An Interview with David Roediger

Abstract

An Interview with David Roediger Jon K. Lauck JL: Where were you born? DR: The hospital in which I was born was in East St. Louis, Illinois. I have long been tempted to claim I'm "from" there, given how central that city has been to African American creative genius and to the tragedy of race in the Midwest. But in truth the life and livelihood of both my parents was in Columbia, Illinois, a dozen miles south. It was a village of two to three thousand, deeply German American, all-white, and built around grain milling and limestone quarrying. JL: How did your parents and grandparents come to be in this part of the country? DR: My family on both sides came to southern Illinois before the generation of my grandparents, overwhelmingly from what's now Germany but with one branch from Ireland. JL: A fairly large group of Germans immigrated to St. Louis in the early nineteenth century. Would you say your ancestors were part of that urban migration stream or were they more oriented toward farming and rural/small town living in southern Illinois? DR: My family connected to St. Louis much later, with some moving from Cairo, Illinois, and Columbia to the city for work in my parents' generation. The most lastingly German part of the family, my father's side, described itself as coming for religious reasons and to avoid conflicts during German unification. I think they sought rural life, but not a farm. Their religious bent, Missouri Synod Lutheranism, became the main arena for continued identification with one way of being German American. My paternal grandmother was a German speaker, though mostly without anyone to speak to. My mother's family was more [End Page 239] German than Irish in "blood" but just the opposite in identity. They lived near and centered life around an Irish American Catholic church in Cairo. JL: What was your parents' line of work? DR: My mother and her twin brothers became orphans before she was five, her mom dying as a result of childbirth and her dad in a railway work accident. She lived her first seventeen years in Cairo. Her aunts and grandmother sacrificed greatly to send her to two years of normal school for teacher training at Southern Illinois Normal College, now Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She taught in Columbia for forty-nine years, mostly fourth grade. My dad followed his dad into work at the limestone quarry just outside Columbia. While his father worked as a mechanic, my father, back from the Navy and World War II, moved into the office as a bookkeeper. JL: What was your mother's maiden name and what did her family do for an occupation in Cairo? DR: She was born Mary Ann Lind. As noted, her dad was a railroad worker. Her mom was a housewife until dying very young. The aunts who worked to support the household in which she grew up had white-collar, or pink-collar, jobs. One kept books for a coal company and the other was a union phone operator, a job that required considerable skill and an absence of much accent. Opening those jobs to Black women was a demand of the Black United Front in Cairo, one that eventually succeeded but just before the positions were largely mechanized out of existence. When he served as lieutenant governor in the late 60s, Paul Simon sent Dick Durbin to fact find in Cairo. Durbin, now a U.S. senator from Illinois, was an aspiring Democratic politician then. The man taking him to his Cairo hotel room—we know this story because Durbin told it later to Barack Obama who made it public—warned that any use of the phone in the hotel would lead to phone operators relaying what was said to local white supremacists.1 JL: How did your parents meet and where and what year were you born? DR: My mother moved to Columbia to accept the first teaching job she was offered, just as the world war began. My father courted her as he was busily eating bananas in an attempt, ultimately successful, to meet the [End Page 240...