolished a couple of months ago, was the tobacco warehouse down on Foster Street, as the last really significant building that survived the 50 years that I've lived here. So that's finally gone and that's a whole ‘nother story of interest, but we can't go into everything because we'd be here forever. As I said, I don't want to get into sort of a chronological bind where I...I think starting off with what you, what we've just talked about was probably a good thing to set the tone of the place, at least for me and my family. So I think, probably that’s…unless you've got some other questions about it.

00:19:23.240 - 00:20:01.140

Michelle Lanier: I'm definitely interested in going into more detail with you about your and your wife's work around integration and desegregation. Would that be a good place to go next for you? Jack Preiss: I'll go wherever you want to go. Michelle Lanier: Ok, great. Help me, and I know we are not going to do a timeline, but when you started becoming, you and your wife started becoming really active with integration work, was it very much after coming to Durham? Were you here for a little while before you started doing that kind of work? Jack Preiss: We started right away. As I say, the first year we were here, we first, the main job was, well, we worked in the Civil Rights Movement in a general way as well as in a local way. I was involved with SNCC and the whole panorama of stuff, the Mississippi summer. I helped train the people at Oxford, Ohio, when the kids from the North came down and we had, when SNCC came in to try to train the college students from Michigan and elsewhere to learn how to deal with what they were going to experience in the South, I was on a staff with Bob Moses and others to help, to help them understand what they were getting into, and I say that's a whole other story. But keeping it more local, there were a bunch of us who came in, I think, in the early 60s; this was right after we got here really. We were interested in doing something about the segregation at Duke so we began having meetings, we got the academic council and the undergraduate faculty council and the staff and began to bring up these questions about Duke, you know, not admitting black students. And that was the policy. Edens was the president then, and the board of trustees simply said, “Well, that's where we are at this point. We're not admitting any black students to undergraduate, graduate courses,” and students, several black aspirants had written to Duke, said they wanted to apply to get in here and were just told politely that it was the policy of the university not to, not to have black students. Didn't mention it directly. We had certain admission policies. It was sort of skirted around the blunt statement that, well, “We just don't permit black students to get in here.” But Duke was, Duke hospital was, had black patients, but they were all treated as a separate category. There were black waiting rooms and black bathrooms. Duke, (laughs) as I always said on many occasions, one of the things you noticed about Duke Hospital was the number of bathrooms that it had. There were white and black bathrooms for visitors for patients, for faculty, for staff. So there were different categories where you were welcome and others where you were not. And it was sort of a wry joke to point that out, actually. Well, anyway, several of us began to agitate to have the board of trustees change the policy, and that was the basic goal, and we finally got enough people to say that the undergraduate council was interested and we got, we didn't have total agreement by any means because there was a feeling that Duke is a private university, it was not covered by the Civil Rights Act that it, the state universities, well, maybe that was right, but Duke was a private university it wasn't covered by those requirements that you not be discriminatory by race. So the racial issue just began to be on the national and state and other public areas where it became really an issue, particularly in education. And that was really the reflex of what I experienced in the summer school, was that if you don't change the educational structure, then you can't make any strong inroads on segregation. So the educational institutions had to be up front about, about accepting people from whatever racial background that they came. So we were sort of the local arm of that, I think, general move, that we had to do something about that initially before we could do anything else. Of course, Duke had in other ways, you know, travel. There were, the bus stations, there were black entries and white entries and seating areas and so on. In these public places there was segregated, which was true all over the South. You just had dual facilities for everything, for hotels, for eating places, and whatnot, and this all had to be seen in the context of the entire cultural system. But being in education was our job, that was where we felt we could make the most impact was by changing the situation with regard to the schools. And, of course, in public education we had the same division. We had white schools and black schools, white high schools and black high schools.

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Michelle Lanier: I have a question about what agitation looked like. You said there were a group of you who were starting to agitate for integration at that time at Duke. Today agitation might involve a lot of emails and a lot of, maybe some social networking things. What did agitation look like in the early ‘60s? Jack Preiss: Well it was, we were just, people who were interested in a certain issue, whether it was segregation or whatever, would get together and say, “Well, as a group we decided we are going to do something about a particular situation,” and we would contact organizations that were interested in or had a relationship to the issue that we were interested in. In this case we had the faculty organizations that existed at Duke. Even though they were all white, they were still, undergraduate faculty council and several others that were, faculty could at least to a limited extent at that time, make their voices heard. You know it's a question of always, there's always board of trustees and then there's the people that did the work, the faculty are always kind of sparring with one another on lots of questions. In this case, it was the segregation policy that we were, those of us who wanted to make changes decided that we would try to make a push for it and get the faculty to put some pressure on the board of trustees who made the policy to make the change. It was as simple as that. So we had meetings, we got together, we had a group who drew up, just among ourselves, like any organization would do, to decide what did we want? What we wanted, number one, to desegregate the student body and also to desegregate the faculty, as well, to make it a policy for departments and other organizations within the university to have more representation of minorities on their boards and on their policy making. But we focused mostly on the students because that was the critical area that we felt was, the prime objective was to desegregate the student body. And that's an issue that I think is still up front. You know, we still have cases about that where if you make special dispensations for...the equality issue became an issue on both sides. Would you, would the policy mean that to get a certain number of black students in or a certain percentage, it got down to figures, you know, how many black students or how many Asian students was later on, you know, it was focusing on blacks then, but there were still other minorities. There are Asian minorities, which weren't in the picture then because there were too few of those and there was no sense of, that that was equally important. We just focused on the black system because that was mainly black/white that was the issue. You didn't want to disperse your interest and say, “Well, we're interested in Asian students too,” because it would have dissipated the thrust of the thing. We had to focus on one particular area and it was, it was just overwhelmingly black that was the issue, even though the black population in Durham, for example, exceeded the white population in numbers. So that got us keeping our eye on the ball and, again, a lot of this story is already in the Rubenstein Collection at Duke. I gave interviews, a lot of the papers that we did, no point going into all that. Anyone that wants to look it up. Lynn knows about that, all that stuff. So you can, you can get the step by step, the documents are there, and so on. What I'm telling you is simply my own little way of expressing what I was part of the group that was doing it. We drew up the resolutions. Michelle Lanier: I understand that there is some documentation of this group. Could you give me a sense of about how large this group was? Jack Preiss: Well, it was, it wasn't a sharp definition, since it wasn't a group that had, you know, a lot of specifics—by-laws. It was just the people who wanted to push it and we had others that were trailing with us on some things. It was sort of a semi-dispersed group. We didn't put it in a technological basis, really. You didn't do that in those days. That was 50 years ago.

