Sam Ford

Sam Ford

Interview Date: April 17, 2024

Interviewer: Tom Hamburger

Transcriber:        David MacKinnon

                               Editor:                Elizabeth Lewis  

This interview transcript is the property of the Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project.

Not to be reproduced without permission.

START OF INTERVIEW

HAMBURGER: This is Tom Hamburger speaking. I’m interviewing Samuel Ford at his house, 250 12^th Street SE. The date is April 17, 2024. If you’re ready Mr. Ford we’ll get started.

FORD: I go by Sam Ford. My legal name is Samuel Ford but nobody calls me that.

HAMBURGER: That’s good to know. Thank you for telling me that. Let me ask you just to start, I’d like to hear your story going all the way back to where you were born.

FORD: I live on 12^th Street in Washington, DC. I was born on 12^th Street in Coffeyville, Kansas. In fact. I remember my mother said 12^th and Vine. When I found this house here, I thought, “Well, okay. I was born on 12^th Street, so.” [Laughs.]

I was born in 1953 in Coffeyville in Coffeyville Memorial Hospital. My mother was a native of Coffeyville as well. My father was from a state which is like five miles away called Oklahoma [laughs]. Coffeyville is right there on the border, right. He was actually from a town called Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, which is about 140 miles south of there. He was born there. It was kind of a blended family. Well, my blended family really. My father was quite a bit older than my mother and my mother had five children before me from a different marriage.

We lived on the west side of Coffeyville and eventually moved on the east side of Coffeyville. I went to Cleveland School, which was a school my mother attended. It was an all-Black school. In Kansas they had segregated schools but the law was that they had to be economical. If a town had fewer than 15,000 people, it could not have segregated schools. If it had more, then it could. Coffeyville had I think 17,000. So, they had segregated elementary schools. I went to the same school my mother went to. Had, in fact, some of the same teachers. All the teachers were Black as well. That’s where I started.

All my early memories are there. It’s all very positive in terms of the area. This was a town where it seemed, as a child, my world was Black. The teachers were Black at the school. I went to the church. Even our police were Black in Coffeyville, which is kind of unusual but there were, I think, at least four Black police I could think of. Shug Folks. Allen Flowers, Calvin Johnson, and a guy named Stuart. So all the police were Black that were in our neighborhood.

We lived near this refinery called the Co-op. The Co-op refinery, you would hear noise coming from there. There was always kind of a bit of a fear amongst the older people that the thing might blow up sometime. [If] there was a fire there, we’d be concerned. Some days the air would be stale. You’d smell this chemical air. It’s kind for interesting because as I’m sitting here as a 70-year-old man, that refinery’s still there. Most of the community is gone. Literally moved away. Polluted by this refinery. The houses, many of them are gone but it’s amazing how the community has just basically disappeared, the one I grew up in.

HAMBURGER: Did you go to high school in Coffeyville as well?

FORD: No. I went to school in Coffeyville until about the fifth grade and then my parents had broken up. My mother moved to Indiana. I moved to Indiana for the sixth grade in Kokomo, Indiana. But I didn’t really like Indiana [laughs]. So I came back and lived with my father from the seventh grade until I graduated. In seventh grade I went to school in Independence, Kansas. That’s where I graduated.

HAMBURGER: By that time, were the schools desegregated?

FORD: Oh yes. They were. Even the schools were desegregated, technically, when I was going there in the 50s, but it was like that was the neighborhood school. You know what I’m saying? But my cousin, for example, my first cousin, they lived over on Sixth Street. He went to a majority White school, which was Lowell. But our neighborhood was a Black neighborhood for the most part, so even after technical desegregation we went to the same school. An occasional White kid would come to our school. They never stayed long. In fact, there were these White people who lived across the street from us at one point. They still went to Lowell. They didn’t go to Cleveland. Nobody cared. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: Tell me about where you went to college and the beginnings of your interest in journalism.

FORD: Interesting thing about going to college. The junior college there is called a community college, two-year college. My first year I went to the junior college, which is called Independence Community College. They have asked me to come back next month. They want to give me an award. I don’t know exactly what it’s called, but it’s an award essentially for being a successful person. They also want me to speak at their commencement. I’m going to be doing that May tenth and eleventh. That’s what I’m going to be doing. I went to school there in 1970, one year. Then the next year I transferred to the University of Kansas which is in Lawrence, Kansas. I graduated from the University of Kansas journalism school. William Alan White Journalism School.

HAMBURGER: Yeah. Very good journalism school.

FORD: I enjoyed it. I was one of those things, I always wanted to be on television, right. I always wanted to be on television. Anything that could allow me to be able to move toward that goal, I took advantage of it. Even when I was a kid at Cleveland School, I remember the radio station in Coffeyville was KGGF which was a well-respected radio station. They broadcast the news for the whole community. Basically, anything that happened. Anybody that died they got their name on there. Anybody [laughs], any news. it was on KGGF. And they came to the schools and interviewed the kids. I remember that like in fourth grade I was interviewed [laughs] on KGGF. They came and I made sure we listened so we could hear what it was.

HAMBURGER: That was your introduction to broadcast journalism.

FORD: That was one of them, that was one of them. Then at Independence when I went to junior high, we had the Independence newspaper, the junior high school newspaper. Of course I was on the newspaper staff. Funny thing though, I didn’t realize in those days that the junior high newspaper only covered mostly soft stuff, because there was a good fight at school that I decided [laughs] to be…

HAMBURGER: Newsworthy.

FORD: Newsworthy. Yeah. This was a fight where a girl pulled a knife on the principal and the police came. I wrote that up [laughs] and turned it in to the faculty advisor, [who was] like, “No. We’re not putting this on.” [Laughter.]

HAMBURGER: Too controversial for the junior high paper.

FORD: But I thought it was a good story. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: You’ve got good news instincts, really.

FORD: Yeah, I wrote that about these two girls [that] got into it over a boy! [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: Oh, that’s hilarious. After you went to the University of Kansas, you went to graduate school after that.

FORD: At the University of Minnesota. I went to graduate school at that point, yes. I wanted to go to graduate school and I didn’t really know where. It was one of those things, kind of, in those days there was obviously an interest in more minorities involved in television and radio and stuff like that. So, there were a lot of opportunities.

I remember when I was 15 or 16, they had a thing called American Legion Boys State. So I was selected to go to Boys State, one of the kids from Independence selected to go to Boys State. They held it at the University of Kansas in the dorms. They put us in the dorms and [based on our rooms and wings we mimicked city and county government]. It was really a wonderful program. Then the next year I wanted to go back. I was selected to go back as a counselor. So I went a second year.

[Funny thing, I so enjoyed being at the University of Kansas for the Boys State program, that became the only college I wanted to attend.] Later, when I took the National Merit program [test], I got college offers from everywhere. Everywhere. It was just amazing how all these things poured in. [But the only one I responded to was from KU.] From being at Boys State at the University of Kansas, that’s the only place I wanted to go. I thought that place was great. I applied. Of course, at Kansas at that time if you graduated from a Kansas high school, they had to accept you. Wasn’t any question of [test scores]. They had to accept you, period, okay. So, I applied and I was accepted at the University of Kansas. I remember just being so happy. I thought that place was just wonderful. Those same dorms that we had Boys State in, I ended up staying at McCollum Hall. And 35 years later, my daughter stayed in McCollum Hall [laughs].

HAMBURGER: Is that right? No kidding.

FORD: I hauled her stuff into McCollum Hall. That’s my daughter there. That first picture right there. You can’t see it either.

HAMBURGER: I can’t see it because of the sun.

FORD: Hold on, hold on one second. I’ll drop this and bring it on over. This is Gina.

HAMBURGER: Is she working with the Alsobrooks [campaign]? [Angela Alsobrooks was elected U.S. Senator from Maryland in 2024.]

FORD: That’s correct. Miss Alsobrooks’ communications director. That’s Gina. She graduated from the University of Kansas.

HAMBURGER: It’s so great. School of Journalism.

FORD: Yup. She got a School of Journalism degree.

