On October 24th 2014, I conducted an interview with Curtis Rudolph on segregation and integration that occurred during his life growing up. I selected Curtis Randolph because he is the father of a close friend. He is also a person I have grown to admire and respect. After Curtis and I found a quiet and comfortable atmosphere we decided to sit down and conduct the interview. I started off the interview with some brief biographical questions such as, “Would you please share some background information about yourself such as your age, ethnicity, marital status, occupation, location of birth, and the town you grew up in”. Curtis responded and informed me that he was born in 1959, making him fifty five years old, on a U.S military base in Japan. He is a Caucasian English male. He is married to Linda B Rudolph and has been married for thirty four years. His current occupation is as a relator and he has resided in Tampa Florida since he was six years old.
Once we started to feel comfortable conversing with each other; I started to ask questions that pertained to his experiences with segregation during his childhood. The first question I asked was “could you describe when you began to realize what segregation was”, Since Curtis was relatively young and resided in a predominately white community; he did not have a lot of information to shed on the subject. He informed me that from first to fifth grade segregation was something that didn’t really impact him, so it was not something he often thought about it. Since his community did not have many black residents when he saw someone of a different race he didn’t really think anything about it. Since there was a lack of black residence in his community there was never any violence over racial issues, and Curtis never formulated an opinion on the system of segregation.
As the interview proceeded I asked Curtis “Growing up