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Michelle Lanier: Do you still run into any of those folks? Jack Preiss: Well, not many of them are left. Most of ‘em are dead. (laughs) I'm one of the, I don't know, …left of me, but, you know, that's the way a lot of things get done. It's a little feathery around the edges, you know it's not a sharp…sometimes it just takes one or two people to do something. As Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, used to say, “It just takes one person to make a difference in a lot of situations.” In our case it wasn't just one person, but it wasn't a lot, and Duke was desegregated. In fact, it happened, I guess, rather quickly, when you come to think of it. It was in 1961 that we really got going on this, and then in 1963 we got our first give black students, and two of them were local, whose parents I knew and worked with in the black community. And, but, several of the othe,r three, I think, came from more or less middle-class families. More or less people like yourself, if I could draw the comparison. They were not the kinds of students that I was getting from, in my class that I had to, with that summer school class. It was from black students that at least had a fighting chance in terms of their background of being able to do the work. You had to get students, if you wanted to desegregate an organization, who could do the work that the organization required. And it was not just getting a bunch of students in by color. It was whether they could in any way, it was a big risk for them. Michelle Lanier: Did your SNCC identity, did your SNCC work overlap with your Duke work? Jack Preiss: Yeah, because we were doing both things. We had, well, it was a regular relationship with SNCC. How to put it. We were part of the, the whole SNCC enterprise and others who were working in it like John Lewis, who you certainly know or know of, and he comes down here every once in a while. I knew John when he was a student. But what we did, we had, just to give you an example, we had a relationship where I raised money to buy cars. See the, SNCC needed to get around down South and transportation. And I bought up cars locally, Cheveys and Fords that needed some attention, and I got them ready. I raised some money in the faculty for this purpose and we bought up some cars and got ‘em in good shape. I had a mechanic that I knew here who would take care of my car, I had an English car, and he was a strict segregationist, but great guy. I liked him in every other conceivable way, but he was just, that's who he was. It wasn't his fault really. It was just the way he was. The way he was brought up. He wasn't a bad, he was a great guy. Excellent mechanic. These cars that I got, I gave them to him to get into good shape and I told him that I was, we raised the money to sell these cars to students coming to Duke who were not well off, but who needed cars. So he thought he was fixing these cars for these white, needy students. But what I did with the cars was to make them available to SNCC to pick up and take down to Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi to do their work. So that was, so SNCC used to, they had some places up in Massachusetts where they sent workers who were really taking a beating with, with electric rods and beatings and everything and they were just running dry, and so they'd come up periodically to go North and take some rest up there, recouping. So there was sort of a traffic, and they would stop here on their way up and we would put them up right in this room. I've had as many as probably 15 SNCC workers sleeping here over night. We fed them and gave them some food to take on. It would take them about two days to get up there from Georgia and Alabama. And on the way back, if we had any cars, they'd pick the cars up, take them back down South. So we had this kind of a system going and so they'd come in—there was always no calling up, and saying, “Well, we'll be there.” They would just show up because they didn't have schedules or times. You went where you went and so they would come here sometimes in the middle of the night. They'd be at the door. We weren't able to, we didn't have IPhones and cell phones in those days or even telephone calls. They just, they knew where to come because of experience and they just arrived and we'd take care of them. So, well that's how it was in those days. That's 50 years ago. If you want to know how we did these things, that's how we did them.

