Joy Ann Busch Walker was born on December 27, 1943. As one of the original members of the 1959 organizing committee of the revitalized NAACP Youth Council, she spent her high school years active in the Council’s campaigns against employment discrimination at St. Louis department stores and restaurants. This interview was conducted by Gwen Moore of the Missouri Historical Society as part of an oral history project titled Unknown Soldiers/Unsung Heroes: Youth Activism in the St. Louis Civil Rights Movement. It has been edited for length.

Joy Walker: I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. I would have been born in Independence but my mother did not want me born in a house. Blacks were not allowed to go to the hospitals there in Independence, the home of our President Truman, so she went to Kansas City where I was born in the hospital, Wheatley Hospital.

I have a younger brother; we had a very good family life, my brother and I, with my parents. My dad was a teacher and then later became an administrator. My mother at first was a stay-home mother and then after we got up in age, she started working, and, in fact, worked until she retired from the Missouri State Welfare office. But my dad was a teacher at Vashon High School and that’s how I ended up going to Vashon, because I would go up to a lot of the activities with him and I just enjoyed it. I just loved the school. So we received permission for me to attend Vashon; I was there for the four years. Just as I said, I had a wonderful family life and the values that my parents instilled within me was that we had a lot of worth and that anything we wanted to do or set out to do, to accomplish, we could. When I left Vashon High School, I went to Harris Stowe State Teachers College—I think it was just Harris Teachers College then—and my major was English and Biology. I was going to be an English teacher, but I started with the elementary first.

Missouri Historical Society: Tell me about Vashon. What was it like?

JW: It was a very exciting time because high school was very exciting. There were so many activities to get involved with and to do. And you got a chance to really get to do some of the things that you wanted to do and explore and end up finding out who you were and just what your capabilities were. With the different activities going on, I became involved in one of them that dealt with the NAACP, and that was through, I believe it was my counselor, Dr. Fredda Witherspoon, who was a good friend of Attorney Margaret Bush Wilson. She had recommended me along with some other students to attend this meeting as they wanted to get a youth group, a youth council with the NAACP. So when we went to the meeting, we met a few times, and then we had an election of officers, and I was elected President. So I was the first President of the Youth Council of the NAACP.

I was President about two or three years, it may have been about two years. During that time there were a lot of things that we talked about, that we were made aware of, and I know we did several surveys trying to get the opinions of what the residents of the African American community felt about a lot of the issues at that time. Because I remember standing on the corner after we had developed a survey, I had the corner of Page and Taylor, and would interview the people as they passed by asking them different questions. I think that was at the time we had Scruggs, Vandervoort, and Barney. That was one of the places that would not allow… they did allow us to shop, but would not hire us. I was one of the ones who stood out there passing out pamphlets or flyers letting them know, reminding them that you’re shopping in a place where they will not hire you to work other than as a custodian.

MHS: You said the first activity that you did was this survey. Who composed the survey?

JW: Well, Attorney Margaret Bush Wilson helped us, guided us, but they were questions that were asking about our feelings about the politics of that day. I was trying to figure out what some of the questions were: How you felt about the hiring practices, what were some of the jobs that you had, were you allowed to…was there any advancement? It was those type of questions. Just trying to get a feel of how people felt about things in general.

MHS: So you based your activities on that survey. You surveyed the black community and they talked about what their concerns were.

JW: Yes, right, what their concerns were. And we knew that there were things going on as far as not being hired in jobs, yet they would allow us to come in. They just didn’t feel that we had the intelligence to be able to be a salesperson. So that was the feeling going around and as we were watching—well it was occurring in the South also—we felt that we needed to do something in our St. Louis area.

MHS: What was it like in St. Louis during this period as far as the racial climate?

JW: As a child, at first I thought things were all right. Then you grow up and you see things differently at 15 or 16 than you did when you were five or six years old. And you’d start questioning, “Well, why are things like this? Why is it that I can’t do this? I can’t go to this place?” I guess it’s almost unfortunate to say, but I don’t really feel that there has been that much of a change in all of these years. St. Louis is still a very conservative Midwest city. But there were places where you were not allowed to go. They would come out and maybe serve you, but you were not allowed to go into a lot of their restaurants. I remember the White Mills Restaurant and then that finally went out of business. You had the White Castles, remember that, before they allowed us to be able to go inside and be served.

But it was the shows where you were only allowed…at the time you thought that this was the way it was supposed to be, where we could not go to the Fox; I remember that as a young child we could not. It was only when I became a teenager that we were allowed to go to the Fox Theater or to what was the old St. Louis Theater, that’s now the St. Louis Symphony building. You had your black shows that you went to, like The Regal, The Crown, The Criterion, The Amytis, The West End Theater. And you know, I didn’t find out or realize until later that there were other shows that you were not allowed to go to and then once they did give a concession, you were allowed to sit up only in the balcony and to go straight up the stairs. But being a child, your parents kind of sheltered you from some things, or said, “No, this is where we go.” And you just accepted that until later when you would hear them saying that sometimes things were just not right and, “Our children should be able to go anywhere they want to go.” It was the same thing in the school system. We lived in a neighborhood where there were white kids on our block on Washington, and it never dawned on me until several years later that we lived across the street or two doors away from them and yet they went to another school, which probably at that time was Eugene Field School. Yet I was going 20, 30 blocks away to Washington School.