HAMBURGER: Following in her father’s footsteps.

FORD: We both got Bachelor of Science degrees from KU.

HAMBURGER: I knew some KU grads. There’s one guy who is about our age, Jerry Seib. Do you know Jerry? I worked at the Wall Street Journal. He was my bureau chief there. What was that ... Luck, Kansas. He’s gone back there.

FORD: You know what amazed me is how many people here in Washington are not just from the University of Kansas but from the University of Kansas Journalism School. I remember they came here one time and they had a party and invited me. I went there and I’m [thinking], “All these people!” I’m like, “Really?” They told me that they just move around the country. They go to Atlanta, throw a party. Everyone shows up. New York. They are all over. They’ve got a lot of grads all over this place.

HAMBURGER: I counted the University of Kansas grads at the Washington Post as well. Anyway, great school. Tell me about your experience at graduate school in Minnesota. Did that graduate school experience lead to your first professional experience?

FORD: So after I was heading toward graduation at the University of Kansas, I sent out, looked for stuff, places I could attend. I did see that the University of Minnesota had a minority trainee program in conjunction with WCCO television. So the two of them had partnered to create this. I applied for that. In that case I did have to take a test, I think the Miller Analogies Test. I forget. It was some of those standardized tests. Apparently, I did okay on it, so I got into the University of Minnesota’s minority training program, which basically meant you were in the University of Minnesota and then you would get summer internships at WCCO radio and WCCO TV. That was it. You worked toward your master’s while you were working and then in the summer you would get these opportunities. That was the program. I got the program and that’s how I started at the University of Minnesota.

But, you know, what happened was, it was one of those things where once I knew I had the program, I decided to drive up to Minnesota to see what it was. Of course, typical fashion, it was the winter time. It was like December. So I drive up to Minneapolis and got caught in a snow storm. I have to stay with these people [laughs] in this little town called Belmont, Iowa. The family was named the Dempsey. I remember, everything was snowed over. You had to get off the highways. I lived with those people for two days. They were interesting folks. Everything that they had, everything that you ate, was stuff they had grown themselves. From the chicken to the corn to the potatoes. everything they grew themselves. The old man made watermelon wine. He would take me down to the basement and we drank his wine. They were amazing people. We exchanged Christmas cards for a couple of years after that [laughs].

But I finally made it to Minneapolis and they showed me around WCCO and the University of Minnesota. A month later I moved up there. That was it. It was some program they had. I applied for it and I got it. At that point I was a student at the University of Minnesota. I did not finish my master’s program because I ended up working. At first, I was working at least for a public radio station, KSJN. because when I was at the University of Kansas, they have a radio station called KANU. When I got in the journalism program, I became one of the morning news readers at the university station. Also covering stories at the university station. When I went to Minnesota, I sought out the same public radio station and it was KSJN and they hired me at KSJN to read news and to cover stories at night.

One of the funny things was at one point I had a summer internship at WCCO TV. I was reporting at night for KSJN radio. So I covered my night story, but when I covered my night story, I missed the last bus from St. Paul back to Minneapolis, so I slept on a table at the radio station until the busses started running. Caught a bus home, took a shower and went to work at the TV station. [Laughs.] And I was happy as hell. It’s like at that point you’re young, you’re about 21, I don’t know, you’re just happy to be there. Eventually I got kind of grabbed by Channel 9, which was the ABC station there, to work weekends. I was so focused on working I wasn’t that interested in finishing this degree.

Then, WCCO came up with a program where CBS was looking for minority reporters. They left it up to WCCO to pick somebody. So from my internships and that sort of stuff, they picked me. Then I went and I thought, “I don’t care about this degree.” [Laughs.] I went and worked in the traineeship program and I was totally television, totally working at the TV station. I just gave up on the degree. I never finished my master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. I was just too busy working.

HAMBURGER: You went from WCCO to CBS news.

FORD: That’s correct. I worked at WCCO for two years in the CBS training program. They call it CBS Minority Training Program. CBS would take a look at you every now and then. I remember the 1976 Democratic Convention. I went to New York with a friend of mine because he was also in the WCCO or in the University of Minnesota WCCO program. His name is Les Edwards. He’s from New York. We were in the program together and there was a girl named Pat Arnold. She was in the program, so there were three, at least three, of us in this WCCO Minnesota program. We became friends of course.

Then, I had never been in New York City. When Les was going home after school that summer, I said, “Les, when you go back home, I’d like to go with you.” He said, “Yes, okay.” So, we went back. It was during the Democratic Convention in New York. While I was there, CBS people heard I was in New York and they told me to come by. So, I came by and I met Bill Small, who was the Vice President of CBS News. He looked at me and he said, “We’ve been looking at your work and we think it is about time for you to sink or swim.” So, at that point, that next January, they called me and I went to New York. Started working at CBS.

HAMBURGER: Tell me briefly about your CBS career, I want to hear the whole story, but take us to your arrival in Washington.

FORD: In 1977, January, February 1977, I moved from Minneapolis to New York and started working for CBS News. I was thinking about that. Some people have written about that year. It was one amazing year, particularly in New York in terms of news. In terms of things that happened.

For example, I remember shortly after I got there, they had this [serial killer], they called him the “.44 Caliber Killer.” Son of Sam, that story, right? I remember working on that story and doing the first story for CBS on the Son of Sam. He didn’t have the name then. The “.44 Caliber Killer” was what it was called at first. I had a lot of clippings of the daily news trying to get that together, so I knew the story on that.

One of the things when you’re the young guy on the staff ... I was the new guy. They work you to death. That’s it. It’s like I was working seven days a week. [Laughs.] Four weeks a month. It was like just working all the time and I’m just, “Well, okay. I don’t care. I don’t know anybody in New York.” I’m just working.

I remember one time I finally had a day off. I was like, “Okay!” I got drunk. [Laughs.] Fell asleep in the house, alright? The phone rang. It was CBS. “We know you haven’t been off work for a month but you’ve got to come to work anyway.” [Laughs.] I said, “What’s the story?” “What’s the story? New York doesn’t have any lights!” That was the black out. I looked out the window and it was dark. I just started laughing [laughs]. I was like, “Okay.”

I was on the 13^th floor of this building and I headed out the door and down the stairs because there was no elevator, right? As soon as I got there to the bottom, a taxi pulled up and these people got out of it. The woman said, “You don’t know how lucky you are.” I was like, “Okay.” I hopped in the taxi. I told him where to go. “We’re heading to CBS.” I had an experience that I don’t think will ever happen again. It was one of those lifetime experiences. I’m driving through Times Square. I riding through Times Square. Guess what happens. The lights come on! [Laughs.] So, boom, and everybody goes, “Oh oh oh!” Then they go [out], boom! “Aw aw aw!” And they go boom! Everybody starts laughing. They didn’t come back on.

We go on to CBS. It’s like in the emergency room. People are running around, coming and going. You know, CBS is a very unionized company, but at that point this is a news emergency so the union rules go out the window. I was the only one doing what I normally do, right? They said, “Okay, who can run a camera?” This guy named Michael George, the desk person, comes up. Used to be a cameraman. He says, “I can run the camera.” “Who can run lights? Who can run sound?” They cobbled together this group and the sent us out to cover the story. We go to Crown Heights in Brooklyn and people are just ripping into stores right and left. Tons of police on the street. Michael George, he had no fear. He was kind of, I don’t know how you would describe him, a very delicate guy. But when he got a camera in his hands [laughs] he had no fear. So I can remember we go into this store and these people are looting this store. It’s in darkness, right? Mike pops the light on the camera. The camera, the light guy pops the light on. [Unintelligible] pointing at these people, they start running and screaming. They start arguing and they said, “Why are you doing this?” And somebody else starts arguing. “It’s the news!” While they’re arguing, Mike is shooting. At one point, we see the police giving up and coming away from the action. We’re shooting that there. I’m on the phone with CBS radio because they have a lot of pay phones around, you know. New York City at that time, we didn’t have cells. I’m just describing what I’m seeing as it happens. So, we did the story. I remember even how I started the story off, which was on the Cronkite News that night. I said, “They ran down the streets yelling, ‘It’s Christmastime, it’s Christmastime!’” And so, it was. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: You have the reporter’s good luck driving through Times Square. Was that your first story on crime ... ?