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Michelle Lanier: And would they be in integrated groups? The SNCC workers? Were they often... Jack Preiss: They were all black, a couple of whites. In fact, a couple of them. Bob Zellner, I don't know if you ever heard of his name. He was a white guy. He's up in Wilson now. He came through here, gave a talk down at the library, and I hadn't seen him in, God, I don't know, 40 years. So reminds me, I got to get back in touch with him. Get together and reminisce, I guess. Anyway. Michelle Lanier: What did your neighbors think of this? Did anyone ever say anything? Jack Preiss: The neighbors...it didn't have anything to do with the neighbors really. I mean, they really didn't have any...I think some of them knew, the neighbors—the guy who lived on the corner of this street, Leech—he was one of the guys who felt Duke was a private university and wasn't really subject to these changes. I mean, we didn't see eye to eye obviously, but it was not a very confrontational kind of thing. It was just differences of how he saw it, how we saw it. I didn't find any faculty opposition. There were just people who didn't want to do it, didn't want to make changes, but they didn't come out and be confrontational about it. They just didn't cooperate in those cases. So you had to kind of, you know, not spend a lot of time back and forthing with people who weren't interested. You went ahead and did what you tried to do. And, so you became politically more sophisticated about how you had to do things in the South. You had to learn pretty quickly about, you know, there were some people who were really tough nuts, and we had the Klan, and we had lots of stories about that, but (inaudible) Klan members, one of them who became, did a 180 on his point of view, and became a supporter of what we were doing when he started out as a Klan leader of the union of tradespeople at Duke; he was the head of the Klan in the local area and he was no friend of mine in that sense (laughs) although he, but that's a whole other story. There's a lot of record of that in various places that Lynn knows about and she can get information about.

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Michelle Lanier: Did you have personal conversations with this gentleman? Jack Preiss: Oh yes, sure, later on, he became one of my biggest supporters. I had him into class to tell what it was that he learned about the Klan and I brought a lot of these people into my courses because I felt it was a good idea to have students, you know, meet the people who were doing things and not just reading about stuff, you know, from the books. So I was, I had some advantage, actually, in what I was doing in my courses that I was involved in a lot of these issues that I was teaching about. So... Michelle Lanier: What was his name? Jack Preiss: Well, the whole thing. I'll give you the information about it. I think that whole area of work is well documented and I'll give you the material about it. If you want to get into some other things we can do with this interview, that you can see, I think what I'm saying, all the overlap here, it gets kind of repetitive. I think one of the things you can do if you want get more of a handle on not only what I was doing, but what other people were doing at other events, you've got to go into the story yourself, at least as it's already there, and when we did...you know, last year was the 50^(th) year the integration of the university. You were here then, so I was on a lot of panels and stuff and I worked with Ben Reese over at what's called Institutional, wait, what's the name of it? It's disguised, it's called Institutional, I forget the name that's used for it, but his office has got about five or six people in it. You know what I'm talking about? You know those people over there. Ben's set-up.