MHS: Did you interact with the white children on your block?

JW: Yes. Yes, we did. And as I look back, I guess as a child you just see things one way and then I think once I remember asking my mother, I said, “Well, does so-and-so,” I can’t think of her name, “Mary, does she go to school, because she doesn’t go to our school.” And mom would say, “No, they go to another school.” You know, whites go to one school and we go to another school. I guess I was maybe about seven or eight then, and I said, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and you know, that was then. There was nothing we could do and so I said, “okay,” and that’s just what I accepted.

MHS: Were both your parents from Kansas City?

JW: I think my mother was born in Troy. Her grandfather was a Methodist minister on what they call the horseshoe circuit or the horse circuit. He traveled between St. Louis, Troy, Glasgow, some of those small areas. My grandparents lived with my mother’s parents. She was born in Troy. Maybe his last pastorate was in Independence so they just more or less stayed there in Independence. So I had a number of relatives in Independence and in Kansas City. She grew up there in Independence, but she did attend Sumner High School here. I think she graduated from Sumner, and then went back to Independence where they lived between Independence, Troy, Missouri, and St. Louis.

My father was born in Independence. He was born in a house, and he lived in Independence. I would say my father was very smart; he was brilliant, because of circumstances he probably would have been a doctor or engineer. Because blacks were not allowed to go to, of course could not go to, the same schools as the white kids in Independence, they built a school called Young Elementary School and my grandfather was the principal. My dad and his brothers and sisters went there and then when my mother and her family moved back to Independence, they went to Young School. I think my mother graduated from Sumner but she had some younger brothers and sisters who went to Young School.

So my dad, as I said, grew up in Independence, and he worked, saved his money. He would work a year and then mainly the only types of jobs that they could get was cleaning houses or doing that type, but he would work a year, save his money, and then he would go to Lincoln University. Of course, he took every course just about that he could get at the junior college they had in Kansas City and then he transferred to Lincoln University. So my dad would work a year, save his money, and then go to school a year. Then he would drop out, work again another year, save his money, and go back until he finally graduated from Lincoln with a degree in chemistry because he was either looking at med school or work as an engineer, but Uncle Sam was waiting on him. They allowed him to finish because they were after him for almost a year. But they allowed him to graduate and as soon as he graduated from Lincoln University, he was drafted into the Army and was sent right away over to Europe.

And when he came back, when he was on leave, he married Mom and then when he came back, of course, I had been born and he decided to forget about med school and to go on and go into teacher education. So that’s what he did. So he came back to Independence, he got Mom and me, and after a couple of months we moved to St. Louis. He had applied for a job here in St. Louis and he started working at—I think it was the old Washington Tech—before being hired at Vashon High School. And just before that he also worked at the Post Office.

I look at myself as a third generation in education with my grandfather, my dad, and now me. And most of my relatives, my aunts and uncles, cousins, are in education. Of course, those were about the only fields really that we could go into at that time.

MHS: Let me ask you about the Youth Council. You were recruited by Fredda Witherspoon? When you started, how many members were there?

JW: I say we started with about 15 or 20, and I think it grew to about maybe 50 members in that organization.

MHS: Why do you think there were so many Vashon High School students represented?

JW: It could have been because Dr. Witherspoon was a good friend of Attorney Margaret Bush Wilson. And when she told her that we really would like to start a youth group with the NAACP and then Dr. Witherspoon being a counselor at Vashon said, “Well, you know, we can start with the nucleus of Vashon students and it can spread from there.” So I think that that was it. And the Vashon students were active in a number of community organizations. Vashon at that time, when I enrolled, it was kind of changing because you had the Mill Creek redevelopment area going on at that time so a number of the students’ homes had been displaced and they had moved as far out as like almost to Hamilton and Goodfellow. But because we rode the school bus, Bi-State was, I think, was a lot better then than it is now; they had better transportation as far as being able to get back to the school. So you had kids who lived in different communities now, not just still living right around Vashon. So they were exposed to a lot of other organizations or other neighborhoods, and they just became, I believe, active members in other organizations or neighborhood activities.

MHS: That’s an interesting point that I hadn’t thought of before. These students were so dispersed, they became exposed to something outside their neighborhoods. Now, when you started with the NAACP Youth Council you said your first activity after the survey was to target Scruggs, Vandervoort, and Barney. How long did you picket the store?

JW: We did that for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t very long, it was just a couple of weeks. I think that at that point the adults took over because there were negotiations at that time or meetings going on. You mentioned Jefferson Bank and not long after that, that was the next thing that they did. We were looking for a change now that things could not just stay the way they were and just keeping us contained in these menial jobs, where we should be able to go or do what we wanted to do if we had the money or at least be given the opportunity to do things. So this was the time, was I guess, just ripe for the feelings that were going on. And you had adults talking, the kids heard, and we did a lot of discussing of it. Right after, I think it was Little Rock Eight, Little Rock Six, I can’t…

MHS: Little Rock, Arkansas. The desegregation of Central High School.