FORD: Yeah, though I’d been there for a while. This was in July as I recall. I’d been there since February. As I said, the summer of ’77, that was really, that year, so many things happened. The Son of Sam. This thing here. They had a candidates race too. Bella Abzug was running for mayor. She didn’t get it but that was the year that Koch got it. Covering the mayor contest. It was a busy, busy year. A lot of fun though, a lot of fun. It was just that first year. Then the second year in ’78 I went to Atlanta. I went down there and they said, “Do you like it?” I said, “Yeah, I like it.” I really did like it.

HAMBURGER: Atlanta for CBS?

FORD: Yeah, for CBS. Their bureau. I went down there and so then I moved to the Atlanta bureau of CBS. It was funny thing because I was from Kansas. I’d never been to the South. Obviously. if you’re a Black person you’ve been watching the Civil Rights Movement. You were watching the stuff. You were like, “Good lord I’m glad I don’t live there,” right? So I go down to Atlanta and there the CBS bureau is at WAGA TV. In Atlanta they love to have their TV stations, at least at the time, in these old houses. These old mansions, right. So, I’m driving down to the place. I turn. “They’ve sent me to the plantation!” [Laughter.] Because that’s what it looked like, something like from Gone with the Wind. [Laughs.] I remember, that was my thought.

HAMBURGER: How was that experience for you reporting in the South?

FORD: It was good. I knew about the Civil Rights Movement. I can remember as a child on a black and white TV in Kansas seeing Martin Luther King’s images on TV. Like a lot of kids, could care less about the news. From the age of about seven, I would sit and watch Walter Cronkite and I’d watch Huntley-Brinkley [Report] with my cousin. She was an elderly lady. I loved to sit there. So almost every night I watched the news. So I knew all about the civil rights stuff. I knew about the political stuff. I knew about all that stuff. It was interesting.

Initially kind of frightening. Interesting going to the South and then covering the stories. I guess they had one reporter, one young girl. She didn’t work out with them. A young Black girl who’d worked with at the bureau. She was complaining that they were only giving her the Black stories. Zeke, who was the news director, said that he would not. “We’re not just going to give you the Black stories.” And I said, “I like the Black stories. Give me the Black stories!” To me they were the best stories down there. I said, “No problem. Give me the Black story. I like them.”

So I covered a lot of the civil rights stuff. To me I find it more interesting. Here I’m covering stuff that’s historical. I didn’t really know a lot of the civil rights leaders in detail like Hosea Williams. I knew the big ones like Coretta [Scott King] or Jesse [Jackson]. I didn’t really, but moving around there, listening to them, interacting with those people. It was just really interesting covering that news. I loved it. I told them, “Give me this. I have no problem with it.”

HAMBURGER: Can you tell me about some of the biggest stories that you covered when you were in the Atlanta bureau?

FORD: In the Atlanta bureau. One thing that I did really like. There was an effort to get the 1965 Voting Rights Act renewed. So, apparently, the first time they did it they had this march from Selma to Montgomery. That’s when John Lewis was attacked on the bridge.

HAMBURGER: Pettus Bridge.

FORD: And all that sort of thing. So, [the marches] would go to these different towns. Things that happened. Marion, Alabama. I think that’s where Coretta King was from and [it] seems some boy named Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed there by the police in some kind of situation. They basically took the same route and they were repeating what they had done before. I followed them giving reports to CBS, particularly the morning news every day about what they were doing as we went on that journey from Selma to Montgomery. That was, I thought, a really interesting story.

Another story that was very interesting at the time was when they had basically the Mariel Boat Lift out of Miami, because we covered that. In 1980 I guess some people were trying the get into the U.S., so Castro just said, “You’ll want to go up there, go, go. And we can take some of these prisoners and stop feeding them and send them too.” So, all these people that were moving to the United States. I can remember at one point CBS sent me down to Miami in a hurry to get down there to cover something. I’m like, rushing to get there. The Atlanta airport in those days was a busy airport. You could just drive up to the front door and there’s a parking lot, park your car, and walk in and you were gone. So I just didn’t go home to pack anything. I just said, “Well, I’ll just be down there quickly and hop in. I’ll buy some clothes down there, right?”

I went to the airport, parked, flew to Miami and they were hijacking planes like crazy. I remember I had the same clothes on for four days. I didn’t even wash them. Washed my underwear in the bath tub in these hotel rooms because I didn’t have time to go buy anything I was so busy. [Laughs.] I remember at one point I said, “I’ve got to buy some clothes.” I start off to the place and I get beeped and it's CBS saying, “They’ve got four planes in the air they’re hijacking right now. Get back to the airport.” [Laughs.] Anyway, back to the airport.

I can never forget this. Some women from Mississippi, some White woman from Mississippi, had just gotten off from a Delta flight and they’re coming in. I said, “What happened?” She said, “Well, same old thing. You’re sitting on a plane. Bunch of crazy Cubans are running down the aisle yelling, ‘Habana! Habana!’ First thing you know, you’re in Cuba.” [Laughs.] It got to the point the Cuban authorities would just flag the planes in, let them on, then take off. No customs, no nothing. [Laughs.] It was just crazy.

HAMBURGER: Take me from the Atlanta bureau, and I want to get the story of your arrival in DC.

FORD: I was in Atlanta for four years. One thing that’s kind of interesting about being Atlanta. I was in Atlanta for four years and then one day this guy, his name was Joseph Paul Franklin, who was the man who shot Vernon Jordan. He was in Tampa, Florida, and they said he was plotting to kill President Carter. They sent me down there. I hopped on a plane for Tampa.

As I was heading down to Tampa, I ran into a former camera guy I worked with named Jerry Small. He was rubbing his hands together. He says, “Have I got a woman for you!” I said, “No!” Because the previous time Jerry Small, we became friends, hooked me up with a woman when I was like 25, 26, this woman was 35, had four kids and smoked. I’m like, “Who is he? I don’t want his women.” But he says, “And she’s from Kansas.” Well at that point I’m a little interested. That was Gloria, my wife. That’s how we met. On a plane. He was working for CNN. She was a CNN reporter and they were headed for the same story I was headed to. I tell people, I say, “From that day,” because I went and sat with her. And at that point, I did like the women he introduced me to.

HAMBURGER: From that point in time was the charm.

FORD: Yeah. From that point until August 12, 2021, we were together. Forty one years until she died in a hospital in Kansas. That was how I met my wife.

HAMBERGER: Tell me a little about Gloria. She was a journalist like you.

FORD: Yes, Gloria was from Wichita, Kansas. She worked in news there. She worked for, I think, two stations, radio KFH and KFDI. KFDI is a big country station. I think it was like the number one station there. She did news for them. Then she worked at KARD television, channel three in Wichita. Then she got a job in Providence, Rhode Island. So she worked there. A co-worker there was Denise LeClair and [they] were buds. Denise got a job at CNN. Denise called Gloria and says, “Hey, why don’t you come to Atlanta. I’m sure I can get [you] one down here.” So then Gloria moved to Atlanta and she was a CNN reporter. That’s how I met her. We were both in Atlanta working.

HAMBURGER: How is it that you both came to Washington, DC?

FORD: We married in Atlanta. I got married, we got married, in November in ’81. They were transferring me to Washington. When I went to Washington, she quit CNN and she moved to Washington with me.

HAMBURGER: Tell me about that. Did you immediately find this house, back to 12^th Street in Washington? Tell me about your arrival in Washington. What that was like?

FORD: I was here in Washington. I think I got here in February or March of ’81, probably ’82. My first story was John Hinkley with the shooting, was John Hinkley at the…

HAMBURGER: The Hilton.