00:44:35.830 - 00:45:36.710

Michelle Lanier: Yes, and I can imagine last year, with it being the 50^(th) anniversary of integration, that you were on so many different programs. Jack Preiss: And they recorded all this stuff. Michelle Lanier: Yes, and so what we're wanting to do with this one as we're starting out is to make sure, certainly not to be redundant with other things that you've done, just to keep it very personal, about your personal experiences with Durham. And what's interesting is so much of your personal life has ended up being impactful on an institutional and communal level. So I think what we could do is to, so 1963, we talked a little bit about that time period for you. It wasn't but two years later you were on the city council, if I'm correct. Would you share a little bit about that, about your time? What inspired you to actually run for city council? Jack Preiss: Well, I felt that city council has a lot to do with, obviously, local pubic policy, and I'm a believer that eventually, as Tip O'Neill used to say, “All politics is local,” because you got all the laws—federal, state laws, but implementation and how you translate the laws that are national or statewide, which covers a lot of territory, that it all comes down to what you do in a particular community that really, that's where the rubber meets the road. And so I felt and still do that whoever gets on the city council or the county commissioners or any local…board of education, that those are the decisions that affect people directly. Because as it comes down from one level to the other, it gets modified and there's legal issues so that the votes that the city council takes, for example, and the commissioners, the county commissioners take, that decides where the efforts gonna be or not be and where the money is—that’s the critical point, where's there's money involved. So I felt that being on the city council was the most important role that I could fill and still do my work at Duke. So that's where I was making my living. I wasn't making any money doing any of this other stuff. It was all because I felt it had to be done. I just used my job at Duke to free me up from financial constraints. So I didn't really do as much in my field, when you come to think about it, that I had to divide my time and energy. I could have just become a regular, just an academic who didn't have much to do with what was going on outside the walls of the school. You know, sort of a mental barrier. A lot of my colleagues would do that. They just...which was all right. I mean, you make your choice. And so I didn't do as much in my research on—the areas I was interested in was political theory with social theory and group dynamics that I’d worked on earlier. But I got more and more into the public area. So getting on the city council was my real, only, first attempt at elective office, so I became partly a politician, which I think is not as it's now thought of, you know, a negative. A politician is sort of intrinsically a bad guy, a bad person. I felt that, I still feel that politics is really the core of social organization, as the Greeks always have said. You know, in Greece, politics was the primary work of the citizen. And that's the way I've always looked at it, so running for the city council was a big jump for me because, people, by the time I ran for the council in '65, which I'd only been here for four or five years, so I lived here…so why would anybody vote for me who was living here all their lives or their family’s, you know. But politics in Durham is interesting because the black population, the black politicians in Durham were very sophisticated, and the Durham Committee, it was called the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs at that point, and it was, it was run basically by the people who were in the burials. Because black people had to be buried by blacks in black places, so black funeral directors were often, throughout the South, important politicians, because they had black community in their grasp. Just like black insurance, Mutual Life Insurance Company was the biggest black-owned company in the United States. So we had a rather interesting black politic entity. These guys were sophisticated. Ellis Jones was the, was the funeral director. The Jones Company still has funeral directors in Durham, as you may know. And his father, the current head guy's father, maybe his grandsons are running it now, probably are. Ellis Jones, I got to know him and the black community was always the central political group that did decide among white candidates who they were going to support. They had a minority role, politically, so they were courted by the white politicians, some of them anyway, to get support if they were running against another white candidate, who were the blacks going to support? There were two white candidates running, so the black politicians got that figured out pretty quick. And the black leadership, which was the black bank, John Wheeler—I’m sure you've heard of him—and his group were sophisticated, they were well to do, they made quite a bit of money, but they understood where the blacks were in terms of politics, and so I got involved with...Ellis Jones became my mentor. He showed me how politics was run in Durham. We had, there was one black on the city council, sort of as a token representative. (inaudible) It was okay to have one black on there, and there was one woman on there, Mrs. Everett. One black and one woman; that satisfied the (inaudible). The rest of them were good old boys of one sort of another. And the Hills and other important Durham families, you know, ran the city. And with these token representatives. So I, I, there was a white faculty member at Duke who was on it from time to time. Rarely were any Duke people active in politics at the electoral level. I mean, they were on various committees, maybe, but except for this one guy who was on it I think one term. Anyway, I told Ellis Jones, I said I was interested in running for the city council because I thought we needed better representation of whites and educators, and he backed me. He got me to appear before the Durham Committee on, what did I say it was called, on Negro Affairs...because they were very suspicious if any white person would really stand up to the issues. They felt that whites were always trying to be sympathetic to the black community, but more on the basis of keeping it in its place and be comfortable just being on the council and following along sort of. For some, you know they'd get some kind of distributive benefits from it, some support for some black social organizations and such, but not any real power to do anything. So I, I felt that we had to change that. So Ellis Jones, after testing me out in a lot of ways—I used to go down to his office and we'd talk about local issues and I think he got eventually to feel that I was genuine in the sense that I was out to do something and not to just be a token on the board. So I went to the committee. They asked me a lot of direct questions and I made commitments about what I was going to do. Of course, civil rights was then nationally an issue by that time, so it had some far reaching sense of it, so. I got to know a lot of the leadership and I'd say that some of them, and I can understand it, you know, not quite sure of whether that was a good move to back me because they were used to backing the other white candidates who they had these relationships with. But I was a newcomer at the ball game and out to do something, at least I thought I might. So the paper, the newspaper, was not too keen on my running and it was run by…the group that owned the paper, were, you know, they didn't want to disturb the current scene. They were big supporters of tobacco. Economically, we had big tobacco business here. When we first came to Durham it was one of the big tobacco markets in the South for the type of tobacco that we raised here. And so I remember the trucks lining up all through downtown for the auctions. And I went to a lot of them, and it was an interesting social happening, quite a phenomenon in itself. But I got to know what Durham was like and where the different power elements were. That's what I learned in the first few years. So I got elected to the city council and so then it was up to me to come through on some of my, wouldn't say promises, but things I said I would try to do. And I was, I brought up a lot of issues. Wense Grabarek was the mayor then. He was, I don't know if you know...have you run into his name at all? Yeah. He was an accountant. Very proud of himself, that he was a great organizer and wore a white carnation in his buttonhole. Strange man. And, but he was trying to run the council from the top down. And he had most of the council members at that time, they were, I think we had nine on the council at that time, the size of it. And everybody was in his pocket except me and he had legislation that he wanted to do. This was the time of setting up all kinds of remedial programs that the feds had, you know, WPA and offshoots of that, and he wanted certain things done, a lot of which ran through the black community to their disadvantage, tearing down buildings and so on. And I wasn't going along on some of it, so he and I did not have a lot of positive relationships. So I brought up all kinds of issues, like about the cemeteries. I just mention that as an example of what, what I did on the council, that all public places essentially had to be desegregated over time. So by 1965 that was well under way, but there was also a lot of resistance in the white communities like Durham about changing patterns. Of course, cemeteries are very important to lots of people and lots of groups, black community included. So Maplewood cemetery is a, is a city, a public cemetery, so, but up to the time that I got on the council it was strictly a white burial place and I, one of the pieces of legislation that I proposed on the city council was to desegregate Maplewood Cemetery. Well, that got me more negative flak than anything else I ever brought up on the city council, was the thought to white people who were, had relatives buried there, that black people were going to be lying in graves next to theirs. And that was something it turned out that a lot of people simply found abhorrent because it was so permanent, you know that they would have to...it was like lying in the same bed. It's lying in bed in a grave, that's the same as going to bed with them... interracial marriage. So I got telephone calls and threats to my children and it was calamitous. It set off this wave of outrage that was, but on legal grounds there was nothing that could be done about it. We had to desegregate the cemeteries, as we did the parks and everything else. I just point that out as an example of where you touched the nerve of certain groups, that they simply were so outraged, they would do almost anything. You know you get surprised when you read now about some of these horrors that are happening, of people being beheaded. It just shows you how primitive we are as human beings. With all our technology, if you look at that side of it, how brilliant and accepting we are, but when you get down to the real gut things for some people, I mean, when it's around religion or race, these things are still there. We've not overcome them. And I think the last couple of years has illustrated how much religious beliefs, these tribal—we’re still tribal societies. With all our technological advances, our medical advances, but when you cut under that, you find these raw belief systems, which is tribal in this country, just like, we like to contrast it between African societies...we're now seeing ebola and we're seeing everything you see on the news now even, where the commentators say, before they show you something, we feel we have to tell people they may see things that are upsetting to them. Well, why say that? I mean, we're seeing that all the time. You know, it's like you have to protect them from seeing a dead body, for example. It's ridiculous.

