Valerie P. Foushee - On her activism and social life while at UNC (clip)
Interviewed by Tracey Barrett on March 26, 2012
Valerie Foushee: ...or I would just kind of like stay in my room, watch TV and study, but I was at Carolina, and that was important.
Tracey Barrett: So did you, you lived on campus all four years?
VF: I lived on campus for two years, and my roommate the first year was a sophomore from the Henderson area, from Vance County, and so when I was social on campus it was with her friends. And then my sophomore year my roommate was a freshman from Chapel Hill, and we knew each other well and we planned to share a room. But by that time my boyfriend who is now my husband was stationed in the military and so he was at Fort Bragg by that time so he came to visit, you know, when he came to Chapel Hill so I really didn’t have much of a social life on campus. My freshman year also there was a lot of political kind of racial unrest at Carolina so I was marching on South Building like all the other black kids until my mom saw me on TV. My mom was a maid at the Carolina Inn at the time, and I happened to be, I was living on the ninth floor in Hinton James dorm and I happened to be looking out the window and I saw this woman walking down the brick walkway at like thirty five miles an hour, and she came into the dorm and she came to my room on the ninth floor and she told me in no uncertain terms, “I am not sending you to college to riot every day. You are here for an education, and that better be the last time I see you on TV,” and it was the last time she saw me on TV because I went to class after that. So it was--, I was too afraid to be embarrassed that my mom came to the dorm with her maid uniform on because she made it clear to me that, again, my education was important, and that they were making huge sacrifices because I was the first, I was the oldest kid. They were making a huge sacrifice for me to be there. So I knew the importance of it but after that year I didn’t return to Carolina, after my sophomore year. And then the year after that I got married.