FORD: Right. That was it. I covered the trial. I covered the trial. So I’d be covering the trial mainly but I stayed at one of these hotels in Georgetown, near Georgetown. I would ride my bicycle, look for houses. I looked at different parts of DC, but Capitol Hill seemed more normal to me and affordable as it turned out. Some of the areas in Northwest, very nice but it seemed very expensive. When I saw Capitol Hill I thought, “Okay.” This seemed to be kind of a mixed neighborhood and I remember, I was riding my bicycle past this house one day. I looked and I said, “What a lovely house.” It had a for sale sign. So, I stopped and these people were here and I walked in and I told them that I was interested in the house. Quite honestly, I think they saw this young Black guy riding up on a bicycle and they thought this was ridiculous. [Laughs.] They didn’t give me too much credibility when I walked in. But anyway, eventually I bought the house. [Laughs.] We moved here in July of ’82. Yeah, we moved here in July of ’82.

HAMBURGER: What was the neighborhood like when you moved here?

FORD: The thing we liked about it was [it was] an integrated neighborhood. It was about half and half at that point. It’s pretty much affluent now I guess but at that time ... That house down there, husband and wife would be screaming on Friday night. [Laughs.] You’d see helicopters coming over looking for suspects. [Laughs.] I had the feeling you could get knocked in the head around here. [Laughs.] But for us it was great. You talk about a city neighborhood. You can walk. You had Eastern Market. We loved it. We loved it. It was just perfect.

HAMBURGER: And you raised your two kids here in this house?

FORD: Both of my children raised here in this house. They went to school here in the neighborhood. My son first went to school ... There was a school called Capitol Hill Montessori. They had a bus. I remember they’d come by and I was so happy when we could put Murry on the bus and he could go to school with the other kids. It was great. Then, eventually Gina, my daughter, went to school ... it seems like something happened ....

HAMBURGER: At Montessori?

FORD: Yeah. I don’t know. My wife was pretty demanding. I think she fell out with the people at the Montessori school. So she pulled them out and put them down the street here at Watkins [Elementary]. Then what was really weird was that one day the kids came home telling us that their Montessori teachers were at Watkins. I guess the school folded. [Laughs.] And Watkins decided to put the program in Watkins, I guess to attract students. Then she put them in there. It was like we got the same thing. We didn’t have to pay for it. So, they were in Watkins.

They stayed in the Montessori program because that school only went to the fourth grade. Then they went to a school called Woodridge which was in Northeast. The Montessori program was there. So she took them there. Then when it was time to go to like junior high, seventh grade, she took and put them in Catholic School, Holy Trinity. So, we moved both kids to Holy Trinity in Georgetown. Then Murry goes to Gonzaga and Gina goes to Holy Cross. We became the non-Catholic people who send their kids to Catholic school.

HAMBURGER: One of the things I wanted to discuss with you is your church activity. Was Ebenezer [United Methodist Church, 400 D Street SE] the first church that you joined?

FORD: No, actually the first church that we went to was Union Temple, which is right across the river [in] Anacostia. I remember when we got here, I wanted to go to a church and we had friend from Atlanta named Bob Moore who had moved up here before us. He was a member of St. Paul and Augustine, which is a Catholic church over on 15^th Street. So we were going to the Catholic church a lot. I was like, “I’m not Catholic, I think we can find a Baptist church around here or something.” So we’re asking folks where they have good music. Junette Pinkney said Union Temple. So we went over to Union Temple [1225 W Street SE]. The building is still there but it was this old stone church. Reverend Wilson was the pastor. Their services were three hours long. But we went there and we enjoyed it.  

Three hours long. Murry, when he’d walk in and see that church, he’d start screaming, “[I’ve] got to be still for three hours?” [Laughs.] He would go berserk when he saw that church. [Laughs.] We went to that church for years, and then it was one of those things where Reverend Wilson ... He was a nice guy, but he got really tight with Louis Farrakhan. He started talking about “the enemy.” At one point, I heard “the enemy” and I realized that he was talking about White people. [Laughs.] I’m like, “I can’t be raising kids thinking the White people are the enemy.” So I just said, “We got to go. We can’t keep going here. We got to go somewhere else.” I thought, “Since we’re going to change churches, let’s find one close.” There’s Lincoln Park [Methodist] which is right down the street. So I started going there. That was fine. It was different, kind of, not as exciting as Union Temple. But I was totally into Lincoln Park. Then they had a preacher that moved here from Mississippi. He decided the church [service] should be longer. I dealt with three hours over at Union Temple and they even cut back some. To have to go through that again!

HAMBURGER: Murry’s not going to like that.

FORD: Not, yeah. The services were too long. They were just too long. I just said, “Church is too long.” I decided I enjoyed his sermons and stuff but I decided I would just go in the balcony and then after about an hour and a half I was leaving. It was one of those things. So at some point, they blocked the balcony off. [Laughs.] At that point I was like, “Okay.” I was walking one day, I was walking down here somewhere and I looked at Ebenezer [United Methodist Church, 400 D Street SE], [and they were] having their 166^th anniversary. So thought, “I think I’ll go see that.” I went to the church and liked it. I liked the church and I thought, “Well, okay.” So, I started going there. Then I joined there. I’ve been going there for 20 years.

HAMBURGER: Do I understand correctly you’re on the historian? Are you the historian for the church?

FORD: Basically yeah. [Laughs.] I mean, I don’t have the title, historian, but I’m on the historical committee. The head of the historical committee is a woman named Cheryl. I don’t think she really kind of knows about the history of the church. She’s just kind of organizing it pretty much because her sister, her aunt I guess, was Joan, the chair of the committee. She more kind of knew what was going on. I am probably the most knowledgeable about the history of the church.

HAMBURGER: It’s got an interesting history. Can you describe that to me?

FORD: Sure, sure. In fact, we kind of went through it, when was that, recently?

HAMBURGER: A few Sundays ago. You sent me [the information]. I found the link and I watched the service.

FORD: The bishop came to the church. Yeah, okay. If you look at the history of Ebenezer, or Methodism if you will. on this side of the city. It starts out with people meeting in houses around 1807. The place where they met was around where Nats Park [Nationals Park, 1500 South Capitol Street, SE] is now. Then there was a tobacco barn where they met. Christ Church, Episcopal church, had met there first. Christ Church then builds a church. So then the Methodists meet there. The original church they said had 61 White and 25 Black members. Eventually this church becomes Ebenezer. They are at some point located on Fourth Street [SE] which is where it’s now an apartment complex, but the building’s still there. It’s between F and G on Fourth. Something like that.

HAMBURGER: That’s not too far from where Ebenezer stands today.

FORD: No, it’s not. Ebenezer’s at Fourth and D [Streets SE]. This is either at Fourth and F, between F and G, or something like that. That’s where the…

HAMBURGER: Oh, is this the former church that’s been made into an apartment, apartments? Oh, that’s where…

FORD: That’s correct.

HAMBURGER: Yes, I do. [The Churchill at 514 Fourth Street SE.]

FORD: Well, that’s it. So that was where at Fourth, at one part, you know, Fourth Street Station. That was the name of it. It’s had various ... I think the church was sold. That was a church. In the church if you look at the history of the church––and there’s a history. I communicate with Gale Monro who was the historian at Capitol Hill [United Methodist Church, 421 Seward Square SE]. She gave me a book on the history of this church. It was really interesting. The Whites eventually made the Blacks sit in the balcony. Now if you’ve heard of churches called the AME church. Well, the AME church started in Philadelphia because Richard Allen grew angry when they told the Blacks they had to sit in the balcony. They segregated the church. Rather than accept that, he formed the AME church, okay. It’s the same story here in Washington. They said the Blacks had to sit in the balcony.

If you look at the histories of Israel Metropolitan CME church and the Metropolitan AME church downtown, their histories talk about the racism of Ebenezer Church that made them leave. That’s why they left the church and that why they’re no longer part of Ebenezer because of racism. But they all started in the same place.