JW: Yes, right. And one of the kids, I think his name was John Smith, a very close friend of one of the kids who was involved in that, had come up here and was living here and I met him in summer school. He talked about his experiences and what was going on and that just kind of acted like a catalyst. And we said, “Oh, you know, there are things that we should be doing up here.” So we did a lot of talking. Our teachers talked to us about things changing and what you’re doing now or what your parents are doing, you should be doing even more than what they’re doing. Whatever their salary is or what they’re doing now, you have to better yourself. If they are doing this, you should be doing even more or the highest status. In order to do that, then we had to be allowed or given the opportunity to attend the different schools, or to get better jobs in order to achieve some of these goals.

MHS: What kind of reception did you get from people who were…

JW: Not very friendly. Not at all. And even from our own group. African Americans were a little skeptical; you know, “Why are you doing this?” and because they were, I guess, afraid. There were others who said, “Oh, this is great. Right on. I’m glad you’re doing this.” But it was kind of mixed and that was an eye-opener for me also. We knew that the Caucasians would not be happy with us handing out flyers, but we didn’t expect the reaction that we got from our own group, which was mixed. Whether some were for what we were doing and others were not, and it was the same thing with the survey. We found when we would try to talk to them, to the man on the street: “No, I don’t have time for this. What difference is it going to make? Nothing is going to change.” You know, you got some of that. And others took time and would give their input or their feelings, their concerns.

MHS: So you picketed for about two or three weeks you said? And from my understanding, you got positive results.

JW: Yes, because they eventually did start hiring black sales personnel.

MHS: You mentioned the teenager from Little Rock who was an inspiration, John Smith. Were there other people locally or nationally that inspired you?

JW: The Little Rock Nine. It seems like at one of our meetings we got a chance, I believe, to meet one of the students who came up for one of our meetings or programs that we had. And even not meeting the person in person, I was just inspired by reading, because I was just glued to the news on it. These teenagers, what they had to go through integrating. It was Central High School, I think, and they just inspired me period.

MHS: Were you aware of any groups locally that were engaged in the same kinds of activities that the NAACP Youth Council was engaged in, as far as demonstrations, sit-ins? Were there other groups doing this same kinds of things that you were aware of?

JW: I think that we may have been the first. And you know, I could see why they’re wanting our youth to get involved and maybe knowing that this was something we wanted to do but didn’t know how to do it. So they gave us the framework, the organization, and the vehicle for being able to do some of the things that we wanted to do as far as trying to better ourselves. I see this group, I just wonder, you know, I would really, it would be great to be able to talk to them to see how they felt about it, but we were the active ones. Not just saying that we were the leaders of the school, but we were the ones who were very active, involved in what was going on at the school and in the community. We could see that there were other things that could have been done, that should have been done, and this youth group kind of gave us the framework or the way to be able to express ourselves.

MHS: Let me ask you about, what do you think the legacy of those demonstrations were, your activities. What impact did the NAACP Youth Council have?

JW: Well, I know what it had for me. I’ve always felt that I was an outgoing person, but I think it helped me to become more assertive and to question why things were done the way they were; and to not be afraid as far as standing up for what you feel is right, even if you, even if there is a consequence. But if you feel that this is right, to speak up and not just to sit there and take it. We were taught that there were ways that you go about doing things and it also taught us how to strategize and let’s plan. And you know, we just don’t go head first into something but you have a plan of action. And because I remember when Attorney Wilson asked us about writing this survey and we’re saying, “Oh, this is like school. You want us to write.” But there was a reason for it. And she explained that you have to have a survey: “Let’s find out what are the people thinking, how do they feel. Maybe get some ideas from them.” So you kind of get a consensus of what the culture is. So that was, I would say the legacy is that it helped you in a sense to understand who you were and to realize that you have a lot of potential. And that if we, if we were to stick together that you could accomplish a lot of things, because I think the one of the examples she gave was about how the Chase Park Plaza Hotel was built. You had some of your other hotels along that area and when they wouldn’t allow the Jews, or whoever this person was, to go to either to stay or to go to the hotel. Then she said, “Well, you know, the Jews got together and they built Chase Park Plaza.” And we looked and we said, “Oh, we didn’t know that was how the Chase had come about.”

MHS: You talked about the impact that the NAACP had on you personally. What about the impact it had on the City of St. Louis?

JW: I think it had—every little bit helps—I think it had some impact. Maybe seeing it later because from us…I think that started next what you said is Howard Johnson, Jefferson Bank, and where you had other businesses and corporations which started to realize we’re going to have to open up our employment to also African Americans. But I think that it was maybe, you know, it was a starting point and it got others to think. And then it’s just like a ripple effect, just spread from maybe just the one little thing that we did that may have been rather insignificant, but it caught the attention of others and it continued and they just picked up the ball and continued.

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