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Exchange Place: How A Small Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation
By The 431 ExchangeHistory
Exchange Place: How A Small Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation episodes
- Ep. 2 Hilda Jean Smith: From GED to PhD
Episode 2. Hilda Jean Smith: From GED to PhD. A day after her wedding, sixteen-year-old Hilda Jean Smith’s mother dies, leaving her the responsibility of raising 10 younger siblings. Though she eventually drops out of high school to do so, Hilda never loses sight that education was the most important stepping stone to a better life. In this interview with Hilda, we hear her incredible story.
This is a presentation of The 431 Exchange. We are a non-profit scholarship fund dedicated to adult students seeking to transform their lives through continuing education. We invite you to learn more about us by going to our website www.431exchange.com where you can hear more inspiring stories by signing up for our newsletter. Thanks!
1 hr 7 min - Ep. 1 School Is In Session
Episode 1. School Is In Session. On a cold December day in 1965, an experimental school known as the Adult Education Center started its first day of classes. Little did they know that over the course of the next seven years, 431 graduates of mostly African American women would go on to make history by integrating the secretarial offices of the Deep South and other parts of the United States.
This is a presentation of The 431 Exchange. We are a non-profit scholarship fund dedicated to adult students seeking to transform their lives through continuing education. We invite you to learn more about us by going to our website www.431exchange.com where you can hear more inspiring stories by signing up for our newsletter. Thanks!
16 min
About Exchange Place: How A Small Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation
From the publisher's feed
Exchange Place is the story of a school whose mission was to train mostly African American women the skills they needed to integrate the secretarial offices of the Deep South between 1965 and ‘72.…
Those offices were not just segregated, for the most part they were completely off limits to women of color, and many were fighting to insure the workplace would stay that way for years or decades to come. Over the course of the school’s history, it was shut down multiple times and constantly under duress from forces conspiring to defeat it. But, it survived to became one of the most successful programs of its kind in the War On Poverty, lauded on the front pages of national newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the subject of an Emmy Award winning documentary in 1968 entitled, appropriately, "The School That Would Not Die". The first season of the podcast tells the inspirational biographies of four of the school’s graduates who changed the moral skyline of their city -- how they did it -- and how the school’s teachers and supporters struggled to overcome the massive forces arrayed against them.