In the case of us, our Ebenezer, according to the history, the White members of Ebenezer were let’s say concerned about the manner of worship of the Black members that they had made sit in the balcony. Apparently, they made so much noise up there and they were so emotional up there––I guess they started shouting up there––that the fear was that one of the Black members in the balcony was going to get overcome with emotion, fall out of the balcony onto a White person, and kill them on the main floor. So, they wanted the Blacks out of the church. So they came to this location at Fourth and D and built a church there for the Black members and told the Black members to leave the church. So, Ebenezer Church was formed 186 years ago, right there. It had White pastors until 1864. That was when they had their first Black pastor, a man names Jones.

Then another thing that is significant about 1864 was slavery had been outlawed in DC in 1862, but there were no schools for Black kids. So the first DC public school for Black kids was established at Ebenezer in 1864. That gave them time to build a school down the street, which they did in the next year or so. They moved into it.

HAMBURGER: I wanted to clarify something you said about the history, if I understood it. This concern that the White parishioners had about over excitement and emotional. That led the White parishioners to leave Ebenezer?

FORD: No. That led the White parishioners to say, “We want the Blacks out of the church. We’re not going to have them up in the balcony because they might kill someone.” At that point they built another church for the Black members and then told them to leave their church. That’s how it worked.

HAMBURGER: So Ebenezer for a time had an all-White congregation?

FORD: Yeah. They had basically barred the Blacks from the church. They called it Little Ebenezer. Little Ebenezer was for the Black people and Ebenezer for the White people, yeah.

HAMBURGER: Yes. I’ve saw this scale model of Little Ebenezer on Fourth Street, but I didn’t know what that referred to.

FORD: Right. So that was it. The Black members were basically assigned to this church. So the Black members stayed at this church, Ebenezer. I don’t know if it changed different names. The name Ebenezer disappeared. So, you can’t really say. For example, Ebenezer and Capitol Hill [Methodist] are on the same square block, right? And they’re the same denomination. We belong to the same conference and everything. You couldn’t say Capitol Hill was the current Ebenezer. No, you couldn’t because there were other Methodist churches around and eventually there was one called Trinity. Then some other churches came into Trinity and that became Capitol Hill. So, it’s not a direct thing of white Ebenezer became Capitol Hill. No. The white Ebenezer and several other churches became Capitol Hill. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: Ebenezer as we know it today. Tell me about that history. When does Ebenezer come together?

FORD: We just celebrated our 184^th. 1838 is when Ebenezer was organized, when it became a church. This is 2024, so we’re saying it’s 186 years old this year. Ebenezer was there. Then the church wasn’t big enough, so they built a bigger church. In 1896, a hurricane hit Washington and destroyed a lot of things, including that church. In 1897, interesting thing. I don’t know if I can find it. Anyway, in 1897, remind me, I’ll find it and I’ll give it to you. They launched another church which is the church we have now. There was a big write-up in the Washington Star about the church. In fact, there is a drawing of the church in the Washington Star, May 10^th 1897. They talk about how the church was started and apparently Methodists from all around Virginia, Maryland, etcetera, were here and I guess bands were big back then, Sousa bands. They talk about the bands. It was just a big affair when they launched this church in 1897. That’s where we are now and the church has been there since then.

HAMBURGER: Is there an archive at the church where the Washington Star article or drawing is to be accessed?

FORD: We really don’t have much of an archive. Apparently at some point they did, but that wasn’t kept up very well. The basement of the church had mold and stuff. I think people just stopped going there. At one point they did have kind of a history room downstairs where you could come and go in and they would show you the stuff.

We did see that the New York Times did document the church’s records. I have a copy of a New York Times microfilm of the church records. I don’t know if they really got all of them, because some of the were really interesting. I went through details like old newspapers just to see when Ebenezer’s name came up. I remember in 1881, I think it was, when James Garfield was killed. Ebenezer hosted an ad on the front page of the paper, a sympathy for his death. Apparently some members got into a fight at the church. Police had to come in and arrested a male and female member for fighting. [Laughs.] There was [in the] pre-Civil War era a member named Thomas Smallwood who was on the rolls of Ebenezer. I don’t know if it was White Ebenezer or Black Ebenezer, but I think maybe both, but he’s on the rolls. He was one of the Underground Railroad captains, if you will. He was transporting people from Washington to Toronto.

HAMBURGER: And he’s White?

FORD: No. He’s Black. He attended a number of the churches. His name was on the roles of Ebenezer. He later wrote a book on his life and he talks about how he would go to Toronto and take slaves with him and then he would come back and bring mail. [Laughs.] He’s talking about the last time he was here. Apparently, he almost got caught. The funny thing is that the metropolitan police department was after him. [Laughs.] Somehow, he managed to get back to Canada. After that he didn’t come back anymore. But he wrote a book and he talks about his experiences.

HAMBURGER: Does the church, or do you, have a copy of the book?

FORD: It’s online. Thomas Smallwood, just write it down. [A Narrative of] Thomas Smallwood [(Coloured Man)]. He didn’t talk about Ebenezers, but he talks about his experiences. [See also Flee North by Scott Shane.]

HAMBURGER: His experiences.

FORD: Yeah.

HAMBURGER: Interesting. As we move into the more current history of Ebenezer, was it an activist church? Was it part of the Civil Rights Movement?

FORD: No, I don’t think so. What was interesting about Ebenezer in terms of [civil rights is that] there was effort for integration and I think there was some talk that they should merge Capitol Hill and Ebenezer. I think the minister of Capitol Hill wanted to merge but the minister of Ebenezer did not because he wanted a Black identity for the church. What happened, you know, [in] the Methodist church, it was a segregated conference. The Baltimore-Washington Conference is what they call it now. The Baltimore Conference was White. The Washington Conference was Black, okay? So then they brought them together. You could have said for a time that Capitol Hill would have been part of the Baltimore Conference. Ebenezer would have been part of the Washington Conference. Of course, then again, they’re united at this point.

We had the Capitol Hill members come over when the bishop was there. That was really a nice moment. We really enjoyed it. But we’ve had times when the churches did not agree. For example, gay marriage. Stuff like that. I remember Reverend Blanchard and Mrs. Blanchard. When they were there [as pastor at Ebenezer], we had a meeting where Capitol Hill came over to Ebenezer for a joint service. [Mrs. Blanchard] talked about the sin of homosexuality. A White member said something like, “Lord, Forgive that evil woman.” [Laughs.] Then she got back to the topic of where she was and she said, “It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.” So, it was like you could hear a pin drop in the church. We didn’t have a joint service for a few years after that. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: Do you have joint services now?

FORD: Yeah. Well, I said we did. We’ve had other ones. This isn’t the first. We’ve had other ones. But yeah. Of course, Capitol Hill as the neighborhood has become Whiter. Capitol Hill’s grown quite a bit. We’re [Ebenezer] just hanging on by our chinny, chin, chin. That’s a fact. What had happened is that with the change in the neighborhood, one of the positive things is that a White church called Redemption Hill needed a church. I don’t know [if] it was ten years ago, Redemption Hill moved into Ebenezer and they rent from us. They do two services a day on Sunday––at nine o’clock and I think at five o’clock. They’re packed. [Laughs.] We have our service which is not too many of us, but the fact that they are renting their church from us helps us stay alive. That’s basically it.

HAMBURGER: Interesting history. We’ve been talking for about an hour, for a little over an hour now. I wanted to move on to more current things. You mentioned how the neighborhood has changed and you talked about the changing demographics. Are there other things that stand out to you about how Capitol Hill and this neighborhood have…

FORD: Well, I mean, if you look around, it looks pretty much the same. That’s a thing about Washington, right, these old buildings, it pretty much looks the same. Although I’ve got videos, I’ve taken over the years, right? So, you’ll see like even this house we had grass. I started to let the vines take over. It’s looks pretty much like it did. Probably a bit sprucier than it did 30, 40 years ago. It’s still DC, still these old houses.

HAMBURGER: I wanted to back to your career because you at some point left CBS and joined WJLA. Is that right?

FORD: Yeah. In [1982], CBS started having problems I think with this Westmoreland interview. Are you familiar with that stuff? [See Westmoreland v. CBS.]

HAMBURGER: Yes.