00:45:36.710 - 01:03:16.640

TO HERE Michelle Lanier: I have a question for you. I've so enjoyed… Jack Preiss: Is this the kind of stuff? Michelle Lanier: It's perfect. I've so enjoyed hearing you talk about that journey into city council and I’ve had a chance to work with the Durham Committee myself and really fascinated...I would love to hear…I don't know much about Ellis Jones, and I would just—your personal experience with Ellis. Seems like, you said he mentored you. Could you talk a little bit about him and ways in which you interacted and your relationship?

01:03:40.000 - 01:14:36.240

Jack Preiss: Well, sometimes in the afternoons, I made a regular practice of it, I went down to his office, down at the funeral home on Dowd Street, and we just got to know each other then. He would tell me about how the system worked and I would tell him about what I thought we could do, you know, both in the city as a whole or on the council, on certain issues. He introduced me to certain people who, there was a whole network of informers that he had. A couple of guys who called him, judge—I forget the guy’s name—this guy called him up every afternoon, a white guy, old timer, and he'd give Ellis, I'd be in the office a lot of times, but he'd call him up and he'd tell him what was going on in the white community, in the white political community. So Ellis had all these feelers and informants out there who were clueing him in as to what the power structure was doing. And Ellis realized that he was sort of the, the middle guy, the committee was the middle person through which political clout could be exercised. Ellis liked being in that position. He made good use of it. So when I went down there and we talked about the scene and where we might want to go, and I think eventually he saw me as, I think, what he determined was the genuine article, that I was in it just to do the right thing and do things that the couldn't do as a black. So I became his sort of entry point into breaking down the system on the city council, which was pretty tight. All he could do was get some, whoever won, if he made the right choice as to who to back in the elections of the white community, he would get some payoff. But he just introduced me to all the different players, the oldtimers and the Hills and the Carters and the Everetts...Robinson Everett, the son of Kathrine Everett, she was on the council. And she was what you would call a moderate person. She wasn't a segregationist like others were, but she had her limits. But Ellis and I just got to be political cronies in that sense, I guess you can say, and as I learned more, I could tell him what I thought was a good way to go on a certain issue, for example. And we got to be sort of, you know, not equal in the sense that he was a much better place to be politically potent than I was, but we had a similarity of focus and I think we respected each other's integrity on that and….So there was another one, Nathaniel White, the father of Nat White, who participated, was one of the first five students [to integrate Duke] actually. But his father was just a great guy. Nat White ran a printing company down on Pettigrew Street, one of the early black businesses. I just thought the world of him. He was always open to another viewpoint on how to do things. He was not set in his ways and that was unusual for, I think, a black businessman, politician and he and I talked a lot about what we should be shooting for. And I’ve always said, and I shared some of these views with him, that I think eventually we wanted to get rid of, maybe that's not quite the way to put it...we wanted to get to a time when it would be unnecessary to have black institutions like black colleges and black churches, that if we wanted to get integration, we would simply have colleges that taught whatever they needed to teach, but they wouldn't be seen as black schools. Because we still have those. But ultimately if we are going to make a difference, then those wouldn't exist. Every school would be just a school for everybody. Of course we haven't gotten anywhere near that yet, but he and I used to talk about that kind of future. Whereas now I think you find still a lot of people who still want to focus on, say, black colleges. Save the black colleges. Why? There's no need to have a college just by identifying by its color. But what it teaches, there should be just as many black students as white students, proportionately, at every college. How close are we to that? Nowhere close. But Nat White and I used to talk about that sort of thing back in the ‘60s. I'd say, “Well, here's my idea.” He'd say, “You really think that's a possibility?” He was open to the idea, and like black churches--because Durham is a hugely church town. We have more churches in this town per capita than any other place I can even imagine when you consider storefront churches and others like it. There's a church on every corner practically. And, of course, that gets us over to the issues, the social issues where the black churches are so conservative on social issues like abortion and even on interracial marriage. Blacks, a lot of black churches don't like that. And they want to preserve the black church. Well, you know, what does that reflect on Christianity? What's that got to do with what religion you have? When you interplay the social issues with the church, whether it's the Catholic church or the Protestant churches, black and white churches, you run into the same issues of what's ok, what is marriage? We’re just battling that out already. It all has its confluence of problems that reflect racial or other kinds of differences. Michelle Lanier: So you were on the city council '65-'69. One term. Did you seek re-election? Jack Preiss: Yeah, I ran again, but by that time a lot of people in the city knew where I was, so I paid the price for that. Even though the blacks committee, political committee supported me, there was still a lot of opposition in the white community, certainly didn't want me back on the council. So they elected Wade Cavin, who ran a general, well, it was kind of business, it was a combination of services like printing and equipment and so on. It was an equipment business and he was, Wade was an okay guy, but he really didn't have much of a handle on how to deal with these kinds of issues, which is exactly what they wanted, basically, so I lost the election. Would have been a miracle if I had won it. Of course, the black, the white unions, we had, we had unions in the tobacco factories then. Labor unions were pretty strong in Durham at that time. The Hobbys, I don't know if you have heard of them—Wilbur Hobby and his family, his brothers. Wilbur Hobby ran for governor, actually, one year in the 1960s, early 70s, and I had the support of them, but the movement was too strong to get me out of the office, so I lost the election. Which is ok. I had four years in there and I was able to move certain things forward, and I think I did a fair amount of things that I tried to get though and did get through. And things were getting, certainly by the time Duke had been desegregated, it wasn't integrated, which I made a point of saying. Desegregation is the first step, but that doesn't mean you’ve got an integrated community. You’ve simply opened the door, essentially, and I still think that's partly the case now. Michelle Lanier: Interesting time period between when you talk about, when you start thinking about desegration, integration at Duke, '61-'63 and then running on the, for the city council '65 and then coming off in '69. I mean, if you look at '61 to '69 you see assassination of JFK, you see assassination of Martin Luther King. Can you remember some of the local responses to... I mean, just being here, I heard some people talk about for instance, after King was assassinated, what it felt like in Durham. Do you have memory of that? Were you in the area?

