0.10 Charles criner, b. 1945  (Page 3/4)

I will never forget we were doing murals at that time, and Dr. Biggers chose the civil rights movement as a subject for the people to do their murals. You see, at TSU before you graduate you had to do a mural. So he would tell us to do something pertaining to our home life or pertaining to the civil rights struggle. And then he would approve it, and that was part of what we did. So it was kind of entrenched in our minds to be aware of what was going on around us. The sketch was done during the junior year, and that was ’67 for me. And then the actual painting was done in your senior year. [My mural] is up at Hannah Hall. In fact, if you go up to the second and third floor, that’s a book all its own. It’s like the Sistine Chapel up there. We used every wall; every corridor inside.

Well this is what happened: The students started protesting, and they started blocking Wheeler off and so forth. This was ’66 or ’67. I was in my dormitory—we were on the third floor and I was looking out the window. It was about maybe seven o’clock and I saw this little white lady driving her car because everybody else—Wheeler was vacant—I mean there was nobody on Wheeler because it was blockaded from both sides. But this little lady had come from somewhere and she was driving through. All of a sudden a brick hit her car; it just hit down on the door, and just dented it. Then another brick hit it but she kept driving and she made it through. If it had hit the window, someone would have killed her. So we knew it was something strange happening, but we didn’t know what.

So about an hour later, we looked out the window, and we saw about a hundred police officers coming toward the dormitory, and they started shooting at the dormitory. I mean just shooting—just like an assault. So anyway, me and my roommate, we decided we would just get in our pajamas and lay down. I mean we had nothing to do with it. And they would come, and they would see that we were in bed and so forth. Well they finally got into the dormitory. We could hear the doors busting as they were coming in. So they finally busted the doors, pulled us out, took us and put us down on the grass, head down, face down—and took [us] to jail. Fingerprinted us all. And we stayed in jail that whole night.

Strange thing about this is that next morning I thought the black community would be outraged. I thought that when we walked through that little corridor and saw the sunlight it would be…but there wasn’t. There was only just a few people. And I think that Dr. Biggers was one of them.

Working artist

After I graduated I got a job at Posters Inc., and I did their little billboard sketches, and they would take them and sell them and reproduce them. And then I went to work for NASA. I helped do the flight plan for Apollo 11, you know. Then after we finally landed on the moon there was nothing for us to do. They didn’t fire us, but I mean up until that time we weren’t even allowed to go home. We would sleep in the hallways because as the engineers change the flight plan, they had these great big books that looked like phone books, and they had a visual line drawing of every three seconds of how that lunar lander would be turned. Well if they changed the plans, all the drawings had to be done again.