FORD: I don’t know if it affected them financially, but what they did, they started laying off people. I remember, I forget what year it was, but my daughter was born, so it was after she was born in ’85. So, it was after July of ’85. Anyway, they started having these cutbacks. I remember WCCO was having an event and they invited a lot of the reporters back to participate in it. They invited me back. I had my son and a baby. Gina was a baby at the time. We went back. It that point at CBS here, I was anchoring the overnights. We had a show called Nightwatch. I was the news reader in Nightwatch. For this we went up to Minnesota and––you probably remember Dave Moore. [A popular television personality and reporter at WCCO from the 1950s until his retirement in 1991.]

HAMBURGER: Sure, of course.

FORD: Dave was retiring and so they were having this party for him. We were part of that. After that, I remember I covered this story around Leech Lake, Minnesota. I just really like that place. I told Gloria, “I’d like to go back up there.” After the events with this party, we went up to Leech Lake, Minnesota, and got a cabin or whatever, a hotel, to just hang out and look at the place.

That morning, I went into town to buy us some breakfast and to get the papers, I look at the Minneapolis Tribune and it’s about layoffs at CBS. I start looking down. I’m looking down, I don’t see my name there. But the job I’d done––they’d canceled Nightwatch. My job has been eliminated but my name’s not there. So, I’m like, “Okay, well did they make a mistake and forget?” You know what I’m saying? So, of course I immediately called Washington and I said, “Do I still work there? And if so, what am I supposed to do when I come back to work on Monday?” My boss said, “Yeah, you still work here and you’ll just go back into the pool of reporters.” That was an interesting thing.

That was in ’85. The next one, in ’86, they got me. [Laughs.] I forget how many people at CBS they laid off that day but it was a bunch. There was a guy, I don’t know him, there was a guy who worked for CBS in Texas and his name was Doerr. His brother [Tom Doerr] was the news director of Channel 7 here in Washington. He called his brother and told him to offer me a job. It’s like the same day or week that I got fired from CBS I got offered a job at Channel 7! [Laughs.] I took it. I didn’t take it right away, but I took it. Yeah. That’s the transition. So then I started working at Channel 7. I worked there for 36 years and seven months.

HAMBURGER: How did your career at Channel 7 intersect with Capitol Hill and with this neighborhood? Can you recall some?

FORD: Not particularly. I covered DC, so Capitol Hill is, you know ... Just being part of the neighborhood, we’d go through various crime waves and not just crime. There are a lot of interesting things like the Hilloween [at Eastern Market]. This is a neighborhood, okay? In some [stories] you talk about areas where people live, okay? But then there are other areas that are our neighborhood where the people kind of congregate around ideas or stuff. So therefore they have things to do––like is it the 5K or 10K? [Begun in 1981, The National Capital Bank Capitol Hill Classic is an annual 10K, 3k, and Fun Run race to benefit Capitol Hill Cluster Schools.] I’ve got pictures of my son at about seven or eight running in the 3K race. They used to combine the [good causes on the] Hill. I forget what they call it, Main [Street] Days or Hill Days. [Also, Market Day.] The race and the festival would be at the same time.

Again, the neighborhood has an identity and people identify with it. In that sense, you know, I always liked the fact that I lived here. The interesting thing when the kids were going to Holy Trinity, there was  like a group of kids that walked together to get on the Metro, to change to the bus, and then make it to Georgetown because a lot of kids up here were going to Holy Trinity or Holy Cross. I remember my daughter Gina would drive. Different kids would be going to Holy Cross with her. Or my son would be going somewhere, he would be riding with so and so. The people knew each other. It’s a neighborhood, the people knew each other and we were part of it.

Even when my kids got grown––not grown, but when they got to be old enough to work, they both worked down at Frager’s. In fact, my son started working at Frager’s [Hardware, 1115 Pennsylvania Ave. SE] first and then my daughter started working at some coffee shop. When she was going to Frager’s, I forget whatever the minimum wage was, but she told them she was making this much at the coffee shop, therefore she wanted to make at least that much at Frager’s. They said, “Okay.” Then my son found out his sister was making more than he. [Laughs.] So, he went and told her, “Hey!” And they said, “Okay, we’ll increase yours.” [Laughter.] Again, it’s wonderful to be part of this neighborhood. The kids get to work at Frager’s down there. We were clearly a part of the neighborhood. Went to church down here. Went to church there. We go to church in the neighborhood. Work in the neighborhood. We go hang out at Eastern Market and Tunnicliff’s [Tavern across from Eastern Market] or La Lomita now, but used to be called McGuires [1330 Pennsylvania Avenue SE].

The funny thing is when my son was like six months old, we were in there eating, at McGuires. They used to have this old black guy singing and playing the blues on Saturday nights. So, he was singing the blues and for some reason my son [who] is six months old was fascinated by this. So, my son starts singing. [Laughs.] And, everybody is [saying], “At six months!” La, la, la. Everybody at the restaurant is looking at him and laughing. Finally, when the guy finished his set, he came over and he said to us, “He did a good job. I’m going to pay him.” And he put two quarters on the table. [Laughs.] We laughed and we bought Murry a piggy bank. [Laughs.] So we could start him a piggy back with those two quarters that guy gave him.

HAMBURGER: Murry’s first professional gig. [Ford laughs.]

FORD: Yeah. Murry doesn’t sing a lick. [Laughs.] Gee, that guy could actually sing, but Murry doesn’t sing a lick.

HAMBURGER: Tell me about other places that you went as a family on Capitol Hill. Did you go to Mr. Henry’s?

FORD: No, not much. There was gay restaurant up here. I don’t know if it was called Blue something or other, I remember. We went in there with the kids and we asked if they had a kid’s menu and they said to us, “We don’t think we ever had children in here before.” [Laughter.] That was pretty funny.

HAMBURGER: You broke the age barrier. [Ford laughs.]

FORD: We went to, mainly there. Then we’d eat at those restaurants down on Eighth Street [SE]. Those were called Matchbox and then ... I don’t know. We didn’t eat out a whole lot. Kids liked one called Fuddruckers. They liked that a lot. We go to those either in Virginia or downtown.

HAMBURGER:  When we talked earlier you mentioned the Jason White shooting as something.

FORD: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. You’re talking about, I guess, the 90s, late 80s, early 90s. [Officer Jason White was shot and killed as he approached a suspicious man on the landing of a house in the 200 block of 14^th Street SE on December 30, 1993.]

HAMBURGER: Yeah.

FORD: Yeah. I was working Sunday night. We heard about the shooting here on Capitol Hill. We got the address. I was at Channel 7, which was at that time was still up––had we moved to Tilden Street? I’m not even sure, but anyway, it was up town. I was hauling down here. I remember it was a Channel 9 live truck. I remember we both flew by the U.S. Capitol or the Park police and they never stopped us near the tidal basin and came here.

There was a guy named Jim Myers, I don’t know if you know Jim, but he was a reporter for U.S.A. Today. He’s retired. I think he still has his house now, but he’s sort of between here and Montreal or where ever he’s staying these days. Jim told me that he heard the shot and he heard it on the scanner because apparently Jason White’s partner, she was screaming on the scanner. It was one of those snow days. We came down here and we did the story.

I remember there was blood in the snow. That’s the one thing I do remember. There was a minister. He was a preacher of some sort. After I did one of the stories, he was out there digging up snow and putting in buckets. He said, “This is disrespectful to leave this officer’s blood here in the snow like this.” We went on the air with it. Within minutes the fire department was here to wash it away like that.

Interesting story, too. I think his death had something to do with ... it was like retaliation from the neighborhood for the death of some guy in Kentucky Courts [340 13th St SE]. One of those kids over there was killed by the police. I think this was like retaliation. That’s the impression I had just talking to folks. There were two brothers, twins, and they were, I assumed, drug dealers. At some point they had put up a basketball court there at Kentucky Courts. They were playing basketball. I think this guy might have been their cousin or something like that. I think one of them told me about this. Anyway, the cousin was killed. Then sometime after that Jason White was killed. I think there was some connection to that.