01:15:08.780 - 01:18:19.320

Jack Preiss: Oh yeah, we were very active. We were trying to unionize Duke, labor union in the hospital and also on the campus. We did get the unions established and we had the big sit-in on, well, Lynn's got all that stuff that I gave her about...you know we had 1500 students sitting out on the quad and all the publicity that we got from that and the unions got involved with it. I say, that is stuff that has already been recorded and I gave her the stuff that I had on the, you know, the people who came down, Bill Cosby and all the rest who popped in here from time to time. And, yeah, that's all documented and no need to go into it. Michelle Lanier: We can go, fast forward to, you mentioned something to me, even before we started recording about some of your ongoing commitments that are happening even now, your support of Student Action with Farmworkers. Jack Preiss: Well, that spins off into my wife's work. She became by virtue of all the stuff she's done, a key figure nationally in that. I think her collection, which I got into the Duke library and which is now digitized, there's 40 of their big boxes of her stuff in there that's been used already by a lot of interested people and farmworkers. Although she and I, you know, were doing different things, I in the housing and she in the farmworkers, they were closely related in terms of their objectives. She was interested in farmworkers, mostly of whom are Latino, although she worked with me a lot in the civil rights before she got into that. She started that in '73. So our work was really family work and two scales. And so I picked up the organization Triangle Friends of the United Farm Workers, which was a relationship with the national Cesar Chavez's movement in La Paz in California. That's where she started with it and then when FLOC came along and Baldemar Velasquez did the pickle boycott, was the big victory we got down here. But Joan was a key player in all of that. So our work is kind of intertwined in so many ways, and although the housing, the kinds of stuff that I built is not possible even now, because I'm still trying to see if there is a way to do a little of it, but, you know, housing for homeless people with disabilities, which is what I focus on now. But it's just hard to do, because of the lack of resources, but Im still working with some groups now, we're trying to keep that alive and the Triangle Friends of the Farmworkers has been reconstituted, and I have a fund that Joan's brother and I have basically financed to carry on work for young people, because Joan was very anxious to get young people involved in these issues, particularly in the Latino community, and so we set up this memorial fund that the National Farmworker Ministry operates now to help finance young people who want to get involved in farmworker labor issues that are still very much up front. So we...things have changed as time has gone on and the place where things are happening has shifted from here to there, but it's still, if you look at it overall, I think its the same battle that we're trying to do, whether it's low-income housing, whether its mental illness, whether its farmworker capacity, farmworkers, well, the whole immigration issue now is simply another phase of what we were doing early. The shift has been because the nature of the problem has shifted to different areas, like how do you still get a labor force to harvest the crops? It's still a problem. Farmers still need people in the fields to do the work. Just like the slaves did the work in the early times we were talking about. You have to make the leap if you want to understand what's going on the world in a sense, whatever field you’re in, whether it's farm relations or armaments or health, what you have to do, I think as I've thought about it over all the time and space that I've been in it for so long, is that anybody who is interested in having an impact on where, in this case, where the world is going, you have to decide what your objective is. There's no point, this is what I've learned in my life, I think, one of the things. There's no point in being generally for or against anything. You have to pick out something in the area in which you are interested or in which you are working and focus on how to get to that point. Whether I was building housing or Joan was working on specific situation of unionizing pickle pickers, ‘cause you have to have results. Nothing can happen unless you get a change, bring about an event or happening that makes a difference. You get what I am saying? Michelle Lanier: I do.