One of the really interesting stories—one day I was out walking my dog and I was walking past Watkins [Elementary School] field and they were out there playing. Kids were out there playing football. Little kids were. I don’t know why, but I stopped and I started talking to this guy. We’re talking and then I find out he’s one of the twins from Kentucky Courts. I just thought he’s probably dead somewhere. Or in prison, you know what I’m saying. It’s like ...  I’m talking to him. He’s out there. He’s excited dealing with his son. So I talked to him and I said, “Okay.” I’d interviewed Velma ... I forget her last name. Jones, I think. Anyway, I’d interviewed his grandmother at one point while doing these stories. I said, “How’s your grandmother?” He said, “She’s fine. We live at such and such place.” Come to find out he’d been married for 13 years. Had an eight-year-old son playing ball. His twin brother, they were both working men, after all these years, both doing well.

So sometimes you think about these things. I was so excited by that fact that I came home, I took a picture of Kentucky Courts, because you know the senior part is still there. It looks just beautiful. They were built in 1967. They’ve really kept that part up. The family part was across the street and that was closed because pigeon guano was collapsing on the people. It’s potentially fatal, right? So, they eventually closed that one and they got a new complex there now. But anyway I came home. I took a picture of one of those senior buildings, put it on Facebook and wrote the story of these kids. That got like 2,000 hits. We think it’s all bad. It’s not all bad news. Some people grow up and change their ways or take advantage of positive things. It’s not always death and jail. Or jail and death. It’s not always that. That was one of my happy stories. It wasn’t for Channel 7; it was just for me. I just said, “I’m just glad that this story is having a happy ending. This responsible father’s raising their children, playing Pop Warner football.”

HAMBURGER: Good news story, actually. I wanted to ask you about just a couple of other news events. Were you on duty when 9/11 [the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001] happened? Was that a story you covered [that had] a Capitol Hill angle for you?

FORD: Yes. I went to work at Channel 7 that morning. I’m not really great about being at work on time. But that morning for some reason I was at work early. I’m sitting there looking at my TV. Looking at the World Trade Center smoking and they thought a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Then they’re talking about sending me to National Airport to see what people have to say. Wait a minute. I forget all the details but the gist of it is this. We are standing around in the newsroom looking at the smoking building and while we’re there we see a plane [going] into the second building while we’re watching. What? At that point we realize this is not an accident.

I remember Gail Pennybacker, who was one of our reporters, and she says, “None of us are safe at this point.” [Laughs.] I’m thinking, “Yeah, that’s right.” Anyway, they’re sending us places. They sent me to National Airport. I’m heading out to the airport when I go by the Pentagon. There’s nothing there. Nothing’s happening. When we get to National Airport, which you know is just a couple miles away, if that, there’s a column of smoke coming out of the Pentagon. My truck is already set up. The crew’s already there. We’re looking at this. Fuzz is coming out of the air. I guess this is from airplane seats. I call them and say, “Hey, looks like something’s hit the Pentagon.” I immediately go on the air. I have the video from Channel 7. I immediately go on the air. What had happened before I went on the air, the police were there because there had been some kind of traffic accident at National. But, at this point they just all go tearing off. I said, “The police have all left. The police are tearing off.” At that point I went on the air and talked about what was going on. I was there the rest of the day.

HAMBURGER: What a day.

FORD: Yeah. My wife was here at the house. If she were alive, she’d punch me right now. But anyway I’m going to tell the whole story. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: Sounds like it’s going to be a good one.

FORD: She’s calling me up. She says, “Something happened here. Something happened here. Something happened.” Apparently when something exploded over there, it shook the Hill. I don’t know what it was. People here felt it. I understand that the last plane was headed for the Capitol to crash into it. They fortunately stopped it. Whatever it was over there, apparently must have rattled the Hill because she said that people were coming out of their houses. That something was going on.

And she was saying, “You know, I need to go get Gina!” Murry, he was going to school at the university, he was going to school at Washington University in St. Louis. He was in college. But Gina was going to Holy Cross. So Gloria said, “I need to go get Gina.” I said, “Well, based on what you’re saying, you probably ought to leave her there.” It seemed like it was safer up there than here. Then she called me back later and she said, “People are walking by here with their kids. I’m worried about my daughter.” She said, “The White man said go get your child.” [Laughter.] I said, “The White man?” So I guess some White man walked up to the house.

Anyway, she said, “I’m going to get Gina.” [Laughter.] She needed anybody to tell her. So she headed to Holy Cross. She wanted to see her baby. She went to see if she was good. I saved that. I saved that recording. I’ve got it somewhere. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: You have her on tape saying that?

FORD: My voicemail. Yeah. I had to save it. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: That’s hilarious.

FORD: “The White man said!” [Laughs.] Then at the end of the day, it was so funny because my son’s two best friends, Ron and Benton, went to NYU. I sent him to Washington U[niversity] in St. Louis. They’re down in NYU running for their lives and I said, “Aren’t you glad your old man sent you to safe, boring St. Louis?” [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: Are there other significant stories that you recall covering? I’m particularly interested when a story, your work intersects with the Hill.

FORD: I covered the Navy Yard shooting [a mass shooting at the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command inside the Washington Navy Yard in southeast Washington on September 16, 2013]. That was one of those things where I would go out and catch a cab. I’d walk down to Pennsylvania and catch a cab to my office. My office in those days was across the street from the U.S. Capitol in what they used to call the Washington Gas building, 101 Constitution Avenue [NE]. That’s where my office was for like 20 years. I would go down here to Pennsylvania Avenue and hail a cab going down to the office. So that day I remember sometimes it was often hard for a Black man to get a cab in Washington. I did a series on Africa though, and after that I didn’t have much trouble catching a cab because the Africans recognized me. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: Is that right?

FORD: Oh true. That’s true. I did a series called The African American Connection. I did a series on slavery and countries that Black people here came from and, believe me, the Africans who basically were the cab drivers in those days, they saw this and suddenly they knew me.

HAMBURGER: That’s wild.

FORD: They liked it. That’s a significant thing because it was the first time they had seen Africa on television when it didn’t involve a famine, a coup, or a war. It was a positive story about Africa and they loved it.

HAMBURGER: What year did that story run?

FORD: The African American Connection, let’s see, when was that. It was in the 90s. About ’91. ’92, something like that. I did a story on my heritage. I told you we were connected to the Cherokees. I called that “Black Slaves, Red Masters.” That aired in ’90. Then the next year, ’91, we went to Africa and did this story called The African American Connection which was about links between Black people there and here. For the African community here in Washington, seeing those things, they just loved it. We ran it every night for, I guess, a week or something like that. Different episodes.

HAMBURGER: What an assignment. What a great story.

FORD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually had a Black news director at that time at Channel 7. That’s why we ended up doing it. [Laughs.]

HAMBURGER: Where did you go in Africa?

FORD: We went to Sierra Leone, and Sierra Leone was a country basically established by the British for former slaves so former slaves could go back to Africa. Sort of like Liberia was established by the United States. That was it. We went there and looked at links between Africans there and, say, Africans in Georgia and South Carolina. In some cases, they still spoke the language or they would know a song or something in the language. They didn’t know what it meant. African Americans would know the song. They didn’t know what it meant. It was the language of the Mende as in Sierra Leone. Stuff like that.

HAMBURGER: You mentioned this earlier and I wanted to come back to it. Your Cherokee heritage.

FORD: The Cherokees just did a story on me recently, like February, I don’t know, recently.

HAMBURGER: I saw that.

FORD: Oh, you saw it. Okay, okay, recently. The African American Connection––in that I said, which was true, that part of the policy of the George Washington administration was to civilize the Indians by giving them slaves. [Laughs.] You know, they became planters, the same techniques the Whites used, etcetera, using slaves to grow crops and that sort of thing. So, some of them took to it, like the Cherokees. Not all the Cherokees but a number of the Cherokees. And there was a lot of interracial mixture between whites and Cherokees. A lot of the whiter Cherokees, you know, just had the same techniques as anybody else.