01:22:06.160 - 01:29:53.560

Jack Preiss: Whether it's building a building, my results is that when I was building housing for homeless people with disabilities, that was my population. Those were the people I was interested in. Still interested in. Can I do anything in housing to make a difference to these people? That's what I had to set my mind on and spend my energy on and what resources I've got. So I had to get these buildings built, and I built them. They're there. Some of them have got my name on them. So I know that I've made that much tangible difference. You have to have an outcome. If you're in a football game, either you win the game or you don't. Do you get what I'm saying? Michelle Lanier: I do. I hear you. I have two questions because I've kept you, but I have two questions that are directly in your line of thinking. So I want to talk about, I want to hear you talk about this building affordable housing and the housing piece, and then what I'd love to do is to wrap up, I hear you touching on almost a thread that weaves from these different points of activism and engagement. I 'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that, your inspiration. So why don't we just dig in a little deeper with the housing? What got you started even thinking about that? Jack Preiss: All right. When I was in college, I was in in the 1930s. I got interested because I was interested in politics then, even as a young person, liberal politics. Remember, my family was never politically oriented, but in school I just got into it, I guess. When I got tocollege, I took some courses in architecture, because I'm interested, it was about architecture, it wasn't being an architect. It was about buildings. And Franklin Roosevelt was in his first term, and he talked about one-third of the nation ill clothed, ill housed, and, whatwas the third one? ill educated, ill employed. It was one third of the nation was ill-housed. That stuck me. That's when I was 16 years old. And ever since then, I've had a thread of interest in housing. I've always been interested in and still am, in structural entities and architecture and from an aesthetic stand point as well as a practical one. And so I think that was the germination of, housing started, I wasn't thinking then about doing anything about it in a substantive way, I guess. That's I guess you can say where it started. And it came in and out of my life, I guess you can say sporadically, but it wasn't until I got down here and I could see the depredation of the black community in what it was living in, with the slumlords and everything, that I was drawn to it because of my early concern about it, and if I was going to do anything for the black community myself in a tangible way. So I got on the housing authority eventually. I was chairman of that housing authority for 15 years. And that's how I got involved with getting the money for it through HUD. So I began to see that I could build the housing if I got the right deals together. Because I wasn't a banker, I wasn't a financial...I had to learn all that stuff. And to educate bankers that they should do it. I was educating them, not them educating me. So that's how it evolved. It was kind of a, I said I, geez, I could do something about that on the Housing Authority. And then I formed my own nonprofit corporation and I built housing myself. Hired the architects, did the work, got to know how to do it, got to know how to deal with developers, became a developer myself, so it was partly teaching myself how to do it. So I built and they're there today. They're doing what they're supposed to do. That's why I say that you have to have, if you're going to stick with something, you have to have some results, either changing laws or building entities, whatever it is you want to build or getting unions, to keep yourself going, because you can't constantly lose out, you know. You have to have stamina to start with because these are areas that are hard to come by and hard to get anything done. But in my own case, I don't think I would have stuck with it that long if I couldn't have produced anything. You can produce ideas, you can write good philosophical text, and I wouldn't mind doing that, but I felt that given where I was and what needed to be done immediately, I had to get in the mix and do it, so I think that Joan had the same idea. She, she was, “Yeah, farmworkers are in terrible shape,” you know, and exploited and everything, so she got involved with the unionization, and the biggest victory that was had on that front was the, there were other ones. We had the Gallo ine was the first boycott that was done by on the west coast, and that got Joan going. And she had the same need to, in her field, in what she was doing that I did, to have an outcome. If you don't have an outcome that you feel has moved your objective along, you can't stay with it very long because it is too depressing, actually, and if you spend a lot of time, money on it if you have to, hopefully, you have to have an outcome in these very tough areas to achieve anything. Michelle Lanier: What has been, or maybe there's a network of things, what has been your inspiration to be so activist minded and in terms of how you committed your life work?

01:30:00.360 - 01:34:53.840

Jack Preiss: Well, because I think citizenship, which is another, I think what we have in this country in democracy...see democratis is a Greek word. The Greek notion of citizenship is that to be a citizen you have to have responsibility for the community. And if you read any Greek history, Athens…the Greek philosophers, it basically says it's a privilege to be a citizen. So the Greeks had slaves, you know, and defeated enemies and so on and they brought back to do work and so on. When it came to, to establishing policy or to fighting wars, that was resolved and restricted to citizens. Slaves or people who were not recognized citizens weren't allowed to be in the army or to fight for the country. But it was the obligation of every citizen to be available to do that, so that at one time, even in the United States, that was more or less the focus. And it was considered not just an obligation but a special status that a citizen had. Michelle Lanier: And how does this relate to you personally? Jack Preiss: Well, I feel that, since I was in the service, so I've done that, but I feel that that kind of service is not the main service that you can contribute, that you have to be a citizen every day. Like John Wheeler used to say about civil rights, you have to, every day, it's interesting, you can put it in the function of a day ‘cause a day has a beginning and an end. It's like light and the dark. You have to get the sunrise again, that you have to fight the battle every day—that’s what Wheeler used to say. Civil rights was just something that had to be ongoing. You don't just win it and forget about it. It's like the World Series, you win it, but it's over. All the big issues in life are never over. Fortunately, sometimes you have winners, you have good days, but around the corner there are bad days and if you have bad days, you can say, well, eventually you'll have some good ones. So it's an ongoing thing, and to be a citizen, which is what, that's how I define my political relationships, and I think it's true generally that to be a citizen is about the fundamental level of what people can be. Everybody can be a citizen, to an extent. What you do with it, then that becomes a personal matter. But we've held to the fact that you have to be a citizen to do certain things; we have hung onto that. The problem is we've made it very difficult for some people to be citizens, like black people. And so for black people to be good citizens, they have to learn a lot about what it is to be a citizen. It's sort of not automatic, you know. Because you you got a right to vote, doesn't make you a citizen. That gives you the opportunity to be one. And that's the way I look at it, that I happened to be born a citizen, so I didn't have to worry about becoming one, but I was there to say, “Well, what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with it?” So I can say, well, I'm just going to make a lot of money and raise my family and that's fine, that's commendable. People, some people don't want anything to do with politics. But in order to do that you have to have a political structure that enables you to be, to have a business and raise a good family. (laughs) Otherwise, it's chaos out there. Michelle Lanier: Thank you. Is there anything else that you would like to add about just living in Durham, being here?