When the government of Andrew Jackson ordered the Cherokees to leave Georgia over the ruling of the Supreme Court––because the Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokees had a right to be there and that the whites in Georgia that were taking their land were in violation––Jackson said, “Chief Justice John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” And of course. he put the army on those people and forced them a thousand miles in winter. A quarter of the tribe died en route. About ten percent of the people there were African Americans. They were slaves. So they were pushed to northeastern Oklahoma.

In doing genealogical research, [I found] my relatives [who] were born before 1839, were born in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee. After 1839 they were all born in Indian territory. You can just see the thing. They were slaves of the Cherokee, you know, various Cherokees. In some cases, the Cherokees, during the Civil War, moved south to Texas to try to protect their slaves because in the Indian Territory, which is Oklahoma, there were issues. In the 1930s, one of the work projects of the New Deal WPA was called the [Federal] Writers Project, where they sent writers to interview the ex-slaves. Among the ones they interviewed were my great grandmother, Phyllis Pettite and her brother Johnson Thompson, who were born slaves of Cherokees in Texas.

HAMBURGER: Oh, so you really have an extraordinary record.

FORD: Oh yeah, yeah. It’s there.

HAMBURGER: Have you seen the actual interviews? Were they transcribed?

FORD: They’re in books, oh yeah. They’re in books. You can go online. Type in Phyllis Pettite or Johnson Thompson and their interviews come up. Yeah. Some interesting things. The Cherokees and the other tribes to some degree, so-called Five Civilized Tribes, sided with the South in the Civil War. So, when the war was over, the U.S. government declared all treaties null and void and said you have to negotiate new treaties. Among the things you have to do, you have to make the slaves, ex-slaves, citizens of your nations, because that was not considered the United States at that time so they couldn’t become American citizens. They were citizens of whatever nations. So, my ancestors, we became citizens of Cherokee Nation.

When they decided to break Oklahoma up and split it into individual property, Cherokees didn’t have private ownership of land. The land belonged to the tribe, period. You could use, etcetera, but you didn’t have private ownership. When they said Oklahoma was coming into a state, they’re getting rid of Indian territory, they were splitting it up. Then they did interviews with the various people to determine whether they had a right to the land. There were some people that were, I guess, squatters. So to have a right to the land, you had to be linked to some Cherokee, okay? If you were Black, you had to have been slaves to some Cherokee. So they interviewed the Cherokees. I’ve got the interviews. You would take, like, my great-grandfather, his name was George Pettite. It was clear he was Thomas Pettite’s slave [Laughs]. The interview was like, boom, boom.

HAMBURGER: Spell Pettite.

FORD: P-E-T-T-I-T-E. The interesting thing in that interview, at one point they asked him if Thomas Pettite was his “father.” You could see the line-out––it goes line, then it says “master.” Then they said, “Was he a Cherokee?” Well, clearly what I’m thinking is Pettite probably was his father, okay? But, there literally is a line through there saying master. In his case there was just no question, boom. You’re entitled to the land.

In the case of my great-grandmother, Phyllis Pettite, she was connected to the Thompson family. No question. In each case, just no question about it. But for some of them, there were questions. Sometimes the interviews would go on for 30 pages because they were asking about this person, that one. You could learn a lot of stuff by these various interviews. In some cases, they had left Indian territory, let’s say during the war, and they hadn’t come back. He hadn’t come back before some date in 1866, you had trouble. If you were back before then there was no problem. Those were sort of the things that were there.

My father’s name is on the roll of the Cherokee Nation. It was interesting that in 1984, I think, I went out to Oklahoma to do a story. CBS assigned me to do a story on a community called Bell where the tribe apparently managed to get running water to this community because people had to go to some well and get water out for, you know, everything. They didn’t have running water. So, we interviewed the Cherokee chief. His name was Ross Swimmer. In fact, he lives here on the Hill. At least he’s got a house here on the Hill. After the interview, I asked the chief, I said, “You know, Chief, my family’s always had a connection to the Cherokees. Are they in your roll book?” So, he went through, looked in his roll book and he found my father, my grandmother and my aunt. He said, “They’re on the freedmen rolls.” I said, “What are freedmen?” He said, “The former slaves.” I remember the crew I had was from Chicago. They were wrapping up their equipment. They stopped, and one said, “You mean the Indians had slaves?” He said, “Well, it’s not something we like to talk about, but yes.”

When I was going to Tahlequah, that’s their capital in Oklahoma, I had told some of my relatives in Kansas that I was going to Tahlequah and my cousin said, “You’ve got cousins in Tahlequah, you ought to go by and say hello.” So, I did. They were the ones that presented these interviews because they had the book called Red Over Black by Rudy Halliburton, a professor at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah who had written this story using those WPA interviews.

HAMBURGER: Let me return this to Capitol Hill. You said that, was it Ralph Swimmer, is that the name?

FORD: Ross Swimmer.

HAMBURGER: Ross Swimmer is on Capitol Hill?

FORD: I ran into him at Trader Joe’s, in the line. He’s got a house here. I don’t know if he lives here all the time, but he definitely has a house here and then they had some Cherokee meeting at his house. I wouldn’t go [unintelligible].

HAMBURGER: Did you have any other connection with the Indian community on Capitol Hill?

FORD: In Kansas?

HAMBURGER: On Capitol Hill.

FORD: Oh. I don’t know that there is an Indian community on Capitol Hill. There’s some people who are Cherokees who live around here.

HAMBURGER: Like Swimmer.

FORD: Like Swimmer. They’re just residents.

HAMBURGER: This has been such an interesting discussion. Is there anything that I should have asked you about during our interview? Anything else?

FORD: No. We talked about a zillion things. The only thing I just say, it’s a very nice neighborhood. I’m getting old. [Laughs.] I don’t know how long I’ll stick around. It’s been great and one of the things that I’ve said is I walk around here. I look at young families and the joy on their faces. To raise some kids and I think back and that was me. When I moved here, I had no children. Me and Gloria had no children. We moved here and we’ve lived in the same house ever since I moved to Washington. The kids never lived anyplace else. My son used to call it his “red house.” “My red house.” To see the joy watching kids grow up. That’s a wonderful thing. I just looked at the folks and I said, thinking to myself, “I hope you all enjoy these kids. Hope you enjoy the situation because it’s been wonderful.” I’ve had a wonderful life.

There were times when I, you know, getting laid off. At one point I was wondering if I’d be able to pay my house bill and stuff, but God worked it out. I didn’t have any trouble. There’ve been rough times. One of the stories I tell about, we had to worry about money at some points. We’re paying for these private schools. Paying this house note. I remember when I went down to Lincoln Park [church], you like to get on your knees and pray a lot. You know to get down on their knees. I was like, “My shoes have holes in them.” [Laughs.] I just didn’t have a lot of money to [unintelligible] [laughs]. I’m like, “Oh God.” So I sort of squat and pray. Show my holey shoes. There were times.

I thought, maybe it’s the American way, you get old. Like now I don’t really have any problems. I don’t have any financial problems, you know what I’m saying, I’m doing okay, you know. I got diagnosed with glaucoma which has got me a little concerned. So, I spend all my money on doctors. At this point it’s been good. My children are both doing very well. My son is a vice president of a hospital in Atlanta. My daughter is very active in the campaign and hoping that Miss Alsobrooks will be representing in the U.S. Senate. I said, “Well if you go down there with her, she wins, you can just come home for lunch.” [Laughter.]

HAMBURGER: All right. Let’s see, they’ve got primary day, then election day to determine that.

FORD: Oh, yeah. It’s going to be rough. In terms of the campaign?

HAMBURGER: Yeah.

FORD: She’s got it, yeah. Miss Alsobrooks is really up against ... she’s got this guy named David Trone who has spent fifty million dollars already on ads. Who can match something like that? It’s really rough. Then if she survives him, then she’s got to go up against the former governor who’s popular. So, it’s, who knows? David and Goliath.

HAMBURGER: Thank you so much for sharing your afternoon.

END OF INTERVIEW

Appendix:  Family Photographs

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