01:34:54.020 - 01:35:18.910

Jack Preiss: Well, we've gotten off what you wanted. I don't know... Michelle Lanier: We've touched on a lot. We've touched on your work with housing, city council...just wanted to make sure if there's anything else you wanted to share? Jack Preiss: Well, that depends on what day you hit me, I guess. (laughs) Michelle Lanier: Well, someone who's listening to this interview, we started with your time in Durham. Where were you born? We didn't say that. Where were you born?

01:35:20.290 - 01:37:00.160

Jack Preiss: I was born in New York City. Michelle Lanier: And you were in the armed services, Air Force? Jack Preiss: Air Force and, I mean, those days, my early childhood, I don't think it, it had any impact. The way that I think about it now, I grew up without a father, basically. My mother married pretty young to a older guy and it didn't work out, so I was, my mother was divorced when I was about two. And she married again and that's, I was adopted by her second husband. I'm from German background. My biological father's name was Lederer, which in German means leather worker, and he was a pretty successful guy. He worked for one of the big chains. There was the A&P store and (alarm can be heard in the background through the next couple of segments) Usually they stop by this time. Michelle Lanier: You were describing your father, that his last name meant leather worker.

01:37:00.160 - 01:39:38.670

Jack Preiss: So Lederhosen, I don't know if you...in Germany and Switzerland in the mountains, the men wear these leather short pants. You see them at various fairs and tourist publicity. So Lederer is a leather worker, they used to, I guess, make a lot of leather goods, particularly clothing and other implements and maybe coverings or whatever. Whatever you use leather for, which is a lot. Yeah, that is my original name. Preiss is also a German name and it's common in Alsace, which is part German and part French. She's jumping on your wire, I guess. Oh, he's off it now. So, yeah, my mother's brother, my uncle, was the main male role model in my life when I was growing up, and he, his two sons and I were very close, my two first cousins. So I, so I had a family relationship that I think substituted reasonably well for the fact that I didn't have a dad. Michelle Lanier: What borough did you grow up in? Jack Preiss: Well, I was in Manhattan and, but I, we moved here when I was about eight years old. We moved to New Jersey actually. So I went to school there. I stayed at my aunt and uncle's house for school year, for school year. I was in the fifth grade at that time. Hackensack in New Jersey was just beginning to be a new town. It was an old Dutch town initially and the land booms of the ‘20s it turned into a more cosmopolitan town with a lot of different racial aspects, Italians, Poles. I went to school with a lot of different kinds of kids. Michelle Lanier: What kind of...what were your alma maters? Where did you obtain your degrees?

01:39:39.730 - 01:41:45.620

Jack Preiss: Well, fortunately I did very well in school. I was a, I did extremely well in school, especially high school. I was vice- president of my class, senior class, and I was an officer in quite a few organizations and in dramatics, I was interested, I played a lot of roles in high school, and I ran for office. I got political when I was in high school and so I went to Dartmouth. I had a, the only schools I applied...well I didn't apply to Princeton. I knew somebody who had gone there, but was too close to home. I wanted to get away from home, so I didn't wind up applying to Princeton. Dartmouth was the only school I applied to. But in those days you didn't apply to schools like you do now. And you got to get interviewed. I had to go to several interviews with alumni and so on. So I don't know why, I guess I just felt I was gonna get in there. But I had a very good school record. I was also involved in a minor way in athletics. I was on the track team. So I wasn't all just with my grades for sure. Yeah, I don't think I got a B even in high school. Michelle Lanier: Then after Dartmouth? Jack Preiss: Well then...well, that's going to be a whole other story of my life and I don't want to get into it now, I think. Michelle Lanier: So I just wanted to, so did you go to graduate school? Did you go into the...

01:41:45.620 - 01:42:08.420

Jack Preiss: Eventually. But I had another different period of my life that I did other things. Michelle Lanier: For another day. Jack Preiss: Well, if there is another day. But I think we've stretched it our about as long as we should. We've been at it, geez, almost two hours. Michelle Lanier: Well, I appreciate your generosity of time.

01:42:08.500 - 01:43:23.280

Jack Preiss: No, I am glad to, if this is something, and I think the records ought to be good about that, that... I’m ? this friend of mine is at Florida State, Paul Ortiz, who runs the whole program there. Did I mention, I've got these things for you? This will tell you a lot about my civil rights stuff. There's an interview I did a couple of years ago and this is another one that I did at a panel discussion at Duke back in 2001 that will tell you something about myself and others. Michelle Lanier: Well, thank. I will definitely share this with the Durham County Library and I... Jack Preiss: Well, listen to them and see if there's any...because we had some things we didn't talk about and maybe some things in more detail that we did talk about. Michelle Lanier: Thank you. You have been...I didn't expect that we would go this long, but it sounds like we could be interviewing you for days and days and still be scratching the surface.

01:43:29.860 - 01:44:27.180

Jack Preiss: Well, you try to bring back stuff yourself. It's interesting for me to think of some of the things I have not thought about for a while. But being on these panels and doing interviews, it, I guess helps me to actually think back on these kinds of questions and what's the focus of this particular enterprise or time and... Michelle Lanier: Well, I really appreciate, particularly for this collection, really focusing on Durham history. I felt like you were very descriptive around again, your time on city council, the work with housing and then, of course, your time at Duke. I know that those stories will be invaluable. So thank you so much again for your time. Jack Preiss: Oh, great. Michelle Lanier: So I am going to end the interview. Thanks again.

01:44:27.180 - 01:44:27.180

Interview ends.